Close

Posts Tagged ‘Monthly update from Memia Labs’

Monthly update from Memia Labs

Thursday, September 28th, 2017

This is the monthly update from Memia Labs; for more information about any of this, please contact them at labs@memia.com

My new band: Me + AI
Believe it or not, my first career choice was to be a pop musician. (Admittedly not a lot of demand for melodic punk-folk cross between The Pogues and Violent Femmes – we never got much further past our first self-published EP… 🙂 ).

The main challenges with any band are dealing with all the varying musical tastes, skills and, let’s face it, egos – yours truly included. This may all be a thing of the past thanks to developments in AI.

New AI startups such as Amper and Jukedeck are training their systems with hours of music recordings and scores to be able to produce professional sounding music (ok…muzak) in seconds using only a few inputs: eg beats per minute, rhythm, mood, and style. Meanwhile if you’re getting writer’s block, you can use AI tools like DeepBeat to generate song lyrics…

Here are a few early examples of what’s possible with HI+AI music production – the AI system appears to complement the musician by being able to replicate the progression, flow and tone of a modern pop song: which the artist then embellishes. Is this a whole new soundscape to be explored? …or will all music from now on converge into a mediocre average of what a neural net calculates “optimal” music should sound like?

How to build a world class AI capability (with a Facebook-sized budget, natch…)
I’m permanently immersed in reading about AI these days… in particular this HBR article Inside Facebook’s AI Workshop – an interview with Joaquin Candela, head of FB’s Applied Machine Learning (AML) group – stood out for me in the clear and relatable way it explains how FB have built their internal AI team by focusing on the business impacts at all times.

Mixed Augmented Realities
The big players have been busy:

  • Google’s AR Experiments site features work by coders who are experimenting with augmented reality – some intriguing peaks into the future in here (plus the usual ephemera).
  • Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines for Augmented Reality is worth a read
  • Magic Leap (remember them?) devices are expected to cost between US$1,500 and US$2,000, and set to ship “to a small group of users within six months.” . Apparently “It would be bigger than a pair of glasses, but smaller than virtual reality headsets such as Facebook’s Oculus Rift … Magic Leap’s device would require users to carry a puck-shaped device, around the size of a smartphone, that would wirelessly provide processing and information to the glasses.”

Liquid Election Time
September 23 is General Election day here in NZ – one of the closest fought campaigns ever known after new Labour leader Jacinda Ardern took over just 7 weeks ago. Watch this space, maybe there’ll be a new crowd in charge the day after…or maybe not.

While NZ benefits from an (imperfect) MMP proportional representation system which provides a high degree of stability and consensus to our politics (dull, even – but no Brexit or Trump votes going on here…) –  the whole parliamentary mechanism of how democracy is implemented seems increasingly archaic in modern times. Thus I was delighted to come across the concept of Liquid Democracy – “combining the advantages of Direct Democracy and Representative Democracy and creating a more democratic voting system that empowers voters to either vote on issues directly, or to delegate ones voting power to a trusted party.” It seems to make total sense now that new technologies exist to implement it at low cost  – NZ would be an ideal small country to test this system  – we should try it out.

Last minute CTO
Meanwhile in the last days of the General Election campaign, the National Party pivoted their position (partly in response to the recent NZ Tech Manifesto) with the announcement of the creation of a new national Chief Technology Officer role – not quite a “Ministry of the Future” but a step in the right direction, eh? Xero’s Rod Drury sums it up:

The Coming Kiwi Agribiz Armageddon and the Pollution Fallout
I’ve previously commented a number of times on the profound impacts of synthetic protein food investment on New Zealand’s heavily agricultural economy. Rosie Bosworth sums up much of the thinking in her article: Is New Zealand on the road to becoming the “Detroit of Agriculture?

