Is there one link, story, picture or thought that you saw online this week that you think somebody you know must see?

My friends: Alistair Croll (Solve for Interesting, Tilt the Windmill, HBS; chair of Strata, Startupfest, Pandemonio, and ResolveTO; Author of Lean Analytics and some other books), Hugh McGuire (PressBooks, LibriVox, iambik and co-author of Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto) and I decided that every week the three of us are going to share one link for one another (for a total of six links) that each individual feels the other person “must see”.

Check out these six links that we’re recommending to one another: 

• RFD: the alien abduction prophecy protocol – lcamtuf’s blog. “Okay, let’s say you’re abducted by time-traveling aliens. They tell you about three future calamities — and then let you go. What should you do? Bear with me here: If you tell the world you’ve been unprovably abducted by aliens, they ignore you. So you have to prove you’re believable by predicting the first calamity in a very public way that can’t be faked. Have I gone nuts? Well, maybe. But this though experiment explains some fundamental concepts in computer security. Plus, it’s got some fairly creative hacks that readers have suggested.” (Alistair for Hugh).
• Ten Year Futures – Benedict Evans. “Lately, a lot of my talks have been about what the future holds. I’m a big skeptic of futurism because we simply can’t know how society will respond to a technology, and it’s the societal response — not the technological advancement — that really shapes the future. But if you’re going to try and guess, you could do worse than this piece by Benedict Evans. After all, he writes that Mobile Is Eating The World, and while he sees VR and autonomous vehicles as cool, in this piece he argues that the next decade’s real transformations are TV and shopping, industries where tech changes haven’t really come home to roost… yet. Sometimes we look too far to the future.” (Alistair for Mitch).
• Singapore ‘vending machine’ dispenses Ferraris, Lamborghinis – Reuters. “Late capitalism strikes again.” (Hugh for Alistair).
• When did we start shopping at stores? – J Stor. “How did we ship before Amazon? Oh yeah, stores. But have we always shopped at stores? (Answer: no).” (Hugh for Mitch).
• Simple math is why Elon Musk’s companies keep doing what others don’t even consider possible – Quartz. “One of the standout presentations at the TED conference this year was the interview with Elon Musk. It’s almost impossible to imagine that this one person is paving the way for electric cars, autonomous cars, commercial space flight, making humans a multi-planetary species, attempting to reinvent traffic, hi-speed tubes to transport people, solar energy, and – probably – a bunch of other stuff that my brain is currently forgetting. He’s doing this all. At once. Right now. Maybe it is all simple math. Maybe we all need more motivation? Oh, did I mention that we’re almost the exact same age? That stresses me out.” (Mitch for Alistair).
• An Algorithm Summarizes Lengthy Text Surprisingly Well – MIT Technology Review. “The good news is that when the robots and artificial intelligence really takes hold, we will all have much more time for activities of leisure, spending time with our family and focusing on work that really stimulates us. I, for one, was looking forward to that moment in time, so that I could read. I read a lot now. I want to read a lot more. Oh, what? Wait… you’re saying that reading will also be taken over to artificial intelligence?….” (Mitch for Hugh).

Feel free to share these links and add your picks on Twitter, Facebook, in the comments below or wherever you play.