1. The End of the Beginning by Ben Evans. Digital is everywhere and yet it’s only just the beginning. Many industries are still (semi-)offline, but as these gaps close, the competitive nature of online will drive ever faster cycles of adoption.
  2. 10 Things You Should Know about Black Holes by Sabine Hossenfelder at Backreaction. All your pressing black hole questions answered!
  3. History of the Capital AI & Market Failures in the Attention Economy by Andrew Kortina. Imagine capitalism as an algorithm, then the answer lies in game theory and systems thinking. “Once production capacity was unlocked, the gating function became consumer demand, and the machine learned marketing as a method for what Marx called “creating need.””
  4. Speech Synthesis from Neural Decoding by Anumanchipalli et al.at Nature. Research on using cortical activity to translate to speech.
  5. Old Age and Decline: Some Philosophical Reflections by John Danaher at Philosophical Disquisitions. Capitalism part II? A look at aging and the societal perception of value loss.
  6. The Threat of Algocracy: Reality, Resistance and Accommodation by John Danaher. An analysis of the rise of algorithms in the public decision making process and the challenges of finding an optimal balance between algorithmic support and human participation.
  7. If Nothing Matters by Guy Kahane. Kahane on the definition and history of nihilism as well as its practical implications.
  8. Few-Shot Adversarial Learning of Realistic Neural Talking Head Models by Zakharov et al. (2019). With one image of a target person the model learns the facial landmarks to create a realistic video clip.
  9. Introduction to NLP by Niklas Donges for Towards Data Science. The first rule of NLP work is laying out the definitions – otherwise you’ll have a rough start.
  10. Vanilla Memories by Hannu Rajaniemi. Short story about biological augmentation by my favourite sci-fi author.