In just the last few months:

I think we can all see how this plays out in ~10 years time…NZ primary sector prices collapse spectacularly in a matter of 1-3 years as industrial synthetic protein production takes off in-market overseas. This leaves disrupted Kiwi farmers desperately sucking the last drops of water out of the ground, pouring extra tonnes of nitrate on the land and antibiotics down animals throats in a fight for financial survival. Any concern for the environment or animal welfare will take second place. The whole house of cards topples as the banks call in debts on the hugely leveraged rural land underpinning most primary sector investment…NZ is left with a legacy of bankrupt farmers, depressed rural land prices and a polluted environment that will take decades to recover. How to avoid this, though? (Personally, I doubt that NZ can go “upmarket” to the high value niches – for one thing, virtually none of the upstream value chain assets are owned here…)

Perhaps the Netherlands, a small and crowded country, is currently number two global food producer in terms of value, shows us how it could be done. However the Dutch have the advantage of being right next to their market geographically.

Definitely one of the first matters on the desk of the new national CTO.

Life 3.0

Currently reading… Life 3.0: Being Human In The Age of Artificial Intelligence by cosmologist Max Tegmark, co-founder of the Future Of Life Institute. The book opens with a bang, outlining a near future scenario where a crack team of AI engineers bring about AGI and take over the world (for the “good”) – …but what then? Very thought provoking and accessible read.

RIP Cassini
Earlier this month – after nearly 20 years traveling hundreds of millions of miles and studying Saturn from every angle – the Cassini probe ended its mission by crashing directly into the surface of the planet. This accessible video outlines 10 Incredible Things We Learned From The Cassini Mission.
Perhaps one of the most profound aspects about the whole mission is the immortalisation of the 18th century Italian astronomer Giovanni Domenico Cassini  who originally discovered Saturn’s satellites and the division of its rings – pretty cool to have your name on the first satellite to visit the planet >200 years after looking through that telescope… what discoveries are we making today that mean individual people’s names will live on that long?

Monthly update from Memia Labs

Monday, August 21st, 2017

This is the monthly update from Memia Labs; for more information about any of this, please contact them at labs@memia.com

The Coming Quantum Computing Revolution
My mind is still trying to absorb the full implications of this @a16z podcast on Quantum Computing.

In particular these lines jumped out at me:
– Nature is inherently quantum mechanical – computation becomes statistical, not boolean
QUIL (Quantum Universal Instruction Language) solves the problem of how do you interface quantum computers with classical computers? Hybrid computers are needed.
– Evolution of processor units: Central Processing Unit (CPU) -> Graphics (GPU) -> Tensor (TPU) -> Quantum (QPU)
– “For a classical computer its power increases 2 to the power of n (no of transistors), but for a quantum computer it increases 2 to the power of q (no of qubits), which itself is 2 to the n. With the new technologies using silicon qubits, the number of qubits follows Moore’s law…” – Quantum computing power is following a hyper-exponential evolution – in a couple of years quantum computers could outperform any classical computer which has ever existed.

Amazing world we live in now where such world changing future technology insight is so accessible…in previous times this knowledge would have hidden in academic research labs and never seen the light of day…

VR Business
Back to (virtual) reality: VR appears to be hitting its stride in enterprise scenarios. There is a growing body of evidence that VR simulation delivers more effective training results (while also reducing hazards and costing far less) than more traditional methods. Industries as diverse as retail automotive and healthcare are actively deploying VR solutions now within their operations.

AR Entertainment
Celebrated New Zealand film director Peter Jackson’s Wingnut AR studio released a table-top augmented reality demo created with Apple’s ARKit and Unreal Engine and running on an iPad. The demo will be developed into Wingnut’s first game. Eye opening as to the entertainment opportunities – and intriguing platform choice given that PJ has previously been publicly associated with AR hypesters Magic Leap. (Where are they?)

Watch the full 2-min demo here:

Ready Player One?



One of my favourite books ever Ready Player One by Ernest Cline is being made into a movie by Steven Spielberg (release date March 2018). Let’s hope that the film is true to the fun mythology of the book and doesn’t just turn into a procession of dull car chases like the trailer heralds….

There are signs that the imaginary massive multiplayer world of the book, OASIS, is taking its first steps towards reality: Japanese technology giant Softbank recently led a $502M investment round into UK-based startup Improbable.io,makers of SpatialOS and enablers of vast virtual and simulated worlds.

