Future Tense: AI, Quantum Leaps, and the Edges of Innovation
AI's Thirsty Frontier: Water, Robots, and the Weird Edges of Technological Change
Dear Friend —
It is Black Friday! And as our Briefing is, and always will be, free, we don’t have a deal for you. Enjoy your weekly dose of link awesomeness for free, as always.
With the be radical team being on a radical work/leisure trip to India this week, we will leave you with… the future.
Happy reading!
P ツ
Headlines from the Future
💦 AI does not only have an insatiable appetite for electricity; it also needs oodles of water for cooling the necessary data centers. As our AI consumption continues to grow, this might prove problematic. The Big Data Center Water Problem and ‘Thirsty’ ChatGPT uses four times more water than previously thought.
🤔 As we feed our AI overlords more and more of our data, the weird edge cases start creeping up: All of a Sudden, Joe Blow Can See the CEO’s Emails.
🔬 Google just made a breakthrough in quantum computing – here is how it works: Understanding Google’s Quantum Error Correction Breakthrough.
🍖 AI-generated slop has truly taken over the Internet. More than 50% of all long-form content on LinkedIn is now AI-generated. Yes, That Viral LinkedIn Post You Read Was Probably AI-Generated.
🤖 Turning our robots against us is surprisingly easy. Prepare for a new battleground for cyber-warfare. Researchers induced bots to ignore their safeguards without exception.
🏰 The global gaming phenomenon Minecraft goes IRL: Minecraft enters real world with $110m global theme park deal.
🌐 Social location tracking app Foursquare is on a quest to map the real world into cyberspace: Foursquare’s 104M Points of Interest.
📞 Using some simple AI tools to analyze 10,000 customer calls highlights the power of AI in a very practical example: Case Study: Scaling customer intelligence.
🚗 Despite the efforts to protect local car manufacturers through high tariffs, it looks pretty inevitable that the market will eventually be flooded by Chinese EVs. Just take a look at the scale of BYD’s latest factory.
What We Are Reading
🚀 What Sets AI-driven Companies Apart Most companies talk about AI’s potential, but the real game changers are those radical enough to reimagine their entire approach. It’s going to take a lot of courage as well as hard work! @Jane
👵 How An AI Granny Is Combating Phone Scams AI for the win here! This AI granny is answering calls from scammers, leading them on, wasting their time, and ultimately helping people avoid being scammed! Daisy, the AI grandma, was created by a British mobile phone company to combat scammers. @Mafe
🚫 Microsoft Starts Boiling The Copilot Frog: It’s Not A Soup You Want To Drink At Any Price If we’re not careful, the AI future of work threatens to look a lot like knowledge workers shoveling slop back and forth in a depressing feedback loop. @Jeffrey
🎸 Poisoning The Day Trust a rockstar to give you actually useful productivity advice – and get your stuff done before something or someone poisons your day. @Pascal
The Fun Stuff
💾 ‘It was our rock’n’roll’ - How the ZX Spectrum became a 1980s icon.
🎱 If you grew up in the early 90’s you might remember Marble Madness – now you can play a modern version in your browser.