THIS WEEK: Geoffrey Hinton, Mania and The Metaverse
Hello from a sunny London. As always, I have collated my top five recommendations for your viewing/listening pleasure this weekend.
PODCAST
This week, we are revisiting my interview with Philip Rosedale, founder of Second Life. As tech and the world finally catch up with Philip's vision for a connected, online, community that mimicks the real world, we look back at what it was that he imagined, what came true and what the future might look like.
Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts from.
Clip to watch here.
QUOTE
This week, I was delighted to see Pieter Abbeel ask Geoffrey Hinton - aka the Godfather of AI - the questions I had suggested for his interview on The Robot Brains Podcast. Here is the clip which you can watch on YouTube. Listen to the full interview here and Pieter's initial interview with Hinton here. Hinton mentions a couple of lines from the above short poem by William Blake in his answer.
INTERVIEW
"Aim high. We have always achieved what we wanted to... never in the the timeline. We fail on timeline, but that feels like the right fail to make as opposed to not achieving what you are trying to achieve technically."
Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX
I was lucky enough to interview the inspiring Gwynne Shotwell, President and COO of SpaceX, for my book Female Innovators at Work back in 2016 and so much has happened since then. So it was great to see that she was at Stanford this week discussing how to balance ambitious goals, how/why SpaceX wants to put people on Mars within the next ten years, and why she almost said no to Elon when he asked her to become President of SpaceX.
Watch the full interview here.
领英推荐
BOOK
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
“The people are pieces of software called avatars. They are the audiovisual bodies that people use to communicate with each other in the Metaverse."
It was great to see Neal Stephenson and Rony Abovitz join forces again this week to help build the Metaverse (more info here). Stephenson’s book?Snow Crash which imagines much of what is planned with the Metaverse and where the name was coined, was first published in 1992.
A great read to see Stephenson's vision and to imagine what might become of the Metaverse.
Buy the book here.
FILM
The Internet's Own Boy follows the story of programming prodigy and information activist Aaron Swartz. Including narration from his friends, family and peers, we get to see Swartz through the ages from curious child to his contribution on the development of the basic internet protocol RSS, his work on Reddit and his tech activism. And it was Swartz's groundbreaking work in social justice and political organizing, combined with his belief in open information access that resulted in a two-year legal battle which tragically, culminated with him taking his life at the age of 26.
A truly touching story of someone who impacted the internet we take for granted today. (You can see the extent of his impact by watching his memorial service here and here.)
Watch the full documentary here.
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As always, thanks so much for reading my weekly newsletter and for listening to the podcast - I appreciate you all.
Until next time...
Danielle