AI Policy
A highly useful resource released last month from Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute AI researcher Miles Brundage on 80000Hours.org – Guide To Working In AI Policy and Strategy. Apparently there is a worldwide shortage of AI Policy analysts…get in quick. 🙂

AI Safety

AI Impacts surveyed 355 machine learning researchers on how good or bad they expect the results of ‘high-level machine intelligence’ to be for humanity: the results are shown below. The optimists outweigh the pessimists for now…just.

AI leader Andrew Ng thinks we should worry more about jobs than killer robots.

Meanwhile, the new film Supersapiens explores the question: As artificial intelligence rapidly blurs the boundaries between man and machine, are we witnessing the rise of a new human species?

SEC Rules on Cryptocurrencies
For the last few months I’ve been sharing my reading as I’ve ramped up my understanding of Cryptocurrencies. No more need, for Dan Romero from Coinbase has collated a definitive Cryptocurrency Reading List on Medium.

It’s the wild west out there…which has finally attracted the attentions of the SEC, who released guidance that DAO Tokens do count as securities and hence many of the ICOs carried out to date fall under SEC regulation. Andrew Simmonds from Simmonds Stewart lawyers outlines the main implications for anyone attempting an ICO from now on. If you’re a New Zealander, the extradition case of the infamous Kim Dotcom looms large in memory…

Incidentally, the very transparency of the Bitcoin blockchain has caused some regulators to remark somewhat humorously that they see Bitcoin trading as “Prosecution Futures“.

“The world is full of total jerkwads”
Fantastic 30-min interactive tutorial by the omnitalented Nicky Case on The Evolution of Trust – based on the principles of game theory. Absorbing.

Other bits and pieces we came across this month…
Boys and their toys  – General Atomics announced a new 10 Megajoule Railgun System capable of launching self-guiding projectiles at launch accelerations over 30,000 Gees.

True Random Number Generator Using Carbon Nanotubes – Hardware-based “true” random number generators are therefore considered the gold standard for security – researchers have built one from Carbon nanotubes, solving a problem for printed and flexible electronics.

100x Faster BlockchainMicrosoft’s new Coco blockchain framework can handle 1600 transactions per second with low hundreds of millisecond latency – they claim this is about 100 times better than other non-Coco protocols

Income Inequality continues to rise
This graph from the NY Times says it all. Meanwhile HBR reported earlier this year that income Inequality is rising between companies, not just individuals.

…But Is The World Really Better Than Ever?
Wonderful long essay from the Guardian exploring the world view of the New Optimists – arguably, by many factual measures, we are actually living in the best of times…and things keep getting better.

Measuring Gravitational Waves
Two very accessible videos from the NY Times and LIGO  explaining how the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) has successfully managed to record the gravitational waves released by two distant black holes colliding trillions of years ago.

Quantum Thought
Finally…last month we linked to a recent Tim Ferriss podcast with Cryptocurrency visionary / polymath Nick Szabo. During the conversation (about 1hr 49min in) the term “Quantum Thought” comes up – this was a concept originally raised as a footnote on Nick’s incredible blog Unenumerated in 2012:

” Not only should you disagree with others, but you should disagree with yourself. …quantum thought, as I call it … demands that we simultaneously consider often mutually contradictory possibilities. Thinking about and presenting only one side’s arguments gives one’s thought and prose a false patina of consistency: a fallacy of thought and communications similar to false precision, but much more common and important. … In quantum reality, by contrast, I can be both for and against a proposition because I am entertaining at least two significantly possible but inconsistent hypotheses, or because I favor some parts of a set of ideas and not others. If you are unable or unwilling to think in such a quantum … manner, it is much less likely that your thoughts are worthy of others’ consideration. “

Beautifully put.

More again next month – Comments, feedback, suggestions? Email labs@memia.com/

Monthly update from Memia Labs

Wednesday, July 19th, 2017

This is the monthly update from Memia Labs; for more information about any of this, please contact them at labs@memia.com 

First And Foremost, AI
Lots going on as usual in the AI field this month.

