Overview: Digital Transformation

The fundamentals are broken ... It has failed because the community has failed... What was meant to be a new, decentralised form of money ... has become ,,, a system completely controlled by just a handful of people.

Howdy, a bot company devoted to automating common workplace tasks. Its product lives in Slack ... operates in the background, listening for the keywords and questions that will activate its powers. ... automates meetings, asking what people are working on, collating their answers, and distributing them to the team ... take your lunch order ... AI…

carmakers must solve an impossible ethical dilemma of algorithmic morality.

AI in itself isn’t good or bad. We’re just beginning to go past our initial, vague apprehensions, and to look concretely into how AI can benefit society while ensuring that it doesn’t hurt us.

So if it’s not defined in the Bitcoin paper, what does “blockchain” actually mean? I’ve asked a lot of people this question, ranging from renowned cryptographers and distributed systems experts to Bitcoin enthusiasts to people not particularly versed in either Bitcoin, distributed systems, or cryptography. No two people have ever given me the same…

Every business in the world will have a bot. It will allow any customer to talk to them in the simplest way possible, sending a message.

If we define design as the decisions that determine how something works ... then Design Thinking is simply the process to make more thoughtful decisions.... We can only knit together what we already know in new ways to get to the something that’s never existed before.... Design Thinking offers — a way to get where you’re going when you don’t kno…

Facebook’s news feed algorithm can be tweaked to make us happy or sad; it can expose us to new and challenging ideas or insulate us in ideological bubbles... The algorithm’s rankings correspond to the user’s preferences “sometimes,” Facebook acknowledges... not the success rate you might expect A glimpse into its inner workings sheds light ... on…

competition in the ride-hailing market is really just the prelude to a much bigger fight over dominance of the self-driving car market over the next couple of decades... If cars are primarily rented, rather than owned, then they can be optimized for shorter trips ... Short-range, high-efficiency electric vehicles will become more practical. -…

The CDO is now a “transformer in chief,” charged with coordinating and managing comprehensive changes that address everything from updating how a company works to building out entirely new businesses.

companies that have successfully transitioned to become high-performing digital enterprises are able to orchestrate six building blocks: strategy and innovation, the customer decision journey, process automation, organization, technology, and data and analytics

humans are already building a specific kind of AI ... systems that we construct and endow with legal, real-world power ... their own internal structures of rules and traditions, while humans perform fuzzy brain-based tasks specified by the system. The system as a whole can act with an appearance of purpose, intelligence, and values entirely distin…

They’re funding a new organization, OpenAI, to pursue the most advanced forms of artificial intelligence ... results public and its patents royalty-free, all to ensure that the scary prospect of computers surpassing human intelligence may not be the dystopia that some people fear a research lab meant to counteract large corporations who may gain …

Just in time for your Christmas break, a hand-picked selection of posts designed to give you something to think about as the year turns.

SEVERAL MAJOR COMPANIES from technology and financial ... IBM, Intel, Cisco, London Stock Exchange Group ... JP Morgan, Wells Fargo and State Street—have joined forces to create an alternative to the blockchain. Overseen by the not-for-profit Linux Foundation, this open source project aims to build blockchain-like technology ...for the business…

In Ronald Coase's The Nature of the Firm ... the function of a firm was to reduce transaction costs, especially information costs, and that firms would grow until the increase in organizational costs canceled out efficiency gains... Today, however, we live in an information economy. Competitiveness is no longer determined by how efficiently we…

One cognitive scientist thinks the leading approach to machine learning can be improved by ideas gleaned from studying children.... With its radical approach to machine learning, Geometric Intelligence aims to create algorithms for use in an AI that can learn in new and better ways... deep learning... systems need to be fed many thousands of ex…

“applied AI” quietly sneaking into our homes and businesses... has reached an inflection point that will move it from niche to mainstream.... the point of applied AI is that it doesn’t have to be a fully realized intelligence — it just needs to do a specific task well.

Software tools, web apps and services for online collaboration

if business needs are met, it generally doesn’t matter whether the intranet is involved or not, so long as the solution is effectively integrated into an organisation’s digital workplace... In trying to make an intranet essential, we lock ourselves into starting with a solution and then looking for the problems... Sometimes the outcome of this ch…

Being surrounded with ready-made solutions to problems can inhibit our creative growth... Given a problem with scarce resources, the human mind will twist and mull until it has a solution. This creativity is probably our species most important feature.

What determines whether the ideas we generate are truly creative? Recent research of ours finds that one common factor often gets in the way: we tend to undervalue the benefits of persistence.

while authority can compel action it does little to inspire belief. Only leadership can do that... That’s why change management efforts commonly fail. All too often, they are designed to carry out initiatives that come from the top. - To Create Real Change, Leadership Is More Important Than Authority | Digital Tonto

this couple will seal their union not before a priest or a judge, but on the almighty blockchain, a distributed global computing and data storage technology. BitNation... has established itself as the first virtual nation... has been building a set of tools and services that together may one day allow people to replace their national identity w…

Over 40 new resources ... some great longreads to enjoy as the nights grow long, the productivity tips you’ll need to find the time to read them, and a free set of steak knives. The Christmas season, after all, is almost upon us.

true artificial intelligence, if it is realized, might pose a danger that exceeds every previous threat from technology—even nuclear weapons—and that if its development is not managed carefully humanity risks engineering its own extinction... Bostrom is arguably the leading transhumanist philosopher today... bringing order to ideas that might o…

Ray is a brilliant technologist, futurist, and director of engineering at Google focused on AI and language processing... of the 147 predictions that Kurzweil has made since the 1990's, fully 115 of them have turned out to be correct, and another 12 have turned out to be “essentially correct” (off by a year or two), giving his predictions a stunni…

Imagine taking a team of highly creative people and sticking them in sterile, lowest-cost-per-square-foot spaces, and expecting them to achieve the best work of their lives?... we've been focussing heavily on the design of our work spaces... Chaining people to their desks (or cubicles) is a sure-fire way to kill great ideas and creativity. -…

I am done with attending badly run meetings and if you have any sense so should you be... running a good meeting comes down to the following: - I am done with bad meetings — Medium

The GDS was set up to improve online public services but disagreements with the top brass over its ambitions have seen four leaders abruptly resign - Why are senior staff fleeing the Government Digital Service? | Public Leaders Network | The Guardian