1 update 👆
Hello my fellow futurists! Welcome to Substack. I’ve converted my newsletter to Substack for a few reasons
it’s easier to manage the publication and archival of the newsletter issues
Substack acts as a discovery tool for new readers
If you hate Substack, apologies. If you’re new to Substack, some of my favorite writers are here; go check out a few:
Florian’s The Practical Polymath
Tomas’ Uncharted Territories
Elle’s The Novelleist
In addition to moving to Substack I’ve changed the name of the newsletter to “Now and Ten”. I like a good play on words. I also think it better captures the actual content I write, a newsletter on what’s happening now in the tech and social trends that are most likely to impact your life in the next 10 years. I hope you enjoy!
2 crazy things ✌
🎨 An AI journey
It’s hard to predict what will happen with AI in the coming decades; the most likely answer is that we are all grossly underestimating the impact it will make on our lives.
I’m reading Accelerando right now, it’s a sci-fi novel written in 2005 about the approaching Singularity. Some of the passages and concepts are laughable, but most are prophetic.
Right now in narrow applications like art generation or text generation, AI does well enough at first glance, like the image above.
Do you like Dali?
I like Dali. He’s one of my favorite painters and an excellent example of surrealism.
Take a look at this image
A friend and I were messing around with MidJourney and with this prompt “surealism salvador dali style painitng of a sea urchin with afterburner”, which admittedly is almost as nutty as Dali was, we generated the above painting. Something that looks like if you framed it in a Dali gallery, people wouldn’t suspect a computer painted it.
That’s the thing about narrow AI, it’s pretty damn good at its narrow task.
We’re still a ways away from solid Artificial General Intelligence, but not that far. The implications are impossible to fathom. I’ll have to write a whole essay on it or a fiction short story.
🌑 us and the moon
60 years ago this week, JFK said,
"We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."
Less than a decade after that speech, Americans set foot on the moon.
Some recent images from India’s Chandrayaan Moon Mission are clear enough to make out the leftover artifacts from the US moon mission, and yet the deniers stay strong in their beliefs. Maybe it’s because we haven’t been back.
Luckily space exploration is booming, and soon enough we’ll undeniably have boots on the ground on the moon. I may not make it to Mars before I die, but the Moon is within reach I’m sure.
India Space Agency post - Reddit
2 Metaverse things ✌
🥽 The leak
Often I think the leaks we see ahead of a big tech launch are intentional marketing stunts by the company themselves, this is not likely one of those situations.
The sheer amount of Mexican slang and swear words in the video leads me to believe this was likely an accident.
The headset looks pretty dope though, I’ll probably buy it.
📺 Disneyverse
Disney has a rich history of innovative creations, they used to have a whole team of folks to cook up delightful things for their guests, Imagineers they called them.
Recently Disney created a cool AR experience companion app for a short film. Watch it, the film just pops out of your TV!
This is all part of Disney CEO Bob Chapek’s plan to own a chunk of the Metaverse and turn Disney+ into a more immersive, delightful experience
More on that:
👁 keep an eye on it
The ethereum merge is happening today - coindesk
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