New Week #81
A special update from NWSH, plus super-fast news and analysis from this week.
Welcome to the mid-week update from New World Same Humans, a newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.
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This week’s NWSH is brought to you by Clay
Amid all the change we’re living through, here’s one truth that is eternal: we humans are social creatures.
The challenge? Keeping track of all our relationships, both personal and professional, is hard. Many of us rely on a mix of spreadsheets, notecards, and address books. They’re difficult to manage. And important stuff — dates, moments, context — all too often falls through the cracks.
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Via Clay’s intuitive interface, you can access powerful features such as natural-language search, dictation and note taking. And receive automatic reminders on birthdays, news articles about people you know, and more.
If you want to deepen your social networks in 2022, give it a try. And let me know what you think!
🙏 An update
Work took me to Hamburg across the last few days, so this special instalment of New Week comes later than usual.
Given that this is already an atypical edition, I want to give a quick update on the state of play here at NWSH.
On the mid-week instalments — the email you’re reading now — the news is pretty straightforward. The world is opening up, and I’m busier than ever with consulting and speaking; that means I’m occasionally having to flex the send out time of New Week. But barring exceptional circumstances (such as this week’s), you’ll continue to see it Wednesday night/Thursday morning, depending on your time zone.
On the launch of monthly essays, more than a few of you have written to me to ask: what’s happening?
The reality: it turns out that my first essay, The Worlds to Come, is an epic. I published the first instalment and then got hit by a barrage of other work. Which means the second instalment is still yet to appear.
I’m now getting back on track. I’ll publish the rest of The Worlds to Come — a set of ideas that I’m so excited to share with you — and then fall into the monthly essay rhythm as promised.
And the overarching plan remains as outlined at the beginning of the year. That is, to double down on our philosophical exploration of three key questions. What is the nature of technological modernity? What is the nature of a human being, and the human collective? What new forms of human life are possible, and desirable? The monthly essays, and an associated regular podcast, are the vehicles via which we’ll undertake that exploration.
I feel bad about the slip on The Worlds to Come. But NWSH was born in the depths of the first lockdown; I suppose I was always going to hit a bit of turbulence when the world, and regular work, started to fire up again.
Mainly, my feelings remain as they’ve always been. Writing this newsletter is a huge privilege. I love the community we’re building, and I’m deeply grateful for the time you spend here. What’s more, the questions we’re asking are more urgent than ever. There’s so much work to do.
And with that, here are some quick notes on the stories that caught my eye this week.
🗓️ Also this week
🍔 Canadian fast food chain Freshii’s new virtual cashiers are actually real people who live in Nicaragua. The brand has installed technology in several outlets that connects customers via video to a remote cashier. Freshii came in for criticism this week when it was revealed that these workers are paid less than the Canadian minimum wage.
We all know the pandemic accelerated adoption of automation technologies and remote work. But we’ve talked less about the way this will fuel new forms of offshoring. Automated stores can be managed remotely. Driverless cars can be coordinated from anywhere. Blue collar workers are used to the hard truth that is offshoring; but this time, knowledge workers in the Global North won’t be immune. Expect further controversies, and a search for new regulatory frameworks.
🤖 This swarm of drones can autonomously track a human through a dense forest. Created by researcher’s at China’s Zhejiang University, the ten drones are fitted with cameras, and stay in formation by sharing data to build a single, comprehensive model of the environment they’re moving through. Check it out:
👨💻 Airbnb told staff they’re now free to work from anywhere. In an all-hands email, CEO Brian Chesky told staff they don’t ever have to come to the office, and that they’re free to move wherever they like inside their operating country. Staff can also work from abroad for 90 days per year, but need to maintain an address, for now, inside their home country for tax purposes. The announcement came amid news, reported in Apple Insider, that some US Apple staffers are disgruntled about the company-wide return to the office that began last month.
🌊 Researchers say ocean life faces a mass extinction event if we don’t reduce carbon emissions. Published in the journal Science, new research says that we’ll see a catastrophe to rival the Great Dying of 252 million years ago, when more than two-thirds of all marine life went extinct.
😅 China’s social platforms, including Weibo and Zhihu, will now display the geolocation of users. According to Weibo, the move is being made ‘to ensure a healthy online environment, and reduce the spread of fake news and invidious rumours’.
🌍 Silicon Valley VC John Doerr has given $1.1 billion to Stanford University to found a new school of climate change. The Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability will open this Autumn. Doerr’s gift is one of the largest ever given to a US university.
🚜 Russian solders stole tractors from Ukraine, so the manufacturer remotely disabled them. Millions of dollars worth of John Deere tractors were stolen and subsequently traced to the Chechen Republic. The lesson here? We’re all used to a constant stream of software upgrades; now we’re moving towards a world in which we’ll upgrade (or, as here, downgrade) objects, too.
👨🚀 SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft brought four astronauts back to Earth from the ISS. The four travelled to the ISS in the Crew Dragon six months ago. SpaceX holds a contract with NASA to ferry astronauts to and from the space station.
💔 A Japanese man says he fell in love with an AI-fuelled hologram that has now been discontinued. Akihiko Kondo, 38, says he married a hologram of the virtual pop star Hatsune Miku in 2018. The hologram ran on a device called Gatebox. Software support for Gatebox has now been withdrawn, leaving Kondo heartbroken and unable to communicate with his holo-wife. Way back in NWSH #22 I wrote about the emergence of virtual companions, and what it means for our shared future.
🌐 Network effects
Thanks, as ever, for reading.
I’ll be back next week with a full instalment of New Week. And expect the next chapter of The Worlds to Come to hit your inbox soon.
Until then, be well,
David.
P.S Huge thanks to Nikki Ritmeijer for the illustration at the top of this email. And to Monique van Dusseldorp for additional research and analysis.