Thursday, July 14, 2016

Friday Thinking 15 July 2016

Hello all – Friday Thinking is a humble curation of my foraging in the digital environment. My purpose is to pick interesting pieces, based on my own curiosity (and the curiosity of the many interesting people I follow), about developments in some key domains (work, organization, social-economy, intelligence, domestication of DNA, energy, etc.)  that suggest we are in the midst of a change in the conditions of change - a phase-transition. That tomorrow will be radically unlike yesterday.

Many thanks to those who enjoy this.
In the 21st Century curiosity will SKILL the cat.

“Be careful what you ‘insta-google-tweet-face’”
Woody Harrelson - Triple 9
Content
Quotes:

Articles:
16 words and phrases describing humanity's future that English desperately needs


The neat division of the world into largely self-sufficient Westphalian states defined by clear geographic borders—in which interstate conflict was driven by the desire to seize land, resources and populations by one state from another—has been upended by the processes of globalization, which have created new connections between states while simultaneously opening up divides within them. Forging—or forcing—economic connectivity seems to be the driving force for international politics in the 21st century, and geo-economics is the framework through which it can be best understood.
Geo-economics argues that states seek control over the nodes of the global economy as a source of power and influence. In this new context, the principal drivers of conflict—or conciliation—will be battles over the management of connections: whose hand will turn the various spigots that control and channel the flows of economic activity, whether pipelines, canals, trade routes or internet connections.

Further challenges will come when existing governments weigh the national security pros and cons of relying on connectivity. Here we see evidence of the schizophrenia that defines the international security environment of the 21st century, which continues to define defense in national terms while accepting and depending on regional and global supply chains that exist beyond the control of any one state for economic prosperity.

Geo-Economics Moves Front and Center as Connectivity Reshuffles Global Politics



Creativity is about deliberately creating or spotting lucky accidents (going wide) and then editing them (going narrow). Going narrow can be partly logical and can use deductive reasoning, but going wide can’t. In reality it’s a logical fallacy to be able to deliberately do something by accident, so you have to put yourself in or create an environment that has a degree of experimentation, originality or noise to create these accidents and then notice them. Creative people don’t magic things out of thin air, they are good at noticing unusual things (sometimes in their own subconscious) and then recognizing patterns, so they can edit them together in a coherent way.

A Language and Process for Designing Businesses.



All the while Moore’s Law marches on, making computing ever cheaper and more powerful. As we said in part one, every decade computing power at the same price goes up by a factor of 100 thanks to Moore’s Law alone. So the computer transaction required to sell an airline ticket on the SABRE System in 1955 dropped by a factor of a billion today. What was a reasonable $10 ticketing expense in 1955 is today such a tiny fraction of a penny that it isn’t worth calculating. In SABRE terms, computing is now effectively free. That changes completely the kind of things we might do with computers.

Computing has become so inexpensive and personal data has become so pervasive that there are now cloud-based apps that make your smartphone the equivalent of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI or today’s NSA — a data mining machine. One of these tools was called Refresh .... Refresh has now been absorbed into LinkedIn which is being absorbed into Microsoft but the example is still valid. Punch someone’s name into your phone and hundreds of computers — literally hundreds of computers — fan out across social media and the world wide web composing an on-the-fly dossier on the person you are about to meet in business or would like to meet at the end of the bar, not only telling you about this person, their life, work, family, education, but even mapping any intersections between their life and yours, suggesting questions you might ask or topics of conversation you might want to pursue.  All of this in under one second. And for free.
And computing is about to get a lot cheaper since Moore’s Law isn’t slowing down, it’s actually getting faster.

In 10 years Moore’s Law will increase processor power by 128X. By throwing more processor cores at problems and leveraging the rapid pace of algorithm development we ought to increase that by another 128X for a total of 16,384X. Remember Google Vision is currently the equivalent of 0.1 visual cortex. Now multiply that by 16,384 to get 1,638 visual cortex equivalents. That’s where this is heading.
A decade from now computer vision will be seeing things we can’t even understand, like dogs sniffing cancer today.

