Hi / Kia ora,

Welcome to another Memia newsletter, a regular weekly scan across the future as it unfolds - as viewed from my corner of the world, Aotearoa New Zealand.

The most clicked link in the last issue (~15% of openers) was video of the Liebherr cranes lifting cranes lifting cranes. Two words: Boys. Toys.🤐

Having been liberated from the election cacophony here in AoNZ a week and a half ago, it’s now just 7 days until our friends across the Pacific (and, being frank, the whole world) are *hopefully* liberated as well. To everyone reading this in the US, we’re hanging out with you over here…🙏

Flu.🦠Shot.🤒

Perhaps the most unforeseen outcome of AoNZ’s lockdowns, border closures, stricter hygiene and social distancing during 2020 is that the number of Kiwis with the flu fell by 99.8 per cent compared with the previous year!

The *ubiquitous* Professor Michael Baker said:

“What the Covid-19 response has done has largely eliminated those excess winter deaths …mortality as a whole is down around 5 percent, so that means an extra 1500 people will survive this year who wouldn't have.”

(Graphic credit: TVNZ)

Meanwhile Yale Science Professor Nicholas Christakis previews some of the arguments in his forthcoming book Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live with this thought experiment: what if…Covid-19 had been deadlier? (Click for the whole thread, compelling).

Nicholas A. Christakis @NAChristakis

Recently, I’ve come to think we are quite LUCKY, in fact, with COVID-19 – because, although it’s quite transmissible, it could indeed have been much deadlier. There's no reason it couldn’t have been more... Medieval. Imagine if COVID-19 had been deadlier. Let's talk about it. 1/

October 25th 2020

444 Retweets1,707 Likes

Climate action priorities🌀

The AoNZ Sustainable Business Council and Climate Leaders' Coalition released a Briefing to Incoming Government on Climate Action Priorities, representing the views of over 150 businesses contributing towards more than a third of New Zealand’s GDP:

I’ll let the summary of recommendations speak for themselves:

ScoMo’s lack of tech ambition💤

Across the ditch, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison made a speech centred on his government’s “digital policies”: in short, accelerating adoption of imported tech products by SMEs rather than creation and export of new technologies. The Aussie tech sector was quick to comment: “uninspiring”, “lacking ambition” and, more fundamentally, inconsistent with the Australian government’s emphasis on supply chain security and sovereignty in response to the pandemic:

Memia @memialabs

Uninspiring: ScoMo's tech adoption fail - InnovationAus Uninspiring: ScoMo’s tech adoption fail - InnovationAusLocal tech leaders have railed against Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s emphasis on tech adoption rather than creation, branding it “uninspiring”, lacking in ambition and “the opposite of what we should be aiming to achieve”.In a speech last week, Mr Morrison centred his government’s digital policies…buff.ly

October 27th 2020

1 Like

…But at least Australia has a tech policy. The New Zealand Labour party’s manifesto - on which they just won an electoral landslide - contains absolutely NOTHING on tech or digital except for “30,000 digital training vouchers” and pursuing “Digital Economic Partnership Agreement” trade deals.

Which would we prefer: a lack of ambition or a total policy vacuum…?

Hong Kong, Taiwan and the Quad⚔️

With all of our media attention fixated on the US election soap opera, rather more significant changes are happening closer to AoNZ’s region:

• ⏳🇭🇰 Hong Kong as a Global Hinge by David Skilling -

“Hong Kong is a good indicator of the strength and nature of globalisation.  The regime change underway in the global system runs directly through Hong Kong.”

• And then: after Hong Kong: China sets sights on solving 'the Taiwan problem'😨.

  • Earlier this year entrepreneur-turned-educator Steve Blank laid out the strategic landscape in The Chip Wars of the 21st Century⚔️ (excellent analysis):

“The dispute over Huawei’s access to [Taiwanese] TSMC has highlighted how vulnerable American industry is to the loss of its sole supply of advanced chips. If the matter cannot be solved by negotiation, China may perceive the restrictions as economic warfare and rapidly escalate, potentially threatening Taiwan. It is not at all clear that Washington has thought through the consequences of its actions here, nor that the current administration has considered chip supply as part of a wider supply chain security and national industrial policy.”

