From Mario to Diamonds: The Future's Wild Ride

Geopolitics, AI gaming, and lab-grown bling—buckle up for tomorrow's tech rollercoaster!

It’s Friday, Friday…

I’ll spare you the rest of the lyrics to Rebecca Black’s 2011 hit, which was universally panned and yet made it into the Top 100 Billboard Charts (and in so many ways acted as a “thin wisp of tomorrow” for today’s (social) media landscape. As usual we have compiled some of the more interesting weak signals we stumbled upon this week—complete with some commentary as to what they might mean in the future.

Gotta catch my bus, I see my friends…
P ツ

The Thin Wisps of Tomorrow

Mario Rules — Let an AI watch oodles of Nintendo’s classic video game Super Mario and then ask it to create a video of a Mario game—including all the physics and game behaviors. MarioVGG, a recent experiment from Google, did just that, and it (mostly) worked. Extrapolate this out, and you might play computer games that are entirely created by AIs. Let the games begin. (link ↗)

Surgery Becomes a Video Game — Surgeons in Hong Kong controlled an endoscope located 5,500 miles away in Switzerland using a PlayStation game controller. The technical feat this represents aside, the last time we used a game controller to steer a highly technical innovation, it led to the sinking of a diving vessel that went out to bring tourists to the wreck of the Titanic... (link ↗)

Geopolitics Abound — Geopolitics, or more specifically the battle between the US and China (with Europe somewhere in the middle), keeps heating up, and it’s pretty foggy as to how this might all end (or continue developing). The latest headlines include a US-sanctioned ban on quantum and chip technology against China (link ↗) and a US/EU/UK AI standards treaty (link ↗). And, of course, you have bad actors waging cyberwar - the German Verfassungsschutz together with other security agencies just issued a bulletin on Russia’s ongoing attacks on critical infrastructure (link ↗). Watch this space as the “P” in the STEEPS framework becomes more and more important.

What Does It Take To Make The Problem Go Away? — During my time at Singularity University, and more specifically while leading SU Labs and its startup program, I often found myself asking entrepreneurs this question. Leveraging today’s (and tomorrow’s) breakthroughs in technology, we ought to be able to solve (at least some) of our biggest problems. The Ocean Cleanup project just proved it’s possible by projecting it takes a mere $7.5 billion to clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch—the massive floating continent of plastic waste. (link ↗)

Diamonds Are a Girls Best Friend — Only ten years ago, lab-grown diamonds were somewhat of a novelty, not that common, and considered inferior. Now they are purer, more beautiful, and significantly cheaper than mined diamonds. Not to mention the often questionable conditions under which natural diamonds are mined. At least when it comes to diamonds, the future clearly is synthetic (link ↗). And just in case you want to get into the diamond business—$200,000 buys you a diamond-making machine on Alibaba these days (link ↗).

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What We Are Reading

🌥️ The Strange Rise Of Daydreaming Daydreaming is on the rise, but for some, the delight of escape has turned into a curse. @Jane

💸 Americans Lost $5.6 Billion Last Year In Cryptocurrency Fraud Scams, The FBI Says Now this is scary: Americans were scammed out of $5.6 billion in 2023 via crypto fraud; a 45% increase from the year before. Beware! @Mafe

🤯 Why AI Hasn’t Blown Our Minds…yet If the “killer app” endgame of generative AI turned out to be justcustomer service — or just functional software development… the economic impact would still be massive. @Jeffrey

🤖 Three-quarters Of Founders In The Latest Y Combinator Cohort Are Working On AI Startups Are we witnessing the rise of the next big disruptor, or are we on the brink of another bubble? @Pedro

⚠️ What A 160-year-old Theory About Coal Predicts About Our Self-driving Future Jevons Paradox applied to autonomous vehicles leads not only to higher emissions but ultimately to more injuries and deaths on the road. A paradox, indeed. @Pascal

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(Random) Bits & Pixels

😴 Take it with a grain of salt, as the sample size is small (n=79), but it looks like screen time before going to bed has little to no effect on your quality of sleep. Once in bed, the story becomes a very different one. Ergo: Leave your screens out of bed! (link ↗)

📰 A true blast from the past and a lovely trip down memory lane: Every RadioShack catalog digitized. (link ↗)

🍿 One of the better (and rather nerdy) use cases for NFTs (the former blockchain/crypto darling tech) is a movie library for kids. (link ↗)

🛰️ Here is a delightful afternoon activity - spell your name in Landsat (satellite) images. (link ↗)

⌚︎ Some 20+ years ago, Casio released the WQV-2 Wrist Camera—a wristwatch with a built-in camera. Here is a wonderful website from that era full of photos taken with the camera. (link ↗)