Overview: Science&Technology

In which I studiously avoid curating anything about 2016 or David Bowie.

Empathy mapping is a way to characterise your target users in order to make effective design decisions. User journey mapping is a way to deconstruct a user’s experience with a product or service as a series of steps and themes. Put simply, these methods encourage your stakeholders to think about user needs effectively,

The fundamentals are broken ... It has failed because the community has failed... What was meant to be a new, decentralised form of money ... has become ,,, a system completely controlled by just a handful of people.

carmakers must solve an impossible ethical dilemma of algorithmic morality.

AI in itself isn’t good or bad. We’re just beginning to go past our initial, vague apprehensions, and to look concretely into how AI can benefit society while ensuring that it doesn’t hurt us.

So if it’s not defined in the Bitcoin paper, what does “blockchain” actually mean? I’ve asked a lot of people this question, ranging from renowned cryptographers and distributed systems experts to Bitcoin enthusiasts to people not particularly versed in either Bitcoin, distributed systems, or cryptography. No two people have ever given me the same…

Therein lies the trouble with virtual reality. The hardware is incredible, but the content has been slow to catch up. Shooting 360 degree video and audio in a way that isn’t jarring and tells a coherent story is difficult and expensive... any brand that deals with physical products and experiences should start thinking about what the ultimate VR …

competition in the ride-hailing market is really just the prelude to a much bigger fight over dominance of the self-driving car market over the next couple of decades... If cars are primarily rented, rather than owned, then they can be optimized for shorter trips ... Short-range, high-efficiency electric vehicles will become more practical. -…

The CDO is now a “transformer in chief,” charged with coordinating and managing comprehensive changes that address everything from updating how a company works to building out entirely new businesses.

companies that have successfully transitioned to become high-performing digital enterprises are able to orchestrate six building blocks: strategy and innovation, the customer decision journey, process automation, organization, technology, and data and analytics

Google Spotlight Stories is a new form of storytelling made specifically for mobile and VR. In these 360-degree, interactive stories, your phone becomes a window to a world all around you. The sensors on your phone allow the story to be interactive; when you move your phone to various scenes, you are able to unlock mini-stories within the story.

humans are already building a specific kind of AI ... systems that we construct and endow with legal, real-world power ... their own internal structures of rules and traditions, while humans perform fuzzy brain-based tasks specified by the system. The system as a whole can act with an appearance of purpose, intelligence, and values entirely distin…

They’re funding a new organization, OpenAI, to pursue the most advanced forms of artificial intelligence ... results public and its patents royalty-free, all to ensure that the scary prospect of computers surpassing human intelligence may not be the dystopia that some people fear a research lab meant to counteract large corporations who may gain …

Just in time for your Christmas break, a hand-picked selection of posts designed to give you something to think about as the year turns.

SEVERAL MAJOR COMPANIES from technology and financial ... IBM, Intel, Cisco, London Stock Exchange Group ... JP Morgan, Wells Fargo and State Street—have joined forces to create an alternative to the blockchain. Overseen by the not-for-profit Linux Foundation, this open source project aims to build blockchain-like technology ...for the business…

One cognitive scientist thinks the leading approach to machine learning can be improved by ideas gleaned from studying children.... With its radical approach to machine learning, Geometric Intelligence aims to create algorithms for use in an AI that can learn in new and better ways... deep learning... systems need to be fed many thousands of ex…

“applied AI” quietly sneaking into our homes and businesses... has reached an inflection point that will move it from niche to mainstream.... the point of applied AI is that it doesn’t have to be a fully realized intelligence — it just needs to do a specific task well.

The development of the VR industry is not solely based on wearable devices launched by major hardware vendors... growth drive also comes from independent developers ... making apps does not have a high entry barrier

this couple will seal their union not before a priest or a judge, but on the almighty blockchain, a distributed global computing and data storage technology. BitNation... has established itself as the first virtual nation... has been building a set of tools and services that together may one day allow people to replace their national identity w…

true artificial intelligence, if it is realized, might pose a danger that exceeds every previous threat from technology—even nuclear weapons—and that if its development is not managed carefully humanity risks engineering its own extinction... Bostrom is arguably the leading transhumanist philosopher today... bringing order to ideas that might o…

The GDS was set up to improve online public services but disagreements with the top brass over its ambitions have seen four leaders abruptly resign - Why are senior staff fleeing the Government Digital Service? | Public Leaders Network | The Guardian

Just as you’re about to publish your draft, we’ll suggest a couple tags for you to use based on what you’ve writte... to increase the number of tagged posts on Medium, but also to help users discover the right tags to use... In our algorithm, we use what is called a nearest neighbors approach... to compare posts... representing posts as vector…

FarmShare is a decentralized platform for community-supported agriculture (CSA) organizations, using the blockchain to tokenize shares and enable community governance... enable communities to buy, sell and trade cryptographic tokens that can be exchanged for weekly deliveries of locally produced organic food... an evolution of the CSA model ...…

Mark Zuckerberg proves not to be a fan of links... On Facebook, he doesn’t encourage you to link. On Instagram, he has simply forbidden them. He is quashing the hyperlink, thereby killing the interconnected, decentralized, outward network of text known as the World Wide Web. Facebook likes you to stay within it. Videos are now embedded in Faceb…

a new 300-page report ... looks at the likely effects of a robot revolution... huge numbers of jobs being wiped out: up to 35% of all workers in the UK and 47% of those in the US, including white-collar jobs... The longer you look, the more you find computers displacing simple work... while some jobs are replaced, new ones spring up that focu…

In this week’s edition, a months’ reading - some 30 posts - on social media, digital transformation, content/system design and EuroPCom2015. But first some news from me

Blog posts take hours to write, those great images need to be found or created and those social networks need to be managed and nurtured. It is often not done or persisted with because there are no apparent quick rewards. This is where the tortoise can beat the hare by slow persistence. It is a marathon and a journey not a sprint... you are bui…

it will be quite unusual to see cars that don’t have full autonomy – let say for new car production in the 15 to 20 years timeframe… for Tesla a lot sooner... at the point which cars are being made that have full autonomy, any cars that are being made that don’t have full autonomy will have negative value - Elon Musk says owning a non-autonomo…

Facebook and Apple... have chosen to focus on a future that takes the shape of an article... largely developed in response to the constraints of print ... a great opportunity for news organizations themselves to rethink those assumptions... considering the time scales of our reporting in much more innovative ways. Information should accumulate …

true digital transformation requires the courage to challenge entrenched beliefs within one’s organization. .. Digital transformation is probably about as big a deal as the invention of credit. It changes the way we do everything. - Digital Transformation: Becoming a ‘Forgetting Organization’ (Wharton)