Tuesday, May 1, 2018

Why everyone should care about blockchain—even if you don’t understand it

This article is for everyone who tries to will themselves invisible at the mention of blockchain.

Imagine you’re admitted to the hospital for an emergency surgery following a freak selfie accident while on vacation on the other side of the world. Right now, there’s no way for doctors to know your full medical history, allergies, or current medications: All that information is stored in silos that you can’t access from the outside. But what if your medical records were all connected and immediately accessible—while still being totally private?

Or imagine you’re an architect in Syria and need to flee because of civil war. Your life savings might not be accessible. Your certifications and licenses are sitting in a desk back home, and may not transfer to the country you resettle in. What if you could immutably prove your identity and qualifications? What if you could send money for free all over the world?

If you like those ideas, you should care about blockchain.

Blockchain is a technology that has the potential to disrupt many of the legacy systems and centralized industries of today. Hold off on letting your eyes gloss over: Even though you’re not a hack-happy crypto-bro, this next tech revolution needs all of us to take part at the start.

The first step to caring is understanding that blockchain is just behind-the-scenes code. That’s all. You don’t need to be the person who knows how to code for it, but you do need to know the type of systemic changes it can affect. You do need to know the industries it can disrupt. If you want the systems of the future to work for you, include yourself in blockchain.

There are many blockchain-powered systems in the works that might already be a helpful addition to your life: Credit scores that aren’t controlled by a handful of high-risk, data-breach-prone companies; credible news systems that resist censorship; efficient power grids that could lower your power bills. This isn’t incomprehensible hype: These companies are relevant, understandable, and being built by people who are not historically associated with tech.

With such great potential, we need to be more inclusive in how we talk about it, design with it, and create uses for it.

If people can’t understand, they can’t participate: As of now, much of the language about blockchain is jargon-heavy and intimidating: cryptocurrencies, ICOs, smart contracts, token sales, and mining. The more people who can understand what blockchain is at a high level, the more people who can make it better, dream up applications to new systems, and accelerate its implementation. It needs to invite broad, diverse participation and be accessible enough that non-experts can dream up potential applications—otherwise, our products and systems will continue to work well mostly for able-bodied white men.

The people who set the rules for a system have the power: It’s estimated that 93-95% of cryptocurrency assets are held by men. Why? Because technology and finance are traditionally male-dominated fields, and cryptocurrency is a mix of both domains. The current rules and methods for acquiring and using cryptocurrencies, no matter how well-intentioned the larger motivation is for their existence, are baked with the biases of their creators, and favor people like them. Part of the hype of blockchain is its decentralization and democratization potential. However, without a diverse set of people designing with it and developing it, exclusion will be built into the base of many blockchain applications.

Systems design depends on more than technology: We live in an era where humanity, technology, and large-scale systems are inextricably linked. Designers, community organizers, and organizational-behavior experts are all versed in understanding the dynamics of people and systems. What are the norms of a community? Who are all the stakeholders? What do they need? What do they value? These human-behavior questions are central to systems design and maintenance, and because blockchain is potentially a massive disrupter to our current systems, the most successful applications will incorporate insights about human behavior. In order to avoid an explosion of trashy apps, let’s get beyond the novelty of the medium, and begin to use it as a tool with a purpose. Like a camera for a photo, a hammer for a nail, or a tweezer for an eyebrow, blockchain is a tool for a system.

SOURCE: https://qz.com/1260694/why-gaining-a-basic-understanding-of-blockchain-is-absolutely-worth-your-time/?utm_source=qzfb

Jeff Bezos Banned PowerPoint in Meetings

His Replacement Is Brilliant
Narrative memos have replaced PowerPoint presentations at Amazon.
Here are 3 reasons why.

In his 2018 annual letter, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos repeated his rule that PowerPoint is banned in executive meetings. What Bezos replaced it with provides even more valuable insight for entrepreneurs and leaders.
In his letter, and in a recent discussion at the Forum on Leadership at the Bush Center, Bezos revealed that "narrative structure" is more effective than PowerPoint. According to Bezos, new executives are in for a culture shock in their first Amazon meetings. Instead of reading bullet points on a PowerPoint slide, everyone sits silently for about 30 minutes to read a "six-page memo that's narratively structured with real sentences, topic sentences, verbs, and nouns."
After everyone's done reading, they discuss the topic. "It's so much better than the typical PowerPoint presentation for so many reasons," Bezos added.

SOURCE:
https://www.inc.com/carmine-gallo/jeff-bezos-bans-powerpoint-in-meetings-his-replacement-is-brilliant.html?sr_share=facebook&cid=sf01002quartz

Sunday, April 8, 2018

Elon Musk Just Issued a Nightmarish Warning About What Will Really Happen if AI Takes Over

"There will be no death."

Artificial intelligence could spur the creation of a robot dictator that could rule mankind forever, the billionaire Elon Musk says in a new documentary.
"If one company or small group of people manages to develop god-like superintelligence, they could take over the world," Musk said in the film.

The documentary Do You Trust This Computer? presents a sobering look at the potential dangers of AI, including what could happen if AI evolves to be smarter than humans and becomes its own master.

SOURCE:  https://www.sciencealert.com/elon-musk-warns-creation-of-god-like-ai-could-doom-us-all-to-an-eternity-of-robot-dictatorship

Brain Activity Has Been Recorded as Much as 10 Minutes After Death

Doctors can't explain it.

Doctors in a Canadian intensive care unit stumbled on a very strange case last year - when life support was turned off for four terminal patients, one of them showed persistent brain activity even after they were declared clinically dead.

For more than 10 minutes after doctors confirmed death through a range of observations, including the absence of a pulse and unreactive pupils, the patient appeared to experience the same kind of brain waves (delta wave bursts) we get during deep sleep.
And it's an entirely different phenomenon to the sudden 'death wave' that's been observed in rats following decapitation.

The big takeaway from studies like these isn't that we understand more about the post-death experience now than we did before, because the observations remain inconclusive and without biological explanation.

SOURCE:  https://www.sciencealert.com/brain-activity-has-been-recorded-as-much-as-10-minutes-after-death