Petervan's Delicacies - Issue #111

The very best

About a status quo with no illusion of ethics, morals, or humanity: maintaining this status quo is the core operating model of global management consultancies like McKinsey. By @jharche

Like the medium is the message, "platform-scale social technology is a political ideology in the conventional sense. Its nature dictates a particular political "grain" and it is hard, perhaps futile, to try to go against directly." by @ribbonfarm  

A New Science-Fiction Story About Surveillance in China. Technology is making people unhinged and violent. Can an algorithm stop them?

Albert Wenger is done with privacy. As it cannot be solved technically, and not be enforces afterwards, let's just get rid of it. Controversial at least.

"The digital dark age becomes a reality when we mistake the internet as our reality." by @Mike_K_Spencer

About Burning Man reconnecting with its initial vision

The next revolution in computing will be signaled by the rise of analog systems over which digital programming no longer has control.

You are being evaluated as you read this. Not the physical body that you conceive of as “you”, but some digital record comprised of 1’s and 0’s that represents you. Right now, mountains of data…

Dubious claims and leaky toilets: Inside the first camp ever to be publicly de-invited from the desert event.

Data and Society

If robots don’t have exactly the same consciousness as humans, then this is used as an excuse to give them different rights, analogous to arguments that other tribes or races are less than human.

In 2019 there is a noticeable trend towards the implementation of a data dividend. As regulating of tech companies is becoming more urgent, the idea of consumers getting paid for their digital data…

Stanford Researchers Dismantle Mark Zuckerberg’s ‘Meaningful Interactions’ Argument. Zuck’s theory that there’s a right and a wrong way to use Facebook may not stand the test of time.

Information about you, what you buy, where you go, even where you look is the oil that fuels the digital economy.

Zeitgeist

Many of the body cameras worn by police are woefully vulnerable to hacking and manipulation. Amber Authenticate wants to fix that—with the blockchain.

Have we all been “Zucked”? Mark Zuckerberg talks a big game but has Facebook really benefited the world or the internet? It’s not a useful app like WeChat. Facebook turns 15, but has been one grand…

Innovation

Silicon Valley entrepreneur Steve Blank makes a good point about McKinsey’s Three Horizons Model for innovation and how our approach to understanding how we apply it needs to change. The model…

The hybrid-powered aircraft will carry up to 500 pounds with a range of 300 miles and could enter service next year.

Future of work

Career progression used to be vertical. Now it’s about choosing a path that builds skills

Predictions and analysis from the experts -- Learn what the experts have to say about AR, VR and the realistic implications the emerging technology will have on the Future of Learning and Development.

To meet the challenge of producing more food with less everything, farm bots are going to be an essential part of the mix.

I quit Google this January. It was a bittersweet moment — I joined 11 years ago as a college dropout and ultimately emerged as a prominent figure in the field of Site Reliability Engineering. My work…

Internet Culture

We interviewed 32 AI researchers to get an idea of when the singularity might occur. In this article, we compare our results to two similar surveys.

FinTech

Venture capital-backed fintech funding surged 120% in 2018. Following is a summary of fintech milestones and potential future moves for the industry.

We at the DFS Lab are running a bootcamp/hackathon to encourage FinTechs to engage with the Mojaloop community and explore the business models that wide-scale, interoperable payment systems like…

New York state has released guidance on how life insurance companies should use nontraditional data when underwriting premiums. The ruling is that it’s okay as long as the algorithms aren’t discriminatory, but that’s easier said than done.

Engineers at the lender have created the "JPM Coin," a digital token that will be used to instantly settle transactions in its wholesale payments business.

By Andrew Keys, Co-Founder of ConsenSys Capital. Read Andrew Keys’s “19 Blockchain Predictions for 2019.” One blockchain milestone that I’ve been anticipating this year is the slow but sure arrival…

JPMorgan is prototyping its own digital currency to be used for cross-border payments and, later, other purposes. Will banks find this a palatable alternative to today's most well-known options?

AI, Robots, Algorythms

One of the Fathers of AI Is Worried About Its Future. Yoshua Bengio wants to stop talk of an AI arms race and make the technology more accessible to the developing world.

Google and Microsoft have added warnings to their "risk factors" for investors about potential legal and ethical problems from their artificial intelligence projects.

We are building a 1-to-1 map of almost unimaginable scope. When it's complete, our physical reality will merge with the digital universe.

Aramark's newly appointed chief AI officer, along with senior IT leaders from Kohl's, eBay and Square, make the case for an AI expert in the C-suite: Title may not be required. As the use of AI across industries grows, some nontechnology enterprises like Aramark are hiring a chief AI officer to bring governance and common sense -- and value -- to the hype around AI. Other organizations like Kohl's, Square and eBay have strong AI teams but have not elevated AI governance to the same level as a CIO position or chief human resources officer -- yet.

The US will join more than a dozen other countries with national AI strategies when President Trump signs an executive order to create the American AI Initiative.

On Monday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order on the “American A.I. Initiative,” a set of sweeping guidelines aimed to increase the United…

In 1970, Lyudmila Terentyevna Aleksandrova lost her right hand. It happened at work, where she was employed by the Russian state. With her hand gone, she fought for a disability allowance that never…

Amazon, which offers facial recognition services, asks Congress to regulate how the technology can be used appropriately.

When the machines come for our jobs, they’ll go to places like Lakeland, Fla., first, our columnist says.

Technology has been disrupting and advancing the way live, and maybe even the way we evolve, for over 3.5 million years. It was that long ago that ancestors, the Australopithecus, started using stone…

A transdisciplinary discussion of artificial intelligence, biomimicry, data science, and software engineering research. Can we frame the development of evolutionary intelligence in these terms?

The Elon Musk-backed nonprofit company OpenAI declines to release research publicly for fear of misuse

Digital Ethics

The results don't look good for surveillance capitalism ...

I am co-curating a dedicated Digital Ethics newsletter with Futurist Gerd Leonhard. Most Digital Ethics topics are there now. You can subscribe via this link.

Post Capitalism

By now, you’ve probably heard about the state of national emergency to be declared over the wall. I want to say a few words about where America stands now. They’re going to a little brutal, a little…

Art related

♫The chills: When music gives us all the feels

Interactive museum exhibits like this are becoming more common as AR becomes cheaper, lighter, and easier to create.

tina roth eisenberg | swiss designer gone NYC

Artist Mario Klingemann’s groundbreaking piece of Artificial Intelligence (AI) generates a never-ending real-time stream of original art. The recent winner o...

Aesthetics

Get lost in the 2D version of a new virtual reality film by digital artist Rick Farin. 

Researchers plotted “vocal bursts” on a map, and found that we experience around 24 nonverbal emotions.

Design is Not Neutral on The Baffler