We are all going to be replaced by robots, right? We are at last on the cusp of the leisure society or, by another analysis, about to enter a new era of serfdom where we are all beholden to our Silicon Valley/Chinese/robot overlords. Or are we? A very similar narrative played out in the 1970s … Continue reading Generating untold demand
Category: innovation
My esteemed former colleague Euan Semple published an interesting little video on YouTube yesterday. I think I've seen the "Ambulance Drone" clip before, but through my new-found PRTech lenses, I smelt something of a rat, and called it out. "Spoilsport" said Euan, quite rightly. https://youtu.be/y-rEI4bezWc For the record, Ambulance Drone was a design concept from a … Continue reading Virtually reality
There's an awful lot of technological Utopian bullshit spoken at the moment about how we are at the cusp of a massive revolution in the hands of technology. On the one hand I think there's a strong argument that this has always been the case, at least since the first industrial revolution. There's a chronocentricity that … Continue reading The Money Siphon
I remember a news story from probably about 20 years ago where a full scale nuclear panic was instigated in the back garden of a suburban house in the South East of England when small capsules marked as nuclear waste had been discovered when flowerbeds had been turned over. To cut a long story short, … Continue reading Data as nuclear waste
As they get older (and they are still only 5 and 6) I increasingly find I'm learning from my kids, both in what they tell me and also in what I can observe. Take, for example, how they play with Lego (or "Legos" if you are American - although why, if you're American you can't … Continue reading Three things innovators can learn from Lego
Had a wonderfully mind-stretching time this morning chairing a session for the Winmark L&D network with Nick Shackleton-Jones leading a discussion about Gamification. The session spurred a number of thoughts for me - here are a few of the related links: My own blogging 0n the subject: https://mmitii.mattballantine.com/2012/02/13/motivating-through-games/ (includes photo of the marvellous Perspex box) https://mmitii.mattballantine.com/2012/02/14/skinner-the-art-of-motivation/ … Continue reading Gamification – links
My earliest experiences of computers were as them being tools of creativity, and that's framed my use of them ever since. The BBC Micro didn't really do much unless you gave it fairly comprehensive instructions. Sure, they could be used to play pre-bought games, but in the very early days the thing came with a … Continue reading The tools of mass creation
360 degree photography is a thing these days. Increasingly you'll see photos on places like Facebook that enable you to pan and zoom around to explore. You can then combine these spherical photos to create clickable "walkthroughs". It's even then possible to view these walkthroughs in a 3D Virtual Reality headset like Google Cardboard or … Continue reading Creating immersive walkthroughs
It's a question I'm being asked a fair bit at the moment and for the legal-minded folk I'm working with a great deal at the moment, this is how I respond... Machine Learning is really interesting. It's being applied to all sorts of problems where traditional models of programming have fallen short. It's mostly based … Continue reading Where can I use machine learning?
There's a lot of hype in the world at the moment about how algorithms are taking over the world. "Algorithms" is a posh word for equations. There's a lot of hype in the world at the moment about how machine learning is taking over the world. "Machine learning" is one of those things that is … Continue reading Algorithms my arse
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