Lux Recommends End-of-the-Year Roundup

We’ve been collecting weekly what we at Lux Capital have been enjoying. To mark the end of the year, we’ve compiled a massive end-of-the-year roundup of some of the most interesting articles, books, podcasts, and anything else that we’ve enjoyed. Here are some of our favorites:

Articles

Craving control: how food messes with your mind: The gut is our largest sensing organ. It is the gateway to our inside world, physiologically and cognitively, for what we eat and the bugs that live within it. We’re only just starting to understand these communication highways. — Adam G

It’s Way Too Easy to Hack the Hospital: Healthcare is now online and our personal medical data is the most sought after monetary-valued data, yet security is stuck in the middle ages. Hospitals and insurance companies need to get smart, QUICK. — Adam G

Google Open-Sourcing TensorFlow Shows AI’s Future Is Data: Google’s push towards an open source ML platform reaffirms a thesis we’ve long held at Lux: software is transient whereas data is sticky, compounding, and lasting. Algorithms, programming languages, and programming paradigms evolve through time. Long term company value is captured in data, not code from yesterday. — Zavain

Facebook gives sneak peek into sci-fi future: “All are big technology bets that sound like they were just beamed down from the USS Enterprise, not dreamed up inside the Silicon Valley company that built the world’s largest social network. But this is what Schroepfer has been asked to do by Facebook’s chief executive Mark Zuckerberg: To peer 10 years into the future.” — Peter

This Guy Wins When Contestants Miss a Half-Court Shot Jackpot: Insurance meets bizarre math problems, all revolving around the probability of something unexpected happening. — Sam

The Year We Decided to Live Forever: “In 2015, tech billionaires pursued anti-aging and cheating death like never before.” — Adam K

The Gygax Effect: Go ahead, mock. But Dungeons & Dragons created the cultural building blocks of our information age: These kinds of articles, along with the final episode of Freak and Geeks makes me wish I had played Dungeons & Dragons when I was a kid. — Sam

Meet one of the world’s most groundbreaking scientists. He’s 34: On Feng Zhang and CRISPR. — Josh (Bonus, here’s a video on how CRISPR works)

Science Isn’t Broken: “The scientific method is the most rigorous path to knowledge, but it’s also messy and tough. Science deserves respect exactly because it is difficult — not because it gets everything correct on the first try. The uncertainty inherent in science doesn’t mean that we can’t use it to make important policies or decisions. It just means that we should remain cautious and adopt a mindset that’s open to changing course if new data arises.” — Zavain

Superintelligence Now! Steven Johnson examines the future of artificial intelligence, alongside our ability as a society to tackle long-term problems. — Sam

The Internet’s Dark Ages: On preservation and loss on the Internet, focusing on a newspaper series that seemed to be lost forever. — Sam

Why amateurs beat experts in predicting tech trends: “…we unqualified journalists, science fiction writers and other geeks-without-portfolio actually have an OK predictive record. If you read widely, take soundings from plenty of experts and apply the understanding of human nature that geniuses often lack — a kind of meta study approach — you can get a quite reliable idea of things to come.” — Josh

The Futility of (Narrow) Speculation About Machines and Jobs: A discussion of the failures in speculation when we think about automation, skills, robots, and the future of work. — Sam

How many books can you produce in one day? (slides): Max Roser takes us through a fascinating quantitative narrative on the rise of technology enabled productivity and prosperity over the last millennia. Central to Max’s argument: how much do we work to afford one hour of reading? — Zavain

Tasting a Flavor That Doesn’t Exist: “Robert Sobel is the vice president of research and innovation at the flavor company FONA International. In the last few years, he’s been researching ways to use smells to trick our brains into thinking food contains high levels of sugar and salt, even when it doesn’t.” — Adam G

The Deployment Age: Jerry Newman of NeuVC takes us through Carlota Perez’ ideas from ‘Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital’, and applies them to the current technology revolution driving the digitization of the economy. Worth the read regardless of where you stand on Perez’ theories, and a fun lens to map the future. Onward! — Zavain

The Big Problem With “Big Science” Ventures — Like the Human Brain Project: the downside of massive simulation projects that often are built without fundamental hypotheses and insights into what is going on in the system being modeled. — Sam

Does PowerPoint Limit Our Ability to Think Critically and Seek Truth? Do slides as a medium for argument and narrative give too much power to the presenter, hence limiting critical response and valid feedback from the viewer? Andrew Smith argues we’ve optimized this medium for convincing, not for truth seeking — and given its prevalence in academia and business, this is a problem. — Zavain

Why Futurism has a Cultural Blindspot: When futurists forget social and cultural change. — Sam

Books

Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World’s First Digital Weapon by Kim Zetter: “Top cybersecurity journalist Kim Zetter tells the story behind the virus that sabotaged Iran’s nuclear efforts and shows how its existence has ushered in a new age of warfare — one in which a digital attack can have the same destructive capability as a megaton bomb.” — Zack

The Sculptor, by Scott McCloud: We believe passion is the best predictor of success. But success has trade-offs comes at a cost. A theme as relevant as the difficult question in the Steve Jobs biopics. Would you give your life for your art? And not just any art, timeless gorgeous celebrated art. Trading current mortality (your life) for future immortality (your art). A beautifully rendered depiction of a Faustian bargain, a quest for fame and immortality through your passion all written by comic genius Scott McCloud. — Josh

