š®Ā Investing in crypto; the upside of Meltdown; rocky road; Zuckās mea culpa; bacteria, matter & fake celebrities++Ā Ā #147
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NEAR FUTURE
š Ā Rodney Brooks: Dated predictions for everything from autonomous vehicles to personal robots. (And, a thought-provoking accompaniment is Katja Graceās essay āWhy everything might have taken so long.ā)
šøšŖĀ Future of work: Sweden is well-placed to deal with the growing automation of job roles. A strong safety net, high trust between employers and employees, good education all turn out to support innovation.
š¤Ā Ā An investor's take on cryptocurrencies. John Pfeffer, a former partner at buyout firm, KKR, on the bitcoin investment opportunity:
[Bitcoin] could be worth 20-60x its current value...the correct answer is probably a long-term, buy-and-hold ⦠investment of a low single-digit percentage of assets.
(Full essay here is worth reading.)
š³ļøĀ Late to the party, Mark Zuckerberg admits that
[Many] people have lost faith in [the] promise of Facebookā & that Facebook has a lot of work to do.
John Battelle reckons Facebook cannot be fixed: āItās the advertising model, stupid.ā (For a great anecdote of this: see Lauren Haldenās plea to have a bra-free Instagram experience & Kaitlyn Tiffany on why we want smaller social networks.)
š„Ā Ā Albert Wenger: Why Meltdown and Spectre will be good for innovation. I agree that this creates a further impetus to renew the computing stack, which was changing anyway as a result of a transition to a machine intelligence fabric. (Apple has confirmed that all its devices are impacted.)
š£Ā Ā Climate change: Get used to saying "bomb cyclone" now. It is the new normal. (See also: Ramez Naamās robust defence of solar energyās future; LED lighting has reduced carbon output by 0.5 Gt annually)
DEPT OF CRYPTO
Taylor Pearson: The blockchain man. THOUGHT-PROVOKING long-ish read.
Fabrice Grinda, one of the worldās most storied marketplaceĀ entrepreneurs,Ā weighs in on cryptocurrencies:
There are cases where a marketplace can benefit from decentralization, an immutable public ledger, the use of tokens to incentivize early use to create liquidity, and where there are no strong incumbents.
EV reader, Kyle Samani: āWhy blockchains represent a new social orderā.
Bitcoin could add 0.3% to Japanās GDP.
When will theĀ Yale endowment buy into bitcoin?
FUTURE OF MOBILITY
Waymo may struggleĀ to monetize autonomous taxisĀ soon. Data shows that the autonomous control systems are still having unexpected failures too frequently to be unleashed en masse. GOOD ANALYSIS
What mightĀ road transport will look like in the future? (Nice short Twitter thread.)
Thirty years of patent filing in automotive industry shows where the industry is headed. Patents relating to data processing are the fastest growing class, outnumbering patents relating to the internal combustion engine almost five to one.
Easing into self-driving is key to gaining the sceptic publicās trust.
TheĀ amazing expansion ofĀ Didi Chuxing.
oBike users could earn oCoins riding a bike next year.
SHORT MORSELS TO APPEAR SMART AT DINNER PARTIES
Using generative adversarial networks to create hyper-realistic fake celebrities.
š¬ Wonderful essay on how microbes gave us life (and sustain us every day). Also,Ā tweaking the microbiome to tackle diseases.
Physicists aim to classify all possible phases of matterĀ using topology.
š¤³Ā Understanding the growth of the Chinese app that wants to āmake the world a more beautiful placeā. See also:Ā using WeChat as an ID card.
š¾Ā Indiaās Aadhaar database, which holds biometric data for more than a billion people, was breached.
Older Indians are addicted to WhatsApp.
China dominates cellular Internet of things connections.
š°šŖĀ The results of a long-term basic income experiment in Kenya are very positive.
On-demand music streaming now dominates music listening in the US.
Grocery list sketched by Michelangelo.
American teens are continuing to sharpen up. Rates of pregnancy, dope smoking and drinking continue to decline.
š¢ļøĀ Ā At its 100thĀ birthday party in 1959, American oil was warned of climate change.
COMMUNITY CAREERS*
EV reader Carl Pei'sĀ OnePlusĀ team builds the best Android phones in the world, and they're looking for excellent people to fill three roles. Recommend you apply or forward to a friend!
Assistant Head of Marketing, full-time, London
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END NOTE
Iāve not said much about AI this week, although the highlight for me was the spat kicked off by Gary Marcus about the limits of deep learning. I havenāt read Garyās full paper, but Carlos Perez does a decent summary of those arguments and compiles a list of responses to it.
And yes, Iāve said quite a bit about blockchain and crypto. My sense is that blockchain and crypto will become a much more significant this year, whether or not the speculative bubble pops. Ā (I wrote about this in my 2018 predictions which you can read here, if you havenāt read them already.)
For the next few weeks, Iām exploring slightly shorter EVs based on feedback that previous episodes were a bit too long. For long time readers, this may be more familiar to the Exponential View of 2016. Iāll check in with you all in a few weeks to see how the format is working out.
Have a great week!
Azeem
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