The $10,000 added cost to Google for making a car self-driving will drop to nothing a decade from now when all new cars will be capable of driving themselves.

I, Cringely - Thinking about Big Data — Part 3 (final somewhat scary part)



There is more certainty in reselling the past, than inventing the future

61 Glimpses of the Future




This is a great 33 min video by Yanis Varoufakis - the previous minister of finance of Greece. I am keenly interested in Varoufakis’ views as he also spent a year as the economist in residence at Valve - where he was able to understand a paradigm shift in economic studies. In massive games one can carry out real experiments with a million participants in real-time seeing real behavior as changes in incentives are made. No longer trying to fit reality into a ‘perfect model’ but able to fit models onto reality.
In this video he presents a brief history of New Deal economics, the change into the financialized ‘bankruptcy’ and a compelling argument about guaranteed basic income.
Think of basic income as a trust fund for all our children to be financed by our  aggregate capital which was, after all, created collectively.

Yanis Varoufakis Basic Income is a Necessity

Technical change turns Basic Income into a necessity
Published on 12 May 2016
Technical change turns Basic Income into a necessity
Future of Work – 04.05.2016, Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute.
Keynote Yanis Varoufakis (GRE), former Greek Minister of Finance
For anyone interested in more his website is here


This is a 55 min video presentation to the RSA (Royal Society of the Arts). This is a MUST VIEW - as it reveals the new ‘Connectography’ shaping geo-politics

Connectivity is Destiny | RSA Replay | Parag Khanna

It is time to reimagine how life is organized on Earth. We're accelerating into a future shaped less by countries and more by mega-cities; less by borders and more by connectivity. A world in which the most connected powers, and people, will win. Leading strategist Parag Khanna shows how the global connectivity revolution - in transport, infrastructure, communications - has upended the ‘geography is destiny’ mantra, and how connectivity, not sovereignty, has become the organizing principle of 21st century society.

For anyone interested in some powerful and interactive visuals of global connectivity - Here is the link to The Connectivity Atlas
Infrastructure connects and defines us. The roads, pipelines and Internet cables that deliver our services also shape our opportunities, our vulnerabilities and our identities. Political maps abound, yet there are few useful, elegant maps of the complex layering of transportation, energy and communications infrastructures that unite us.

The Connectivity Atlas invites you explore the lines that advance our global connectedness. All of the data contained in this Atlas is open and available for reuse. Suggestions and contributions of additional datasets to include are welcome.
This project represents a collaboration between Development Seed, the University of Wisconsin-Madison Cartography Lab, and Dr. Parag Khanna, author of Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization


Another change in the conditions of change looms globally - why we will need robots and why we should begin worrying about whether we will have enough creative knowledge generators in the future. A signal that free education may be essential to accelerating change and shrinking populations.
…. urbanization, labor outmigration, globalization, and an unprecedented aspirational culture that eschews rural farm labor where other opportunities exist. But one central reason, contributing to and accelerating all the others, is far more surprising: Karnataka is shrinking. As in most states throughout southern India, the fertility rate in the state has fallen to 1.8, and for many years has been well below the rate at which new births can replace those who naturally pass away. Population is getting smaller, influencing wages, farming practices, and habitat. Zero population growth has arrived in southern India: a Baby Bust.

As growth has ceased throughout Karnataka, across southern India, and in many other parts of the world, new social arrangements are evolving, new ecologies are coming into being, and new political and economic conflicts are emerging. What happens to an economy, anywhere in the world, when population stalls or declines? How are relationships between workers and owners reconfigured? What happens in families, when the demands for women’s labor and demands for reproduction come into conflict, especially in historically patriarchal contexts? When labor becomes scarce, do regions shift to land abandonment and incidental rewilding, or instead to increasingly mechanized and intensive agricultural systems?

After the Baby Bust - The Politics and Ecology of Zero Population Growth

Having calmed down from the overblown twentieth-century fears of overpopulation, the world has yet to grapple with the end of population growth–and even de-population–that will occur this century. As Paul Robbins observes, global population growth rates peaked in the 1970s, and if current trends continue, some countries could see their citizenries substantially depleted in the coming decades. As native populations in Germany and the United Kingdom dwindle, replaced by immigrants from rapidly growing countries in Africa and Asia, a surge in nationalism and cultural upheaval is already apparent. What comes next depends on how governments and civil society this radical new order of things.


