The Context

The Context is an ongoing weekly Patreon series that gives a deeper understanding of the implications of current events, and technologies shaping the world.

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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Going to Space

Aren’t we spoiled that just 50 years after the Moon landing many of us pretend that space travel should be ubiquitous? The history of innovation is not linear. After an idea becomes applicable, and before it spreads reliably, and affordably to a large number of people, there can pass a lot of time. It took

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Dangerous Demagoguery

Our decreasing ability to interpret the world makes us insecure, anguished, and vulnerable. If we meet somebody who says “Don’t worry. Yes, there are a lot of things that you don’t know. The world is dangerous, but I have the answers. It doesn’t matter how complex the world appears. I have simple answers to the problems that you

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Tesla

Cars on the Tesla Network will generate $20K per year for ten years according to Elon Musk. Once Full Self Driving is available, it won’t make sense selling them to you. Also, what if the real Tesla products are not cars, or systems for solar energy generation and storage, but the Gigafactories themselves? Welcome to

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The Context

I’m launching a new video series, entitled The Context, to give a deeper understanding of the implications of current events, and technologies shaping the world. The first episode is about Libra. Welcome to The Context this week. We are going to look at what is the context for Libra, the digital payment system announced by

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