Cyberman

08/02/2021

Theological concepts – regarding consciousness, individuality and agency – have both informed secular philosophy and been informed by it. Since theology is particularly suited to issues raised by artificial intelligence, thinkers both religious and secular need to pay attention to these questions now.

Can a robot pray? Does an automaton have a soul? AI and theology meet – Ed Simon | Aeon Essays

Can a robot pray? Does an AI have a soul? Advances in automata raise theological debates that will shape the secular world

23/01/2021

Groups outperform individuals. And interactive, deliberative groups outperform passive ones. When we open our ideas up to group scrutiny, this affords us the best chance of finding the right answer. And when we are looking for the truth, critical thinking, skepticism, and subjecting our ideas to the scrutiny of others works better than anything else.

Our built-in biases help explain our post-truth era, when “alternative facts” replace actual facts, and feelings have more weight than evidence.

21/01/2021

Most people who choose to work in television, particularly in commercial television, are prepared to accommodate themselves to the prevailing realities. The Pythons had the psychic and financial resources—and the safe shelter back home at the BBC—to enter the lists against Goliath. Few others do.

Their quixotic battle to stay off network television.

18/01/2021

“Our managers and executives are currently working on the assembly lines.” They are doing what!?

“It was like being with a parent that didn’t really want us”, says CEO of GE Appliances, Kevin Nolan. He explained: “The one hope everyone had was that Haier bought us because they wanted us, and we were curious to find out what that would mean”. 4 years later, we visited to find out how G...

17/01/2021

“The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.” Managers who spend most of their lives in meetings should post that thought on their office walls.

A new book by the author of “Moneyball” shows how, together, the psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman made the world a better place.

13/01/2021

Teachers favor less creative children “because people who are more creative also tend to be more playful, unconventional, and unpredictable, and all of this makes them harder to control. No matter how much we say we value creation, deep down, most of us value control more. And so we fear change and favor familiarity. Rejecting is a reflex."

Creativity can seem like a mysterious process. But many of the most creative people understand that you can actually break it down into a simple formula, involving what researcher Douglas Hofstadter calls “jootsing.” Here’s how understanding systems can help us think more creatively.

07/01/2021

And many people would sooner suffer in reality than live a lie, however beautiful it may be. This is why meaning can't be modeled as simply another piece of the "pleasure" package.

Growing up I was a very science-minded kid — still am — and from an early age I learned to accept the basic meaninglessness of the universe. Science taught me that it's all just atoms and the void, so there can't be any deeper point or purpose to the whole thing; the kind of meaning most people ...

04/01/2021

Then, imagine some wild technologies that may yet be in our own future (brain-interfaced computing, a personal holodeck, a sock that never gets holes in it) and remember that (apart from areas like medicine and climate-mitigation) these technologies aren’t things we really need anymore, but represent things that would perhaps be “nice to have.”

There are not many ways to cause a stir in the classroom as an engineering professor, but one of them is surely to stand in front of a room full of bright-eyed, up-and-coming engineering students and inform them that “innovation, as we popularly understood it, is essentially dead.” Nevertheless,...

01/01/2021

Until his sticky end in Mexico City, “Comrade Van” lived a chaotic and colourful life—one that contrasts with the orderly logical theories with which his name is still linked

30/12/2020

If your typical bookcase is 3 feet wide, and you just want to have the background from your shoulders up, then you might order 9 feet of history, or 9 feet of literature.

Books by the Foot curates shelves full of books for Washington offices, hotels, TV sets—and, now, Zoom backdrops.

16/12/2020

In China, a sassy chat bot is stealing millions of men’s hearts. It’s also recording their most intimate desires and emotions.

09/12/2020

We’d all like life to be simpler. But we also don’t want to sacrifice our options and capabilities. Tesler’s law of the conservation of complexity, a rule from design, explains why we can’t have both. Here’s how the law can help us create better products and services by rethinking simplicity.

We’d all like life to be simpler. But we also don’t want to sacrifice our options and capabilities. Tesler’s law of the conservation of complexity, a rule from design, explains why we can’t have both. Here’s how the law can help us create better products and services by rethinking simplici...

08/12/2020

COBOL is a coding language older than Weird Al Yankovic. The people who know how to use it are often just as old. It underpins the entire financial system. And it can’t be removed. How a computer language controls the financial life of the world.

