Peter Vander Auwera - Issue #78

The very best

About the privatisation of public space. Parent company Alphabet would provide services in response to data harvested

About the long excellent argument by Adam Ludwin (CEO Chain) on the value (or not) of cryptocurrencies. It’s easy to believe cryptocurrencies have no value. It’s also becoming fashionable to believe they will disrupt everything. Neither extreme is true.

About taking back our human agency. Tristan Harris thinks big tech is taking advantage of us all. Can its power be used for good?

About Conformable Decoders aka human digital implants.

About the education young people need today. There are practically as many philosophies of education as there are schools in the United States. There are the Prusso-American schools of Horace Mann’s age, the public schools of the No Child Left…

Once, robots assisted human workers. Now it’s the other way around.

The field of artificial intelligence may finally be coming back around to Douglas Hofstadter. Since winning a Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction for his 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, Hofstadter, 72, has been quietly thinking about thinking, and how we might get computers to do it. In the early days of AI...

I spent over 10 years working for a bank and I loved it. I think their days are numbered though, probably; mainly as I believe the services and products they provide will be gradually replaced by…

New film Loving Vincent is made entirely of oil paintings. Alex Stanger visited the production studio in Poland to find out how it was created.

Your brain does not process information, retrieve knowledge or store memories. In short: your brain is not a computer

A fascinating conversation between the CEO of Microsoft and the CEO of Swift

Data and Society

The video would be blurred and voices muffled but the idea is for people to be able to guess whether friends and family are available in order to hop on spontaneous video calls.

Editorial: A huge weakness in wifi security erodes online privacy. But the real challenge is designing with human shortcomings in mind

Zeitgeist

When Institutions fail to hold human possibility

From Star Trek to The Matrix via The HitchHiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, science fiction has long predicted computing innovation before the designers have

Innovation

Safaricom, Kenya’s largest telecom company and provider of the nation's mobile money service, M-Pesa, has launched a new innovation center in Nairobi...

Tesla's former VP of production breaks down exactly why you shouldn't be afraid to build your own products.

Architects are too obsessed with being original and should get over their aversion to copying, according to a new book co-written by Winy Maas of MVRDV

Future of work

How To Identify A Toxic Culture Before Accepting A Job Offer. With everyone touting their “amazing” culture it can be hard to tell who is telling the truth. Here are a few red flags to look for.

As many as a dozen financial institutions are deploying IBM’s Watson to search for signs of employee misconduct so they can avoid a Wells Fargo-size scandal. But the legal and technical limits of its use are major issues.

While the rest of the auto industry increasingly uses robots in manufacturing, Toyota has taken a contrarian stance by accentuating human craftsmanship.

Collective intelligence—the idea that a team performing well on one task will succeed on other projects—sounds good, but new research raises doubts.

Hospitals and med schools use fake corpses to teach anatomy, and the most lifelike model is the SynDaver Patient.

Internet Culture

Social networking platforms are currently held back by flawed principles and monetization strategies. Mercury Protocol will allow social networks to move forward by creating a tokenized social…

FinTech

Swell, hosted by Ripple, was the result of a monopolistic network trying to exclude a well positioned rival from SIBOS, the world’s premier financial services event. SIBOS, owned by SWIFT, is a…

Mastercard's blockchain technology is now available to developers in the B2B space and beyond, after the company made its APIs open to the public.

This article from Lets Talk Payments talks about Alipay storming North America.

J.P. Morgan Chase & Co said on Monday it launched a new payment processing network that uses blockchain technology.

Barclays Plc will need to defend its advantages in the payments business from encroachment by technology companies including Amazon.com Inc. and Apple Inc., according to Chief Executive Officer Jes Staley.

Bitcoin gets official blessing in Japan

Alternative forms of online money are going to dominate payments in the next decade. There may be agreement on the potential, but quite how regulators and central banks will respond is still up in the air.

JPMorgan Chase is to buy Silicon Valley-based WePay to help its small business clients marry software with payments.

The people behind blockchain computer project Tezos raised millions in July. But they are now waging a bitter feud that threatens to derail their plans.

In May this year, fintech start-up R3 raised $107 million from a consortium of the world’s top banks...

AI, Robots, Algorythms

What exactly do these robot & hologram companions look like, what can they do, & who's making them? Here are some examples of personable robots & holograms.

The version of DeepMind's AlphaGo that beat Lee Sedol last year had trained on thousands of human amateur and professional games to learn how to play Go. Now, the latest version, 'AlphaGo Zero' has skipped this step and mastered the game by playing against itself, starting from completely random play. In doing so, AlphaGo Zero has surpassed human level of play and defeated the previously published champion-defeating version of AlphaGo by a shocking score of 100 games to 0.

AI is likely to exceed human performance in most cognitive domains. This poses substantial safety risks

Waymo’s self-driving minivan

Post Capitalism

Op-Ed: My first book, "Climate Capitalism," which I co-wrote with Hunter Lovins, demonstrated our belief that capitalism could be oriented to solve some of the world's biggest problems. Since that book was published in 2011, my thinking about the role of capitalism as we know it today has changed.

The status quo is set by the stories we have been told for decades. To challenge it, we must tell stories of beautiful alternatives and amplify them.

Art related

While today the stereotype of the stuffy architect clad in black survives, there have been many architects throughout history that loved a splash of color.

Within the context of La Manzanera, La Muralla Roja (The Red Wall) asks to be considered as a case apart. It embodies a clear reference to the popular...

Towards Biology is an audiovisual piece for Room 9 designed and produced by Ricardo Bofill Taller de Arquitectura in cooperation. Audiovisual content and technical…

In this selection of winning and shortlisted images from this year’s competition, amateur and professional photographers worked to a brief of showcasing Britain’s eclectic landscapes

Museum made the decision to drop Domestikator, which depicts a human figure penetrating an animal, after criticism on social media

The pictures shortlisted by Arcaid Images Architectural Photography Awards 2017 capture the beauty and wonder of built environments.

The Foster + Partners structure embodies Apple’s new “Town Square” retail concept

Other

Miriah Meyer explores how interactive visualizations can help us find meaning in mounds of data.