Categories: Articles

Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention #331

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 (BitCurrent, Year One Labs, GigaOM, Human 2.0, Solve For Interesting, the author of Complete Web Monitoring, Managing Bandwidth: Deploying QOS in Enterprise Networks and Lean Analytics), 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:

Elon Musk’s Wild Ride – Bloomberg. “Simulation-enthusiast, iconoclast, saviour of the species — there are plenty of ways people describe Elon Musk. It’s almost plausible to see him as a stranded Martian time-traveler, building the things he needs to return home, skirting the risk of paradox by pushing the envelope without tearing through it, warning us against AI. But is all well in House Musk? This Bloomberg piece takes a more critical look at what he’s built.” (Alistair for Hugh).
Preparing For The Future Of Artificial Intelligence – Executive Office of the President National Science and Technology Council. “A few months ago, when I was in DC, I met some members of Obama’s tech team. Their thinking on machine learning and AI was encouraging, pragmatic, and a bit scary. Recently, the administration released a document entitled, Preparing for the Future of AI. If you think, as Musk does, that AI will kill us all — or just, as I do, that it’ll transform every aspect of human creativity and economics — you should probably have a look.” (Alistair for Mitch).
How Half Of America Lost Its F**king Mind – Cracked. “The best explanation of Trump I’ve seen, and one we should all read.” (Hugh for Alistair).
The Weird Economics of Ikea – FiveThirtyEight. “What isn’t Ikea becomes Ikea, and what is Ikea becomes everything.” (Hugh for Mitch).
It Looked Great. It Was Unwatchable. – Slate. “What happens when you create something with a new technology that is so jarring and pushing of the limits that humans, literally, can’t handle it… yet? If you were the movie director, would you have kept at it or killed it?” (Mitch for Alistair).
Telling Is Listening: Ursula K. Le Guin on the Magic of Real Human Conversation – Brain Pickings. “There is a magic in how us humans communicate and connect. It’s easy to forget that in a world of text messages and snapping. Let’s not. People often want to know why I don’t push out more content in social media. It’s crazy to me. I like my content to be worthy of your ears and your discourse. I’m an old, old man, I guess.” (Mitch for Alistair).

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

Mitch Joel

Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.