š® [CORRECTED] Creative AI; Apple & Google vs Viv; rich dudes & immortality; the future of cities; Trump, shamans and aliens++ #66
Creative machine intelligence; movies, jazz and writing. The problems of life extension. The battle for the future interface. What media companies must do.Ā Tetrisā bizarre history. Tripping shamans. Living with aliens⦠in a simulation.
Hope this stimulates some great conversation this week ;)
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THIS IS A CORRECTED VERSION WITH URLS FIXED. Massive thanks toĀ Martijn de Kuijper of Revue for sorting out the problem.
Dept of the near future
š“š¼Ā The bleak future of life extension. Charlotte Shane: āmore rich, white men [and] not even the march of time can free us from our oligarchs.ā THOUGHT PROVOKING
š„Ā Googleās laws of robotics.Ā ACCESSIBLEĀ introduction to Googleās new AI ākill switchā. (The inaccessible paper is here.)
š Our future interface with the digital world will be through voice. EV reader, John Battelle, on Vivās ambition to be the human interfaceĀ and how it challenges Google and Appleās dominance. Long-time expert Tim Bajarin on Viv and British-firm, Artifical Solutions.Ā GOOD READS.
š” Jeff Jarvis: āFor [the young], content is a social token that feeds their conversationsā¦Ā Content is not king. Distribution is not king. Conversation is the kingdom.ā Why media must rebuild around value, not volume.Ā EXCELLENT
š® Is the future of business a company without workers, managers, or a CEO? The Tapscottsā primer on decentralised autonomous organisations. RECOMMENDED
š° āCapitalism concentrates wealth.. and concentrated wealth results in less wealth, and far less collective well-being.ā MUST READ
Dept of pay-it-forward
š Exponential View is closing in on 10,000 readers. To say thank you to all of you, 25 readers can get a free copy of Sam Arbesmanās new book, Overcomplicated. Sam is Scientist-in-residence at Lux Capital.
Dept of artificial creative intelligence
šĀ Space Odyssey 2001 rendered in the style of Picasso. STUNNING. Bhautik Joshi applies semantic style transfer to take us from Kubrick to cubist. He previously set van Gogh onto Blade Runner. This type of semantic style transfer is novel. It really only emerged earlier this year, but the technique is out in the wild and the hackers are hacking. This is progress through proliferation.
Sunspring is a movie whose screenwriter, Benjamin, is a recurrent neural network. Ā Benjamin was trained on dozens of sci-fi screenplays and āovertime learned to imitate the structure of a screenplay, producing stage directions and well-formatted character lines.ā The movie is weird and occasionally moving (and surprisingly well-cast).
(Weāve written about recurrent neural networks generating text, e.g. EV reader, Samimās work to generate political speeches using RNNs, EV#12)
š·Ā DeepJazz uses deep learning to generate jazz.Ā DeepJazz was built in 36-hours using some open-source deep-learning toolkit. Another example of progress through proliferation.
Can we use computational methods to better understand art? This is what visual stylometry aims to do, using ācomputational and statistical methods to calculate and compare these underlying image features in ways humans never could before. Instead of relying only on what our senses perceive, we can use these mathematical techniques to discover novel insights into artists and artworks.ā
Brief review of Maluubaās ground-breaking AI-based text comprehension system. (Quite impressive, approaching human quality.)
š A16Zās Frank Chen has put up a really fantastic 45-minute primer on machine learning and deep learning.
Weāve reached āpeak humanā in banking, and algorithms are starting to take over.
Dept of the man-made environment
More than half of humanity lives in cities, but their vibrancy is fragile. Jonathan Glancey on the hollowing out of cities: āWe need to seed our city centres and their inner rings, especially those that have been hollowed out, with new forms of enterprise, production and manufacture.ā
Walkability seems like a desirable goal within cities. This excellent study from Richard Florida shows a high-correlation between urban density, walkability and venture capital investment per head of the population. Ā And given that most āstartupsā never reach industrial scale, perhaps this is the shape of a new urban artisanal sector.
Data: the top US cities by venture capital returns. (Washington DC leads.)
Weāve proclaimed the arrival of the anthopocene, a new geological era fundamentally shaped by man. Think of our extensive cities and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. (For more see EV#44.)Ā Here is a challenge to that idea, rather that āhumans have been niche-constructing through their entire history.ā THOUGHT PROVOKING
Short morsels to appear smart at dinner parties
š»Ā The incredibly weird history of Tetris. MUST READ if you were ever addicted to the game.
Bank of Starbucks: More cash held on customerās loyalty cards than many banks
Microsoft researchers can detect cancer earlyĀ from your search logs.
Nuclear Trump: what would it mean to have the Donaldās finger on the red button? Gripping read.
fMRI study of shamans tripping out shows stronger functionally connectivity with the posterior cingulate cortex. (Something is happening, they arenāt just closing their eyes and flailing their hands.)
š½Ā Yes, there have been aliens. āThe pessimism required to doubt the existence, at some point in time, of an advanced extraterrestrial civilization borders on the irrational.ā
The New Yorker on the simulation argument. (Read this alongside the aliens piece above.)
What you are up to
Congrats to the following EV subscribers for their OBEs and MBEs in the Queenās Birthday Honours list this year: Mike Butcher, Saul Klein, Alice Bentinck, Wendy Tan White & Matt Clifford. (Know someone who got an honour who isnāt reading EV? Time to invite them to subscribe!)
EV reader,Ā Moritz Mueller-Freitag, on ā10 Data Acquisition Strategies for Startupsā. Rather good if you are building a product with machine learning in it. (Which I assume is any digital product or any service-based offer which has capacity for optimisation.)
Silicon Valley has a problem problem. Riva Melissa Tez: āAs part of the startup ecosystem weāve overemphasized the need for CEOs to sell us a vision to the point of dishonesty.ā
š And one to set you up for a fantastic week, EV subscriber Izzy McRae,Ā on how to say super-charged thank you.
End note
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