Here, by Richard McGuire: What started as a short comic in 1989 has become a full 300 page graphic novel transcending space and time as a single corner of a room, aka “Here” is juxtaposed and overlaid in a way that only images can communicate from the dawn of the millenia through the present, back to ancient settlers and thrust into the future. It’s almost like the app “What Was Here?” and its fascinating to consider the near infinite occurrences, moments, feelings, events that took place in a physical place you may be standing right now. — Josh

Aurora, by Kim Stanley Robinson: A book about a generations-long mission to another star system. Fascinating exploration of the complexity of the ship needed for such a mission. Bonus: the story is primarily told from the perspective of the ship’s AI. — Sam

Unflattening, by Nick Sousanis: A gorgeous experiment in visual thinking by Nick Sousanis. This started out as his academic thesis and touches on science, art, perception, computation, entropy, conformity. Each page is a thought provoking retinal delight. I found myself looking at the page then staring into space thinking every few turns of the page. — Josh

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel: A troupe of traveling musicians and actors wander the Midwest years after a pandemic kills nearly all of humanity. Great read. — Sam

A Slap in the Face by William B. Irvine: From the same author as previously recommended A Guide to the Good Life, a great handbook on how to insulate yourself from life’s little and big transgressions. As Mark Frauenfelder of BoingBoing and Make magazine says: “After providing readers with a catalog of amusing insults, Irvine analyzes the role they play in everyday life and offers invaluable advice for reducing their sting. His suggestion that you laugh at yourself when you are insulted — a form of verbal aikido — is nearly foolproof.” — Josh

A Guide To The Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy by William B. Irvine: The ultimate hack: finding equanimity by appreciating the little things, cherishing that which might be gone tomorrow and realizing that whatever you might be upset about it complaining about could always be far worse. This is timeless wisdom from Seneca, Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus wisely written in page turning prose. — Josh

The Professor in the Cage: Why Men Fight & Why We Like to Watch by Jonathan Gottschall: As Mike Tyson said, “Everyone has a plan til they get punched in the mouth”. Just an absolutely captivating brilliantly written book. Having started boxing a few years ago, once thinking it was a ridiculous “sport,” I came to appreciate the insane endurance and fitness required, the learned lightning quick agility, the chess-like strategy, tactics and countertactics, the hard-headed dedication to train and the great class-equalizing effect of rich and poor people alike in the ring. Ironically in pugilism I’ve found peace and equanimity that helps my decision making. Gottschall wrote The Storytelling Animal and now returns to recount the history of fighting from animal kingdom through today as he himself shed his professorial garb and stepped into the ring. A mix of eye-opening evolutionary psychology explaining everything from the controversial but undeniable differences between women and me, why we fight, what we fight over, universals across animals, how cultural norms have evolved because of and in spite of fighting, the importance of honor from the dueling days of Hamilton through the knockouts of Tyson to the mixed martial arts (MMA) phenoms of today — and why whether in Boardrooms of activist campaigns or barroom brawls or the ring or the cage, we just can’t look away. — Josh

Equilateral: a book set in the late 19th century about a massive project to build a giant equilateral triangle in the Egyptian desert and set it on fire, in order to communicate with the canal builders on Mars. It is wild stuff and thought-provoking stuff. — Sam

Ghost Fleet A few passages feel like very high-probability near-futures in technology and geopolitics. Don’t read it for a gripping espionage or war story. Read it instead for the clever technical contraptions, intelligence techniques, and grounded speculations of how our interconnected complex global economic and military worlds will collide. There are extensive footnotes supporting the predictions embedded in the prose that are ripped from tech headlines, science journals and whitepapers that ave briefed intelligence communities. — Josh

Podcasts

Talking Machines: Simply put the best ML podcast out there, approachable for layman while not simplifying the core of what’s emerging at the cutting edge. — Zavain

Hardcore History with Dan Carlin: I think that one of the great failures of standard modern education is how poorly it teaches history. What should be the most dramatic, exciting subject of them all has been turned into dry textbooks that simply associate events with dates. That’s why I love this podcast. Dan is an amateur historian who injects life into history again. My favorite was the 5 -part “Wrath of the Khans” deep dive into the Mongolian empire. This needs to be made into a Hollywood movie. ASAP. — Jeff

Films

Racing Extinction: A documentary premiered this week on Animal Planet, Discovery and Smithsonian called Racing Extinction. Equally fascinating and terrifying. Brilliantly filmed and narrated it depicts the plight of the worlds animals going extinct at a rate 1000x faster than normal and how 50% of all species on earth will be extinct in the next century if we don’t do something about it. — Adam K

Online Courses

Edge Master Class 2015: A Short Course in Superforecasting by Phil Tetlock: attended by Danny Kahneman, Danny Hillis, Rod Brooks and other brilliant minds on the topic of Superforecasters, a new book of the same name. Tetlock investigates and reveals what it is about this group of people in the way they think and evaluate evidence that makes them more accurate than others at predicting the future. A remarkable intro to better decision making and better forecasting the future. — Josh

Big History Project: Via Bill Gates, it’s captivating, all-encompassing and wonderfully compressed content that will give you a true grasp to grok everything from the Big Bang to modernity. There are 8 “thresholds” each isn’t longer than an hour or so and you will feel much smarter and richer for it. — Josh