05/12/2020

Dadaism brought light to post-WWI gloom, experimental art exploded out of New York City’s turbulent 1980s, and it seems 2020’s global pandemic has kickstarted our creative thinking. While almost half of respondents report having more ideas due to changes in their working environment, almost a third of people feel more creative than usual, and a fifth are more inspired.

Explore the findings from WeTransfer’s Ideas Report and see how thousands of people found new ways to connect, to create, and to challenge their doubt, while a global pandemic gripped the planet.

02/12/2020

Philip Brickman was an expert in the psychology of happiness, but he couldn’t make his own pain go away.

01/12/2020

"Let’s continue to encourage everyone to nudge for good, but let’s also urge those in both the public and private sectors to engage in sludge cleanup campaigns. Less sludge will make the world a better place." - Richard Thaler

Where there’s sludge, there’s an end user who’s come off worse. Understanding how to remedy sludge comes down in part to understanding the motives behind it.

30/11/2020

We don’t have managers anymore, nor the job titles. We started with a complete redesign of the organization. Imagine our company as one XXL circle with one goal. Within this are XL circles, in the XL circles you have large circles, within which are medium sized circles and so on. Each circle has a defined purpose, responsibility and role.

CHECK IN: Today, I enjoy happiness and pride working at Consumentenbond, a Dutch non-profit organization. I wasn’t always so lucky!

30/11/2020

In 1990, the science fiction writer Douglas Adams produced a “fantasy documentary” for the BBC called Hyperland. It’s a magnificent paleo-futuristic artifact, rich in sideways predictions about the technologies of tomorrow.

Are.na is a social platform for creative and collaborative research.

24/11/2020

Cities on fire, elected leaders endorsing violence, homicides surging—­­to a normal American, these are apocalyptic signs. To Turchin, they indicate that his models, which incorporate thousands of years of data about human history, are working.

A historian believes he has discovered iron laws that predict the rise and fall of societies. He has bad news.

23/11/2020

ON FEBRUARY 9, 2020, for the first time in the Academy Awards’ 92-year history, a woman conducted the orchestra. A noteworthy moment for women in music, to be sure. But it was also a big moment for video games.

Composers like Eímear Noone and Manami Matsumae created some of the most iconic songs in games that have defined the industry.

23/11/2020

Looking for first principles is just a way of thinking. It’s a commitment to understanding the foundation that something is built on and giving yourself the freedom to adapt, develop, and create. Once you know the first principles, you can keep learning more advanced concepts as well as innovating for yourself.

There’s a big difference between knowing how to follow a recipe and knowing how to cook. If you can master the first principles within a domain, you can see much further than those who are just following recipes. That’s what Julia Child, “The French Chef”, did throughout her career.

16/11/2020

So, with every decision, we ask ourselves: “Will this still work when we are 10 or 100 times bigger?” This question has become our mantra.

I wrote recently about Mies Van Der Rohe and his design principle “less is more”. I asked why, in architecture, ‘less is more’ and ‘state of the art’, but in organizations it seems to be the opposite. In this article I want to share how we try to keep things simple at Viisi.

16/11/2020

The world’s biggest sales event - eclipsing Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the United States - spanned 11 days this year, and brought sellers on AliBaba’s platforms 21 times as many orders by value as Amazon.com Inc’s two-day global Prime Day last month.

Alibaba sales for its post-COVID-19 Singles' Day shopping extravaganza hit $74 billion, a haul that was overshadowed by a 10% drop in its shares on Wednesday after China published draft anti-trust rules aimed at internet platforms.

13/11/2020

When asked, "How could you possibly have done the first interactive graphics program, the first non-procedural programming language, the first object-oriented software system, all in one year?" Ivan replied:

Well, I didn't know it was hard.

The future of internet

11/11/2020

“Housing First”, on the other hand, reverses the path: Homeless people get a flat – without any preconditions. Social workers help them with applications for social benefits and are available for counselling in general. In such a new, secure situation, it is easier for those affected to find a job and take care of their physical and mental health.

In Finland, the number of homeless people has fallen sharply. Why? The country applies the "Housing First" concept agains homelessness.

11/11/2020

The brother of the deceased Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar and a Kalashnikov-wielding Swedish executive known as “El Silencio” are suing Europe’s most valuable fintech company, Klarna, in the US.

The trademark company for the druglord Pablo Escobar is suing Klarna in the US for not paying for the phones sold on Klarna's platform.

