🔮 Trillion-dollar iPhone; delaying AGI; face recognition; ferrets, rats, Ether whales++ 218

Funding the new economy

Exponential View

Azeem Azhar’s Weekly Wondermissive: Future, Tech & Society 

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Dept of the near future

📳 With 1.6bn sold, the iPhone is the most successful product of all time, argues Horace Dediu. Total sales have exceeded $1tn, generating $131bn in taxes. But the iPhone story is one of dynamic pivots, such as the changes in distribution, financing and the App Store. “Apple, since its inception, has always been oriented around its customers, not its products” argues Dediu, and that such a “priorities-driven company habitually re-designs its processes and its resources.”

⏱️ Rodney Brooks: artificial general intelligence has been delayed. Strongly argued and compelling. Like Brooks, I doubt the optimistic predictions, such as those by Ray Kurzweil, that we’ll see artificial general intelligence in ten years. We will see powerful, wonderful things coming out of the AI domain by then, but not that. A large par…