Google announced their new PAIR – People + AI initiative to advance research and design of people-centric AI systems.

Deepmind taught its AI agent to do Parkour using reinforcement learning

The European Parliament debated Do Robots Have Rights?

Elon Musk reprised his doomsaying about AI Safety at a meeting of US State Governors. (In follow up I got interviewed on NZ’s TV3 news in my role at the AI Forum NZ).

While Musk’s central arguments are certainly valid (and – as previously noted – covered in much more detail in Nick Bostrom’s book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies), personally I can’t help thinking that any robotic superintelligence would be more preoccupied with getting away from this paper-thin envelope of breathable atmosphere on the 3rd rock from the Sun and going off to explore the galaxy than engaging in any kind of Terminator-style war of attrition with baseline humanity. My philosophical view is that it is far more likely to view us with the same casual disinterest with which we humans view, say, termites in a termite mound today. Reassuringly there are still plenty of termites left in the world today. And their understanding of humans is probably about the level that ours would be of any posthuman superintelligence. Rest easy. :-/

A First Look Into ConstructionTech
Living in the city of Christchurch, New Zealand where the economy has been going through a 5-year construction boom thanks to both the 2011 earthquake rebuild and NZ’s fast-growing national economy generally, I am constantly amazed at how primitive the construction industry appears to be in its use of information management and automation technologies. Building sites in 2017 still crawl with people in high-vis, banging steel bolts into place with hammers and manually operating diesel-powered machinery. Projects are still managed using 2D paper plans and printed gantt charts.

Compare this to a mid-future vision of construction where the client walks around in a high-resolution VR rendering of their future building, changing walls, pipes, fixtures and fittings at will and immediately being able to see the price / compliance implications. Once they’re happy with the building they’re commissioning, they effectively click “Buy Now” and this sends instructions to a network of 3D-printers and other manufacturers (possibly on the other side of the world) to make up the modular components of the building and place them into containers to be shipped to site. When they arrive, a fleet of autonomous robots promptly take the pieces out of the containers and clip the building together piece by piece. Building consent is automatically filed with the local authorities.  (And it goes without saying that when the building is looking a bit tired in 50+ years time, it can be “unclipped” and removed from site and recycled without the risks of micro dust particles filling the air or filling huge amounts of landfill with rubble.)

In our current overinflated house price bubble market of 2017,  a residential house or commercial property just doesn’t seem to deliver anything like value for money. Buildings and property are effectively being used as a “reserve currency” rather than for housing itself – and the value of these properties can go down as well as up. Seems to me that construction is one of those asset-heavy industries which is ripe for disruption. And it seems the VCs of the world agree with nearly $1Bn being invested into ConstructionTech over 2015-2017.

Here’s a market map from CBInsights with over 100 ConstructionTech businesses profiled, in spaces including AR/VR, Drones, Risk Management, Marketplaces and Supply Chain Management. There must be thousands more worldwide. Watch this space.

The guys at SpaceCraft who have designed an “open-source” Wikihouse built out of plywood have an alternative approach to transform the economics of the construction sector.

There are 3D-printed houses that take less than 24 hours to construct.

You can even potentially grow a house out of grafted trees or (ew) synthetic meat.

Wealth Inequality – Facts and Figures
This online resource from Inequality.org starkly illustrates the uneven (and getting more so) distribution of income and wealth around the world, particularly in the US. Facts are facts. An essential resource.

Meanwhile Finland is the latest country to do a Basic Income Experiment, this time for the unemployed. Incidentally this month I was introduced to the concept of a Universal Basic Dividend rather than Universal Basic Income: “…the National Dividend would vary depending on the performance of the economy…” because the existing financial system generates consumer prices at a faster rate than it distributes consumer incomes”. Intriguing. Local NZ progressive politician Raf Manji also makes The Case for Economic Rights this month. Something has to be done, right?