Here’s another looming demographic change in the conditions of change.

The Eclipse of White Christian America

A once powerful demographic group is losing ground in American politics.
The key question is not why one white Protestant subgroup is faring worse than another, but why white Protestantism as a whole—arguably the most powerful cultural force in the history of the United States—has faded. The answer is, in part, a matter of powerful demographic changes.

In 2004, the same year that Americans re-elected George W. Bush as president, the U.S. Census Bureau made waves by predicting that by 2050 the United States would no longer be a majority-white nation. Four years later, when Americans elected Barack Obama as their first African American head of state, the Census Bureau lowered that threshold year to 2042. When Obama was reelected in 2012, population experts forecasted that by 2060 whites will see their numbers decline for the first time in American history, while the number of people who identify as multiracial will nearly triple and the number of Hispanics and Asians will more than double. Mark Mather, a demographer with the Population Reference Bureau, summed up the magnitude of these shifts for The New York Times: “No other country has experienced such rapid racial and ethnic change.”

These racial and ethnic changes are dramatic, but they only partially account for the sense of dislocation many whites feel. In order to understand the magnitude of the shift, it’s important to also assess white Christian America’s waning cultural influence. It’s impossible to grasp the depth of many white Americans’ anxieties and fears—or comprehend recent phenomena like the rise of the Tea Party or Donald Trump in American politics, the zealous tone of the final battles over gay rights, or the racial tensions that have spiked over the last few years—without understanding that, along with its population, America’s religious and cultural landscape is being fundamentally altered.


What rules of thumb enable us to make good decisions? The answers to this could well be considered a definition of wisdom. This is a very good 67 min video by the authors of ‘Algorithms To Live By’ - they have actually found powerful computational algorithms and have translated them into robust rules of thumb for guiding the decisions in regular life. Worth the view.
Intuitively, rational action is exhaustive, exact and deterministic, always yielding the right answer (this is the luxury of an easy problem). When we take into account the context of human decisions, and the costs involved, the best strategies may have none of these properties. Real rational action may involve not considering all of your options, not choosing the best outcome, or making a guess.
Using approximations, trade-offs of error vs delay, relaxing constraints and turning to chance are not concessions made when we can’t be rational - these are what being rational means.

Brian Christian & Tom Griffiths: "Algorithms to Live By" | Talks at Google

Practical, everyday advice which will easily provoke an interest in computer science.
In a dazzlingly interdisciplinary work, acclaimed author Brian Christian and cognitive scientist Tom Griffiths show how the algorithms used by computers can also untangle very human questions. They explain how to have better hunches and when to leave things to chance, how to deal with overwhelming choices and how best to connect with others. From finding a spouse to finding a parking spot, from organizing one's inbox to understanding the workings of memory, Algorithms to Live By transforms the wisdom of computer science into strategies for human living.

Brian Christian is the author of The Most Human Human, a Wall Street Journal bestseller, New York Times editors’ choice, and a New Yorker favorite book of the year. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Wired, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, and The Paris Review, as well as in scientific journals such as Cognitive Science, and has been translated into eleven languages. He lives in San Francisco.

Tom Griffiths is a professor of psychology and cognitive science at UC Berkeley, where he directs the Computational Cognitive Science Lab. He has published more than 150 scientific papers on topics ranging from cognitive psychology to cultural evolution, and has received awards from the National Science Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, the American Psychological Association, and the Psychonomic Society, among others. He lives in Berkeley.


Metaphors can’t be proven to be right or wrong and there is no way to exhaust the potential meanings in a metaphor. It is interesting how deeply metaphors structure how human reason - see George Lakoff on this. But now we may be on the threshold of enabling algorithms to use metaphors.
"Relational ability is the key to higher-order cognition," said Gentner, Alice Gabrielle Twight Professor in Northwestern's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. "Although we share this ability with a few other species, humans greatly exceed other species in ability to represent and reason with relations."

