1) Now an electric car on
subscription
Canoo thinks the
tides are changing and a subscription-based car-buying model is the future.
Canoo subscribers pay a monthly fee for a bundle that includes a Canoo EV,
maintenance, registration, access to insurance, and charging. The service
launches next year. Canoo calls its vehicle an "urban loft on
wheels." With a wraparound bench, the Canoo’s inside is designed to feel
like a living room.
2) Yuval Noah Harari warns
that companies and governments can "hack" humans
For Harari, the age
of rival investment between the US and China in Artificial Intelligence should
worry us all.
"On the most
shallow level it could be a repeat of the nineteenth century industrial
revolution, when the leaders had the chance to dominate the world economically
and politically," he said. "I understand the current arms race as an
imperial arms race...You don't need to send the soldiers in if you have all the
data on a country."
From the
geopolitical to the personal, the age of digital surveillance also threatens
what it means to be human and free, Harari warned.
"The point is
when you gather enough data on people, you get to know people better than they
know yourself. Are we at the point where companies or governments can hack
millions of people, that means they know my medical history, personal
weaknesses?"
But how do you hack
a human being?
"You need a lot
of biological knowledge, enough computer power, and enough data about me. You
can hack my body, my brain, my life, you can reach a point where you know me
better than I know myself," he said.
In his view, there
is state surveillance in China, surveillance capitalism in the US, and no
serious third player in the arms race for tech dominance.
3) They know where you were
last summer!! ;-)
Clearview AI, a
relatively unknown tech company, has devised a ground-breaking facial
recognition app. You take a picture of a person, upload it and get to see
public photos of that person, along with links to where those photos appeared.
The system — whose backbone is a database of more than three billion images
that Clearview claims to have scraped from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo and
millions of other websites — goes far beyond anything ever constructed by the
United States government or Silicon Valley giants.
Federal and state
law enforcement officers said that while they had only limited knowledge of how
Clearview works and who is behind it, they had used its app to help solve
shoplifting, identity theft, credit card fraud, murder and child sexual
exploitation cases.
4) Is there a case for
central bank digital currency (CBDC)?
Money, as we know,
has three functions. It’s a unit of account, a medium of exchange and a store
of value. Money issued by central banks, which is the norm around the world,
performs all these three functions. Such money is uncontested legal tender. A
central bank digital currency (CBDC) is a different proposition, different from
these commercial cryptocurrencies because a CBDC will be able to perform like
money. It will be able to perform all the three functions of money that I
listed above. It will be like traditional money except that it will be in a
digital form. The main advantage will be that a CBDC will make payment systems
more efficient.
5) A new book walks through
business failures
While much can be
learned from business success stories, there is a lot to learn from mistakes,
failures, blunders, errors, lapses, traps, snags, bad judgment, mistiming,
malpractice, deceit, fraud, and foibles as well, Robin begins. Forewarned is
forearmed, and the lessons of hindsight and research can help avoid failures on
your part as well, and prevent the destruction or erosion of value.
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