On this bank holiday morning, I have a few interesting articles to send your way.
First up a key investment theme: self driving cars.
This excellent article on the New Energy Finance blog puts electric vehicles in the context a radically digitising society…
In short: “our transport system is digitizing, just as the phone system digitized, just as the energy system is digitizing, and this will yield dramatic benefits in terms of asset utilization (in other words cost), flexibility, service levels and cleanliness. And it simply makes no sense to have an inherently analogue power unit – vibrating, volatile-liquid-consuming, hot-polluting-exhaust-producing – at the heart of a fully digital, sensor-pervaded, solid-state-electronics-controlled system.”
In prospect: a sudden step change as electric, autonomous driving, infotainment, connected vehicles dominate the market.
In fact, as an entertaining article this week by Bob Cringely suggests, these vehicles have been coming for some time…
Introducing the iBrain
If you are looking for a fascinating, technical read, this deep dive into Apple’s efforts to develop AI is excellent…
It shows the extent to which AI is running behind everything that Apple does and indeed the extent to which AI will be all pervasive as we move towards anticipatory machine intelligence.
Big Picture: Dataism replaces Humanism
Finally it’s worth reading Yuval Harari in the FT…
“Big Data, Google and the end of free will”
“We are now at the confluence of two scientific tidal waves. On the one hand, biologists are deciphering the mysteries of the human body and, in particular, of the brain and of human feelings. At the same time, computer scientists are giving us unprecedented data-processing power. When you put the two together, you get external systems that can monitor and understand my feelings much better than I can. Once Big Data systems know me better than I know myself, authority will shift from humans to algorithms.”
My take: One area where algorithms are already replacing human decisions is in the field of medicine. We are collecting vast streams of data on blood, heart pressure, cells and DNA to diagnose medical conditions. It’s helping us to develop early warning systems for chronic conditions — a hugely addressable market — people are beginning to trust these diagnoses from the Cloud.
On Thursday, I pointed to Illumina and Medtronic as leaders in the field of computerised medicine — and I will have a full podcast dedicated to the subject tomorrow.
Until then, feel free to alert your colleagues by forwarding on this email or retweeting.
All feedback is most welcome. You can connect with me by email and on twitter.