Four For Friday | April 28, 2023
Four For Friday | April 28, 2023
LF43 | Baby making in Japan, protecting your AI creations, 13m minutes to LIVE and finding trust in AI
Welcome to a Looking Forward’s Four For Friday. Four things that have piqued my interest this week relating to systems change, healthy longevity and / or Web3. Enjoy!
Reversing Japan’s fertility decline
Seems it’s possible to make the Japanese have more babies after all. While most of Japan languishes at a fertility rate of 1.3, the town of Nagi is almost at 3, due to a bunch of joined up smart policies.
Interesting development in copyright for AI
The US Copyright Office [typo fixed on earlier version, thanks Jim] has excluded AI from copyright. As an artist you are protected if you use a machine to help you make your work, as long, apparently, as that machine isn’t powered by AI. Unlike in other settings, they’re suggesting that you would need to know exactly what the AI machine will create in order to have its output protected. This one is fascinating and will open up a ton of conversations. It’d be good to be a copyright lawyer right about now (and if not that, an AI prompt engineer for $300k/ year isn’t a bad option either…).
13m minutes more: the need for rethinking life stages
Thoughtful perspective about the need for a new approach to life stages. There’s something rather bracing about working out how many minutes you’ve ‘got left’, based on typical lifespans. More people are realizing the three-stage model is broken and looking for alternatives. This quote summarizes it:
‘When are you old?’ is really the question. And, when you stop dreaming of what you can do, then you’re old. I haven’t stopped dreaming yet.”
Have just arrived in London and caught up with Julia Randall-Khan from the Purpose Exchange yesterday - she’s building something to answer this exact question, and it’s good to hear they’re rapidly gaining traction.
What’s the point of Web3 in an AI world? Trust
The difficulty of knowing what’s real and what’s fake in an AI world may finally deliver a meaningful use case for Web3. Last year’s Web3 excitement has cooled along with crypto coin values, and has been replaced by the generative AI feeding frenzy. However, the core proposition of Web3 - being able to trust things without an intermediary - could actually come into its own with AI. The speaker, Cathy Hackl is a thoughtful metaverse commentator and practitioner, and worth paying attention to.
That’s all for this week. As always, feedback welcome. Feel free to share insights or links of interest.
- Stephen