Five Interesting Things: Today’s Scan Hits
Here are five indicators, observations or articles that caught the eye of FA futurists today.
- Highlighting different ways to look at information and organization, San Francisco artist Chris Cobb created an installation at a book store in which he cataloged 20,000 books by color. (Click the link, it is a wonder to behold.)
- Ford is applying big data technologies to feed information back to drivers of its Energi plug-in hybrid vehicles, allowing supervisors to monitor performance of fleet vehicles, mine external data and social media for consumer information, manage dealership vehicle inventory in sophisticated ways, and understand and manage its supply chain.
- Harvard physicist and computer scientist Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross theorizes that artificial intelligence emerges from the effort to surpass constraints and maximize future freedom of action. One implication of this theory of AI is that human efforts to “box” or control artificial intelligences would wind up accelerating AI capabilities and development.
- As China and Russia try to increase their global influence, Joseph Nye writes that they are having trouble with “soft power.”
- Happy birthday, Interwebs! Today is the 20th anniversary of CERN releasing the world wide web source code as royalty-free and open software.