10/11/2020

Ramsey believes that as long as you have one red cent of debt – credit card debt, student loans, car payments, mortgages, medical bills – you can never be free. The day you take scissors to your credit cards is the beginning of your financial salvation.

Millions turn to Dave Ramsey’s ‘tough love’ financial counsel. Many say he saved their lives. Critics say he ignores the structural reasons so many are in debt and poverty

10/11/2020

But what happens when you apply a technology that seeks to optimise — quickly and cheaply — to cultural industries?

As AI gears up to create, how can culture preserve its ability to enrich?

09/11/2020

For his monthly intention in November, Pope Francis prayed that AI will be beneficial for humanity.

This isn't the first time he ventured into the fraught territory of AI ethics and alignment.

09/11/2020

Originally a science-fiction genre from the 1980s that described a futuristic and dystopian setting, Cyberpunk has reemerged as a total lifestyle aesthetic for Gen Zers in China. Dreadlocks, silver eyeshadow, shiny clothes, neon colors, and high-tech-inspired photo filters have infiltrated the country’s magazine covers, luxury campaigns, trendy cafés, and social media.

Originally a futuristic and dystopian science-fiction genre from the 1980s, Cyberpunk has reemerged as a total lifestyle aesthetic for Gen Zers in China.

29/10/2020

I’m indebted to the Jungian therapist James Hollis for the insight that major personal decisions should be made not by asking, “Will this make me happy?”, but “Will this choice enlarge me or diminish me?”

After more than a decade of writing life-changing advice, I know when to move on. Here’s what else I learned

23/10/2020

To put this in human-centered design terms, these large transformers are an extremely valuable way to augment the team during divergent moments in a project, when we're creating choices. The tech struggles, however, in convergent moments, when we're making choices.

Recent advances in machine learning have created a new catalyst for design

21/10/2020

Fear of the unknown has followed new technologies since first humans evolved from monkeys. Artificial intelligence will have significant consequences for humanity, having in mind that, for the first time in human history, there is a possibility that technology will surpass us in intelligence.

Human beings, machines, behaviour, economics, culture, art

15/10/2020

“To restructure mobility means redistributing privileges — and that garners resistance,” the cycling activist said. And, for Berlin, Soerensen added, the new bike lanes are “only a small taste” of what is to come.

New spaces created during the pandemic are coming under attack from politicians and the auto industry, while cycling advocates say the changes don't go far enough.

14/10/2020

Toilets are a symbol of Japan's world-renowned hospitality culture. Public toilets will be redesigned in 17 locations throughout Shibuya with the help of 16 creators invited from around the world.

Public toilets in Shibuya like you've never seen.

13/10/2020

A chronic dependance on a combination of electronics, artificial intelligence and a high speed internet connection for the simplest tasks is a recipe for disaster. It makes our lives more complicated, especially when we don’t understand what is going on behind the deceptively simple interface.

Until recently everyday objects were shaped by their technology. The design of a telephone was basically a hull around a machine. The task of the designers was to make technology look pretty.

12/10/2020

But, did you know that there was a country in Europe that made self-management the only official way of managing a company?

It was in 1980. when Ricardo Semler became the CEO of Semler & Company (later Semco), a company founded and developed by his father. Ricardo started working for Semco a few years back but did not like the traditional hierarchical structure in his father’s company. Often, he argued with older Semle...

07/10/2020

Mainstream economics is suffering an identity crisis, which began with The Great Recession and has reemerged during the current pandemic. In response, a growing collection of voices has advocated looking beyond the field—in particular, to science fiction—as a way to imagine it anew.

Mainstream economics is suffering an identity crisis, which began with The Great Recession and has reemerged during the current pandemic. In response, a growing collection of voices has advocated l…

30/09/2020

To become citizen choice architects, people must know both that a behavioral problem exists and how it can be addressed through changes in the choice architecture. They must also be motivated to gain some basic insight into the psychological mechanisms behind these changes.

What would it mean to empower people—citizen choice architects—to design their own decision environments?

29/09/2020

Also, if you were taught that ENIAC was the first computer (or digital computer, or electronic digital computer, etc, ad nauseam), that’s more propaganda than fact. ENIAC was more directly based on machines like Colossus than was known at the time, because the wartime efforts of the British remained classified, while ENIAC was widely celebrated in the media.

We've recovered the manual to the oldest-known digital computer, decades after it was thought to be lost.