Hi all! Already a week past since the vacation. Busy catching up with the Cities of Things field labs in Rotterdam, where we tested a rough conversational robot kit for the Afrikaandermarkt, and the Munich Amsterdam plans, where we presented the attentive neighborhood community hub for the Circular Society Forum. Next to that, rounding up a research report into web3 from a different lens. And preparing for a new role, I will tell more next week, I think.
Let’s quickly dive into the news of last week and some potential interesting events. The season has started, and a lot is organized again, I notice. Last week I attended the online PRIMER22 conference. Or at least I tried, but due to the time difference, I was able to catch a few talks. A pity Hopin as a conference tool makes you feel very distant always.
For this and next week, these events might be interesting:
- This Thursday, from Arizona with an interesting panel on Designing the Future with Applied SciFi: https://csi.asu.edu/calendar/events/designing-the-future-with-applied-sci-fi/
- Next week, in Amsterdam; the Society 5.0 festival; https://society5festival.com
- And this afternoon, in Delft; Ethics in AI
And some of the news I noticed last week.
| Can Society Learn From the Mistakes of Futurism? FUTURISM – I would say yes. It should learn even, doing futurism is meant to make mistakes and learn. “The next few decades showed that futurism is harder than it looks. Technological changes may seem inevitable, but they often come down to one person making an arbitrary choice.”www.wired.com • Share |
| Nvidia says falling GPU prices are a story of the past TECH – It seems that Moore’s Law is under pressure not for technology reasons but for the rising costs making it economically not viable to keep up with the pace. www.digitaltrends.com • Share |
| Upset by high prices, GM’s Cruise develops its own chips for self-driving cars CHIPS WITH EVERYTHING – Speaking on Moore’s law in context of Nvidias plans, this is another development to take notice. Like Apple and others chips are developed for specific applications. The future?“General Motors’ autonomous driving unit Cruise has developed its own chips for self-driving cars to be deployed by 2025, as they aim to bring down costs and scale up volume, executives said Tuesday.”www.reuters.com • Share |
| Is AI Art a ‘Toy’ or a ‘Weapon’? PROMPTING – “A prolific AI artist shares his perspective on the controversial medium.”www.theatlantic.com • Share |
| The creator economy: a power law ECONOMICS – Next to the protocol economy, we have the creator economy as a contextual backdrop for Web3 technologies and new organizational principles. It seems.“Where does power really lie in the creator economy value chain, and which are the most attractive market segments?”www.mosaicventures.com • Share |
| Stephen’s Web ~ Becoming an AI-fueled organization INTELLIGENCE – AI is already there… “”In fact, more than a quarter of our survey respondents have reached full-scale deployment of five or more types of AI applications within their organization,” report the authors.“www.downes.ca • Share |
| RADAR FUTURES REPORT – A FUTURE IN SYNC FUTURING – A DAO as publication or vice versa… “These days, it’s hard to feel like we’re on the same page: with each other, with the world around us, even with ourselves. In response, it feels like we’re seeking the solid ground of synchrony: reaching out to the collective, reaching back to our roots, and reconsidering our relationship with space and time to find our footing yet again. Exploring these ideas, what sits behind them, and what kind of future trajectories they inspire will be the basis for RADAR’s first Futures Report.”futureinsync.radardao.xyz • Share |
| Expanding access to the future of work with crypto payouts CRYPTO – The valuation of crypto is changing, up and down. New regulations by the US government might change the landscape, will there be a recognized digital currency after all based on the blockchain principles. Payment providers will need to take a stand so it seems: “Stripe now reaches a majority of the globe: 4.4 billion people in more than 110 countries can receive funds in local currencies or crypto.”stripe.com • Share |
| The Pathologies of the Attention Economy ATTENTIONING – Exploring aspects of the still very happening attention economy with Citton’s Ecology of Attention: “This analysis should at least encourage us to ask new questions about our own struggles with attention and distraction.”theconvivialsociety.substack.com • Share |
| Daring Fireball: Apple Watch Ultra DEVICES – Listening to a conversation of Ben Thompson and John Gruber in their podcast Dithering (paid plan), I realized that the new Ultra Watch seems to bring the new phoneless world more near. Together with the new AirPod Pro that is beefed up with more computing power the role of the phone is loosing its communication functions, the glass slab is purely consuming visual communication (a lot still). I wrote a piece on this when the first Airpod was introduced as the likely future. It still is on that trajectory.daringfireball.net • Share |
| Apple AirPods Pro (2nd Generation) Review: A New Standard HUMANE TECH – What will happen with tech becoming like the Airpods have achieved now? It impacts communication habits for sure.www.wired.com • Share |
| Can smart mobility hubs be a game changer if you ignore their city logistics role? HUBS – Hubs are more than parking places for mobility solutions “Mobility hubs can play a role in service- and construction logistics (including storage of goods), microhubs for cargobike companies, companies offering zero-emission light electric freight vehicles, and more.”www.citylogistics.info • Share |
| Radar Trends to Watch: September 2022 – O’Reilly INTELLIGENCE – Check if you missed anything.www.oreilly.com • Share |
| Daniel Eckler 👨🚀 on Twitter: “Stable Diffusion is only 30 days old… a MEGA THREAD 🧵 on its rapid rise.” DIFFUSIONS – Great thread with examples of the newest kid on the AI generated images block, Stable Diffusion, now video…twitter.com • Share |
| de lichtkogel.nl CITIES – In Dutch: I contributed to the editor board of this publication on a bike-friendly city by the Ministry of Infrastructure.delichtkogel.nl • Share |
Paper for this week
To stay a bit in the Web3 space. Back in 2014, Vitalik Buterin wrote a defining blog on Distributed Autonomous Organisations, one of the core components of Web3 technologies. This year he is one of the authors of a reflective paper on the state of a decentralized society: Decentralized Society: Finding Web3’s Soul. Judge for yourself if it is ‘saving’ the Web3 movement from the investment angle…
In this paper, we illustrate how non-transferable “soulbound” tokens (SBTs) representing the commitments, credentials, and affiliations of “Souls” can encode the trust networks of the real economy to establish provenance and reputation. More importantly, SBTs enable other applications of increasing ambition, such as community wallet recovery, sybil-resistant governance, mechanisms for decentralization, and novel markets with decomposable, shared rights.
Weyl, Eric Glen and Ohlhaver, Puja and Buterin, Vitalik, Decentralized Society: Finding Web3’s Soul (May 10, 2022). http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4105763
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