The Context Podcast - David Orban

Learning not only the pieces of knowledge, but the additional tools that are dearly needed in order to be active, thriving components in today's and tomorrow's society is key. Evidently, current academic and educational institutions are not up to the job, while gamification, Learn to Earn and other components in moving to a decentralized system of certificates can be the solution to achieve what i...

Bitcoin and mining are going to deliver an increased degree of sovereignty, not only to individuals, but to entire nations. Today, we are living in an energy financial system that is unsustainable, it must and will be substituted by a new one that is going to pay unexpected dividends. You hear from many different places that Bitcoin mining is wasteful and that it is damaging the environment. This...

What are the highlights of Artificial Intelligence development in the past year or so? I define Artificial Intelligence as a Jolting Technology. Rather than a constant rate of doubling, like the two years of Moore's Law, AI progresses with a shrinking rate of doubling. Its rate of acceleration is increasing. Stanford University with open AI a few years ago published their study, looking at AI doub...

We are creating digital realities and must enrich them with the kind of features that can benefit us. NFTs are good for objects, but what about ourselves? We have been tracking who we are forever. The basic example is presenting yourself by stating your name to someone while shaking their hand. We have also developed ways to make sure that people are who they say they are through identification do...

There is an explosion of interest around the concept of the metaverse, and it is worth describing its various features and the parameters that can define how different people may interpret it. What is the hardware and the software that can support it, the new business models that can be disrupting the existing leaders of technology, and how Artificial Intelligence has an important role to play. We...

A month ago, I became a grandfather. I am very happy! This is the start of what I would call the completion of my genetic duty. Congratulations to Jacopo and Sara, and welcome Emily! The role of grandparents plays an important foundation in human society. It frees up the parents either for a precious few hours or for a more extended amount of time to procure food or to just be a little bit farther...

I recently went through the process of renewing my driving license, which made me think of two important components of our future infrastructure. One, the oracle problem: how to connect external data sources to the consensus mechanisms that blockchains offer. Second, whether this would be the last time that I needed to renew my license because, with the hopeful, rapid deployment of self-driving ca...

Dubai is like being on Mars. It is a pretty unique place that shows how a hostile environment can give rise to a thriving human community. The major difference is a force of gravity of 1.0 g rather than 0.37 g. I'm exaggerating of course. In Dubai, the air is breathable when you leave the enclosed air-conditioned hotels or shopping malls. Dubai doesn't need to generate its air, but it needs to gen...

When there is a powerful movement like Blockchain, Bitcoin and Crypto, people who discover it have to learn through important and sometimes painful lessons. The early adopters have to step up to their role of being the teachers and the tolerant, welcoming group so that the new adopters feel comfortable and can in turn adopt the same role, maybe a few years later. When Bitcoin was born, it was real...

For the past several decades we have been digitizing our information flow, and lately we have started digitizing the world at large interconnecting things that are digital by themselves, and are able to act on the world. This complementary network of networks is the Internet of Things, which is now poised to change the world. When you have an object that can calculate, knows its position and has m...

Does it happen that someone calls you on the phone, and when they start talking you wonder why is this person even calling you? We have so many alternatives available today that can be much better than the old way of phone calls for certain interactions. The ability to use, take advantage of, and properly configure these options is pretty essential in today's technological world. If you want to ta...

Recently I was able to observe a team member exerting real violence on software tools that he was using for completely unintended purposes. Why? Because he was familiar with them. That is when I realized even more clearly that excessive degrees of knowledge and familiarity can represent an important obstacle in an age where we must upgrade our knowledge, at a jolting pace. Unlearning can be as imp...

Why is it that so many of us have negative experiences with customer support in some organizations? They don't realize that those experiences can fundamentally taint the ability of enjoying the products and services that otherwise we would keep using for a much longer time. Is it possible to evolve support services, and an organizational culture that incentivizes a dependable, high quality behavio...

In its recent meeting dedicated to artificial intelligence, Tesla made a bombshell announcement at the very end: next year they will present the prototype of a humanoid robot capable of executing tasks that are today done by humans. This announcement is the opening salvo of a new era of humanoid robots among us, and we must start a conversation in really understanding the implications Tesla has de...

Can businesses adapt to exponential changes rapidly enough with their own internal resources? With ecommerce, for example, they had literally a decade or two to internalize the capabilities. Even so, companies like Walmart wasted billions of dollars getting things wrong, and they were lucky, at least for the moment, to have had the time to try again and again, to catch up with Amazon. The market s...

Many of us barely realize, but the abundance that our society is able to provide is creating problems that we have to address, similarly to how we have addressed problems of scarcity in the past. The most fundamental scarcity or abundance that we know and recognize readily is that of food. Humanity's history has been characterized by a scarcity of food and famines where common. Population couldn't...

We live in glorious times. 1000 years from now people will look back and wonder: “How was it to live in the 21st century?” Did we realize what we were going through and how fundamental the decisions that we made would be seen in the future? There are unique moments in history that we recognize as very important, and even now we are living a unique moment of transition and transformation that is as...

We aim to build the cleverest software agents and robots, excited about the possibilities of artificial intelligence. We aim to build the smartest possible programs that serve us. But what if this approach was the opposite of what we should aim for? What if we instead aimed to build a set of AI components that were of the minimum cleverness necessary for a given task and became an infrastructure c...

With the launch of the suborbital flights of Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin there have been a lot of online and offline conversations around how society should look at these initiatives, positively or negatively. They do represent a good example to evaluate the interactions and the implications of allocating private wealth, and driving a common policy. Space exploration for many decades was the e...

The recent series Loki explores interesting themes in a smart way of what is the nature of reality, our perception of free will. It may be surprising to you that reality is not necessarily a fixed and definitive system, but we constantly push against its boundaries. Why are the laws and parameters of our particular universe the way they are? What are the differences in the laws of other universes?...

Self driving cars have been part of our imagination and technological aspirations for a long time. Now that they are here, the question is not if their features are ready for us, but if we are ready for them. This is not a dream anymore, and it is urgent that we not only think about the technological hurdles that can make this a reality, but the sociological and regulatory obstacles that can make...

Modern finance’s powerful tools, but also just simple lending and borrowing are unavailable to billions of people. Decentralized finance, or DeFi is a new generation of technologies that aims to eliminate inefficiencies, and emancipate billions of people with the help of modern finance. DeFi emerged over the course of the past few years, mainly based on blockchain technologies, overcoming the cost...

Our desire to understand is boundless. We reach out with our robots in the solar system and with astronomical instruments all across the universe in the hopes of recording communications from alien civilizations. We operate under the assumption that we will be able to understand them, which could be wrong. But we can prepare for this complex and important task, using artificial intelligence as a t...

Artificial intelligence is going to permeate what you do, and learning to live with it is a skill that you must acquire in order to understand the world of today and tomorrow. Artificial Intelligence is a technology that has been simmering for decades and promising incredible breakthroughs described by science fiction books and movies. We used to discount it, but now we can’t do that anymore: AI i...

When European explorers were conquering the South American continent, they were looking for the mythical city of El Dorado. Now “El Bitcoinado” is going to be the real opportunity for a new kind of economic revolution after El Salvador approved legislation to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender. This will come into force 90 days after the signing of the legislation. and during this period there will be...