Curated Commons // Edition 6
Thank you for subscribing and welcome to the sixth edition of Curated Commons. Let’s dive right in.
The normalization of…conspiracy theorists
Apparently, you can love soccer, Game of Thrones and be a (now ex) Senior VP at Citibank, while also playing a central role in disseminating all things Qanon. Wild story!
The game of war
The digital transformation of war has been already apace for a few years with drones and robots. Here comes the co-founder of Oculus with what Wired calls as an Operating System for War solution.
https://www.wired.com/story/behind-anduril-effort-create-operating-system-war/
Getting video calls right
Love them, or hate them, you just can’t avoid ‘em video calls these days! Came across this really comprehensive guide to getting video calls right. https://www.benkuhn.net/vc/
Holy…financialization
You can take God out of finance, but not finance out of Godly stuff. The Vatican apparently used charity funds to bet on Hertz credit derivatives!
https://www.ft.com/content/f966e8b4-945a-45d0-8391-a305b3d8f7f5
In a low-trust bot-filled digital world, we are but a few pulsating beings
A bot powered by OpenAI’s GPT-3 posted comments on Reddit for a week, and apparently no one noticed. Not sure if it says a lot about Reddit or about the bot!
This is a brilliant read giving us a glimpse in to a future when propaganda meets AI. You can already use AI to make up non-existent faces, and text, which, when done smartly and at scale, can seriously mess up with our ideas of what’s ‘true’ and what’s not (like this short paragraph below written by the AI system).
We need a 2020 version of this classic NewYorker cartoon - On the Internet, nobody knows you’re not a bot!
And while at bots and AI, do read the case of the onions that were too sexy for Facebook’s image-recognition algorithm! We do have some time before machines fully take us over indeed.
https://www.bbc.com/news/54467384
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Always have a side-gig, more so if you are an airline
Loyalty programs started some time in the 80s, but in the last four decades, they’ve grown to become fairly strong standalone businesses. So much so that in the case of some airlines, their loyalty programs now are more valued than the whole airline!
https://www.ft.com/content/1bb94ed9-90de-4f15-aee0-3bf390b0f85e
Does your brain-computer interface have ethics? Whose ethics?
Jobs of the future are already here!
History is colorful, but is it history?
We are living through a uniquely 2020 problem - YouTubers are upscaling the past to 4K, and historians are taking issue with it saying it doesn’t depict a true version of the past.
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/history-colourisation-controversy
Free speech infringes my copyright, or something like that!
Read this pretty startling confession (more like a humblebrag actually!) from the CEO of a company that sends millions of takedown notices on YouTube that they freely send notices alleging copyright-infringement to videos which their customers might not like!
What should super-rich tech company CEOs famous for a scary laugh probably not do?
This.
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