The Principles Of Scalability

Philosopher Sam Harris talks to Geoffrey West, author of the recently published Scale: The Universal Laws of Life and Death in Organisms, Cities and Companies ,  in this podcast “From Cells To Cities”. Massive wide-ranging 2-hour conversation on the similarities between how biological and social systems scale, the significance of fractals and emerging properties in complex “life-form”-like systems like cities. (Starts from around 8 minutes in). Fascinating. Can’t wait to read the book.

A Use For Blockchain?
The self-proclaimed “CryptoValley” Swiss town of Zug announces its implementation of citizen IDs using Ethereum-based Blockchain tech.

Cryptocorrection
Following on from last month’s reading list, the Crypto bubble has deflated a bit in the last few weeks.

Meanwhile this podcast from Tim Ferriss talking to Crypto guru Nick Szabo – the guy who originally coined the term “smart contract” and arguably conceived of Bitcoin itself – is hugely insightful, helps to understand the fundamental (non-speculative) value of cryptocurrencies going forward.

Adoption Chain Risk
I enjoyed this article from prolific blogger and SaaS VC Tom Tunguz, introducing the concept of Adoption Chain Risk: “the extent to which partners will need to adopt your innovation before end consumers have a chance to assess the full value proposition.” This is a problem I’ve seen time and time again for SaaS startups that need to engage with the whole value chain, not just their immediate customer. Adoption Chain Risk – The Importance Of Selling To Everyone In Your Startup’s Supply Chain

(This Week) Coffee Is GOOD For You
Drinking more coffee is associated with a longer life, according to new research. Just as well, eh?

Speaking of Addictions…
“In Silicon Valley, it’s a race to the bottom of your brainstem; where your fear, anxiety, and loneliness reside…” You vs Technology

Stressful
How stress works in the human body to make or break us. Long Aeon essay on how the “subtle flows and toxic hits of stress get under the skin, making and breaking the body and brain over a lifetime”.

The End Of Guessing?
Let’s leave off with this pearl which popped up on my LinkedIn feed last week (ignore the US-centric brandnames…):

The end of guessing:
We don’t guess the weather. We use the weather app.
We don’t guess for food delivery. We use Seamless.
We don’t guess for directions. We use Google maps.
We don’t guess to get a taxi. We use Uber.
We don’t guess for getting the best hotel or flight deal. We use Kayak.
We don’t guess for restaurants. We use Yelp.
We don’t guess for getting a contractor. We use Angie’s list.
We don’t guess for job salary. We use Glassdoor.
We don’t guess with our workout. We use Fitbit.
We don’t guess for getting the best rate. We use Bankrate.

We still guess for healthcare costs.
We still guess if we can pay off our student loans.
We still guess on TV advertising.

The more guessing is in an industry, the more likely it is to be disrupted.

Monthly update from Memia Labs

Wednesday, June 21st, 2017

This is the monthly update from Memia Labs; for more information about any of this, please contact them at labs@memia.com 

AI <=> Art
Fascinatingly esoteric presentation at a recent AI Meetup I attended from artist Ronan Whitteker of the newly launched Aftermath Gallery: Artificial Intelligence and the Digital Arts. Some provocative examples of AI being applied in the artistic space: from trippy Puppy Slugs built with DeepDream to a short film scripted by an AI brought up on hundreds of sci-fi screenplays. Watch the whole of Ronan’s presentation here.

AI <=> Politics
Wired magazine floats the idea of electing an AI as the next President. (Couldn’t be any worse, right?)

AI <=> Leadership
Attended an informative panel in Auckland –The 4th Industrial Revolution – Artificial Intelligence hosted by the Trans Tasman Business Circle and featuring New Zealand AI leaders Greg Cross from Soul Machines and Danny Tomsett from FaceMe. Key insights from the talk included the rapid onboarding of virtual “employees” – avatars who are designed and parameterized to improve interactions real people (customers, staff, citizens…). Soul Machines (based on visionary Mark Sagar’s BabyX technology) are the poster child of the New Zealand AI industry (raising a US$7.5M Series A round last year) and FaceMe are well on the road to commercialising their virtual employee technology with Nadia – an avatar designed to help people with disabilities in Australia.

