Petervan's Delicacies - Issue #112

The very best

Fantastic post on creativity and solid arguments why that will always be a human endeavour.

About Apple’s surveillance as self-care and the logic of screen timing

About how to stop being the last robot and truly become a human being in control of your destiny.

About corporate collaborations with artists: beyond the "artist in residence" programs.

Robert Fritz about happiness: Happiness is not the goal. Creating a desired outcome is. Happiness is a by-product.

Technology can meet our needs with the touch of a screen, but is this making us turn away from the people in our lives in favor of our devices?

Consumerism innovates new levels of consumption in order to keep growing a global economy. This isn’t a troubling trajectory of the Singularity, but a blanket approach to a coercive internet. The…

The fossil fuel industry and the tobacco industry are funding disinformation campaigns so societies and countries can’t take action

As an evolutionary anthropologist, I have spent my career working to understand the mechanisms of human relationships and the role they play in our daily lives. Our sociability sits at the very…

Humans have the unique capacity to purposefully evolve ourselves because we have future consciousness, which is cognitive, motivational, and emotional.

This article is an overview of how militaries around the world use AI for logistics, homeland security, autonomous vehicles, and more.

Dull tours of supermarkets and mundane shots on YouTube and Instagram are warm and relatable—and also push back against the envy industry.

"As it ponders important social choices that involves the application of new technology," Langdon Winner wrote in 1992, "contemporary moral philosophy works within a vacuum." "The vacuum," he goes on to say, "is a social as well as an intellectual one. Often there are no persons or organizations with clear authority to make the decisions…

Direct democracy! Universal basic income! ... Fascism? The inside story of Italy’s Five Star Movement and the cyberguru who dreamed it up.

I remember a time when algorithms weren’t very reliable. In 2001, navigation software had about a 50% success rate of bringing you where you needed to be

Data and Society

The fear of A.I. has long been that we might merge with computers, create hybrid superbeings, or become enslaved by them. But the rise of “deepfakes” points toward a very different outcome.

Researcher finds one of the databases used to track Uyghur Muslim population in Xinjiang.

The controversy around Google’s Nest home-security devices shows that consumers never really know what their personal technology is capable of.

“Xuexi Qiangguo,” a Chinese government propaganda app that recently became a huge hit was developed by Alibaba, but there’s ample evidence there’s social and Government pressure for people in China…

Facebook security monitors users who have made aggressive comments, as well as former employees, through a "be on lookout" or "BOLO" list. It can use its apps and web sites to track the location of these people as it deems necessary.

Roger McNamee warns Facebook users of the platform’s sinister ambitions.

California, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, New Mexico, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Rhode Island, Washington — last I checked, these states have introduced draft “privacy…

World After Capital: Getting Over Privacy (Finish) NOTE: This is part of a series of excerpts from my book World After Capital. Today’s post wraps up the prior discussion of why as part of increasing...

We are living in a world increasingly driven by data in every aspect of our lives with emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Big data, Blockchain & Cloud computing acting as the driving…

NEVER DITCH a party without an excuse. On a cold Sunday night in 1409, the great and the good of Renaissance Florence—men of the governing classes, painters, goldsmiths, sculptors—had gathered for dinner. Donatello was there, so was Filippo Brunelleschi, the engineer behind the great dome of the Duomo.

Imagine a world where you don't have to adapt to the environment, but instead, the environment adapts to you That's the true promise of the Internet of Things –

Zeitgeist

Virgin Galactic successfully blasted a crew of three into space during the aerospace company's fifth-supersonic powered test flight Friday morning.

According to Estonia's president, governments should offer their people e-services with the same efficiency and user experience as online stores do.

Spotify Teardown claims that the streaming service is sending (and receiving) much more than music. The authors contend that the service is engaged in emotional manipulation given their playlist emphasis. Music is only the surface layer of a much larger data collection and advertising infrastructure.

The surveillance states takes to the skies.

Innovation

Shenzhen flooded the world with cheap gadgets. Can it now become what Silicon Valley never did—a global hub of innovation, entrepreneurship, and manufacturing?

Movement is a common theme in conversation with Jules Saint Gerome. Softly spoken and politely intense, he speaks in a stream of consciousness that mirrors the passing wake of a sailing boat. Ripples of nuance and insight that link a peripatetic working life with a thoughtful consideration for how we engage with our natural environment…

The automaker's new feature taps into light timing data to let drivers ride the “green wave” and breeze through town.

In the previous blog, we looked at data from vehicles and why vehicle manufacturers want to gather the information. We also looked to understand data from a ‘per-duty-cycle’ perspective rather than ‘per-day’. In this blog, we’ll look at In-Vehicle Infotainment. What is this and what data volume does it represent?

