21st April 2018
Stuart Russell (UC Berkeley Professor) and the Future of Life Institute, created this eerie video that depicts a future in which humanity develops lethal drones. Video starts at around two and a half minutes into thepresentation.
From Digiday : ‘Ads.txt has gained adoption, but 19 percent of advertisers still haven’t heard of it.’ ‘Ads.txt is a file on a site, listing which companies are authorised to programmatically sell or resell inventory, and was introduced last May, as a way to root out domain spoofing and ad tech arbitrage.’
From Campaign. ‘Creativity’s female future: Meet the next generation of women redefining creativity.’ Campaign and Creative Equals present thefuture creative leaders; the women defining creativity today and tomorrow.
The Economist looks at the decline in the importance of ‘customers’ and the rise of ‘subscribers’, in The Subscription Addiction; but discusses three flaws in the approach – the cost of paying upfront for new subscribers, consumer disloyalty and lack of exclusivity.
‘Hold The Front Page’… The House of Lords Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence, has published its report. You can wade through its observations and recommendations here; and here is a recent perspective from McKinsey – ‘Notes from the AI frontier: Applications and value of deep learning’.
From The Drum. ’50 years on, Kubrick’s ”2001, A Space Odyssey”, continues to both inspire and inhibit brands.…often credited in all its glorious, futuristic technicolour for having prophesied tech like Amazon Alexa and Space X.’ And here (just because it is awesome) is the opening sequence. Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra – starts at 12′ : 40″ in.
As (some) people move away from Facebook, where are people going for their news? From Digital Content Next : ‘They seem to be turning (or returning) to news aggregation and curation apps (such as Flipboard) which have had their ups and downs over the years.’
Two different perspectives on the future of Facebook and other social networks. Firstly, The Monday Note, on ‘Mark Zuckerberg’s long game : the next billion.’ – The growth areas are Africa and Asia, facilitated by internet.org and its ambition to ‘be the internet’ across these continents. An alternative perspective is from Buzzfeed (perhaps more relevant to the occident) : ‘There are big forces pushing us toward fragmentation. These are not attempts to take over but instead to carve out an independent territory – What Comes After The Social Media Empires’.
‘Festivals once offered spiritual release, but like so many things, they have been co-opted, and repurposed by corporations and the state. Festivals today promote brands and war through marketing, surveillance, and subtle propaganda. Consumers, effectively, are buying tickets to their own subjugation.’ From The Outline : ‘Music festivals are the cultural dystopia we deserve.’
And finally, the Walmart Yodelling Boy, Mason Ramsey, proves a big hit on the Ellen show.