Future Today #099 - McKinsey. Natural Capital. Metaverse. Imagination

Welcome to Future Today! A newsletter for those curious about social innovation, disruptive technologies and futures studies. In it I share weekly articles, reports and interesting links, and recommendations of books, movies, series, events and courses.

🤖 Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey? So, I would like to propose another metaphor for the risks of artificial intelligence. I suggest that we think about A.I. as a management-consulting firm, along the lines of McKinsey & Company. Firms like McKinsey are hired for a wide variety of reasons, and A.I. systems are used for many reasons, too. But the similarities between McKinsey—a consulting firm that works with ninety per cent of the Fortune 100—and A.I. are also clear.

🌱 None of the world’s top industries would be profitable if they paid for the natural capital they use. The distance between today’s industrial systems and truly sustainable industrial systems — systems that do not spend down stored natural capital but instead integrate into current energy and material flows — is not one of degree, but one of kind. What’s needed is not just better accounting but a new global industrial system, a new way of providing for human wellbeing, and fast. That means a revolution.

⚡️ Measuring trends in Artificial Intelligence. The AI Index is an independent initiative at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), led by the AI Index Steering Committee, an interdisciplinary group of experts from across academia and industry. The annual report tracks, collates, distills, and visualizes data relating to artificial intelligence, enabling decision-makers to take meaningful action to advance AI responsibly and ethically with humans in mind.

👓 The Metaverse Isn't Dead. It seems like some unspoken rule of the Internet: every few years, the “[X] is Dead” formula must be activated. This go-around it’s the metaverse in the crosshairs. I probably shouldn’t take the bait, but I can’t help myself. No, the metaverse isn’t dead.

🧠 The human brain is a machine that feeds on stories. British writer Will Storr analyzes the role of storytelling in human history, from Greek tragedies to serials, literature, cinema, advertising and even political storytelling.

Recommended book: La realidad no existe (2023) - Jaime Rodríguez de Santiago // Recommended tv series: Extrapolations (2023 - )

💭 We Need Imagination Now More Than Ever. Pandemics, wars, and other social crises often create new attitudes, needs, and behaviors, which we need to anticipate. Imagination — the capacity to create, evolve and exploit mental models of things or situations that don’t yet exist — is the crucial factor in seizing and creating new opportunities, and finding new paths to growth.While imagination may seem like a frivolous luxury in a crisis, it is actually a necessity for building future success.

📊 10 Graphs That Sum Up the State of AI in 2023. The Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) has assembled a year’s worth of AI data providing a comprehensive picture of today’s AI world, as it has done annually for six years. And I do mean comprehensive—this year’s report came in at 302 pages. That’s a nearly 60 percent jump from the 2022 report, thanks in large part to the 2022 boom in generative AI demanding attention and an increasing effort to gather data on AI and ethics.

🐙 Octopus time. We humans are forward-facing, gravity-bound plodders. Can the liquid motion of the octopus radicalise our ideas about time? The octopus may navigate its ocean home with ease, but it can seem like a creature from another planet. It populates our popular visions of cosmic beings and extraterrestrial life, with its eight arms, three hearts, and a malleable body without bones. 

🔬 How Scientists Are Using AI to Talk to Animals. In the 1970s a young gorilla known as Koko drew worldwide attention with her ability to use human sign language. But skeptics maintain that Koko and other animals that “learned” to speak (including chimpanzees and dolphins) could not truly understand what they were “saying”—and that trying to make other species use human language, in which symbols represent things that may not be physically present, is futile.

🦾 Superhuman: What can AI do in 30 minutes? The thing that we have to come to grips with in a world of ubiquitous, powerful AI tools is how much it can do for us. The multiplier on human effort is unprecedented, and potentially disruptive. But this fact can often feel abstract. So I decided to run an experiment.

Asking ChatGPT

🧔🏻 Do you believe that reality exists?

🤖 As a language model, I do not have a personal belief as I am an artificial entity with no belief capability. However, I can provide insight into the philosophy of reality.

The question of whether reality exists is a topic of philosophical debate that has occupied philosophers for centuries. Some philosophers argue that objective reality exists independently of human perception, while others suggest that reality is a subjective construct of the human mind.

From a scientific perspective, most scientists accept that objective reality exists independent of human perception. Physics, for example, studies the properties and laws of nature that apply anywhere and at any time, regardless of whether anyone observes them or not.

In conclusion, although there are different perspectives on the existence of reality, most people accept that there is an objective reality that exists independently of human perception.

🧔🏻 Along those same lines, do you think the theory that we live in a simulation is possible?

🤖 As a language model, I have no personal opinion since I am an artificial entity with no capacity for opinion. But I can provide information on the possibility that we live in a simulation.

The idea that we live in a simulation, also known as simulation theory, suggests that our reality is actually a computer simulation created by an advanced civilization. This theory has been explored by philosophers and scientists, and although it is still a matter of debate, it has gained some attention in recent years.

From a scientific perspective, some experts have argued that the technology needed to create such an advanced simulation does not yet exist. However, they have also suggested that the necessary technology could be developed in the future.

In addition, the idea that we live in a simulation has been explored in popular culture, including movies such as "The Matrix" and "Inception," which has led to increased interest in the theory.

In conclusion, although the theory that we live in a simulation is a matter of debate, some experts have suggested that it is theoretically possible, although its validity has yet to be proven.

The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible — Arthur C. Clarke

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