Peter Vander Auwera - Issue #50

The very best

My plug for Gerd Leonhard's latest book "Technology vs Humanity: the coming clash of man and machine". 

Dear graduating students,

Comment: We design machines to think and act in ways that only mirror humans. That's too restrictive, limiting what AI might be capable of, says Alex Taylor

“The strongest force propelling human progress has been the swift advance and wide diffusion of technology.” — The Economist

What does it mean to be a rock and roll muse, revered for your inspirational effect on a songwriter?

Data and Society

The smart city is, to many urban thinkers, just a buzzphrase that has outlived its usefulness: ‘the wrong idea pitched in the wrong way to the wrong people’. So why did that happen – and what’s coming in its place, asks Steven Poole

Zeitgeist

The autonomous cars, launching this summer, are custom Volvo XC90s, supervised by humans in the driver’s seat.

Has raising children turned into stressful, obsessive work in the hands of middle-class Western parents? Two new books explore this troubled territory

Its latest operating system experiment throws out decades of software history in pursuit of smaller-scale devices.

Innovation

The label’s become too big to be useful, and tech could suffer for it.

“[Naval Ravikant] is an entrepreneur and angel investor, a co-author of Venture Hacks, and a co-maintainer of AngelList. Previously he]was a co-founder at Genoa Corp (acquired by Finisar), Epinions.com (IPO via Shopping.com), and Vast.com (white-label classifieds marketplace).” 1. “The cost of starting a company has collapsed.” “As the cost of running a startup experiment is…

Future of work

Internet Culture

Google Cloud Platform today announced a major release of three database services from beta, signaling that they’re ready for production use. Google Cloud Platform will now be positioned to handle the routine but vital database needs of corporate clients as AWS and Microsoft have been doing exclusively until now. Cloud SQL, Cloud Bigtable and Cloud Datastore are all now in general release, Google said in a blog post.

FinTech

The size of the legal engineer’s undertaking is tremendous, but it is proportional to the commercial value of automated contract provisions, decisions, and actions.

Re-learning old lessons about shared state

Library of CongressIt's clear that technology is changing financial services at a rapid rate.Business Insider surveyed a number of the brightest minds

Ripple chief technical officer Stefan Thomas gave some insights about W3C's Web Payments Working Group.

AI, Robots, Algorythms

This company can help humans win the race against artificial intelligence by putting a chip in their heads.

Steven Pinker believes there's some interesting gender psychology at play when it comes to the robopocalypse. Could artificial intelligence become evil or are alpha male scientists just projecting?

Post Capitalism

What is New Economic Thinking?

Art related

French designer Clement Balavoine has created a digital-only process that lets fashion designers create and personalise a garment without touching fabric.

Other

What does it mean to be a rock and roll muse, revered for your inspirational effect on a songwriter?