Making computers reason and learn by analogy

Structure-mapping engine enables computers to reason and learn like humans, including solving moral dilemmas
Northwestern University's Ken Forbus is closing the gap between humans and machines.

Using cognitive science theories, Forbus and his collaborators have developed a model that could give computers the ability to reason more like humans and even make moral decisions. Called the structure-mapping engine (SME), the new model is capable of analogical problem solving, including capturing the way humans spontaneously use analogies between situations to solve moral dilemmas.

"In terms of thinking like humans, analogies are where it's at," said Forbus, Walter P. Murphy Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in Northwestern's McCormick School of Engineering. "Humans use relational statements fluidly to describe things, solve problems, indicate causality, and weigh moral dilemmas."

The theory underlying the model is psychologist Dedre Gentner's structure-mapping theory of analogy and similarity, which has been used to explain and predict many psychology phenomena. Structure-mapping argues that analogy and similarity involve comparisons between relational representations, which connect entities and ideas, for example, that a clock is above a door or that pressure differences cause water to flow.


The future of work definitely involves occupations we’ve never heard of for technology that hasn’t been invented yet - but always there will need to be design and designers.
In five years machine learning will enable computers to make the kinds of aesthetic choices that humans make today—the more on the production end of the spectrum, the more quickly it will happen. This will enable massively more personalized experiences. Imagine reading a magazine article where the photo editor wasn't just aware of you as part of a broad demographic, but knew your visual fluency and consumption more intimately than your spouse. Yet who teaches the computers to make those creative choices? How do we balance the possibilities of personalization when each article wants to have its own editorial flavor, each publication its own style? Training and directing creative machines will be one of the most exciting and important creative jobs of the future. It's starting today.

The Most Important Design Jobs Of The Future

Designers at Google, Microsoft, Autodesk, Ideo, Artefact, Teague, Lunar, Huge, New Deal, and fuseproject predict 18 new design jobs.
Yesterday's graphic designers are today's UX designers. Will tomorrow's UX designers be avatar programmers, fusionists, and artificial organ designers? Yes, according to the illustrious roster of design leaders we spoke with here.

Design has matured from a largely stylistic endeavor to a field tasked with solving thorny technological and social problems, an evolution that will accelerate as companies enlist designers for increasingly complex opportunities, from self-driving cars to human biology. "Over the next five years, design as a profession will continue to evolve into a hybrid industry that is considered as much technical as it is creative," says Dave Miller, a recruiter at the design consultancy Artefact. "A new wave of designers formally educated in human-centered design—taught to weave together research, interaction, visual and code to solve incredibly gnarly 21st-century problems—will move into leadership positions. They will push the industry to new heights of sophistication."

Here are 18 of the most important design jobs of the future, as identified by the men and women who will no doubt do much of the hiring. Most looked three to five years out, but some peered farther into the future (see: organ designer).


Here’s more on the domestication of DNA - programmable RNA.
“This nanoformulation approach allows us to make vaccines against new diseases in only seven days, allowing the potential to deal with sudden outbreaks or make rapid modifications and improvements,” says Daniel Anderson, an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Chemical Engineering and a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES).

Engineers design programmable RNA vaccines

Tests in mice show the vaccines work against Ebola, influenza, and a common parasite.
MIT engineers have developed a new type of easily customizable vaccine that can be manufactured in one week, allowing it to be rapidly deployed in response to disease outbreaks. So far, they have designed vaccines against Ebola, H1N1 influenza, and Toxoplasma gondii (a relative of the parasite that causes malaria), which were 100 percent effective in tests in mice.

The vaccine consists of strands of genetic material known as messenger RNA, which can be designed to code for any viral, bacterial, or parasitic protein. These molecules are then packaged into a molecule that delivers the RNA into cells, where it is translated into proteins that provoke an immune response from the host.

In addition to targeting infectious diseases, the researchers are using this approach to create cancer vaccines that would teach the immune system to recognize and destroy tumors.


The domestication of DNA will blend and combine with our domestication of matter and AI - this is an interesting hint of a future looming near us. There’s a geat 1.5 min video as well.

