A proposed experimental design to test whether consciousness of a future event improves the ability of humans and/or computers to predict that event. If we find that this is true, it implies the existence of consciousness, as well as retrocausality as a result of conscious observation.… Read More “Proposal for a Consciousness Test”
When I was eight years old, I had a very unusual dream in which I saw many lifetimes of my future. In this dream I saw a very clear picture of what the world would go through for perhaps a century or two into the future.… Read More “The Keeper of the Book: My Childhood Dream of the Future”
In this month’s podcast: get your lugholes around some accents and dialects with @VoicesofEnglish, join the @OrkneyLibrary bookmobile and discover the library boldly going where no library has gone before with @archmission #AnythingButSilent https://t.co/6mCDPqBemb pic.twitter.com/waxTGsfI0E
— The British Library (@britishlibrary) August 15, 2019
My work with the Arch Mission Foundation to build a backup of planet Earth was recently featured in Newsweek.
One small disc for man, one giant library for mankind…
The Lunar Library, produced by my nonprofit charity, The Arch Mission Foundation, was crash-landed on the Moon on April 11, in the Israeli Beresheet lander. But despite the crash, at least 60,000 images and pages etched into nickel films, survived intact and are now on the surface of the Moon.… Read More “My Lunar Library has Landed – There is Now a 30 Million Page Library on the Moon”
After many years of work, I am pleased to say that the first installment of the Lunar Library has launched and is enroute to the Moon, where it will remain for at least 10’s of millions of years. Read more here.… Read More “The Lunar Library has Launched!”
Today, we are launching Fuzionaire Diagnostics.
Technological progress often comes from incremental improvements to existing technologies, rather than major evolutionary leaps. But occasionally there is a truly fundamental advance that improves the entire foundation on which we are building. This is the type of leap we are announcing today.… Read More “Announcing Fuzionaire Diagnostics: a True Breakthrough in Chemistry, Applied to Saving Lives”
Early this year a software engineer, Shaun Gilchrist, reached out to me after reading a blog post of mine from many years ago, about my informal search for hidden patterns in the prime numbers.
The Ulam Spiral revealed non-random patterns, but they didn’t quite match up.… Read More “An Interesting Pattern in the Prime Numbers: Parallax Compression”
Today my foundation, The Arch Mission Foundation, announced our mission to land the Wikipedia (and other datasets) on the Moon in 2020 with Astrobotic. This will create a permanent backup of human civilization that will persist on the Moon for billions of years.… Read More “Announcing our Mission to Land the Wikipedia on the Moon!”
It’s mind blowing. An object I conceived of and had made, which was in my house, that I held in my hand, and once carried in my pocket, is now orbiting the sun for millions of years, near the asteroid belt, moving faster than a bullet, in a red Tesla Roadster.… Read More “Sun Stone”
I am thrilled to announce the launch of the first Arch™ payload, on board the Falcon Heavy Test Launch, with SpaceX.
Read the full blog post here:
Our goal at the Arch Mission Foundation™ is to permanently archive human knowledge for thousands to billions of years.… Read More “Arch Mission Foundation Announces Our Payload On SpaceX Falcon Heavy”
I’m quoted in this article in TheStreet.com on what predictions Blade Runner got wrong.
https://www.thestreet.com/story/14331182/2/blade-runner-future-technology.html
… Read More “What Did Blade Runner Get Wrong?”In the place of artificial intelligence, we have what Spivack calls “artificial stupidity,” which makes robots do the “stupid things” humans don’t want to do, such as vacuuming your house.
Today we began to reveal a little more of what we’ve been working on in stealth mode, since last December. It’s a new science and technology startup studio, based in Los Angeles, called Magical.
You might think of Magical as a moonshot factory, except that we’re not just aiming for the moon.… Read More “Magical, My New Startup Studio in LA, Comes Out of Stealth”
I was quoted several times in this article on the future of bots and intelligent assistants, in The Atlantic.
Since the advent of the Web, the newspaper industry has struggled with declining subscribers and plummeting revenue.
