Twenty-Twenty-Done or Twenty-Twenty-Fun?
Australian bush-fires, Suleimani assassination, plane shot down, Black Mamba, COVID-19's first wave, market crash, lock-downs, mass unemployment, negative oil, “I can’t breathe”, work from home, tech dominance, Beirut explosion, RBG, California fires, elections, vaccinations… How far we are from the naive and self-centered opening lines of my 2018 predictions : “Salt Bae made us swoon, La La… uhm “Moonlight” won Best Picture, Harry put a ring on it, we couldn’t get “Despacito” out of our heads, and I couldn’t (and still can’t) afford Bitcoins and the iPhone X”.
Welcome to the Uberisation of Nudity
Sex, money, tech, and power. One way or another, all major world events have been tied to one of these four concepts. OnlyFans, a social media platform created to share explicit content against tips, finds a way to merge all four. In doing so, it also manages to elegantly reflect the state of technology in 2021. Censorship, the dispersion of creativity, COVID’s impact on the economy, sexism… What equally affects a young woman in Paris and an American art director in Ukraine will inevitably affect us all.
The Uberisation of sex is here
Like many other young women throughout the world, Paris native Hélène, aka EnMarcheNoire…
It’s really not as hard as it sounds
Is technology closing the gender divide or making it worse? Are we going towards a utopia or a dystopia? As new technologies such as IoT and Machine Learning become more sophisticated and more embedded in daily life, the timeline for ensuring they are inclusive is shortening. Yet, such questions mask the fact that we all very much have a role to play in this decision, should we be given a chance to get a say.
As Amazon, Uber, Google, and countless others have shown, too many blind-spots in the technological world are shaking the foundations upon which Western societies are…
What is the Role of AI in War?
Anyone with a wet finger in the air has by now heard that Google is facing an identity crisis because of its links to the American military. To crudely summarise, Google chose not to renew its “Project Maven” contract to provide artificial intelligence (A.I) capabilities to the U.S. Department of Defense after employee dissent reached a boiling point.
This is an issue for Google, as the “Do No Evil” company is currently in an arm-wrestling match with Amazon and Microsoft for some juicy Cloud and A.I government contracts worth around $10B. Rejecting such work would deprive Google of a potentially…
A non-musical lesson for a musical strategy
It would be easy to argue that Spotify is on its way to industry hegemony. With 286M users, 124M of whom are premium subscribers, the company made $7.3bn in 2019, against $5bn in 2017, and $2bn in 2015.
Such growth, to me, is indistinguishable from magic.
Yet, Spotify is still operating at a loss, in part due to absolutely razor-thin margins (ie: non-existent). That’s because a very high percentage of its revenues are paid back to the artists, meaning the company has always operated at a loss as it concentrates on break-neck growth. And therein lies the issue: 1 fan…
The pandemic (you know the one) has disrupted stores and restaurants in a way no one could have expected at the start of 2020. A health scare, mass unemployment, e-commerce, Amazon competition, ballooning debt… we didn’t start the fire, it was always burning… but now there are ambers everywhere and we’ve got to get to work to save the good china.
In order to save shops and restaurants from the ongoing bloodbath, dozens of solutions providers have gone into overdrive all over the world. They promise to help set up payments, loyalty programs, hardware, analytics, e-commerce… anything to keep stores…
How to rise above the AI noise
When trying to predict the future of AI, a few rules must be abided by, lest one be considered “frothy around the mouth”, as I was once described by a technologically-challenged executive in his 60s (compliment taken). Below are a few principles to consider when trying to predict the future of AI in any way, shape, or form.
1. We overestimate the effect of Artificial Intelligence in the short run
The first part of Amara’s law (echoed by Bill Gates) is the most relevant in the digital age as we’re won’t to abandon ourselves to flashy headlines and clickbait, especially when it comes to AI-induced automation.
The internet doesn’t have to be a corporate playground. That’s just the path we’ve chosen.
As the U.S. (slowly) waves goodbye to net neutrality and Europe ushers in a new privacy age, now is the perfect time to check in on the health of our mutual best friend and everyday companion: the Internet. It was once Anakin Skywalker (Star Wars reference! Call me, Disney), meant to bring balance to the Force and be the great equaliser, voice for the voiceless, harbinger of democracy and the dissemination of ideas. It delivered on many of these promises, but is now seemingly having a period of teenage rebellion (or a Darth Vader moment): Facebook is spying on us…
I’m pretty sure that at this point you simply were too afraid to ask.
What is Artificial intelligence? What are some examples of artificial Intelligence? Should we trust it? What are the dangers of Artificial Intelligence? What’s next? Those are all important questions, which we answer below.
Regularly receiving queries about Artificial Intelligence is of course flattering, but can also be bothersome, as some of the most regularly asked questions could easily be answered via a quick Google search. …
Ever since the pandemic began, and workforces went home to begin a long period of remote work (which has yet to fully end), we’ve been inundated with think-pieces discussing the “New Ways of Working”. Supposedly, the Old World is never coming back, and we all have to adapt to the reality forced upon use by COVID or be left behind. I tend to agree.
Much like most other “thought-leaders” out there, I however don’t have much of a clue about specifics; what’s a “New Way of Working”, exactly? What skills do we need to thrive in this new environment? What…