Scientists Create Successful Biohybrid Being Using 3-D Printing and Genetic Engineering

Scientists genetically engineered and 3-D-printed a biohybrid being, opening the door further for lifelike robots and artificial intelligence.
If you met this lab-created critter over your beach vacation, you'd swear you saw a baby ray. In fact, the tiny, flexible swimmer is the product of a team of diverse scientists. They have built the most successful artificial animal yet. This disruptive technology opens the door much wider for lifelike robots and artificial intelligence.

Like most disruption, it started with a simple idea. Kit Kevin Parker, PhD, a Harvard professor researching how to build a human heart, saw his daughter entranced by watching stingrays at the New England Aquarium in Boston. He wondered if he could engineer a muscle that could move in the same sinuous, undulating fashion. The quest for a material led to creating an artificial ray with a 3-D-printed rubber body at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard. Scientists from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Michigan, and Stanford University's Medical Center joined the team.


Now this is something I’ve been waiting for - not quite the ‘regrowing’ of teeth but getting closer.

THE END OF ROOT CANALS?

STEM CELL-STIMULATING FILLINGS COULD CHANGE DENTISTRY AND SAVE YOUR TEETH
What if damaged teeth could heal themselves? That's the inspiration behind a new project from Harvard and the University of Nottingham to create stem cell stimulating fillings.

Dentists treat hundreds of millions of cavities each year by drilling out the decay and putting in a filling.

But 10 to 15 percent of those fillings fail, says Adam Celiz, a therapeutic biomaterials researcher from University of Nottingham. And that leads to millions of root canals to remove the tooth's pulp, the soft tissue in the center of the tooth that contains the blood vessels, nerves, and connective tissue. A root canal can weaken the tooth, which may eventually need to be pulled.

Celiz and his fellow researchers have developed a new kind of filling made from synthetic biomaterial that can stimulate the growth of stem cells in the pulp of the tooth. Just like regular fillings, the biomaterial is injected into the tooth and hardened with UV light.


This is interesting - the AI analysis of the emotional arc of human literature.
The six basic emotional arcs are these:
A steady, ongoing rise in emotional valence, as in a rags-to-riches story such as Alice’s Adventures Underground by Lewis Carroll. A steady ongoing fall in emotional valence, as in a tragedy such as Romeo and Juliet. A fall then a rise, such as the man-in-a-hole story, discussed by Vonnegut. A rise then a fall, such as the Greek myth of Icarus. Rise-fall-rise, such as Cinderella. Fall-rise-fall, such as Oedipus.
It turns out the most popular are stories that follow the Icarus and Oedipus arcs and stories that follow more complex arcs that use the basic building blocks in sequence. In particular, the team says the most popular are stories involving two sequential man-in-hole arcs and a Cinderella arc followed by a tragedy.

Data Mining Reveals the Six Basic Emotional Arcs of Storytelling

Scientists at the Computational Story Laboratory have analyzed novels to identify the building blocks of all stories.
Back in 1995, Kurt Vonnegut gave a lecture in which he described his theory about the shapes of stories. In the process, he plotted several examples on a blackboard. “There is no reason why the simple shapes of stories can’t be fed into computers,” he said. “They are beautiful shapes.” The video is available on YouTube.

Vonnegut was representing in graphical form an idea that writers have explored for centuries—that stories follow emotional arcs, that these arcs can have different shapes, and that some shapes are better suited to storytelling than others.

Vonnegut mapped out several arcs in his lecture. These include the simple arc encapsulating “man falls into hole, man gets out of hole” and the more complex one of “boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl.”

Today, that changes thanks to the work of Andrew Reagan at the Computational Story Lab at the University of Vermont in Burlington and a few pals. These guys have used sentiment analysis to map the emotional arcs of over 1,700 stories and then used data-mining techniques to reveal the most common arcs. “We find a set of six core trajectories which form the building blocks of complex narratives,” they say.


