Building meaningful futures - Issue #2
In this issue lots of links and reading on the future of work and society, the new trend of trust, ethics, philosophy, inspiration, artificial intelligence, startups, health tech, neuroscience, quantum computing and China.
In today’s volatile business world, it’s more important to think and play as a jazzman instead of a structured classical composer or musician. A company needs a poetic capacity, to be pro-active and creative in any situation.
This poetic capacity is a product of a transformation process in which a company designs a narrative that incorporates its knowledge, its skills, its values, its ambition and its vision on the future of our society. In a Socratic switch a company dares to speak out from its inner heart, which is not a soft part of the process but the essence of its business. These are trends of a complete new system.
Prepare yourself and your company for a different future and join us for the first Socratic Design Workshop for Business at IET London on Friday, 25 November 2016. Tickets for executives cost £1,000, startups and entrepreneurs pay £500, including food & drinks for the day.
How to create meaningful work and business
New essay I wrote with Humberto Schwab on how to create meaningful business.
“We see the parallel tectonic movements in politics taken place, where brand loyalty is no longer self-evident; it is conditioned by values and trust. All trends point towards the need of a complete new paradigm, to get rid of old reflexes, old assumptions, old biases to change the vocabularies and to boost meaning in a new direction. Values becoming the hard side of business!
But why is this so difficult?”
IoT Stars Networking Event @ IoT Solutions World Congress
If you’re heading to the IoT Solutions Congress, join us on October 24 in Barcelona for some beers and inspiring talks, insightful panel discussions and start-up pitches offering you a glimpse into the future of the Internet of Things. Our final program includes stage presence by IoT leaders from Hitachi, Philips Healthcare, Siemens, SAP, OpenMarket, Worldsensing and Electric Imp.
I’m offering 10 tickets with a 50% discount for my newsletter readers: use code SHIFT50 to redeem your ticket (first come first serve). Don’t wait last minute as the place is filling quickly.
Future of work and society
What’s The Future of Work?
Last Thursday, Tim O’ Reilly had the honor to be one of the warmup acts for President Obama at the White House Frontiers Conference at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Here is the prepared text and slides from the talk he delivered there.
“Something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?”
Why we need to plan for a future without jobs
Andy Stern spent his career organizing workers. Here’s why he thinks work is doomed.
Welcome to a world without work
Automation and globalisation are combining to generate a world with a surfeit of labour and too little work
President Obama schools Silicon Valley CEOs on why government is not like business
President Obama explains to arrogant high-tech CEOs why government can’t be run like business.
And here is their answer…
Mark Zuckerberg, Satya Nadella, and Others Respond to President Obama's Challenges for the Tech Industry
Obama presented WIRED with six challenges the tech industry needs to address. We asked six of the biggest names in the our world how they could get it done.
How Freelancers Are Reinventing Work Through New Collective Enterprises
As the economy promotes this dizzying mix of exploitation and inventive community-building, freelance workers — in both higher and lower wage sectors — are fighting for legal rights, creating new work arrangements, and building businesses with social vision. Somewhere between economic coercion and human agency, with plenty of success and struggle, freelancers are finding their way through the economic wilderness.
The future: where borrowing is the norm and ownership is luxury
Turn any idle asset into a productive piece of capital. All you have to do is set a price, and the robots will take care of the rest. What could possibly go wrong?
Trust
Rachel Botsman: We've stopped trusting institutions and started trusting strangers
Something profound is changing our concept of trust, says Rachel Botsman. While we used to place our trust in institutions like governments and banks, today we increasingly rely on others, often strangers, on platforms like Airbnb and Uber and through technologies like the blockchain. This new era of trust could bring with it a more transparent, inclusive and accountable society – if we get it right. Who do you trust?
The Unmet Need for Trusted Talent Advisors
In a world that’s changing ever more rapidly, we all need trusted advisors. It’s a significant unmet need that creates a very attractive business opportunity. John Hagel on this central part of his research and writing for almost 20 years…
Ethics
11 must-reads on the ethics of the Fourth Industrial Revolution
The Fourth Industrial Revolution, a wave of innovation enabled by the digital age, raises some profound ethical questions about the kind of world we want to live in.
Philosophy
Philosophy and the Bildung
“The meaning of beauty has fallen from a state of grace. No longer is it connected to goodness or truth, to the mind and the spirit. Instead, in today’s popular culture, beauty is overwhelmingly associated with the body. Corporeal beauty has become an emblem of a particular global value system, one that perpetuates an economy of desire focused on appearances, money, and fame, sought by most, but acquired by few. The quality of Beauty has been reduced to the shallow, the ephemeral, the transient. But it was not always that way.”
Inspiration
Research backs up the instinct that walking improves creativity
For centuries, great thinkers have instinctively stepped out the door and begun walking, or at the very least pacing, when they needed to boost creativity. Charles Dickens routinely walked for 30 miles a day, while the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche declared, “All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.”
