The choices we make today shape our world tomorrow.
Author mpescePosted on Michel Bauwen’s P2P Foundation helps humanity share the best ideas at global scale, giving us a leg up through some tight years ahead.
(Over the next days we’ll be linking to all of the great projects Michel mentioned in his wide-ranging chat. Please stand by.)
Author mpescePosted on Social media promised a voice for the marginalised and powerless. Danah Boyd shows us how our voices – amplified – redefined power.
Wonderful links from points mentioned in our conversation, courtesy of Danah:
Here is Danah’s incredible RE:PUBLICA talk from May 2018. Trust me, you will not regret taking the 50 minutes to watch this.
Author mpescePosted on NYU Journalism professor Jay Rosen opens a window onto a world where the next billion seconds of journalism grows from a foundation of trust and relationships.
Jay writes and teaches extensively on journalism and it’s future. Here’s an essay “Optimising Journalism for Trust” about the Dutch publication De Correspondent that Jay refers to in our interview as one future for journalism.
Jay takes a deeper look at De Correspondent in “This is what a News Organisation built on Reader Trust Looks Like“.
(apologies for the rough sound quality in this episode – we recorded it remotely from Jay’s office in Berlin where he’s working with German journalists.)
Jay writes extensively at pressthink.org – have a look at what he’s thinking now.
The granddaddy of all alternative newspapers, the Village Voice closed down after 63 years in operation. Read all about it.
This is not great news, as Bloomberg reports: “Local News is Dying and It’s Taking Small Town America With It” — because without local news there can be no local politics.
From the Columbia Journalism Review – “A Civil Primer: The Benefits and Pitfalls of a New Media Ecosystem“.
Here’s a recent interview with De Correspondent CEO Ernst-Jan Pfauth
Returning guest Rob Tercek shows how software turned newspaper into web pages – vaporising business models that kept us well informed.
In his 2016 tour-de-force Vaporized: Solid Strategies for Success in a Dematerialized World, Rob looked at how software replaces hardware.
Printing presses are hardware. Newspapers – they’re hardware too.
So what happens when something vaporises? Here’s Rob:
We’re living in a time of vaporised media – and we got here suddenly, with no preparation, or any clear plan on how to make this work for us.
How do we stay well informed as news organisations find their dollars taken instead by search engine giants Google and Facebook?
Rob talks about “the Gerasimov Doctrine” – using the collapse in the media to wage a sort of covert war against a government – and here’s an article Rob recommends in this episode, exploring that whole topic.
Also highly recommended is the Peter Pomerantsev book Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, about how this has become the new reality for Putin’s Russia. Read more in this article from The Guardian.
Listen here — or on iTunes.
Author mpescePosted on In our world, you flip a coin and it comes up either heads or tails. But in the spooky quantum world – that’s everything from a single atom all the way up to a small virus – that coin can come up both heads _and_ tails, depending on how you read it. So which is it? Heads? Tails? Both? Neither?
Welcome to the strange world of quantum computing where this both-true-and-false ‘superposition’ allows quantum computers to vastly outperform their ‘classical’ peers (such as the one in your smartphone).
At least, that’s the theory.
Quantum computers are so unstable they tend to self-destruct before we can get them to run a program!
Researchers Claire Edmunds and Virginia Frey from the University of Sydney’s Quantum Control Laboratory join us to explore this new quantum frontier: The deeper you go, the weirder it gets over the next billion seconds.
If quantum computing fascinates you as much as it fascinates me, you may find these resources interesting:
IBM scientists explains quantum computing at 5 different levels (video good for beginners to experts)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWJCfOvochA
IBM Institute for Business Value Report on Quantum Cybersecurity – what happens after quantum computing breaks all the encryption we use on the Web to keep our information secure and private?
https://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/gbs/thoughtleadership/quantumsecurity/
Here’s a tutorial – in the very easy to learn Python programming language – that allows you to generate random numbers using a quantum computer.
And since you’re going to need a quantum computer to run this program, here’s the IBM Q Quantum Experience (5 qubit device available publicly on the cloud) – a REAL quantum computer you can run your own experiments on!
Author mpescePosted on Back in July 2016, Pokémon Go opened the doors to the brave new world of augmented reality – an overnight success fifty years in the making. With companies like Magic Leap and Facebook working hard to create augmented reality ‘spectacles’, the next billion seconds will see us put our smartphones down — instead placing the screen over our eyes. We’ll like what we see in our new, “improved” reality – but who’s creating and controlling that reality? That’s a question confronting all of us at the dawn of “The Last Days of Reality”.
Here’s a taste:
Or listen to the whole episode here:
(May not work outside of Australia and New Zealand)
Here’s all of the media and links mentioned in the episode:
First, video of Pokémon Go players in Ryde – as the situation was tipping out of control:
The article from the Sydney Morning Herald about Niantic removing the ‘Pokestops’ from Ryde in a game update – pleasing the local residents.
Here’s some early footage of the ‘Sword of Damocles’ – the very first augmented reality system:
Sega’s VirtuaVR system – which I helped design:
Which led to the Magic Leap One AR spectacles – being released in September 2018. Here’s an video about that:
Mark Zuckerberg’s 2017 keynote at Facebook’s F8 Developer Conference, where he talks about how important augmented reality is to the future of Facebook:
Here’s that 2014 article from The Guardian about that infamous experiment where Facebook manipulated the emotions of 689,000 of its users – without telling them.
Finally, here’s HYPER-REALITY. You really want to watch all six minutes. It’s gold.
HYPER-REALITY from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.
Author mpescePosted on
Why is it so hard to tear ourselves away from Facebook’s feed? What is it feeding us that makes it so addictive?