Expect some rapid chess moves to play out in the region after the US presidential election result is clear.

• Meanwhile, directly related, Australia, Japan and India have been practicing their “Quad exercises” with the US:

Memia @memialabs

Eyeing China, Australia joins ‘Quad’ drill with US, Japan, India Eyeing China, Australia joins ‘Quad’ drill with US, Japan, IndiaMilitary exercises set to take place in Bay of Bengal and Arabian Sea are likely to upset China.buff.ly

October 21st 2020

[Weak] signals

The steady stream of signals received from the unfolding future…

• The evolving future of the Platform Economy by Simone Cicero: how tech trends and a new landscape of risk will reshape the network economy of the next decade.

More CDBCs

• Central Bank of Bahamas launches landmark ‘Sand Dollar’ digital currency

• Nearly 2 million people signed up for China’s Digital Yuan ‘lottery’ …but early users were not so impressed. Central planners beware?

About-facial recognition

• When US uniformed police taped over their badges in Portland, activists started using their own facial recognition tools to identify individual officers.

What can’t you do with AI?

• Two amazing videos of what you can do with GPT-3 in Google Sheets🤯:

Paul Katsen @pavtalk

=GPT3()... the spreadsheet function to rule them all. Impressed with how well it pattern matches from a few examples. The same function looked up state populations, peoples' twitter usernames and employers, and did some math.

July 21st 2020

1,872 Retweets9,466 Likes

• (…or alternatively…🤣)

Keaton Patti @KeatonPatti

I forced a bot to read over 1,000 hours of QAnon theories and then asked it to write QAnon theories of its own. Here they are.

October 23rd 2020

4,315 Retweets15,080 Likes

AR

• Never get lost indoors with this helpful AR guidance bot:

VR-esolution

• Coming to a VR headset near you soon: researchers borrow solar panel tech to create new ultrahigh-res OLED display:

Quantum supremacy supremacy?

• IBM announce a roadmap towards a 1,000-qubit device by the end of 2023.

Building ecotech

• A new type of cooling paint is able to reflect 95.5% of sunlight and reduce surface temperatures by 1.7C compared to the ambient air conditions, promising significant reductions in CO2 emissions from buildings.

• Simple natural light tubes to bring light indoors by day and night:

Mashable @mashable

These tubes bring natural light indoors and help reduce energy costs

October 21st 2020

79 Retweets289 Likes

Mind expanding

So much being covered that this week’s newsletter Mind Expanding links couldn’t fit into the weekly email - but they’re amazing reading covering Data Science, Humanity as a *Complex System* The Ministry Of The Future and Imagining the End of Capitalism (Twice)… read them online here instead.

Rollcall

Going on around AoNZ this week:

• Local regenerative agriculture experts Melissa Baer and Jemma Penelope published a mammoth post Transparency, Sustainability and Certification: The Future of our Food Production and Distribution Systems - a huge amount of deep thinking in here and a framework that’s fundamentally relevant for AoNZ’s food-exports based economy:

  

• Congratulations to all the winners of the HealthTech Supernode Challenge competition announced last week.

• University of Canterbury has partnered with EdX to launch UcX - a platform offering free global MOOCs. Good to see an AoNZ University exploring with new business models as global tertiary sector consolidation comes barreling down the tracks…

Hidden gems

Finally, a couple of nuggets from around the internet this week:

• Before it ends (see Mind Expanding above), capitalism thrives:

Vinay Gupta @leashless

The genius of capitalism

October 23rd 2020

24 Retweets171 Likes

• Finally, under the ice, a peaceful, ethereal, bat-sea-angel. Who knew these creatures existed?

  Massimo @Rainmaker1973

  Photographer Alexander Semenov captured this under-the-ice footage at the White Sea in March 2018: life is there, undisturbed, as confirmed by jellyfish and by this hovering sea angel [full video: buff.ly/3b7KFr3]

  October 26th 2020

  463 Retweets1,762 Likes

🙏🙏🙏 Thanks as always to everyone who takes time every week to get in touch with links and feedback, it’s always great to hear from you.

Special request: if you enjoyed reading this week’s newsletter, please take a moment to share with someone in your network who might enjoy it too. Thank you!

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More next week…

Cheers / Ngā mihi

Ben