The Future Unfolds—from Weight Loss to AI and everything in between
AI faces an age-old question: Is it merely a feature or a distinct product? And what defines art and a good movie? Ponder these intriguing questions with us.
The Thin Wisps of Tomorrow
AI: Feature or Product? With the announcement of Apple Intelligence (is that what AI always meant?), the deep integration of lightweight AI functionality into all their OSes, and the spectacular failure of AI-native widgets like the Humane Pin, it makes you wonder: Is AI, at the end of the day, merely a feature we add to our existing stuff, or can it be something more fundamental like the Personal Computer once was?
What Makes Art? First, we had an AI-generated image winning an art competition, only to be disqualified because the artist didn’t disclose that the image was AI-generated. Now, a photographer has won an AI photography competition with an actual photo. This raises the essential question: Is it art if it’s not human-generated? But then—is it art if we use a Photoshop filter? Or, is Michelangelo’s work considered art, even though he likely didn’t paint much of it himself?
Need Data? Follow Amazon’s Lead! Amazon needs data to train their AI. The code repository GitHub (owned by Microsoft) has lots of it but doesn’t allow you to scrape it all at once. Instead, it rate-limits you, which is annoying for Amazon. Amazon’s solution? Ask employees to create GitHub accounts and share the credentials with the company, allowing them to scrape GitHub’s data from multiple accounts simultaneously. That’s one way to do business, we guess...
The AI Will Not Take Your Order Now: Fast food giant McDonald’s shutters its AI-powered drive-thru pilot. We’re not surprised—we always wondered how an AI makes sense of kids screaming, “We want ice cream!” from the backseat.
The Head Will Talk to You Now: Here’s an incredibly accurate open-source framework to make static images speak. Check out the demos!
Meanwhile Text-to-Video is improving rapidly. Exhibit A: Runway’s latest model, Runway Gen-3. Exhibit B: Google’s AI generates sound effects for videos just by watching them.
Still wondering what to do with ChatGPT? Wonder no more! Reddit comes to the rescue (as it often does) with this compilation of creative ways people use ChatGPT and other LLMs.
Talk About Dating (and Weak Signals): Most Japanese people would reportedly welcome a government-run dating app. Presumably released and maintained by the Ministry of Funny Walks? Meanwhile, Chinese companies are gearing up for their next-gen AI-powered sex bots.
Ozempic’s Impact on Fashion: The weight-loss drug Ozempic is a breakthrough success in the US, leading to some interesting consequences. There’s been a decline in fast food sales and now an increase in demand for smaller clothing sizes at fashion retailers. A prime example for our Disruption Mapping framework.
Getting Rich as an Influencer: Aside from mega-influencers like Mr. Beast, it seems the only ones getting rich are those who run the platforms. Shocking.
From Cassette Tapes to Batteries: Remember TDK? The brand once synonymous with cassette tapes and hi-fi equipment is now a major player in the battery market. They just announced a breakthrough that allows them to make batteries with 100 times the storage capacity than previously possible. Speaking of nostalgia, remember phones with weeklong battery life? We might be returning to that glorious past.
The Reason Why Renewables Are Inevitable: Money. It all comes down to money. The latest Levelised Cost of Energy Analysis by investment bank Lazard shows that renewables are simply cheaper than other forms of energy, at least in Australia where the report originates.
What We Are Reading
🌿 World Record Broken For Living Thing With Most DNA A fern discovered in New Caledonia has set a new record for the largest genome ever found, with 160 billion base pairs of DNA that would stretch out to about 100 meters if unraveled, far surpassing the human genome. Scientists are investigating how it functions and survives with such an enormous amount of genetic material. @Jane
🪦 If Ray Kurzweil Is Right (again), You’ll Meet His Immortal Soul In The Cloud Is the Singularity Near(er)? Ray Kurzweil still seems to think so. In his latest interview, he covers his thoughts on death, living to 300, and humans ultimately merging with AI. @Mafe
🔮 Using Strategic Foresight To Create The Future We Want Futures thinking isn’t just for the corporate sector. Non-profits can fruitfully use the same tools, just as the world can likely benefit from the growth of “social foresight” practices. @Jeffrey
🤖 Among The A.I. Doomsayers Based on the recent community conversations on the legitimacy of dooming perspectives over AI, revisiting this piece profiling both decelerationists and effective accelerationists adds an interesting and insightful detail to those apparent perspectives, also showing how intertwined they actually are. @Julian
🚀 Times Science Fiction Movies Accurately Predicted Future Technology “Science fiction is essentially a form of prediction,” someone once wisely stated. @Pedro
😬 The Collapse Is Coming. Will Humanity Adapt? A sobering yet realistic outlook on the impending collapse of life as we know it, what we can do about it, and why it shouldn’t depress us. @Pascal
(Random) Bits & Pixels
Marion Stokes spent 30 years recording every minute of US television on 71,000 tapes. Her story is truly fascinating.
Space nerds rejoice! Satcat tracks and provides information on satellites, space weather, debris, and more. To the stars and beyond!
Light has become incredibly cheap.
The Podcasts
The League of Intrapreneurs talked with Pascal about “Disrupt Disruption”.
The team at Wunderbar Together did a long interview with Pascal in German about various topics. It’s an amazing conversation, and even if you don’t speak German, you might enjoy hearing Pascal speak in his native language.