Clipboard Brief: #1

Some interesting things I came across recently —

1. MIT Technology Review: 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2017
2. A Computer to Rival the Brain
   The author argues that artificial intelligence has achieved much of its recent success by mimicking biology, now it must go further.
3. Why Amazon is the World’s Most Innovative Company of 2017
   By using the “divine discontent of the customer as a North Star”, over its nearly 22 years, Amazon has continuously evolved — by moving and gentrifying one sector after another and often by experimenting in adjacent areas.
4. A Conservative Plan to Combat Global Warming
   The strategy of a carbon tax is very simple: it requires each household and business that causes CO2 emissions to pay a tax in proportion to the volume of emissions that they create. Levied indirectly by being built into the prices of all goods and services that use carbon in their production, the expectation is that this tax will cause households and businesses to change their behaviour in ways that reduce the volume of CO2 emissions.
5. What George Orwell would have made of Donald Trump
   For 70 years the political argument in liberal democracies has been largely about “means”. The populists have upturned the debate: now it is about the “ends”.

Two additional sources —

1. Our World in Data
   I chanced on an online publication that does a remarkable job of visualizing global development trends through data.
2. Historian Yuval Noah Harari and TED Curator Chris Anderson in a fascinating conversation on escalating political divisiveness.