Every purchasing decision involves a trade-off between what I call fidelity and convenience. Fidelity is the total experience of something - how great the experience is. Convenience is how easy it is to get something. A live concert is a high fidelity way to experience music; an MP3 file is a high convenience way to experience music. Depending on the situation, one or the other is probably pretty appealing. What's not appealing is something that offers neither.

I'm that tech writer who gets on stage and plays funny tech songs. I wouldn't want that to be all I'm known for, but it's a bit of a differentiator.

Now companies tend to mine gigantic databases for insights into what might happen six months from now. That might always be valuable, but there's a different kind of value - and a competitive edge - in processing ongoing streams of data through a software model that can quickly and constantly make predictions about, say, whether a certain customer is going to defect, or an aircraft is going to run into trouble.

Our brains seem to have the power to do one or the other - record and remember every detail, or chunk it to higher level concepts and forget the details. We can't seem to do both. The fact that you could not fly over a city and remember every detail is not something to worry about.

Chunking is the ability of the brain to learn from data you take in, without having to go back and access or think about all that data every time. As a kid learning how to ride a bike, for instance, you have to think about everything you're doing. You're brain is taking in all that data, and constantly putting it together, seeing patterns, and chunking them together at a higher level. So eventually, when you get on a bike, your brain doesn't have to think about how to ride a bike anymore. You've chunked bike riding.

Our brains are great at knowing what to forget. We actually have to teach computers to do the same.

Fidelity is the total quality of an experience, including a sense of exclusiveness and aura. Convenience is simply how easy something is to get, which often means a low price and ubiquitousness. A super-fidelity product or service would lose its luster and quality if it's pushed too hard toward convenience. A super-convenient product or service would start to get expensive and exclusive if it moved toward higher fidelity, which would naturally undermine its convenience.