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Gerd’s latest finds, resources, inspirations and must-reads (newsletter #4 / 2015)

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Greetings from Switzerland! Here's the latest from the last week – enjoy:

BEST FINDS

  • All We Need To Fix The Planet Is More Cash by FastCo.Exist – a thought-provoking piece by fellow futurist Ramez Naam “The one way to slow devastating storms and reverse climate change is clean energy, and the only way to do that is to pay more for R&D.”
  • Facebook Heir? Time to Choose Who Manages Your Account When You Die via The Wall Street Journal – a true sign of the times and how Facebook has become ‘digital infrastructure' (albeit maybe not for long) “…the world’s most popular social network will begin allowing its members to designate someone—what they call a “legacy contact”—to manage parts of their accounts posthumously. Members can also choose to have their presence deleted entirely.”
  • Building Robots With Better Morals Than Humans by The Atlantic – a very important issue and debate, very much related to my recent TedX Brussels talk on ‘digital ethics' “How do we build machines that will make the world better, even when they start running themselves? And, perhaps the bigger question therein, what does a better world actually look like?”

 

MORE GOOD READS

  • How To Be Liked By Everyone Online by The New York Times “To have something liked online is not as great as having something actually liked. It doesn’t even necessarily mean someone enjoyed it — it might simply mean, “Got it,” or more wanly, “This provoked some kind of feeling, however minor.” Another letdown: Being a star in real life signifies tremendous professional success or, at the very least, celebrity; to “star” something on Gmail means you need to write back.”
  • HoloLens: Get ready to mix the real and the virtual in a mind-blowing new world by The Guardian – in my view this technology has the potential to become as common as SMS, which is both exciting and frightening at the same time (i.e. solid HellVen) “​​Consider that we’ve already lost shared consensual audio reality and we didn’t even notice it going. In any city centre, it seems more than half of people are wearing headphones now; we don’t share the soundtrack of the streets anymore…”
  • Peter Thiel and Education's New Utopians by Bloomberg View “…I don’t think that withdrawing from the school system because you have the financial and social wherewithal to do so makes the tech industry stronger, smarter or better able to create important products.”

MY RECENT WORK

These are our first two TFA Presents short films and there will be more to come, so stay tuned for the rest of the series.

Have a great week!

Futurist Gerd's Personal Newsletter by Gerd Leonhard
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