The snow would thaw, the rivers begin to run and the world would wake into itself again.

So wrote Neil Gaiman in "Odd and The Frost Giants."

Today, in 2015, we see an encroachment of Ariticial Intelligence, under the form of deep machine learning, penetrating nearly every aspect of our interconnected social lives.

Unfortunately, like most advancements in the sum of human knowledge, this amazing technology is being used to siphon more dollars from your provate coffers. Afterall, the greatest virtue of modern business appears to be maximizing value for shareholders.

Let me be perfectly clear: as a small business, we love revenue and profit. What we don't love is the commoditization of the invasion of personal privacy to slake the lusts of marketing executives in their never-ending quest to sell you garbage. We are critical of Facebook's strategy to pursue deep machine learning in order to creat an even more effective advertising platform.

Of course, painting in broad strokes while creating generalizations is fraught with the danger that communication will degenerate into disinformation and propaganda. However, we are not convinced that the ubiquitous proliferation of social media over the past decade is an automatic net benefit to the prosperity of humanity.

Yes, information technology, and social media in particular, are allowing groups of dissatisfied populations the ability to coordinate everything from revolutions to corporate boycotts.

But at what price?

I think most of us, at some time or another, have felt an overhwelming feelings of desire to achieve personal excellence along a particular path; whether that be something as abstract as "entrepreneurship" or some definite goal like "published author" or "professional game developer."

But is passion really necessary for any measure of success?

I often find that consistent self-discipline is far more useful to success than any amount of passion. A long view of history means we should take the perspective that we take the immortal perspective of having omnipotence and eternity at our disposal while being acutely aware that time is a finite resource.

We can always find new lovers, earn more money, have new adventures, play more games, and drink more beer. However, every passing day rapidly depletes our store of Time which we find rapidly appreciates in combinatorial explosions of value as supplies accelerate towards oblivion in lock-step with our mortality.

If popular notions of reincarnation are somehow objectively true, then there is no reason to delay doing whatever needs to be done - today! - to come closer the far-end of the bell curve of human potential so that we can reap the rewards of our creative success for lifetimes to come (even if that success comes posthumously!).

If popular notions of reincarnation are nothing more than confortable lies we tell ourselves to soothe the knowledge that every breath hurls us closer to the grave, there is no reason to avoid doing whatever needs to be done - right now! - to traverse the abyss of time, pregnant with habitually discipline, that separates the average from the legendary.