Elena Corchero - Inspiring others through technology
How are you going to use technology to inspire others?
Elena brings science closer to people through the development of lifestyle consumer products using smart materials. She is a former Research Associate on wearables at MIT MLE and Alumni of the Material Futures MA at Central Saint Martins in London, and founder of Lost `Values.
Artificial Intelligence
Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI) opens in Cambridge
CFI brings together four of the world’s leading universities (Cambridge, Oxford, Berkeley and Imperial College, London) to explore the implications of AI for human civilisation. Together, an interdisciplinary community of researchers will work closely with policy-makers and industry investigating topics such as the regulation of autonomous weaponry, and the implications of AI for democracy. Professor Stephen Hawking provided the opening speech.
Being Human in the Age of AI, Robotics & Big Data
(reprinted from the KINpendium, a publication of the Kellogg Innovation Network, KIN Global 2016 conference)
7 Ways to Introduce AI into Your Organization
In the simplest case, cognitive technologies can be just more autonomous extensions of traditional analytics — automatically running every possible combination of predictive variables in a regression analysis, for example. More complex types of cognitive technology — neural or deep learning networks, natural language processing, and algorithms — can seem like black boxes even to the data scientists who create them.
Big-Data Algorithms Are Manipulating Us All
THE AGE OF Big Data has generated new tools and ideas on an enormous scale, with applications spreading from marketing to Wall Street, human resources, college admissions, and insurance. At the same time, Big Data has opened opportunities for a whole new class of professional gamers and manipulators, who take advantage of people using the power of statistics.
I should know. I was one of them.
The Gofer in the Machine
Successful virtual assistants need to know how their users feel. Mark Harris speaks to the programmers making them emotionally, as well as artificially, intelligent.
Differentiable neural computers
DeepMind is now capable of teaching itself based on information it already possesses.
In a significant step forward for artificial intelligence, Alphabet’s hybrid system — called a Differential Neural Computer (DNC) — uses the existing data storage capacity of conventional computers while pairing it with smart AI and a neural net capable of quickly parsing it.
There is a blind spot in AI research
Fears about the future impacts of artificial intelligence are distracting researchers from the real risks of deployed systems, argue Kate Crawford and Ryan Calo.
Here's what you get when you connect AI with 3D printers
By retrofitting industrial robots with 3D printing guns and artificial intelligence algorithms, Ai Build has constructed machines that can see, create, and even learn from their mistakes.
Startups
Uber, But for Millennials Who Want Orchestras in Their Living Rooms
Watch out, Top 40: string ensembles are heading Bach to Brooklyn.
Why I Backed a 24-Year-Old Trying to Assess Human Potential
Today Upfront Ventures is announcing that we’ve backed Rebecca Kantar’s startup Imbellus, a company designed to assess human potential and…
9 Year Old Girl Entrepreneur wows Shark Tank's Mark Cuban
The young Lucy’s Sushi World owner explained to the judges the lack of female sushi chefs is due to the fact that women are discouraged from entering the lucrative profession. Patterson mentioned the popular documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi and alluded to a quote from renowned sushi chef Yoshikazu Ono claiming women are unfit to be sushi chefs.
Must watch 2:30 minute video pitch to see what Lucy is going to do about that!
Enspiral
Changing the Way Social Entrepreneurs Do Business
Health Tech
The Astonishing Healthcare Tech of the Future Is Arriving
This week in San Diego, Singularity University hosted its annual Exponential Medicine conference. The conference aims to connect the dots between healthcare disciplines and cutting-edge tech by convening medical practitioners, technologists, entrepreneurs, and over 80 expert speakers from the field.
Neuroscience
'We’re growing brains outside of the body'
Madeleine Lancaster has 300 brains growing in her lab – here’s how she’s done it.
Quantum Computing
Massive Disruption Is Coming With Quantum Computing
Moore’s Law (or the exponential growth of integrated circuits) is actually referring to the fifth paradigm of computation. Here’s the list of the underlying technologies: (1) Electromechanical; (2) Vacuum Tube; (3) Relay; (4) Transistors; and (5) Integrated Circuits.
China
Your brilliant Kickstarter idea could be on sale in China before you’ve even finished funding it
Shenzhen, China Yekutiel Sherman couldn’t believe his eyes. The Israeli entrepreneur had spent one year designing the product that would make him rich—a smartphone case that unfolds into a selfie stick. He had drawn up prototypes, secured some minimal funds from his family, and launched a crowdfunding campaign. He even shot a professional promo video, showing…
Shenzhen: The Silicon Valley of Hardware (Full Documentary)
Future Cities, a full-length documentary strand from WIRED Video, takes us inside the bustling Chinese city of Shenzhen.
China's new quantum satellite is designed to teleport data outside the bounds of space and time and create an unbreakable code
This week, China launched the world’s first quantum satellite. So what exactly does this mean? “The satellite is designed to establish ultra-secure quantum communications by transmitting uncrackable keys from space to the ground”.