The choices we make today shape our world tomorrow.
Author mpescePosted on Now that everything is connected, things know where they are & can tell us. Does that mean nothing gets stolen, or will thieves find new ways to work?
It should be getting harder to steal – but connectivity helps thieves, possibly even more than it helps us protect ourselves from theft.
Louise Sampson is the Executive Manager of Fraud and Intelligence at Suncorp Group.
Author mpescePosted on We’ll be seeing more, heavier rain and coastal erosion. How can we prepare to meet these risks – to keep ourselves and homes safe?
We listened to some of the world’s leading climate scientists – including Australian of the Year Tim Flannery – to learn all about the future of precipitation, then spoke with a leading architect on how to make our homes resilient in floods – and even a storm surge!
Our great guests in this episode were:
Fellow futurist and friend Sally Dominguez;
UNSW climate scientist Professor Steven Sherwood;
Monash University climate scientist Professor Christian Jakob;
Brisbane architect James Davidson.
Tim Flannery has an amazing new book coming out – The Climate Cure shows us what the COVID-19 pandemic can teach us about how to take some necessary steps to manage our climate.
The Users Guide to the Future was produced in partnership with GIO.
Author mpescePosted on Physical distancing makes personal transportation a necessity. When public transport risks infection, cars & bikes become our safe spaces. Co-host Sally Dominguez looks at the sudden reframing of the automobile as self-contained ‘safe space’ during the pandemic. Special correspondent Drew Smith rhapsodises about the Renault Espace, the first MPV designed – to carry people.
Be sure to sign up for Drew Smith’s “Looking Out” newsletter – grab it here.
We saw more change in March & April of 2020 than in the rest of our lives. How has the pandemic accelerated our journey into the future? We ask four guests from series 2 and 3 – John Robb talks about the ‘black swans’ revealed within the pandemic; Fiona Kerr explores the ways we need technology to connect – and the price we’re paying for our lack of physical contact; Ramez Naam looks at how the crash in the price of crude oil has accelerated the transition to a decarbonised economy; and Tiffany Shlain reminds us that in a world where we all want to be connected, a ‘Digital Sabbath’ is more important than ever!
John Robb is the author of “Brave New War” and shares his thoughts on the more-vital-than-ever ‘Global Guerillas‘ blog.
Fiona Kerr runs the NeuroTech Institute.
Ramez Naam guides, advises and invests in clean energy.
Tiffany Shlain is a filmmaker and author of the bestseller “24/6”
Author mpescePosted on Retail banking generates most of the sector’s profits. Founder of neobank Up!, Dominic Pym, tells us why the best user experience wins.
Listen to the all the episodes of BetaBank here…
Close relationships with machines change the way we think, rewiring our nervous systems. How can we stay safe – and ourselves – into the future?
Fiona talks about the ‘The Art & Science of Looking Up’ report – which is available here.
Do billionaires worry about the future? Writer and futurist Doug Rushkoff learned fear of the future drives the 0.0001%ers too.
Doug’s amazing book Team Human is well worth the read.
Author mpescePosted on In thirty years the Web has grown into the foundation of civilisation – but can we make the Web more useful, more private – and more human? That’s a question that Sean White, Chief Research & Development Officer at browser-maker Mozilla continually considers. The answer is evolving.
Some of the answer lies with new Web technologies, like Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid project. And plenty of the answer lies within ourselves, as our use of the Web evolves.
Social media has been weaponised and is now used against nations as a tool of war – invisible, subtle, and dangerously destabilising. John Robb has spent over a decade studying how these new networks represent the new powers – and the new engines of war.
Some of John’s best writing goes to his Patreon supporters…
John writes the amazing Global Guerrillas blog – you should check it out.
John’s book Brave New War is quite good, too.
Author mpescePosted on VR pioneer Tony Parisi tours CES to discover ‘cybershoes’, RealMAX augmented reality spectacles, Vuze+ 3D cameras — and explores how 5G mobile networks will transform media creation & consumption.
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
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!
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