👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week’s remarkable stories at the intersection of technology, business, design, and culture.
Three articles and three podcasts wrestled from this week's algorithmic feeds and click-bait chum. No fluff, just stuff⚡️
📚 Reading
👩🏻🔬 How Pattie Maes Almost invented Social Media:
It wasn’t explicit in the software yet, but there was another latent implication that [it] was predicated on—if you shared some overlapping set of cultural tastes or references with someone, then perhaps you might want to form a deeper connection with that person, that relationships between individuals could be organized and mapped statistically, using databases and computer algorithms.
20-minute read by Steven Johnson in Hidden Heroes
🤖 Revenge of the Chickenized Reverse-Centaurs:
But even though an Amazon driver represents the tight coupling of a human and a machine to do more than either could do on their own, that’s not the kind of centaur that we talk about when it’s a chess master paired with a chess program [..] An Amazon driver is a reverse-centaur. The AI is in charge, and the human is the junior partner. The AI is the head, telling the body what to do. The driver is the body — the slow-witted, ambulatory meat that is puppeteered by the AI master.
8-minute read by Cory Doctorow in OneZero
🕹 The Great Overlap:
The conjunction of physical and digital technologies, information and virtual identities is becoming easier for brands to engineer, and the benefits for customers are compound. From effortlessness to opportunity, the potential for more personalised and creative experiences is boundless. The overlap between digital to physical has intensified with greater effect for over a decade.
12-minute read by Paul Ostryzniuk
🎧 Listening
🤓 Thinking Afresh about Business:
It's asking the question: what's underlying that, what's the core theory underlying that? [..] I think the business world in some sense works at the app level; it's almost like it works in Word and Excel and Powerpoint, and not in Windows. It has no idea what goes on in Windows. I think the business world works to a great extent at that app level and doesn't question the underlying sciences enough.
40 minutes with Roger Martin on Lancefield on the Line
🌋 How to Survive in the New Economic & Financial Order:
[A] belief that there's a link between interest rates and the rate of inflation. This is what we teach in finance, but financial history is very clear [..] that we can move into a new system where these things are not true [..] The wrong question is really focused on the old system, too much focused on central bankers. Central bankers in my opinion, are largely impotent, and that's what people haven't worked out yet.
54 minutes with Russel Napier on Hidden Forces
📱 Inside Apple Software Design:
When you worked at Apple in software development, you knew what the vision was. That was always very clearly communicated. Still, it was just a vision [..] a brief handed over to the engineering team. It was our job to figure out how to do it. And that's where the bottom-up contribution comes from [..] We came up with that, providing the contribution that helped to realize the vision.
100 minutes with Ken Kocienda on a16z Podcast
🎁 One More Thing
Join us for a night of innovation, creativity, and collaboration on June 16, London. There’re some exceptional guests with a story to tell.
If you can’t make it that evening but are in London, we would love to meet up. Just let us know over the email address below 💌
📬 Suggestions?
Please send tips, comments, and ideas for the next issue by replying to this email. Or, send them directly to hello@futuring-architectures.com 🙏