The failure of the mainstream media, and growing threats from fake news and partisan news outlets, is not only a risk to the newspaper industry (whether paper or completely digital), but is also a threat to the checks and balances that make Democracy work.… Read More “Idea: Could a “Basic Cable” Model Solve the Newspaper Industry’s Woes?”
Today we are officially announcing the Arch Mission — a non-profit foundation dedicated to spreading humanity’s knowledge across the distant reaches of space and time. I first wrote about this concept in 2015. We have been working in stealth since then and now I am proud to announce the project has reached a major milestone.
The Wall Street Journal’s CIO Journal covered the announcement of Bottlenose’s Nerve Center 3.0 platform today. They did a nice job capturing the big idea here.
I have been speaking about the need for “automating the analyst” for several years. This need is prompted not only by the data deluge — the Cambrian explosion of data volume, velocity, and variety of data sources — but also by the simple reality that enterprises cannot hire the number of data scientists they need to adapt to this new environment.… Read More “AI, BI, and the Necessity of Automating the Analyst”
I wrote the attached story, “The Path,” in 1985, for an American Literature class assignment. I was a 10th grade junior high school student at the Beaver Country Day School, in Chestnut Hill, MA.
The assignment was to write a short story in the style of either Hemingway or Faulkner.… Read More “I Wrote This Short Story in 10th Grade – 1985 – Ernest Hemingway Assignment”
I’m thrilled to say that my company, Bottlenose, has been selected by Gartner Group as a 2016 Cool Vendor in In-Memory Computing.
I’m very proud of the team and what we built here. Truly the next-generation of business intelligence, powered by AI and streaming analytics.… Read More “Bottlenose Named Gartner Cool Vendor in In-Memory Computing”
I had a fun chat with Nathan Latka on his podcast, about my Venture Studio process and some of the deals I’ve produced.
Read my new article about how to evolve Twitter, on VentureBeat
… Read More “How Twitter Could be 10X Bigger, 100X More Profitable, and 1000X More Awesome”I’ve spent many years studying, writing about, building, and funding companies (such as Bottlenose, Klout, and The Daily Dot) in Twitter’s ecosystem.
Despite the media chatter, I am still bullish on Twitter – as should be any investor who understands the social network’s fundamentals and true potential.
I was recently interviewed by Blake Morgan at Forbes, on the subject of “Building Influence in the Digital Age” — listen to the interview here:
… Read More “My Forbes Interview – People May be Brands, but Brands are Not People”Peter Drucker’s grandson Nova Spivack, CEO of Bottlenose, says that Drucker would have felt today that real influencers are not spending a lot of time on social media.
My new article on the growing role of the Chief Analytics Officer has gone live on GigaOm. Read it here.
Interesting ranking of futurists by analyzing their social and Web influence. I rank in the top 20. Of course, I couldn’t have predicted that.
The fundamental problem that Twitter has is engagement. If engagement can be corrected, the whole Twitter ecosystem (and their stock price) will improve.
Improving Twitter engagement comes down to fixing the core consumption experience.
First of all what’s wrong with the consumption experience?… Read More “How to Solve Twitter’s Engagement Problem: Add Semantics”
UPDATE: The Arch Mission Foundation was officially launched on October 24, 2016
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In this article, I propose an achievable project to seed the solar system and eventually the universe with digital copies of humanity’s most important knowledge — stored in digital archives that I call “Archs.”… Read More “Let’s Put the Wikipedia in Space: The Arch Project”
I recently gave a Webinar with my co-founder, Dominiek ter Heide, of Bottlenose on our real-time big data analytics architecture for measuring trends in stream data. You can watch it here.
With the resignation of Twitter’s CEO, Dick Costolo, there has been a sudden burst in commentary on what is wrong with Twitter, and where they should focus next.
There are suggestions that Twitter should focus on live real-time events. There are suggestions that Twitter should focus on algorithms to filter content so they are more like Facebook.… Read More “Twitter’s Future is Actually Its Past – Where Twitter Went Wrong and How to Right It”
I have been thinking about Twitter for many years. One of the interesting trends that many of us who share an interest in social networks have been tracking is the decline in engagement on Twitter.
