Peter Vander Auwera - Issue #55

The very best

About Machines, like humans, having their own relationships.

About the deprived human being

About not so young fools and creative courage

About the endless bombardment of news and gossip and images that make us manic information addicts. 

About the illusion that technology creates trust

Should humans adapt to bots. Will our conversations with real humans deteriorate? 

Wearable cameras will be ubiquitous. We’ll barely notice.

Preventing unintended consequences through stronger data ethics

I doubt that any phenomenon, real or imagined, has inspired more perplexing, convoluted, and ultimately futile philosophical analysis…

Once you realize you have them in more than you have them out, you'll start to be more comfortable with the idea of actual body hacking.

Hi, Backchannelistas, Steven here. It’s hard to type while holding your head still — I’m afraid a sudden motion will wrest the AirPods from…

We're storing more of life on our devices and it is changing the way we remember.

Leveraging everything from advanced hardware engineering to AI, this startup wants to give you control over your world's sounds.

In 2006, then-New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg issued an executive order establishing the Office of Special Enforcement, a citywide agency responsible for enforcing “quality of life” regulations—a nebulous, ideologically charged concept that refers to anything from music venues with too many noise complaints to nightclubs that facilitate prostitution to decrepit structures that pose a fire hazard.

Anti-Social Grumblings I recently gave a deliberatively provocative TEDx talk titled "quit social media" (see the video above). The theme of the event was

There’s been a lot of talk in recent years about “collective” intelligence — how networks of people can swarm together in social movements…

The internet was supposed to usher in a new e-paradise. A new book, Utopia is Creepy, suggests it's not quite panned out that way

Few figures in the history of management have had a greater impact than Frederick Winslow Taylor. The irony is that there have also been…

Robot deception, addiction and possibility of AIs exceeding their remits noted as hazards that manufacturers should consider

Review: In an impressive but bleak follow-up to his blockbuster Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari suggests that humans' advantage over machines is a delusion – and we'll ultimately live in their shadow

Data and Society

A huge online attack enabled by Internet-connected devices illuminates a problem keeping security experts awake at night.

An artist’s concept of Aerial Dragnet system: several UAS carrying sensors form a network that provides wide-area surveillance of all low-flying UAS in an

Zeitgeist

The way software agents interact on the Web is poorly understood. Now evidence shows that they fight each other for years.

There is a growing and disturbing trend of anti-intellectual elitism in American culture.

by Tobias van Schneider first appeared on my private email list.

Innovation

“If you aren’t genuinely pained by the risk involved in your strategic choices, it’s not much of a strategy.” — Reed Hastings

Amazon are building a forest: in the heart of downtown Seattle, beauty emerges, a convoluted scaffolding, sharp sunlight glinting off glass, anodised steel forming perfect spheres. A new building, an architecture of innovation. Three interlinked spheres that will form meeting spaces: this is architecture not as functional separation of space, nor as load-bearing trusses and…

"If you are a very talented person," Thiel told a Windy City college crowd last week, "you have a choice: You either go to New York or you go to Silicon Valley."

Musk may soon detail the architecture he hopes will colonize the solar system.

@LSUsocial

Future of work

How organisations enshrine collective stupidity and employees are rewarded for checking their brains at the office door

I love my comfort zone. To me, that’s where the real magic happens.

Imagine that one morning you discover a ring that grants you magic powers. With this ring on your finger, you can seize the presidency, rob Fort Knox and instantly become the most famous person on the planet. So, would you do it? Readers of Plato...

Internet Culture

Snapchat personality.

"Efforts in customer experience often serve as the heart and soul of digital transformation." - Brian Solis I...

if you don’t underestimate me, I won’t underestimate you

Cheap and accessible capital has advantages: More founders get to pursue big dreams and previously “unfundable companies” not only raise huge amounts of..

Here is my view of what Apple is going to announce in September 2017. First, though, Pantomime http://pantomimecorp.com/pantomime-creatures…

FinTech

Last year Alipay, the Alibaba-affiliated payments app, released an April Fool's prank video. It touted a fictional feature that would let people find strangers nearby to fulfill favors of all sorts for cash—from charging a phone, to delivering toilet paper, to going on a date. Today the joke has turned into reality. Ant Financial, the company...

Markets are putting Deutsche Bank through a safety drill. If we’re lucky, the rustle of investors fleeing Deutsche Bank late this week will…

Deutsche Bank shares were indicated down 6.2% ahead of the opening of the Frankfurt market on Friday.

During a webinar focused on Digital Wealth Management for one of our clients, I thought that I would poke the audience by discussing a Future World in which we all create wealth by investing in our Digital Assets. I started by referring to MyCreditScore, as a Digital asset, only because it is not that utopian…

When a Blockchain Isn’t a Blockchain

(They just don’t know it yet.)

Learn how new FinTech architectures and startups are creating novel types of business models in Africa and Asia, where there are far fewer traditional banks, and in Europe and the US, where financial institutions generally avoid the market for small business loans.

FinTech is attracting the attention of cities around the world, now including Manchester and Zurich.

Best FinTech accelerator? Your regulator.

With the launch of iOS 10 on Sept. 13, new payment functionality was enabled for Siri, iOS's voice-activated virtual assistant, and iMessage, Apple's text-based

IBM’s recently released report suggests the Blockchain technology will be implemented by 15% of big banks by as early as 2017.

JP Morgan is building an ethereum based private blockchain in partnership with EthLab co-founded by Jeff Wilcke, an ethereum core developer.

AI, Robots, Algorythms

We rely on our phones and laptops to see information. But what if we could feel it instead?

Introducing Something New. Identity for All

The Fourth Transformation: How AR and AI change everything

How will artificial intelligence systems change the way we live? This is a tough question: on one hand, AI tools are producing compelling advances in complex tasks, with dramatic improvements in energy consumption, audio processing, and leukemia detection. There is extraordinary potential to do much more in the future. On the other hand, AI systems...

It’s already here. In the age of the public self, where our personal and financial information trails across the internet, it might not…

Software programmed to interact with humans is hot property in Silicon Valley, with potential benefits for businesses, consumers – even the bereaved

AI is from Venus, Machine Learning is from Mars

Get used to talking to businesses like you talk to your friends.

Post Capitalism

Art related

The system used machine learning techniques to comb through hundreds of examples and put together a frightening clip.

The Tate is using AI to pair today's news photos with works from its permanent collection, with striking results

Frank Lloyd Wright Designs an Urban Utopia: See His Hand-Drawn Sketches of Broadacre City (1932)

Decades ago, New York lost one of its grand entryways. What if a new one were hiding in plain sight?

Every Exhibition Held at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) Presented in a New Web Site: 1929 to Present

Other

The first Future of StoryTelling Festival will offer participants virtual reality, immersive theater and other interactive experiences.