Hello from a very rainy Singapore.
DISPATCHES FROM THE FRONTIER
What's been going on at snowbird
It's been an exceptionally satisfactory week wrapping up a very interesting strategy project. It's great to work with a leader who is hyper-aware of their predicament, open-minded about new possibilities that the strategy may build towards and has the conviction to champion it internally. The other reason is I wanted to experiment with bringing an ensemble approach to strategy - bringing in trusted partners from around the world to feed into the larger picture. And the bet paid off. Foundations laid by Early Studies in LON with their pioneering approach to research, coupled with cultural anthropology from freshly minted Dyad(so edgy they don't even have a site yet), based in SYD, brought to life with smart design and product thinking from Company Policy in NYC - baked into a set of interconnected strategic choices in SIN🤗. I'm really proud of how it all came together!
ART-AS-A-HABIT
A few months ago I decided to pursue art-as-a-habit-and-not-just-a-hobby. I post what I made here.
Another reason I'm so happy this week. Look how well this turned out! It was with a lot of instruction from a watercolor champion, but still!
THE FINDS
Before the public consciousness settled for disembodied chatbots as the avatar for AI, the longest standing representation of what intelligent, self-aware, computing of the future could be was a physical, extremely humanoid, robot. This week's finds check-in with where this vision is today. Robots are more common than they were a decade ago. But they're nowhere near as common as microwaves and TVs. Which is why I think we're still in the kindergarten stage of this. Because we're still wrestling with how they fit into our lived reality. The uncanny valley is still very much a thing. But unlike some other technologies, there is enough critical mass than we will definitely be graduating into Robot primary school in the next half-decade. Here are the finds:
- POST HUMAN I'm a big fan of Emily Chang. I've followed her work for over a decade and she brings the sharpest lens on tech and business. In this video series she meets some of the world’s most advanced, and most intelligent, robots. They use the term "synthetic species" which I find fascinating.
- JETSONS TIME The IEEE has a really fun site that asks us not dwell on the sci-fi tropes and ask "the reality is robots still need a lot of improvement. Before they can rise up, robots need to stop falling down."
- ROBOTUSKERS Indian temple uses lifelike robotic elephant in rituals to avoid cruelty to live animals. We don't talk about Religion x Tech enough (I'd linked to Rest Of World's excellent coverage a few editions ago)
- ROBODENSE "Robot density" is a measure that serves as a barometer to track the degree of automation adoption in the manufacturing industry. South Korea is the leader of the pack. Singapore is second. Cleaning robots are so common here! Sidebar story: my team and I were brainstorming at a cafe when a cleaning robot decided to relentlessly make us lose our focus by humming "running down the mountain". Back to density - China has now overtaken Japan and Germany to be #3. The geopolitics of tech is only going to get more dramatic.
- CLASSIC FUMBLES Amazon's robotic arm Sparrow is great at "top-picking" - picking up an item at the top of a storage container. It can even manipulate over 20o MILLION items of varying sizes and weights. But it struggles at "targeted picking" - having to search through a container to pluck out an item hidden by other stuff. It's a common task that any able human employee could do. For robots to do the same, however, will require nothing short of a breakthrough in the field.