Future Today #012 - Moonshots, Nuclear Fusion, HAL, Systems Thinking
David Alayón
Chief Executive Officer @ Innuba · Innovation Advisor @ Mindset · Fellow @ Acumen · Professor @ IE & Headspring · Author of UPGRADE · Futures & Foresight enthusiast
Welcome to Future Today! A newsletter for those curious about social innovation, disruptive technologies and futures studies. In it I will share weekly blog articles, interesting links and recommendations for books, movies, series and courses.
?? Moonshots! A game of radical thinking. Moonshots! is a game designed to unlock your moonshot mindset and brainstorm radical solutions to the world’s toughest problems. Inspired by the X Rapid Evaluation team’s exercises for coming up with new moonshots, the game involves randomly matching different problems and technologies together and seeing what fresh, unconventional ideas the combinations spark.
?? Roblox isn’t just a gaming company. It’s also the future of education. Roblox, which recently made its debut on the New York Stock Exchange, has quickly become one of the most valuable video game companies in the world. Unlike Take-Two and EA, Roblox is not just a gaming company. It is a virtual playground for nearly 200 million monthly users, with two-thirds of those users being of school-going age.
?? Closer to nuclear fusion (ES) Nuclear fusion is a clean and abundant source of energy that could offer a solution to climate change. The ITER reactor aims to prove that fusion is viable, i.e. that it can produce more energy than it uses. After several delays and cost overruns, the assembly phase of ITER began last year and will be operational in 2025.
?? The Foundations of AI Are Riddled With Errors. The current boom in artificial intelligence can be traced back to 2012 and a breakthrough during a competition built around ImageNet, a set of 14 million labeled images. In the competition, a method called deep learning, which involves feeding examples to a giant simulated neural network, proved dramatically better at identifying objects in images than other approaches. But research revealed this week shows that ImageNet and nine other key AI data sets contain many errors.
?? Your Strategy Should Be a Hypothesis You Constantly Adjust. Strategy as learning requires senior executives to engage in an ongoing dialogue with operations across all levels and departments. The people who create and deliver products and services for customers are privy to the most important strategic data the company has available. And the strategic learning process involves actively seeking deviations that challenge assumptions underpinning current strategy.
?? Systems thinking, tinkering, being. The question that keeps me awake is “What does it mean to be a systems thinker?” This reflection guides me in a lifelong process of personal and professional development. For convenience, I am grouping my posts here under four headings.
?? Building Possible Worlds: A Speculation Based Framework to Reflect on Images of the Future. In this paper, we present a framework to explore and reflect own, current images of the future. The framework is based on the process of speculative worldbuilding with the aim to create a ‘thick description’ of a possible world to (self)reflect on the present assumptions and to understand and reframe today’s actions and decisions.
?? 5 Years After the Oculus Rift, Where Do VR and AR Go Next? Think back to those first few years of the current age of virtual reality. The first Rift prototype showed up behind closed doors at E3 in 2012. A lot’s happened since Facebook’s first headset brought virtual reality to the masses. Facebook might have been a first mover, but it also wants to be the last one.
?? The ethics of HAL (ES) I remember in a short discussion with a neo-liberal colleague that, when I remarked that it would be very important for ethics to govern economic affairs, he replied, somewhat startled, that I was trying to turn the economy into a sharia.
?? El Pentágono desarrolla partículas invisibles para controlar tu cerebro (ES) El proyecto BrainSTORMS está desarrollando un sistema que usa nanopartículas y campos magnéticos para monitorizar y controlar las 80.000 millones de neuronas del cerebro. Estas nanopartículas — que afirma son totalmente seguras para la salud y pueden extraerse fácilmente — se unirían a todas y cada una de las neuronas que hay en el cerebro para comunicarse inalámbricamente con una máquina.
If you liked it... Share it! Don't be shy! And if you want to get in touch with me, ping me at [email protected]. See you next week!
Hassle-free. Make one handy decision and you’re done for the day.
3 年#Fusion. Potentially, 'THE' game changer. Exponentially cleaner and cheaper, but mostly endless. #Systems = everything. Understand the elements and the order they interact with each other to get the outcome they are working for, should be the ultimate aim of any decision maker. Systems are alive, so they change and understanding must be adjusted. As #strategy. Tx, David.