The discussion raised a deeper question for me about what “leadership” looks like in the future when many (most) of a manager’s direct reports aren’t biologically human. The skills to manage virtual employees are likely to be entirely different to those of traditional people management. Are all the shelfloads of business books about leadership…now redundant? Will “leaders” be replaced instead by an avatar “fleet controller” poring over her analytics dashboard and tweaking the personalities of her digital peons in response to changes in customer satisfaction metrics…?

Will all companies of the future have no biological employees at all? (We know that CEOs can potentially be replaced by software…).

CAIO
Is a chief AI officer needed to drive an artificial intelligence strategy?

Cryptocurrency Reading Homework
It’s been a crazy month in the world of cryptocurrencies.

The total market capitalization of all Crypto$ broke through the US$100Bn barrier in the midst of a climb that has driven total values up more than 1,500% from just over $7bn on 1st January. At the time of writing there appears to be some sort of correction happening but it’s anyone’s guess as to where the valuations will go.

On the one hand this behaviour can easily be seen as a classic speculation bubble and prices will come back down to earth with a bump. But for an alternative viewpoint, given that the intrinsic value of a currency is subject to a network effect – eg the more users and use cases for exchange, the (exponentially) more its utility, it’s also possible to argue that the current values are still just a tiny percentage of their long term potential as users and use cases grow. It you look at the traditional bell curve of technology adoption, Crypto$ is still way to the left of the “innovators” segment:

So fair to say Crypto$ is likely to have an imminent major effect on our economy, banking and payments systems and needs to be more deeply understood. Here are some of the best articles I read in the last month:

Cryptoeconomics 101 – “If Satoshi is the Galileo of cryptoeconomics, Vitalik may be the Einstein.”

The Economist: A surge in the value of crypto-currencies provokes alarm

Thoughts on Tokens – “The most important takehome is that tokens are not equity, but are more similar to paid API keys. Nevertheless, they may represent a >1000X improvement in the time-to-liquidity and a >100X improvement in the size of the buyer base relative to traditional means for US technology financing — like a Kickstarter on steroids.”

I was wrong about Ethereum  – “Ethereum’s sole use case at the moment is ICOs and token creation. What’s driving the Ethereum price? Greed from speculators, investors and developers.”

Australia Will Recognize Bitcoin as Money and Protect Bitcoin Businesses, No Taxes – “Bitcoin will be treated as money in Australia by July 1, 2017, and will be exempt from goods and services tax (GST). Bitcoin traders and investors will not be taxed for purchasing and selling Bitcoin through regulated exchanges and trading platforms” …expect New Zealand to follow suit soon…

And this gem:

Blockchain isn’t just Crypto$ you know
And a few interesting developments in the more general Blockchain space too:

Russian group delivers the first unhackable quantum-safe blockchain. “Unhackable” yeah right.

Don’t use a blockchain unless you have to – “Your business doesn’t need to be decentralised… it doesn’t need a blockchain, it needs better branding, design, copywriting, and most importantly the ability to iterate their product quickly. They need to be able to throw features at the funnel and see what converts. You know, that thing where you build a business on the internet.”

The Mighty Amazon
Amazon is an amazing, ubiquitous and still growing company – and with its announcement this week that it is buying ailing US grocery chain Whole Foods is now entering a new phase in its US market dominance. Here are a couple of insightful pieces to help us understand Amazon’s strategy:

Why Amazon Is Eating The World :  “…the enduring benefit here is the improvement that comes from opening up Amazon’s internal [businesses] to outside users…” Think AWS, Amazon fulfilment… all services that they relentlessly put out into the market to ensure they are fit in the Darwinian sense…

Amazon strategy teardown from the remarkable @CBInsights

Still Trying To Get My Head Around…
The Human Brain Can Create Structures in Up to 11 Dimensions

Other interesting bits and pieces this month:
Mary Meeker hits peak (355!!!) slides in her annual Internet Trends address Lots of useful data in here.

Alphabet sell leading robotics firm Boston Dynamics to Japanese Softbank

It’s (NZ) election year! Voters’ judgement of a political candidate’s competence takes just 10 seconds.

