Exponential View - issue 24

My weekly exponential view is at issue#24.

We are even featured in ProductHunt this week. Check it out!

Here is the current issue. As always, sign up at https://azeem.io/s

Dept of the near future

• The Web we have to save. Hossein Derakshan spent six years in an Iranian jail for blogging. On his release he discovered the decentralised, critical web has been replaced by algorithmically-mediated streams dominated by a thimbleful of firms. Here is his plea. Long, powerful
• Introducing agnotology, or the study of ignorance. Emphasising the unknowns is essential to strategy and creativity. And in avoiding hubris.
• The secret history of jay-walking and why humans can reclaim city streets. Illustrates the danger of regulatory capture. Take heed: all the tech majors have powerful lobbyists. Recommended
• Uber’s end-game is to build a privately-held public transport infrastructure, argues Matt Buchanan of TheAwl.
• Apple’s services business is now much larger than Hollywood. Must read by @asymco
• Emotional intelligence in design. Designers and engineers now control our world. Facebook’s Beth Dean on how to bring more empathy into the equation.
• Common-sense reasoning has recently taken a back seat to sexy statistical approaches (like machine learning) but it could be important for many emerging AI-mediated tasks. I’ve been lucky to get to know two companies in this broad domain, Powerset (Microsoft) and Evi (Amazon.)Long, detailed overview from the CACM. (See also these paper on using deep nets for neural reasoning.)

The rest of the issue is available here.