Here’s a story (I haven’t analyzed its emotional arc) that is interesting despite unavoidable hyperbole of a corporation that has been a giant and is facing a face changing environment.
The company, as ever, talks a big game. Microsoft's historical instincts about where technology is going have been spot-on. But the company has a record of dropping the ball when it comes to acting on that instinct. It saw the promise in smartphones and tablets, for example, long before its peers. But Apple and Google beat Microsoft anyway. The question looming over the company's efforts around AI is simple:
Why should it it be different this time?
The thought that we may be at ‘peak app’ because of the rapidly emerging AI capabilities and the emergence of the AI-ssistant may also be a weak signal for a realization that only an open Internet ecology will enable the greatest value generation.
with fears mounting among developers that a war could emerge over bot standards, Microsoft has been uncharacteristically diplomatic. It organized a conference in San Francisco in June to promote cooperation among bot-makers. "We're really interested in it being interoperable — we want it to be an ecosystem," says Lili Cheng, a senior engineer at Microsoft who helped organize the two-day event. (It was called Botness.) "It's more like, what are the problems and challenges that we are finding that we can work on together?"

Exclusive: Why Microsoft is betting its future on AI

Inside Satya Nadella’s plan to outsmart Google
No matter where we work in the future, Nadella says, Microsoft will have a place in it. The company’s "conversation as a platform" offering, which it unveiled in March, represents a bet that chat-based interfaces will overtake apps as our primary way of using the internet: for finding information, for shopping, and for accessing a range of services. And apps will become smarter thanks to "cognitive APIs," made available by Microsoft, that let them understand faces, emotions, and other information contained in photos and videos.

Microsoft argues that it has the best "brain," built on nearly two decades of advancements in machine learning and natural language processing, for delivering a future powered by artificial intelligence. It has a head start in building bots that resonate with users emotionally, thanks to an early experiment in China. And among the giants, Microsoft was first to release a true platform for text-based chat interfaces — a point of pride at a company that was mostly sidelined during the rise of smartphones.

Microsoft is beta-testing software that records business meetings and produces transcripts in real time. The same software can also, say, take an audio recording of an interview between two people and produce a transcript that distinguishes between the speakers — perhaps the single most desired piece of technology for any journalist who ever lived.


One of the progenitors of the Internet is Vint Cerf - here is a 55 min video talking about the origin and history of the Internet - a very clear explanation with some visuals of what the Internet is and how it works. Worth the review Cerf presents many examples of original technology next to today’s tech - amazing just how far and how fast we come.

HEIDELBERG LECTURE: VINTON G. CERF (ACM A.M. TURING AWARD 2004) (2016)

The Origins and Evolution of the Internet
This talk will explore the motivations for and design of the Internet and the consequences of these designs. The Internet has become a major element of communications infrastructure since its original design in 1973 and its continued spread throughout the societies of our planet. There are many challenges posed by the continued application of the Internet to so many new uses. Safety, Security and Privacy are among these challenges especially as the so-called "Internet of Things" continues to evolve. The increased digitization of our information poses a different challenge: the preservation of digital content for hundreds to thousands of years. Might we be facing a Digital Dark Age?


The Internet of Things, AI and the Energy network converge to transform energy geo-politics and bring near zero-marginal cost energy everywhere.
Most wind turbines are equipped with devices that measure the wind speeds at their hubs, and some solar panels contain sensors for sunlight intensity. EWeLiNE combines these data with other atmospheric observations — from ground-based weather stations, radar and satellites — and sophisticated computer models predict power generation over the next 48 hours or so. The team checks these power forecasts against what actually materializes, and machine learning then improves the predictive models.

Germany enlists machine learning to boost renewables revolution

Grids struggle to cope with erratic nature of wind and solar power.
The rows of towering wind turbines and legions of glistening solar panels spread across Germany’s landscape are striking emblems of the country’s shift to non-nuclear, low-carbon power. But although Germany is the world’s poster child for renewable energy, its grids cannot yet cope with the erratic nature of wind and solar power.
In June, German meteorologists, engineers and utility firms began to test whether big data and machine learning can make these power sources more grid-friendly.