Meet the frugal millenials planning for decades of retirement.

Not even wrong – ways to dismiss technology by @BenedictEvans – “I don’t think that anyone believes that if we had general AI, it would be a toy – indeed it’s more likely that it would think that we were a toy.”

Much more than a game, chess is an alternative history of humanity well worth reading for all chess players.

The Modern Tech Corporation Deconstructed
Came across this wonderful, playful article by Carlos Beuno on modern corporate strategy: A Priest, a Guru, and a Nerd-King Walk Into a Conference Room…

The New Planets Suite
Just can’t get enough space videos. 🙂

Here are two more gorgeous visualizations of our solar system that were released this month:

Flyby animation video of Jupiter made up from photos from NASA’s Juno spacecraft as it orbits from the giant gas planet’s north pole to and past its south pole. Those swirls of gas clouds are bigger than Earth!

A Fictive Flight Above A Real Mars – stitched together from images taken by the HiRISE (High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment), a powerful camera attached to the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter which has been orbiting Mars since 2006.

Monthly update from Memia Labs

Wednesday, April 26th, 2017

This is the monthly update from Memia Labs; for more information about any of this, please contact them at labs@memia.com 

Virtual Reality is quickly developing proven real-world applications
This short film from the BBC shows just how far VR has come in the last year – showing applications for charity fundraising, treatment of PTSD, depression, teaching surgeons and, movingly, allowing hospice patients to experience their bucket-list items from their hospital bed.

Augmented Reality is already here, it’s just not widely distributed yet
Last year’s standout AR success of Pokemon Go (doubling Nintendo’s market capitalisation to $42Bn in months) and newly-IPO’d Snap’s continued AR innovation with it’s expanded World Lenses offering – commercial Augmented Reality is already mainstream, but still confined to the ghetto of social media and entertainment (and the under-20s).

@a16z’s Benedict Evans chronicles the end of Smartphone innovation, as the next mass technology platform – AR – rises to take its place in a classic disruption S-curve.

Meanwhile right now in 2017, here’s a good summary of what Facebook’s recent announcements mean for AR/VR startups right now – in particular the launch of AR Studio, a development toolkit aimed at developers of AR content. Facebook looks well positioned to build a critical mass ecosystem for AR content, with the early innovators Snap clearly in the sights…

Chief scientist of Facebook-owned Oculus Research Michael Abrash calls out April 2022 as the date when AR glasses will replace your smartphone and become your new everyday computing device.

Parallel Worlds, Parallel Economies, Cryptocurrencies

 
As VR and AR technology develops at an amazing rate, the themes that are explored in scifi novels such as Ready Player One and Reamde – where entire parallel realities have developed with their own rules of society, politics and economy – are starting to eventuate.

In addition, the evolution in blockchain-based cryptocurrencies provide a more reliable and permeable substrate for real-virtual-real-world currency transactions than those traditionally backed by the game makers themselves.

Escape to another world
As video games get better and job prospects worse in the real world, this sympathetic article from the Economist’s 1843 magazine profiles the young men dropping out of the job market to spend their time in an alternate, gaming, reality. A justified escape “for those who feel that the outside world is more rigged than the game”?

Parallel economies in virtual gaming worlds have been around for over two decades now – early versions of World of Warcraft launched in 2004 saw the advent of Gold Farming – developing world cybercafes full of virtual “farmers” would churn out higher-level characters with pockets full of virtual “gold”. This practice was since regulated by WoW maker Blizzard but in-game and real-world purchases of virtual world assets are now commonplace across many virtual reality worlds – either using an in-game auction mechanism or using a direct exchange-rate – eg ~256 Linden dollars to one US$ in Second Life (registration required).

Meanwhile, recently Pokémon Go accounts were reputedly exchangable for up to US$999,999.

