Future Shock & Awe: From Slumdog Smartphones to AI's Wild Ride
Where tuk-tuks meet tech dreams, and the world spins faster than you can say 'Google Maps'
Dear Friend –
The radical team just came back from a wonderful (and wonderfully stressful) trip to India. Contrasting ancient cultures with bustling city life in a rapidly growing economy is, on so many levels, truly mind-boggling. The moment that might have captured this the most for me personally was a visit to Dharavi, Mumbai’s biggest slum (and one of the biggest slums in the world – it was prominently featured in the movie Slumdog Millionaire). On a mere 2.39 square kilometers, one million people live and work together – creating a $1 billion/year industry. Let alone the marvel that life in the slum is, seeing hundreds upon hundreds of tuk-tuks at the outskirts of the slum – every single one having the driver’s smartphone propped up in front of them, running Google Maps, was a true “isn’t that interesting” moment for me. Of course, smartphones are everywhere. But seeing seemingly every tuk-tuk driver in Mumbai rely on Google Maps for navigation (and ferociously making use of its traffic jam avoidance features) brought that point home on a whole different level. The future truly is here, and in some ways it is more democratized than we might anticipate.
And now… this:
Headlines from the Future
📋 When Ben Evans publishes one of his presentations, we stop and listen. Here is his latest masterpiece: AI eats the world.
🍋 Meanwhile, on the other side of the AI fence, leave it to Ed Zitron to bring a healthy dose of realism (and AI pessimism) to the table: Godot Isn’t Making it.
✨ For some, AI is religion, and AGI is god. But are we actually getting any closer to building a true artificial general intelligence? Even Sam Altman, in his latest remarks, seems to paddle back… How close is AI to human-level intelligence?
☀️ Solar energy’s ascent is truly unstoppable. The latest case in point is Japan: 20 gigawatts of electricity, equivalent to the output of twenty nuclear reactors, will be generated using a new thin, bendable solar film coming online by 2040: Japan eyes next-gen solar power equivalent to 20 nuclear reactors. Meanwhile, Mercedes-Benz developed a car paint that harnesses the power of the sun to generate up to 7,500 miles of electric driving by simply letting your car sit in the sun.
🕵🏼♂️ Want to dip your toes into the world of AI agents (those useful little AI friends who do stuff on your behalf)? Here is a good directory (feels like Yahoo! all over again – so many directories to make sense of the rapidly emerging world…).
🧑🏼🏫 Students rejoice! 94% Of AI-Generated College Writing Is Undetected By Teachers.
🙀 And there goes your data: AI chatbot builder leaks hundreds of thousands of records online.
🚗 The sheer scale of BYD’s electric vehicle factory is truly off-the-charts mind-blowing. No wonder that German car manufacturers struggle, and most US-based manufacturers don’t even compete.
👾 Never underestimate the power of the crowd: The crowdfunded computer game Star Citizen has raised an eye-watering $750,000,000 from nearly 5,500,000 people so far!
🤖 A Manifesto written by cAI, a custom-built AI program created by the renowned Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang, outlines 10 Principles of Coexistence between Humans and AI.
🎒 Generation TikTok can’t read long-form anymore: The snippet generation (also see the “brain rot” note below). Meanwhile more than 50% of all long(er) form content already is AI-generated slob.
🦜 Just like the Wizard of Oz wasn’t a real wizard, AI isn’t empathetic: ChatGPT’s artificial empathy is a language trick. Here’s how it works.
🍭 Maybe hooking up VR with your tastebuds will finally create a useful use case for the troubled technology: Licking this “lollipop” will let you taste virtual flavors.
😵 A nerdy look at why LLMs hallucinate and what do to about it: AI Hallucinations: Why Large Language Models Make Things Up (And How to Fix It).
📍 AI’s killer app remains somewhat elusive, yet some good use cases are emerging. Here is one: AI Helps Researchers Dig Through Old Maps to Find Lost Oil and Gas Wells. Predicting the weather has always been a domain of big data and thus machine learning – now GenAI improves our forecasting accuracy by quite a bit: Google DeepMind’s new AI model is the best yet at weather forecasting.
What We Are Reading
🤹♂️ How To Decide Which Innovation Projects To Greenlight Picking innovation projects is like walking a tightrope between playing it safe with everyone’s comfy ideas and taking wild, risky bets. It turns out that a simple ranking might just be the secret sauce to finding that sweet spot. @Jane
🌍 Coca-Cola Is Dramatically Scaling Back Its Plastic Promises Coca-Cola, one of the world’s top producers of plastic pollutants, is scaling back its packaging sustainability goals, reducing its target for the use of recycled material in its packaging from 50% by 2030 to 35–40% by 2035. @Mafe
🤖 A Revolution In How Robots Learn The recent history of advances in AI suggests that the “gradual and then sudden” future of robotics will be driven by new approaches to learning at speed and scale. @Jeffrey
⚡️ The Very Real Constraints On Artificial Intelligence In 2025 With global energy consumption of data centers expected to double by 2026 to an energy consumption equal to that of Japan, the challenges of expanding the grid loom large. The Netherlands already limits data center expansion to protect the grid, and in-house electricity sources for big tech are being pursued intensely. @Julian
🚫 Australia Is Banning Social Media For People Under 16. Could This Work Elsewhere — Or Even There? Australia just passed a law banning social media for people under the age of 16; however, the law raises concerns about potential unintended consequences, privacy issues, impacts on free speech and expression, and loopholes in enforcement. @Pedro
😱 ‘His Facebook Was A Shrine To My Face’: The Day I Caught My Catfish Everybody talks about the risk of AI-generated deepfakes. Here is an absolutely crazy story of what catfishing (someone impersonating you online using data available on the public Internet and social media) looks and feels like. We all should be more mindful of what we put online… @Pascal
The Fun Stuff
🧑🏼✈️ You know the old saying that flying is so much safer than crossing the street? Well, it turns out – it is, indeed, much, much, MUCH safer: US airlines have transported passengers for more than two light-years since the last plane crash.
🧠 ‘Brain rot’ named Oxford Word of the Year 2024.
🏃🏼➡️ Genius! “I trained myself to run farther using the Strava API and an IOT dog food bowl full of M&Ms”
🗺️ This is truly bonkers! Fei Fei Li’s new startup, World Labs, allows you to step into any image (think: a classic painting) and explore it in 3D. (UPDATE) Days later, Google launched Genie 2 – same idea, different execution.
🧑🏼🚀 Always wanted to be an astronaut? Here is the original NASA Apollo Mission Manual.