Sidewalk Labs wants to rethink cities. We’re finally getting a look at what that will mean in Toronto, where the company is building a prototype neighborhood.

Think Expedia — but for consumer products.

Future of work

Bands are known for drink, drugs and dust-ups. But beyond the debauchery lie four models for how to run a business. Ian Leslie explains

The real opportunity for organizations goes beyond doing more of the same labor faster and cheaper.

Change should become routine

Among its many benefits? Protection from robots.

Internet Culture

This article as PDF. Dropgangs, or the future of dark markets The Internet is full of commercial activity and it should come at no surprise that even illegal commercial activity is widespread as well. In this article we would like to describe the current developments - from where we came, where we are now, and where it might be going - when it comes to technologies used for digital black market activity.

FinTech

Japan’s banking giant Mizuho Financial Group will launch its digital currency platform for payments and remittance services in March.

Discover latest Stats on the Growth of Fintech!! We have put all facts from first wire transfer to blockchain technology and beyond.

We compare digital banks Starling, Monzo, N26 and Revolut on funding raised, CEO approval rating, media mentions, staff numbers and more...

Designers are being invited to design a crime of the future, linking the financial and creative industries, for The Future of Money Award 2019.

Apple Inc has teamed up with Chinese payments giant Ant Financial Services Group and several local banks to offer interest-free financing, its first such move in the country as it looks to boost waning smartphone sales.

AI, Robots, Algorythms

We should not be creating conscious, humanoid agents but an entirely new sort of entity, rather like oracles, with no conscience, no fear of death, no distracting loves and hates.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning might sound like the stuff of sci-fi movies. But hedge funds, major banks and private equity firms are already deploying next-generation technologies to gain an edge.

It isn’t easy to be a citizen in 2018. We are told to watch out for bots and biased ...

SYDNEY, Australia, February 18, 2019 — Augmented analytics, continuous intelligence and explainable artificial intelligence (AI) are among the top trends in data and analytics technology that have significant disruptive potential over the next three to fi

If you believe the hype on artificial intelligence, China is the heir apparent. While China’s research efforts in artificial intelligence (AI) began later than the U.S. and Europe there are some…

Like traditionally-trained pediatricians, the AI  broke cases down into major organ groups and infection areas before breaking them down into subcategories.

The Innovation Excellence community is home to articles, webinars, videos, training and education - powering growth in the innovation management profession.

'Summoning the demon.' 'The new tools of our oppression.' 'Children playing with a bomb.' These are just a few ways the world's top researchers and industry leaders have described the threat that artificial intelligence poses to mankind. Will AI enhance our lives or completely upend them?

As the machine intelligence explosion seems inevitable, the troubling trajectory of technological singularity forces us to think seriously about what we want as a species.

Digital Ethics

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. Below are some morsels that are not in this week DE-newsletter:

New research suggests that a controversial gene-editing experiment to make children resistant to HIV may also have enhanced their ability to learn and form memories.

Memory palaces, cuneiform, kung fu–for millennia we’ve pushed ourselves to recall with greater precision, learn faster, perform better and achieve more. One new technology in particular we’re about…

Post Capitalism

There’s something happening here.

Art related

Discovered during my art history classes: Maarten Vanden Eynde

Canadian artist Janet Cardiff’s "The Forty Part Motet," is deceptively simple in appearance: a spare room occupied solely with a ring of black speakers on st...

Why would anyone want to watch a hologram of the famous performance artist doing nothing? Abramović’s much vaunted show is tedious and trite

Between the Clock and the Bed

Princeton faculty members are studying the collective, in-the-moment creative process in dance as a valuable model for exploring social decision-making. Mathematical model-based investigations of complex group dynamics may help to explain and explore collective behavior in nature and art and to inform the design of control systems for robot teams operating in challenging environments.

Aesthetics

Watching a film at a fraction of its original speed on an ePaper screen can completely change the perception of the movie, its context, and time itself.

A film watched at 1/3,600th of the original speed is not just a very slow movie, it's a way to you see yourself against the smear of time. Background: https://medium.com/@bryan/very-slow-movie-player-499f76c48b62?source=friends_link&sk=deadb3073d5ef89fc425f61b1aabec5e…

composed of bright round, exposed concrete discs, the structure condenses aspects of dynamism, balance, lability, and mobility.

Other

In the tangled depths of a nearby national park lays hidden and almost secret lake that, like moth to flame, I eagerly venture to several times a year. I had found it through the use of satellite…

How many hoops can a person hula? Marawa Ibrahim holds the record at 200—but when she's twirling a modest 100, her skill makes your head spin.