Indeed this decline is not only evident from Twitter’s own metrics and reporting, but also to anyone who has been an active user of Twitter since the early days of the service.
Interesting article in Venturebeat about the emerging Venture Production Studio model, which I wrote about in 2011 here on this blog.
I’m very pleased to see Bottlenose getting ranked at #13 in the Top 100 Startups in LA listing this year. We’re making progress!
Read my article in Semanticweb.com about the significance of 2014 in Semantic Web history.
… Read More “2014: A Turning Point for the Semantic Web”Google is moving away from hand-made ontologies — they were never a fan of them. From the early days, Google’s philosophy has been biased towards big data over manually constructed knowledge.
I am pleased to announce that I have been added to the Board for the Data Creativity Awards, by I-COM, The Global Forum for Marketing Data and Measurement. Details here.
Cards are fast becoming the hot new design paradigm for mobile apps, but their importance goes far beyond mobile. Cards are modular, bite-sized content containers designed for easy consumption and interaction on small screens, but they are also a new metaphor for user-interaction that is spreading across all manner of other apps and content.… Read More “It’s Time for an Open Standard for Cards”
When we talk about the future of artificial intelligence (AI), the discussion often focuses on the advancements and capabilities of the technology, or even the risks and opportunities inherent in the potential cultural implications. What we frequently overlook, however, is the future of AI as a business.… Read More “The Next Step for Intelligent Virtual Assistants”
I’m happy to announce the release of Bottlenose Nerve Center 2.0 today. Analyzing 3 billion messages an hour (72 billion messages a day), and doing real-time predictive analytics on nearly 300 million data points an hour, it’s a big step in real-time big data analytics. … Read More “Bottlenose Nerve Center 2.0 Released – Milestone for Real-Time Big Data Analytics”
I had the honor of participating in a panel on the future of AI with a group of industry luminaries, led by Kevin Kelly of WIRED Magazine.
Watch the discussion here.
My venture, Bottlenose, has a big announcement today. We’re unveiling the first live trend intelligence system to provide analytics against real-time broadcast TV and radio (and social media). You can read more in the TechCrunch article here.
Read my article in VentureBeat about how Bitcoins may restructure our civilization, and the need for advocacy to support this transition, if it is going to happen. Here’s an excerpt:
… Read More “How Bitcoins Could Restructure the World”Bitcoin is a trend with all the ingredients necessary for changing the world.
Read my article in Gigaom on the coming cognition-as-a-service wars. The next thing after the Semantic Web.
The stunning news that Apple bought social search engine, Topsy, for more than $200M has many scratching their heads. Why would Apple want social data, and why would they pay so much for it?
There has been a lot of speculation about the reasons for this acquisition — ranging from making Siri better, to making the App Store smarter, to acquiring big data expertise to develop insights on the Apple firehose.… Read More “Did Apple Buy Topsy for Contextual Awareness?”
I was quoted in this New Yorker article about whether relationships between humans and bots are real, along with some other AI experts. Can bots experience love? Read it and find out.
Twitter’s business model appears to have shifted from being a network to being a destination. The question I address here, is whether this shift in strategy is going to work, and what the implications are.
Bottlenose has just launched something very very cool: A free version of it’s live visualization of trends in the Twitter firehose. Check it out at http://sonar.bottlenose.com and get your own embed for any topic. This is the future of real-time marketing.… Read More “Bottlenose Announces Free Live Visualization of Global Social Trends”
Read my article in Gigaom on the Quantified Self market and how it is developing.
There are too many choices available for consumers when it comes to devices and apps that track your steps or daily activities. What needs to happen is consolidation across the industry and a focus on storytelling, not just activity.
Check out my article in Forbes on the future of Virtual Assistants. What’s after SIRI and IVR?
… Read More “The Future of Virtual Assistants”All of the interesting stuff happens when data collides. A voice-based interface to a single data set is a thing of the past.
LOS ANGELES, July 23, 2013 — Bottlenose, the first application for Trendfluence™ discovery in social streams, today announced that the company has completed a $3.6 million Series A round of venture capital financing.… Read More “Bottlenose Series A to Bring “Trendfluence” to the Enterprise”