Disenchanted or just plain turned off by online dating, people are finding love and romance in other corners of the internet. Platforms designed for networking, gaming, blogging, answering questions and even making lists are doing unintended double duty as matchmakers.
Like the 3D TV, we’re far, far away from the sort of color, resolution and contrast required to push these images beyond mere novelty. But holograms have a future in the fields of remote surgery and telecom. We are already using 3D technology, from autocad and ultra-realistic remote conferencing, to medical technology that allows surgeons to operate remotely or students to learn anatomy.
Fake news will spread, despite efforts to rein it in. Political campaigns in the United States will spend $8 billion on advertising in 2018 - less than 1/25th of total advertising spending for the year, and new technologies are likely to be deployed more frequently on consumers than voters. (But) the history of advertising teaches that when people get used to ads, the ads stop working. Researchers have a term for it: advertising wearout. “The overall persuasiveness of an ad declines exponentially” the more consumers are exposed to it.
Instead of the mere ability to correlate fever and malaria, machines need the capacity to reason that malaria causes fever. Once this causal framework is in place, it becomes possible for machines to ask counterfactual questions — to inquire how the causal relationships would change given some kind of intervention - a 21st-century version of the framework that allowed machines to think probabilistically.
For the past century, the personal car has dominated that arena, shaping the streets and environments around it. Roads are straight and wide for faster travel;
intersections are regulated to protect distracted humans; businesses are located near open spaces for better parking. As cars start to drive themselves, we have some ideas for how urban planners of the future might reimagine those outdated layouts—and transform the city into a joyful mess of throughways and byways optimized not for cars but for people.
These devices are always “awake,” passively listening for the command to activate, such as “Alexa,” “O.K. Google,” or “Hey Siri.” The problem is they’re far from perfect about responding only when we want them to. How often do these devices go rogue and record more than we’d like them to? Neither Google nor Amazon immediately responded to my questions about false positives for their “wake words." But anyone who lives with one of these devices knows it happens.
Ones and zeroes don’t lie like humans do. The internet is a prime example of how an infallible technology butts up against the fallibility of man. So it is perhaps unsurprising that the internet, as it stands, is broken.The heart of the problem is we have met the enemy and he is us. People make up the internet. We developed a technology that enables communication in ways that humanity never dreamed of, but we’re screwing it up because we can’t learn to trust each other.
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As a Partner and Co-Founder of Predictiv and PredictivAsia, Jon specializes in management performance and organizational effectiveness for both domestic and international clients. He is an editor and author whose works include Invisible Advantage: How Intangilbles are Driving Business Performance.
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