FiRe dispatches from the Scout team
Scout co-founder Brett Horvath and I are in Park City this week, soaking in the mountains and problem-solving with some of the world’s smartest people at the Future in Review (or FiRe) summit. My family started Future in Review as an extension of Strategic News Service, a weekly global report on technology and the economy that my dad launched out of the unfinished extra room in my parents’ house back in 1995. Now, 13 years after FiRe debuted, it’s a blast to be here with Scout, putting on our own tech-savvy programming.
What you can expect from us this week:
On Wednesday morning, Brett will talk with Tim Stonehocker, the CTO of virtual assistant upstart Hound, and Kamran Elahian, an early investor and board member of Hound parent company, SoundHound. (You might recognize them as a music discovery service akin to Shazaam.) Hound, just out of its beta and wicked fast, has been putting incumbent virtual assistants like Siri and Cortana to shame lately. Watch this demo video to get a sense of what I mean.
On Friday morning I’ll sit down with Ramez Naam and Cory Doctorow, two members of the technology and science fiction justice league, about the 20-year outlook for AI, climate technology and automation. Ramez is a computer scientist, futurist, speaker and the award-winning author of the recently-released Apex, the third installment in the Nexus trilogy. If you’ve ever found yourself wondering about what a real-life brain-to-brain communication system might mean, read his books. Cory has published nine novels, including The Rapture of the Nerds (with Charles Stross) and the YA hit Little Brother. He’s also the co-editor of Boing Boing and the head of the EFF’s Apollo 1201 Project, which is working to eliminate existing Digital Rights Management structures they consider unfair.
And throughout the week, I’ll be posting updates from the conference for Scout members about technology, economics and morality. Starting tonight, with a post about Hyperloop. It turns out that COO and Deputy Chairman Bibop Gresta is joining us for dinner.
