1. Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. I devoured Weir’s The Martian and was less than impressed by his follow-up Artemis. PHM is back with all of the author’s strengths: Witty dialogue and lots of technical elements, making it a sci-fi that’s both fun and educating to read.
  2. Red Hot: The 2021 Machine Learning, AI and Data (MAD) Landscape by Matt Turck. Turck brings us his eight annual overview over the AI landscape. Advances have largely come from the combined advances in both machine learning and data infrastructure. Key trends this year include feature stores, ModelOps, AI content generation, as well as growth of China as an AI power house.
  3. Creativity Myths: Prevalence and Correlates of Misconceptions on Creativity by Benedek et al. (2021). The creative process is shrouded in mystery (think “mad genius”), seen as uncontrollable and subject to spontaneous inspiration — but scientific evidence demystifies the process: Rather, creativity is the “extraordinary result of ordinary processes” (Sternberg & Lubart, 1996, p. 681).
  4. A Story is a Lie and a Story is True by Leon Lin at Avoid Boring People. Based on a theory by Kurt Vonnegut, researchers from Vermont and Adelaide used machine learning to classify 1,327 famous stories. Their finding: Stories have shapes, and there are six standard shapes. These stories influence how we perceive investments, startups, and our own lives.
  5. Building for Mental Wellness — A Case for Mindful Cities by Masawa. A city is an organism of its own, a host with a strong grip on its inhabitants. And so we really need to think what kind of structures, architectures, and dynamics improve urban life.
  6. Why China Crushed its Tech Giants by Lavender Au for Wired Magazine. The fast growth of Chinese tech companies was nurtured by the CCP, allowing those companies to exploit legal grey areas and raising their CEOs to hero status. The flurry of regulations and crackdowns we saw in the past months is set to continue. “The message is clear: to survive, big tech must make China’s priorities their own.”
  7. Boosting Brain Health is Key to a Thriving Economy by Megan Greene. Nearly three times the number of Americans experience anxiety or depression compared to pre-pandemic numbers. As much as two-thirds don’t seek professional help. Governments should invest more in mental and brain health — not just for ethical, but also for economic reasons.
  8. Going Big and Fast on Renewables Would Save Trillions in Energy Costs by Beinhocker, Farmer, and Hepburn for Bloomberg. Transition to clean energy: The authors argue that a quicker shift to zero-carbon deployment could save $26 trillion in energy costs globally compared to today’s energy system.
  9. The Counterintuitive Mechanics of Peloton Addiction For a while now I’ve been really into gamification of gym tech. My gym Beat81 uses leader boards and extensive analytics to push its members to give their best. Trackers like Whoop use similar methods to motivate their users. This article explains the  design and gamification choices that Peloton uses to keep people on the exercise platform.
  10. The Exponential Age Will Transform Economics Forever by Azeem Azhar for Wired Magazine. Humans are notoriously bad at exponential thinking, and yet we can’t deny that we live in a world defined by exponentiality. “The gap between our institutions’ capacity to change and our new technologies’ accelerating speed is the defining consequence of our shift to the Exponential Age. On the one side, you have the new behaviours, relationships and structures that are enabled by exponentially improving technologies, and the products and services built from them. On the other, you have the norms that have evolved or been designed to suit the needs of earlier configurations of technology. “The gap between our institutions’ capacity to change and our new technologies’ accelerating speed is the defining consequence of our shift to the Exponential Age. On the one side, you have the new behaviours, relationships and structures that are enabled by exponentially improving technologies, and the products and services built from them. On the other, you have the norms that have evolved or been designed to suit the needs of earlier configurations of technology.”