Hi all! Weeks are passing by like days… The experience of organizing a conference like
ThingsCon is always a similar process. You run always into a lot more work in the end. You tend to forget to amount of work as soon as the event is over and you got all the energy out of it. This rush started this year a bit earlier as we have that special Summer Edition planned as an event on 10 June.
So check it out and join us. Read this newsletter with the latest news and special deals.
What else happened last week?
I went to a symposium (part of it) about usage-driven personal mobility services at TU Delft. Always insightful to see some of the research work done. It triggered some questions on the premisses of MaaS (Mobility as a Service) apps, which are designed with the idea that the problem to solve of planning of door to door routes is mostly about the uniformity of the app, having one app for all, with one ticket etc. The use of the current apps is very low as it is not solving real problems yet… Interesting insights are however that there is a chance that the last mile electric vehicles are replacing the wrong modes of transportation; walking and biking instead of car use.
I also had a session with the CMD Advisory board of Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. Which was a nice and open discussion on learning goals and more. Keep your eye on their Golden Dots party this year which celebrates 20 years of CMD.
A
podcast tip; Kevin Roose is a NYT journalist that has written a good book -
Futureproof- on our relation to AI developments. I read it before, it is quite compact. In the podcast he had a nice conversation with Scott Galloway discussing his framing: we need technology that makes us more human. I really feel for his analysis that replacing human activities with AI and robotics will happen fast then we think as the tipping point is not one way the robots become humanlike, but we also grow into habits to adapt to machine learning behavior closing the gap. We should focus on what makes us different, and build valuable relations in that with tech.
What if the internet is generated 99% by AI tools? How are we going to find the human content?
Events this week
And next Monday the
WWDC will inspire speculations for the next features and devices of Apple. Will RealityOS be introduced?
And looking for updates on the Dutch media and metaverse, check next Tuesday’s
Cross Media Cafe (Dutch).
And now for the news of last week
The weekly dose of robotics, autonomous systems, and critical tech reflections.