“To operate the grid more efficiently and keep fossil reserves at a minimum, operators need to have a better idea of how much wind and solar power to expect at any given time,” says Malte Siefert, a physicist at the Fraunhofer Institute for Wind Energy and Energy System Technology in Kassel, Germany, and a leader on the project, called EWeLiNE.

At about 45,000 megawatts, Germany’s wind-power capacity is the third largest in the world, behind China’s and the United States’. And Germany is outperformed only by China in solar capacity. But the pace of the country’s switch to renewables and its ambitions are unrivalled. Renewables now provide about one-third of domestic electricity and the government has promised that by 2050, at least 80% of the country’s electricity will come from renewables.


The saying that the future is here - only it’s unevenly distributed is true - but it’s also accelerating - in some cases the future is already the past before it’s evenly distributed. :) This is both fun and interesting - a very brief look at the unevenly distributed future becoming yesterday with some nice pictures and graphics. Worth the view.
In 2020, the A.I. translates top 10 major languages, at 99% accuracy, straight from your wrist. Stop investing time and resources in learning a new language. Then, by 2030, the A.I. is a part of you. Implanted, augmenting your brain.
“There is more certainty in reselling the past, than inventing the future” is no longer relevant. Your business must put the accent on what the consumer needs rather than the existing demand. Innovation comes first in the future tech.
Generation Alpha; post 2013-2015, this generation is not going to use technology, but become THE technology.
Billions of people, units of information, meta-patterns, interconnections. We are our own creation; we have become data.

Future Tech – 15 Realities Of The Coming Future In A Minute

The so-called disruptive technologies five years ago, the actuators and the smart sensors, embedded in physical objects, interconnected through wired and wireless networks, are nowadays transforming global business, societies and lives.

We wait less time and own fewer goods while sharing and renting more as we are creating new economic systems, seeking to maximise the availability and the usage of temporary spaces for living, working, storage, and parking.

However, not everything is perfect, uniform or equal; beyond research and analysis, competitive intelligence, expert synthesis and data, there is that personal take on the consumers and landscapes ahead.


For Fun
Well I have to admit I’m one of those who are highly addicted to good coffee - in fact I’ve been roasting my own coffee at home for over a year - fantastic taste, flavor and I now never pay more that $6 per pound of green beans. Green beans easily can last over two years - whereas roasted coffee has a much more limited shelf life (for optimal flavor). All that said - this sardonic 4 min Video looking at this beverage that has, along with sugar, become the engine of world productivity - is very funny.

If Coffee Commercials Were Honest - Honest Ads



I love the freedom of playing with language - new words create new imaginings, new senses of reality. Here’s a great article with some new words. Although this article and these particular words are not aimed to entertain.

16 words and phrases describing humanity's future that English desperately needs

I began to take an interest in wordplay as a teenager while learning German, a language with a small root vocabulary but endless possibilities for constructing compound nouns. My own favorite German coinage is Schicksalszwanghaftigkeitsfatalismus — feel free to send me your attempted translation of that mouthful.

There's plenty of room in English for new and clever nouns describing humanity's condition — creating them just requires a little creativity.

Here are some of the neologism buzzwords I’ve developed in recent years to help capture our complex future.

Two examples:
Expatistan
Today, more than 300 million people live outside their country of origin — a larger absolute number and percentage of the world population than ever seen in history. A record 9 million Americans also now live outside the United States. Many of these migrants are not just two-way expats but “perma-pats” who may never return “home” but continue to move from place to place over the course of their careers.

In the spirit of “Bollystan,” Expatistan is not a physical place but a state of mind that many expats share as they come to relate more to each other than to fellow citizens.

Pax Urbanica
As cities become ever more the central nodes of authority in the global political and economic system, they change the behavior of states in more peaceful directions. As I argue in "Connectography," a 21st century world dominated by coastal mega-cities may be more interested in trade and market access than territorial conquest.

Even among rival states, war becomes more like tug-of-war over supply chain control rather than traditional geopolitical interests. If leading cities on all continents maintained commercially focused (even if highly competitive) relations, their diplomatic leadership could sustain an era of global peace among cities: Pax Urbanica.

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