Peter Vander Auwera - Issue #73

The very best

About a vision for the next 30 years by one of the most intriguing futurists. Opening keynote for the PNG Investment Conference, Sydney, 7 September 2017. How smartphones, digital money and drones will transform the developing economy of Papua New Guinea.

About the relationship between entrepreneurship and precarity, i.e. entreprecariat

About the shift from a tri-form society, where markets dominate, to a quadriform society, where networks dominate

About the business model for protocol builders. Going through the various documents of the Filecoin SAFT funding, an absolute must-read for anyone interested in crypto, one answer in their Q&A touched upon how these companies will be defined and…

About the Internet of Things sending us back to the feudalism of the Middle Ages. The companies that make our digital devices think – and act – like they still own them, even after we've bought them. Are we becoming digital serfs?

Today, people don’t seek out computers in order to get things done; they do the things that let them use computers

Photography came of age amid the wars and atrocities, as well as the humanitarian aspirations, of the modern world

Taken literally, it’s just bad advice. But philosophy can redeem this self-help cliché.

The capacity for AI to recognize sexual identity based upon facial cues

Artificial intelligence is emerging as a creative force; in the process, it reveals something of itself.

Data and Society

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Blockchain, the secure distributed ledger technology first created to track bitcoin ownership, has taken on a number of new roles in recent years tracking..

In the past few years, blockchain has developed an unrivaled reputation as the next big thing for the decentralized internet. Startups have absorbed billions of dollars from traditional funding and token sales to develop software and proof-of-concepts that employ blockchain to fix many of the problems that riddle centralized online services.

Zeitgeist

The iPhone X replaces TouchID with FaceID. Here's what kind of security trade-off you can expect.

It was 1946 when the first real computer was completed. It occupied 1,800 square feet and weighed roughly fifty tons. Now, less than a century later, damn near every single one of us owns a computer…

In an effort to combat the swarms of mosquitoes apparently making mating grounds out of the standing water left behind from Hurricane Harvey, Texas has called in the big planes. The state asked the US Air Force to spray 6 million acres in the state with insecticide from in its low-flying C-130 cargo planes. The...

North Korea appears to be stepping up efforts to secure bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, which could be used to avoid trade restrictions including new sanctions approved by the United Nations Security Council.

Innovation

A shorter version of this post first appeared on the HBR blog --- I just watched a very smart company try to manage innovation by hiring a global consulting firm to offload engineering from “distractions.” They accomplished their goal, but at a huge, unanticipated cost: the processes and committees they designed ended up strangling…

Most organizations absolutely loathe chaos. It’s their ‛biggest enemy’. That’s because, traditionally, we’ve been taught to think and act analytically

An inside look into accelerator programs worldwide reveals a shift in business models.

You need to treat innovation differently than operations

In this video interview, Stanford’s Dan Klein explains how he’s taking improvisational theater beyond the stage and into business, leadership, and life.

In this series on systems thinking, I share the key insights and tools needed to develop and advance a systems mindset for dealing with complex problem solving and transitioning to the Circular…

Future of work

Rather than regenerate the areas in which they are based, the tech titans have constructed private fiefdoms

Offices are full of distractions but technology is at hand

Internet Culture

Over the weekend at IFA 2017 in Berlin, Huawei introduced the Kirin 970 processor, the first of its kind to include artificial intelligence baked into the chip. Instead of hosting AI in the cloud, the Kirin 970 has an integrated neural network processing unit (NPU) for processing intensive tasks like image recognition on the device. During the launch presentation, Richard Yu, CEO of Huawei Technologies Consumer Business Group, cited that the Kirin 970 is capable of processing 1.2 gigabits per second, twice as fast as its predecessor, the Kirin 960. In terms of image recognition, the

FinTech

When we first looked at the fastest growing API categories of recent years, Financial and Payments both made the list. We've seen a number of signals that there is great interest in API related to Finance so we decided to take a deeper look at the category's growth this month.

The former CIO of UBS is now working for a cryptocurrency non-profit.

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Vikram Pandit, who ran Citigroup Inc. during the financial crisis, said developments in technology could see some 30 percent of banking jobs disappearing in the next five years.

The nation's biggest bank is putting its support behind a modified ethereum protocol dubbed Masterchain to make interbank money transfers safer and faster.

JPMorgan's CEO has raged against the cryptocurrency — but fintech leaders say it is here to stay

Jim Rickards' reveals the global elites roadmap for how to use cryptocurrencies against their populations. Here's what's really at play...

Mike Cagney, a co-founder of Social Finance, is stepping down as chief executive and chairman after sexual harassment claims at the start-up.

The largest bank in the US, JPMorgan, has filed a patent for an electronic currency with many similarities to bitcoin

AI, Robots, Algorythms

Opening keynote for the PNG Investment Conference, Sydney, 7 September 2017. How smartphones, digital money and drones will transform the developing economy of Papua New Guinea.

Fantasy is a big part of our futurist predicament.

We were expecting Rosie from “The Jetsons” or maybe C3PO. Why did we end up with Alexa?

Amazon’s warehouses, which now employ more than 125,000 people across the United States, are being outfitted with the latest in robots and tech, but not at the expense of human jobs.

Today Apple announced its new FaceID technology. It’s a new way to unlock your phone through facial recognition. All you have to do is look at your phone and it will recognize you and unlock itself…

Art related

Should artists embrace, subvert or actively resist this new identity?

Net artist Sebastian Schmieg takes a closer look at digital labor and the arbitrary nature and strangeness of online freelance service marketplaces. What happens to us as humans?

From the Archive: Björk's Biophilia Live

Other

You might have heard that we are made of ‘star stuff’, but what exactly does that mean? In this collaboration between The Atlantic and the podcast TRBQ (The Really Big Questions), the NASA astronomer Michelle Thaller explains how every atom in the human body – and, indeed, every object in the Universe that is composed of anything more complex than hydrogen and helium atoms – can be traced back to the life cycle of a star.

Business Insider created an animation with projections from Northwestern professor Christopher Scotese to show what Earth might look like in 250 million years.

​The world's oceans are incomprehensibly vast, a fact that's quite apparent in this spectacular time-lapse of a cargo ship's journey over the course of a month.

Alibaba founder Jack Ma is known for his showmanship. But over the weekend he paid an especially ambitious tribute to the ultimate showman—Michael Jackson. On Sept. 8, at the party commemorating Alibaba's 18th birthday, the Chinese e-commerce mogul performed an elaborate dance number inspired by the king of pop himself. After arriving on stage in...

It has a resolution rate of one frame per trillionth of a second.