Building meaningful futures - Issue #3
The problem with the power of fake news stories emerging last week is just another example of the world we’re moving into, a world where decisions are taken increasingly by machines with serious consequences for humanity in general.
“We do not want to become arbiters of truth ourselves”, said Mark Zuckerberg in his flawed approach to fixing his fake news problem.
Facebook is still a tech company, making money with algorithms, however it became the most powerful news distributor on Earth - the new front page of the news for more than 1 billion people every day.
In an exponential technological era, lies too get spread exponentially. It’s all about speed (technology) versus judgement (media), as this excellent NPR investigation reveals.
What’s the point of applying deep learning on today’s massive available data if the system cannot distinguish good from wrong moral code? The system will learn from itself, right?
It’s high time - looking at the consequences everyday around us - to reflect on our basic universal and shared values to decide where we want to go with this and how to embed this into technology. We need healing, not fixing, we need to redefine what it means to be human in this ever-increasing fast-paced exponential technological era.
“If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. (…) And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.” - Hannah Arendt.
Socratic Design Workshop for Business London
This is your last chance to join this unique day of learning about the exponential trends impacting your business and how to prepare your business for such change.
Join Yuri van Geest (Exponential Organisations), Humberto Schwab (Socratic Design), Justine Kolata (The Public Sphere), Canay Atalay (Patica), myself and many other international entrepreneurs and business leaders for the Socratic Design Workshop for Business next Thursday (25/11) at IET The Savoy in London.
We only got 3 seats left now; contact me directly if you’re interested to join.
More random interesting reads
Google, Facebook and the search for truth | tim@cole.de
The decisions by both Google and Facebook seem to indicate that the tech behemoths are starting to face up to the fact that they are not just conduits of information, but responsible for their acts. As such, they are a part of modern mass media and should be held to the same standards, both legally and ethically, as broadcasters and newspapers. Witness the growing outcry over their power in distributing information to the American electorate.
Trends
Verge 2021
Five years into the future with top 10 leaders.
In 2011, we had only begun to see how putting a computer in everyone’s pocket would change the world. But these devices have now pushed towns to subsidise ride-sharing apps instead of building parking lots; programmatic video filters that once required warehouses of computing power are now an everyday part of the teenage experience; and 140-character messages have become a backbone of politics. Change is coming at us faster than ever.
Design Thinking
Mark Curtis: ‘Design thinking must not become a management fad’
Design thinking is in vogue, but Mark Curtis is worried that unless it is culturally embraced, it could become just another management fad.
Future of Work
Deep Learning Is Going to Teach Us All the Lesson of Our Lives: Jobs Are for Machines
“Do you want half of people to starve because they literally can’t add economic value, or not?” before going on to suggest, ”If the answer is not, then the smartest way to distribute the wealth is by implementing a universal basic income.”
Tim Leberecht: 4 ways to build a human company in the age of machines
In the face of artificial intelligence and machine learning, we need a new radical humanism, says Tim Leberecht. For the self-described “business romantic,” this means designing organizations and workplaces that celebrate authenticity instead of efficiency and questions instead of answers. Leberecht proposes four (admittedly subjective) principles for building beautiful organizations.
Why exponential technological change will need ‘exponential humanity‘
Gerd Leonhard on why machines can increasingly mimic the human brain and may indeed soon outpace it in certain respects such as calculations per second or storage capacity. Yet he believes that for the foreseeable future no mechanical apparatus, algorithm or bot can have an original thought, or create a meaningful work of art, or invent a new field of science, or show authentic empathy and compassion.
The Scary Truth About Corporate Survival
Companies really are failing faster. Here’s why.
Politics
Russia starts blocking LinkedIn website after court ruling
Russia’s communications regulator ordered public access to LinkedIn’s website to be blocked on Thursday to comply with a court ruling that found the social networking firm guilty of violating a data storage law.
We’re heading into dark times. This is how to be your own light in the Age of Trump
Today is November 18, 2016. I want you to write about who you are, what you have experienced, and what you have endured.
Education
How A Happy School Can Help Students Succeed
Research shows that the way a school “feels” can help kids learn. But school climate remains a hard concept to define and measure.
The school of the future has opened in Finland
Hopefully every school will be like this one day.
Smart Cities
Urban farming, food markets and parks replace banks and parking lots in this masterplan for Amsterdam
A large, circular new masterplan for Amsterdam introduces green, pedestrian-friendly spaces to the city center.
AI
The Simple Economics of Machine Intelligence
Interpreting the rise of machine intelligence as a drop in the cost of prediction doesn’t offer an answer to every specific question of how the technology will play out. But it yields two key implications: 1) an expanded role of prediction as an input to more goods and services, and 2) a change in the value of other inputs, driven by the extent to which they are complements to or substitutes for prediction. These changes are coming. The speed and extent to which managers should invest in judgment-related capabilities will depend on the how fast the changes arrive.
The Competitive Landscape for Machine Intelligence
Don’t get left behind.
Bionic
New Bionic Eye That Connects to The Brain Successfully Restores a Woman's Sight
A new visual implant from SecondSight may help restore useful sight in more than 6 million additional people who aren’t candidates for the company’s previous implant model. Recently, there are more options being developed to restore both hearing and sight in affected patients, such technology has the potential to improve the quality of life of countless people.