David Orban

Spectrum of Abilities

We have many skills, many senses, many ways of coping with the world, absorbing the information, changing it, structuring it, and then acting on it. As our civilization evolves, the technologies that we invent and deploy complement our biological skills, with nonhuman or even superhuman abilities. There is an interesting interpretation of our fairly recent […]

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Thinking with X

We are convinced, through the collective narrative leveraging our scientific understanding, that we think with our brains. While that is true, there is much more: some of us think with our stomach, an sculptor will think with her hands, a ballet dancer with her entire body. Our proprioception extends feedback loops outside of the body,

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Human Networks

With modern technology platforms, the networks of connections that we can leverage go way beyond the limits of our biological and social evolution, the original circle of contacts in a village. The Dunbar Number of 150 meaningful connections may increase, augmented by the power of social networks and both synchronous and asynchronous channels of communication.

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Jolting Technologies

There is a paradigm shift moving from accelerating technological change to jolting technological change. What is a jolt? The jolt is the measure of the rate of change of acceleration. Imagine a rocket. The engines are at full power, and the rocket brings on board both its propellant and its oxidant. As they chemically combine

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Geoengineering

We’ve been doing geoengineering, transforming our environment, since the beginning of human civilization. In the past many effects appeared only local, or at most continental, while today they are global. The flow of real time information enhances our ability to assess the impact of the changes in the environment. The responsibility is ours to take

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Programmable infrastructure

As we develop smart infrastructures for our societies, it will be necessary and natural to make them programmable. The programmability of agile and upgradeable platforms leads to resilient ecosystems of applications. The APIs, application programmer interfaces, must be developed with security in mind, so that this new generation of infrastructure can’t be exploited by malicious

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Young Disruption

What is the right age to introduce children to the disruptions hitting our society? Shouldn’t we, rather than talking to executives or people who are founding startups actually target high schoolers or even earlier, children in elementary school? They would then understand the power of exponential technologies and what is happening in society sooner rather

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Memetic Ambitions

Memetics is the study of evolution of culture and ideas, in all their expressions. Science, technology, philosophy, all evolve, and our tools for creating, evaluating, agreeing on and implementing ideas with them. We have huge challenges ahead of us, and the best tools are science and reason to face, solve, and overcome them. It is

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Telepresence

What do you do when you have to speak at two conferences in distant cities at the same time? If you are me, you hire a mime, and stick an iPad on his head, to be your remote body. Telepresence helps in many ways, amplifying our interactions through space and time. From robotic surgeries, to

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Digital Governance

In the 21st century, all regulations and all governance should either be or aim to be digital, as soon as possible. What does that mean? What are the implications? What is the context of regulations and governance being digital? We went through digital transformations many times. It started with the first computers in the fifties

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