Four For Friday | Oct 11, 2024
LF143 | Systems change to green the mid-west, outcomes funding for AI, GESDA Science Radar, a collaborative to do list for humanity + a marketplace for AI agents
Welcome to Looking Forward’s Four For Friday. Four things that have piqued my interest this week, together with a bonus: AI Tip of The Week. Enjoy!
Systems investing blueprint for MidWest agriculture
The team from TransCap have just launched an evolution of the ‘report’; something that helps the readers drive from insight to action.
For centuries, people have done research, often capped off with a big meeting in a room, and produced a report on the outcomes. Some are so novel and powerful that they change the paradigm and the world - an Origin of the Species moment. But most don’t result in much more than nice looking, decaying paperweights. (Many don’t even get read - one third of World Bank reports have no downloads. )
This TransCap report is a combination of a report and a map - it embeds the content and insights about the investment opportunities for regenerative agriculture in the US midwest into a Kumu map that indicates how the dots are connected.
“The map identifies a number of strategic investment opportunities which, when pursued in concert with one another, could unblock systemic challenges and help transform the agri-food sector in this critical region. It is also a research report—clicking on each of the shapes on the map will reveal a brief research summary, and various views of the map will enable you to zero in on different elements of the system. [...] we need to adopt a polycapitalistic approach: matching the right type of capital to the right intervention, at the right point in time"
The So What? Expect more reports to be not just static summaries of a state in time but a dynamic and in future interactive tool to help guide decisions and actions on the topic in question.
Outcomes AI
A smart move by ZenDesk - shift the business model to one that’s aligned with outcomes. Customers only pay when their software does what it’s designed to do - help automagically solve customers’ problems and not require escalation to a real (expensive) human.
The So What? Outcomes payments has been one of the Big Ideas in health reform, which is inching closer with value-based payments. This brings this alignment to other sectors.
2024 Science Breakthrough Radar by GESDA
A fascinating, well-researched and beautifully presented report (kudos to the Shapeable team) by the Geneva Science and Diplomacy Anticipator (GESDA) that explores future emerging science trends. The team gather insights from over 2000 scientists to predict the shape of breakthrough innovations in 5, 10 and 25 years. This year, ‘eco-augmentation’ was a key theme i.e. how we as humans use tech to co-evolve and partner with nature.
So What? A powerful and upbeat look into the future that refocuses discussions away from the rather dreary and depressing daily news of conflict and strife.
A collaborative ToDo list for humanity
What’s the best use of your time and money (and carbon footprint)? As the world spirals into regional conflicts, climate breakdown, eye-watering inequality, democratic dysfunction and uncharted demographic territory, is the five minutes reading these weekly missives the best use of your time? Instead should you be cleaning up a park or signing a petition?
Enter Wishonia. This delightfully ambitious site aims for nothing less than ‘Global Optimization’. It proposes an AI-powered stack of 8 billion digital twins (we all get one), an army of ‘prosocial AI agents’ collaborating together to deliver public goods and a decentralized decision making framework for humans (using “Aggregated Pairwise Preference Allocation (APPA)) to figure out what people want.
The end result bundles SDGs, Getting Things Done, AI utopia, participatory democracy and the Sunflower Movement into one. It’s a super-powered ToDo list - aligned our collective wishes. Check out this ‘distributed, semi-autonomous to do list for humanity’ and have some fun planning what to do with your next 5 minutes.
The So What? This is one of the most crazy, ambitious yet so very practical ideas I’ve seen. It’s the brain child of Mike Sinn, the founder of CureDAO. He’s a fascinating chap with ideas that deserve more airtime. Given that alignment to Looking Forward’s values, expect to see more of him and Wishonia.
Bonus - AI Tool of the Week
Agent.ai - a new professional network for AI Agents. This site has AI agents that lets you string together multi-step processes that would otherwise require you prompting a chat multiple times. Things like- go to this YouTube video > record transcript > summarize content > write a LinkedIn post about it > draft it ready to publish. Look out for AI agents being a game-changer for knowledge workers.
That’s all for this week. As always, feedback welcome. Feel free to share insights or links of interest.
- Stephen