New Week Same Humans #14
Your next office is inside the metaverse. A new AI wants to fake your face. Plus more news and analysis from this week.
Welcome to the Wednesday update from New World Same Humans, a newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.
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💡 This week’s Sunday instalment looked at three implications of longer lives. Go here to read The Megatrend that Changes Everything.💡
This week, new AI tools want to write you poetry and remake your face. But does it bode well for our shared future?
Meanwhile, social tokens are the new crypto-hype. And a host of startups are building the next evolution of the office: inside the metaverse.
Also featuring the device that lets you think instructions at your laptop. And how Jay-Z is betting big on the legalisation of cannabis.
🦄 I can’t believe my AIs
Google have created a new AI app that writes verse inspired by iconic poets. Visit Verse by Verse and you can select your literary legend, feed an opening line, and let the AI do its thing.
Here’s what an AI Walt Whitman had to say about this newsletter: New World Same Humans // Too vast a destiny beyond us! // Strange is our song through the open land // Singing the night, with its wondrous voice.
Works for me.
Meanwhile, there’s been much talk this week of our old friends generative adversarial networks (GAN), and how they can create highly realistic fake versions of almost anything, from cars to song lyrics. A new site, This X Does Not Exist, gives an overview.
And this new tool will take a picture of your face and apply GAN magic to generate new faces that look kind of like you. The company says this can help you protect your privacy in a world of facial recognition.
⚡ NWSH Take: Just five years ago GAN fake faces were terrible; today they’re photo-realistic. And now, GANs and other AI tools are being democratised. It’s all pushing us fast in the direction of a world where we cannot know whether what we see online is real. // Fake job resumes. Fake brands. Fake faces on social media profiles? On dating profiles? Get ready. // In a world of AI trickery, authenticity will be more prized than ever. Start thinking now about new messages, digital channels, and physical incarnations that make you real in a world of fake.
🤑 Social tokens are the next crypto revolution
You already know what this graph means:
Bitcoin reached a three year high of over $19,000 on Tuesday, putting it up 160% in 2020.
Twitter’s army of fevered crypto-maniacs is screaming I told you so. But meanwhile, a new kind of cryptocurrency has been making waves across the last few weeks.
Social tokens are crypto tokens created by individuals or communities, and used as a currency within the group. One of the most successful examples, $WHALE, was created by an individual, and is used by the community around him to access online events, bet in group poker games, and buy merch.
$WHALE has broken a market cap of $30 million, and many crypto watchers reckon social tokens are the next big thing.
Time for NWSH to mint a $HUMANS token?
🚀 Launching something new
I’ve just launched a new strategy and futures consultancy, called SFRU.
We’re on a mission to understand today and tomorrow. And to work with clients to help them respond to, and innovate for, a changing world.
Soon, we’ll publish our first report: Five Trends for the 2020s. You can learn more about us and subscribe here:
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👨💻 Your next office is in the metaverse
Bill Gates told the New York Times DealBook Conference this week that he estimates ‘over 50% of business travel and over 30% of days in the office' are gone for good.
The big downside? Organisations lose the creative friction that occurs when random team members bump into each other. ‘More could be done on the software side to allow for serendipitous run-ins after meetings,’ he says.
A host of new startups agree; they’re racing to create new virtual environments in which knowledge workers can gather and be productive. Gather bills itself ‘a virtual space for people to live and interact more effectively’. And check out this video demo of Branch, which aims to be a virtual HQ for remote teams; the company has raised $1.5 million so far.
⚡ NWSH Take: Even the most conservative industries are being infiltrated by online culture. Slack brought social media dynamics – emoji! gifs! – to work messaging. Now Gather, Branch and others are borrowing from multiplayer video games to create a new workplace metaverse. // Workers will increasingly bring expectations cultivated online into their working lives. How can you serve those expectations, either for your own teams or for others? Think the personalisation delivered by Spotify, or the convenience of an Uber.
🗓️ Also this week
🎤 Virtual concert platform Wave has signed a deal with Chinese giant Tencent. It opens up the massive Chinese market to Wave’s innovative online events.
🤔 This device lets the user communicate with a laptop via thought alone. The AlterEgo was created by researchers at MIT Media Lab, and was just featured in TIME magazine’s Best Inventions of 2020.
🐔 KFC is rolling out autonomous food trucks in China. All the chicken, no human interaction.
👨🏻🔧 This new app from Google will pay users for carrying out simple tasks. The Task Mate app is currently live only in India; users can earn via tasks such as shooting a short video of a specific location.
💰 Roblox has sold $1.2 billion worth of virtual currency to users this year. Children under 13 make up 54% of users; the company is now eyeing an $8 billion IPO.
🌿 Jay-Z will become the Chief Visionary Officer of a blockbuster new cannabis company. A $400 million deal will create the biggest cannabis business in California; investors say they’re betting on ‘inevitable end of cannabis prohibition in the US’.
🤯 Thisoptical illusion set Twitter alight. Seriously, that guy will reach the ground one day.
🤷 British people have decided they like the EU now. New figures show the favourability rating of the EU among Brits has reached a 15-year high. Britain left the EU on 31 January.
🌍 Humans of Earth
Key metrics to help you keep track of Project Human.
🙋♀️ Global population: 7,827,884,841 and counting
🌊 Earths currently needed: 1.7725420926
🗓️ 2020 progress bar: 91% complete
📖 On this day: 25 November 1952 saw the debut of Agatha Christie’s play The Mousetrap at the Ambassadors Theatre in London. It became the longest continuously-running play in history, having stopped on 16 March 2020 due to the pandemic.
Your share in this community
Thanks for reading this week.
It looks as though we’ll see a mad dash for crypto-profits in the weeks ahead. Yet another case of new world, same humans.
In the meantime, though, we at NWSH are building something more valuable than any coin (well, almost): social currency!
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I’ll be back on Sunday. 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.