Peter Vander Auwera - Issue #64

The very best

About the switch from book to digital entertainment; stories/narratives. Neuroscientists who insist technology is changing our brains may have it wrong. What if we are switching from books to digital entertainment because of a change in our need to communicate?

About work as the blessing vs the easy path to retirement. Life is work, and work is a blessing. A new mindset.

About fairness, accountability, and transparency in machine learning. In the next ten years we will see data-driven technologies reconfigure systems in many different sectors, from autonomous vehicles to personalized learning, predictive policing to precision medicine…

About mass consumerism and the illusion of dematerialization. Until the 19th century, hardly anyone recognized the vital role everyday buyers play in the world economy.

About one possible future scenario where all your software belongs to Amazon.

In the material world we live in here on planet Earth, we are often blocked in our capacities to manifest potential beyond what we think we know. Seeing is different from thinking. Seeing is having a…

As we pass the tipping point toward a world fast enough and interconnected enough to be dominated by emergent systems, our methods of making decisions, and the tools available to help us make them…

The Australian anthropologist explains why being scared about AI and big data has more to do with our fear of each other than killer robots

10 Things Ginni Rometty (IBM) Taught Me about Future Tech - SEPA Payments news helping corporates navigate payments technology and payments industry trends

Data and Society

Preventing unintended consequences through stronger data ethics

About a year ago I left Google to join Slack, and I hit the ground running. The team I joined was really excited about the platform we were planning to launch and things were super hectic. We were working with partners to implement bots, deliberating if developers will understand and buy into the concept of bots, and speaking at events to introduce this notion of the conversational office.

Zeitgeist

The former chancellor and the historian discuss government ‘cock-ups’, artificial intelligence, and life in the public eye

How I learnt to love the economic blogosphere

Innovation

How technology companies are investing in disruptive technologies – and the impact on their organizations.

From coinventing Photoshop to reinventing movie f/x, ILM's Knoll is always a few parsecs ahead of the pack. Now he's jumping in to hyperspace with Rogue One

A few years ago I worked at a mega corporation. I had just finished up a brutal week of all-day meetings with 20 people. My boss and I sat down to catch up. Eventually, she warned: It didn’t matter…

Future of work

leaders need to see themselves as architects, as space designers, creators, and implementors

The future is one in which you probably won’t have ‘a job’. That is not to say you won’t work, just that you will work in fundamentally different ways. This is the full version of an article we wrote…

Internet Culture

If you thought the Amazon Echo rumor mill had shut down for 2016, you're wrong. That's because word of a new Amazon Echo with a 7" touchscreen has surfaced, an

FinTech

Jack Ma, founder of the world’s largest e-commerce platform, has coined a new phrase to define the mission of Alipay to help more young people, small companies and poor nations gain access to capital, advocating a concept of “techfin” to turn the...

Last para says it all: "But we do not live in a rational world, and GPII has the benefit of incumbency."

So-called fintech companies, which take deposits, make electronic payments or lend money, will be able to apply for bank charters from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.

Why is payments startup Stripe worth $9B? Partly, because it's made it so easy to tap into the backend, allowing the creation of a massive Stripe Ecosystem.

AI, Robots, Algorythms

MIT announced its new artificial intelligence on Monday, and it’s a prototype of a clairvoyant. Using a photograph, it can predict and depict what hap...

An article in Wired, “Google, Facebook and Microsoft are remaking themselves around AI”, highlights a topic I’ve been discussing for a long time now: the efforts technology giants are making to…

All right, don't panic, but computers have created their own secret language and are probably talking about us right now. Well, that's kind of an..

About "Geeky leadership" 

At The Wall Street Journal CEO Council conference, the co-director of MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy offers a recipe for a successful company.

Art related

What is the potential of machine art, and can it truly be described as creative or imaginative?

Beware of The Dandelions is an immersive environment built on the aesthetics of hip-hop, designed to embody the communal lessons found within complex sciences. Through…