The power of artificial intelligence combined with the eternal surveillance of the smartphone made a monster out of Zuck’s social network – but has it divided us more than it united us? How are people using this social network to spread fake news? How is fake news being weaponised to change the way we vote?
All of these questions – and much more – are answered in our special two-part episode, “The Last Days of Reality”.
Part one tells the tale of how we ended up where we are – addicted to Facebook and in the thrall of shadowy firms like Cambridge Analytica. Here’s a taste:
(ANZ listeners only)
And because this isn’t fake news, here’s the links to the stories referenced in the episode:
Buzzfeed reports on Macedonian content farms
https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-became-a-global-hub-for-pro-trump-misinfo
Facebook exploits ‘insecure’ to sell ads, Darren Davidson, The Australian 1 May 2017
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/media/digital/facebook-targets-insecure-young-people-to-sell-ads/news-story/a89949ad016eee7d7a61c3c30c909fa6
https://www.forbes.com/sites/paularmstrongtech/2017/05/01/facebook-is-helping-brands-target-teens-who-feel-worthless/
Facebook’s formula for winning with AI
https://www.fastcompany.com/3060570/facebooks-formula-for-winning-at-ai
Experiment shows how to talk women into lower maths scores
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/314/5798/435
May 2017 Observer exposé on links between Cambridge Analytica and Brexit
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/07/the-great-british-brexit-robbery-hijacked-democracy
Cambridge Analytica becomes Emerdata
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/05/02/cambridge_analytica_shutdown/
Jimmy Wales founds WikiTRIBUNE
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/jimmy-wales-wikitribune
And, finally, a link to WikiTRIBUNE
Author mpescePosted on Like artificial intelligence, virtual reality is one of those twenty-year ‘overnight success’ stories. For longer than that, VR pioneer Tony Parisi has been probing the boundaries of computer graphics, interactivity and illusion to create the next generation of technologies that immerse us in experiences of new worlds.
Tony tells us why VR has finally come of age – and what’s coming next, as ‘augmented reality’ integrates ‘consensual hallucinations’ into our daily lives – influencing everything from entertainment to business to the design of our kitchens:
The show opens with a nod to Beyonce’s amazing performance at Coachella 2018 – which featured the largest livestream audience in history, nearly half a million viewers:
There’s a new technology – videogrammetry – that allows full performance capture in 3D. Videogrammetry was used to create a video by former Smashing Pumpkin’s frontman Billy Corigan, with amazing VR landscapes created by Tilt Brush virtuoso Danny Bitman (@DannyBittman on Twitter):
My own journey into VR began when a friend lent me his copy of issue #2 of MONDO 2000. The entire collection of MONDO 2000 is available on the Internet Archive, so here’s a link to the interview with Jaron Lanier that changed my life…
Author mpescePosted on The ‘Next Big Thing’ always promises to be the cure for all our ails – but inevitably the high promises tarnish and all our best efforts fall back to earth. For as long as we’ve had technology, we’ve believed in its capacity to craft a perfect world – even though we ourselves are far from perfect.
Author and philosopher Erik Davis has spent twenty years dissecting our attitudes toward technology, utopia and belief – and writes about a future where we ‘wise up’ enough to understand the human value of our imperfections.
Here’s a bit of a taste of our wide-ranging conversation about faith, reason, utopia, and why we seem to make the same mistakes over and over again…
Erik hosts an amazing podcast – Expanding Minds – that you can listen to here. (I did an extended interview with Erik in early 2018, you can listen to that here.)
Author mpescePosted on Producer Alex Mitchell and I traveled to Melbourne on Saturday to attend the Australian Podcast Awards – because this podcast had been named one of six nominees in the Technology and Science category.
Although chuffed to be nominated, we had no reason to believe we’d win – the list of competitors was solid:
In Collingwood’s Melba Spiegeltent, we settled in for a long night. Alex and PodcastOne MD Grant Tothill consoled me – there’ll always be next year, and besides, series 2 is better than series 1, so…
Then the presenter opened the envelope, and managed to say, “The Next…”, and Alex and I realised WE’D WON!
It’s absolutely true what they say – despite your best intentions you can’t remember anything when you accept an award you (secretly) very much wanted to win. Your mind goes blank.
By way of thanks we’ve created this special Web-and-socials only episode of The Next Billion Seconds as a thank you to all of you – our listeners. You made this happen.
Thank you.
Author mpescePosted on All the way back in 1994, Bill Gates quipped, “Banking is necessary – banks are not.” For billions of ‘unbanked’ in the developing world, banking happens through a smartphone app – no branches, no tellers, and no ATMs. How does a bank inspire trust – or trust its customers – when it’s all inside a smartphone?
Banking futurist Andrew Davis shares his vision of a future where banks protect privacy as well as your money, a world where everyone, everywhere becomes a banker.
Here’s a clip of Andrew talking about ‘open banking’ – the coming revolution where banking becomes about your data just as much as today it’s about your money:
One of the most interesting innovations in banking involves the analysis of mobile usage to measure the creditworthiness of an individual or business. This article from the World Bank explains how it works.
Author mpescePosted on 
For two and a half thousand years, cities and politicians have grown together. The city gives politicians a platform, a stage – and a demanding public. Always economic powerhouses, our cities also hold the key to an urban future where city-states like Singapore rise in prominence.
We talk to Sydney City Councillor Jess Scully about how best to grow a ‘world city’ like Sydney over the next billion seconds – and what it means to have a political career in a time when every citizen has social media to amplify their voice, their beliefs – and their anger.
The future is here – and it’s local. In this clip, Jess talks about the importance of Sydney to Australia’s economy:
In our interview, Jess mentions the DECODE Project – designed to give people rights over the data collected about them. Read about DECODE here.
The City of Sydney wants to increase the housing supply – and this article explains why that’s more difficult than it might appear.
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