In case you’ve been hiding under a rock or in a Faraday cage for the past week, Microsoft recently created and launched Tay, a chatbot modeled after the conversation of teenage girls, in an attempt to improve on their own customer service AI. Tay was designed to interact with other users on Twitter and a…
Securing Things
As the promise and scale of IoT continues to be fulfilled, interesting implications – and business opportunities – creep out of the woodwork. Any proposition to create exponential growth in the number of active IP addresses in the world will also give rise to a new potential security disaster. Since a requirement of these Things…
Creating Smart Assholes
Just because you made a machine “smart” doesn’t mean you made it intelligent. Smart homes, IoT, AI, ubicomp, robotics, ambient media, pervasive computing – all are words that in one form or another describe our attempt to embed digital intelligence into the otherwise dumb, lifeless devices around us. However, as we engineers so often do,…
Dr. Me
Let’s start by taking the following as givens: • As the growing elderly population floods the healthcare system, it will introduce a strain that our current methods of care will not be able to properly handle • The desire for patient empowerment will continue to shift greater care responsibilities away from traditional providers and towards…
Hacking the Body
Ryan O’Shea runs the business side of Grindhouse Wetware, a Pittsburgh collective of programmers, engineers, and enthusiasts working towards body augmentation using safe, affordable, and open-source technologies. Started in 2012 by a group of colleagues through the biohack.me forums, Grindhouse has rapidly grown into a key figure in the biohacking movement and gained a great…
Health’s Elusive Holy Grail
Everyone is claiming that we stand at the precipice of one of the greatest shifts the health world has ever seen. Big data is going to change everything; how we diagnose, how we treat, how we monitor, how we live, and how we die. Yet while optimism abounds among the tech community, many who have…
Everything I Know, I Learned from My Nintendo
Lessons learned from a generation raised with one finger on the reset button. If you’re like me (read: grew up in the 80s, kind of nerdy, liked technology, found friends exhausting), then odds are you had one or more of a Nintendo, Sega, Atari, ColecoVision, or PC around the house as a kid. For many…
I remember…
I remember not being connected. I remember not hearing a ping every 30 seconds, conversations without distractions and paying attention to those in my physical presence. I remember silence. I remember getting lost and being found, making plans to have friends around. I remember trivial arguments that lasted hours and learning – not through Google,…
Artificial Speculation
Introduction Scanning is a tool used in the foresight practice to uncover weak signals that herald shifts within different industries, behavioural changes, and other emerging movements that will shape the future. While this tool nets fruitful inspiration for organizations around the world, typically these exercises are limited to a few years out and within fairly…
Be Yourselves: Balancing Your Business Style
I’ve never been much of a salesman. Raised on a farm, my father instilled me with fairly humble values and a penchant for letting my work speak for itself. But my father never raised a boy intent on operating in an office environment and whether I’m pitching to a prospective client or trying to persuade…
Technology’s Shadow
How exactly does one “balance” technology? What is there to balance? More importantly, what would one even balance against? As a man of rigor, I performed an exhaustive, five minute scouring of the internet and as far as I can tell, there is no antonym for the word “technology”…and that’s just weird. If we trust…
Building a Better Man: The Corporate Redesign
I recently completed a series of articles analyzing how we structure and operate businesses. In these four articles, I analyzed corporations at various stages of life – infancy, youth, adulthood and old age – by taking the corporate personhood metaphor far more literal than it should ever be taken. In doing so, I wanted to…
Death to the Corporation
This is the fourth in a series (see the first, second and third) of articles analysing corporate personhood and the standards to which we hold corporations. Since Dartmouth v. Woodward in 1819, private corporations have been viewed as having many of the same rights as you or I, prompting one to look at the state…
Married, With Children
This is the third in a series of articles (see the first and second) analysing corporate personhood and the standards to which we hold corporations. Since Dartmouth v. Woodward in 1819, private corporations have been viewed as having many of the same rights as you or I, prompting one to look at the state of…
The Awkward Years
This is the second in a series (see the first) of articles analysing corporate personhood and the standards to which we hold corporations. Since Dartmouth v. Woodward in 1819, private corporations have been viewed as having many of the same rights as you or I, prompting one to look at the state of business around…
A New Light Enters the World
This is the first in a series of articles analysing corporate personhood and the standards to which we hold corporations. Since Dartmouth v. Woodward in 1819, private corporations have been viewed as having many of the same rights as you or I, prompting one to look at the state of business around them and ask…
The Anti-Muse
“Could you just leave me alone for ten minutes, I need to think about something. No, I don’t need help. What? How dare you call me an introvert! Don’t affix your labels to me. And don’t even think for a second that this means I’m an extrovert either. I can be inspired by whatever I…
Death and Rebirth of the Music Industry
The old-crown of the music industry are currently on their knees and may I be one of many to say, it’s about bloody well time. These relics of a bygone era have held back the industry for decades from both a creative standpoint and in terms of technological innovation. Struggling to cling onto outdated business…
Warm Embrace of Uncertainty
It’s a classic quote, however, in my opinion, we’ve been saying it wrong for years. In fact, 3 things in life are certain: death, taxes and change. What I’m about to tell you is nothing new, so unless you have 10 minutes to kill, go ahead and skip this article; you’ve heard it all before….
Too Far Ahead of the Curve
One would need an ungodly number of fingers and toes to count the times that a ground-breaking new technology has been brought to life as an inferior product and rightly, has catastrophically failed in-market. It never ceases to amaze me how many brilliant technologies are so terribly fumbled by organizations, only to be picked up…
Printing Life
Article co-written with Maryam Nabavi. While Maker culture continues to emerge as a dominant force in manufacturing and consumer interests, far bigger implications of the movement are on the horizon. What happens when we begin to apply the same DIY, hacker mentality to a field as sensitive as health? How much can we accomplish? Can 3D…
Designed to Evolve
Everyone loves a good come back, right? Well not me. I was the guy who rooted for the overlord, not the underdog. Drago should have beat Rockie. Apple should have been crushed by Microsoft in the 90s. Michael Vick should have stayed incarcerated. Zombies should just stay dead. See, I’m not that impressed by comebacks…
Leading the Leaderless
Traditional business structures are shifting (albeit at a snail’s pace… but I digress, that’s another article entirely). Organizations are becoming increasingly flat, chains of command blurred, and reporting, collaboration and operational structures more dynamic and ad-hoc. As organizations strive to develop more open and creative working environments, the traditional shackles of hierarchical management are being…
Paging Doctor R2
Co-Authored by Paul Hartley It is undeniable that technology-enabled devices have had a great impact upon our ability to diagnose, treat and care for the sick and infirm. However, we must be cautious to not get caught up in the flashing lights, bells, whistles and web-integrated gadgetry of it all. Many people have a dangerous penchant…