The choices we make today shape our world tomorrow.
Author mpescePosted on A clever bit of AI software transforms my voice into a silky-smooth ‘Lisa’ – almost an archetypal radio host. In the near future we’ll be able to make ourselves sound – and look – like anyone else. How will we know if we’re being fooled?
Big thanks to Twitter user @nearcyan – who offered me a demo of https://koe.ai – have a play with it yourself!
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!
It’s growing increasingly difficult to know where the truth lies. We’ve gotten very good at our electronic fakery – from photoshop to ‘deepfakes’ to synthetic audio of Obama so accurate it’s indistinguishable from the real thing.
All of this feeds into a growing online community which instantly separates into tribes, then tunes out any competing with a cry of “fake news!”
Series Two of The Next Billion Seconds takes a look at the intersection of technology, truth and our future, beginning with frequent guest John Allsopp, revealed in the ways he teaches his children the spirit of inquiry, to help them discover where the truth lies.
Here’s a brief excerpt:
Here’s a few links to topics covered in our conversation:
Those famous faked photos of faeries from the early part of the 20th century.
Lawfare on ‘deepfakes’, security and privacy.
The Register on Human voice cloning.
And that poor woman who got pilloried for a tasteless tweet