The legal, regulatory and taxation framework for virtual currencies is still entirely muddy. However cryptocurrencies – being based only on software – can easily span both realities. As the penetration of crypto$ grows – in particular blockchain based App Coins – it is likely that the membrane between real-world and virtual-world economies will become increasingly permeable. Indeed, marketplaces where (real or virtual) goods and services can be exchanged for cryptocurrency already exist.

The World’s First Cryptocurrency Hedgefund
While not particularly focused on virtual-world currencies, a few months ago saw the unveiling of the world’s first blockchain asset hedgefund, Polychain Capital – with investment from Andreesson Horowitz and Union Square Ventures). Polychain founder Olaf Carlson-Wee is interviewed in a recent @a16z podcast: fascinating.

And in another significant blockchain development, the Ukrainian government has gone into partnership with Bitfury Group to bring a range of Blockchain solutions to the electronic services: “A secure government system built on the Blockchain can secure billions of dollars in assets and make a significant social and economic impact globally by addressing the need for transparency and accountability”

Can’t not mention Neuralink
More hyperactivity from Elon Musk (who incidentally also believes that we’re already living in a virtual world). Following on from his impromptu musings at last year’s Code Conference about Iain M Banks’ “Neural Lace” concept, he formally launched his new company Neuralink at the end of March. Plenty of noise, not a lot of substance at this stage.

An entertaining readup of Musk’s logic here from WaitButWhy: http://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html

(As mentioned last month, Musk’s fellow Paypal alumnus Bryan Johnson has already been working on similar things building brain-computer-interface (BCI) prosthetics at his $100M-startup Kernel).

I’ve been following this space for a while now – my own take here from last year – personally I suspect Musk and Johnson are focusing on the wrong problem: by the time BCIs solve the outbound-brain-bandwidth problem, the human brain will likely be a small (replaceable?) component of the overall meta-intelligence architecture…

Non-BCI Prosthetics
Perhaps closer to the here and now, here’s a list of 10 Human Body modifications coming soon.

Privacy Concerns
Who owns your face? – Modern advanced face recognition lets police identify people (and groups) from far away and without interacting with them. Yet, unlike fingerprinting, in the US no federal law governs face recognition in 2017.

Federated Learning: Collaborative Machine Learning without Centralized Training Data – A gnarly privacy issue of machine learning is that private data has always needed to be processed centrally (and hence may not be kept private any more). Here Google Research outline their solution: all the training data remains on a user’s device, and no individual updates are stored in the cloud. Good stuff.

Other Bits And Pieces
And here are some other links we bookmarked this month:

In Our Time: The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum – The BBC’s Melvyn Bragg is one of those polymaths able to eloquently explore complex ideas across literally any domain of knowledge or culture. This podcast is a fascinating looking back at the fossil record to predict what is likely to happen as a result of current global warming trends – with some scary speculations at the end.

Teach Yourself Physics: some great links for those of us who gave up after high school.

A New Li-Fi System That’s 100 Times Faster Than Wi-Fi – providing speeds of 42.8 Gbit/s over a distance of 2.5 meters – but still about 5 years away from being consumer-ready.

Google Chases General Intelligence With New AI That Has a Memory

GitHub now lets its workers keep the IP when they use company resources for personal projects  – common sense prevails…

How spherical codes work – for example to communicate reliably with Mars

And lots of commentary this month about the concept of Doughnut Economics – attempting to model human economic activity within a Goldilocks zone of environmental and social sustainability.

Following on from last month, here’s a more accessible writeup on historian Yuval Noah Harari’s thesis about the forthcoming Rise of the Useless Class: “Most of what kids currently learn at school will probably be irrelevant by the time they are 40”. Happy days.

Finally…

Personally I’m still challenged to find a concise answer when a family member or friend asks “so what exactly do you do in your job?” Apparently this is a classic problem for Neo-Generalists – “…living in an era still dominated by hyperspecialism and experts with ‘the one right answer’, the N-G defies easy classification – tricksters who traverse multiple domains, living between categories and labels.” As one reviewer put it, the book “forces us to re-evaluate traditional career trajectories and consider what it means to live, learn and lead in the 21st century.” Worth a read.

Comments, feedback, suggestions? Email labs@memia.com