The Context Podcast - David Orban

We have had the ability to create virtual realities, since we have been telling stories around the fire. Today’s technological tools of immersive reality, like Oculus 2, have become very sophisticated. These alternate realities in my opinion should be as interactive as possible. I am not especially fond of sitting back and passively watching what is going on. The ability to manipulate objects, to...

Jolting Technologies are those characterized by an increasing rate of acceleration. When I formulated the paradigm of Jolting Technologies, I had very few data points to start from. I looked at the increasing acceleration in the power of AI applications. In particular I criticized Stanford University’s approach which used a linear interpolation on a logarithmic chart to conclude that AI had “two e...

The names and labels that we give to things, allow us to concentrate our attention on their nature, guided by the intuition and the associations that the name elicits, as every name represents an analogy, or a metaphor to another object or a concept. In reality, it is an interesting chain of cultural heritage. And of course, it accelerates our understanding as we leapfrog through those intuitions...

What does it mean for Elon Musk to start from first principles? When does he address a given technological challenge? Can we take inspiration from the approach and apply it to other problem sets in front of us? Too rarely if ever people running established processes ask themselves: “If I went back to the drawing board, could I achieve some kind of radical improvement that would vastly out compete...

When new technologies emerge, it is always an important question: what can we do for the market to fully express itself? If regulators need to intervene in order to make sure that the market is healthy, with a plurality of players competing in order to provide the best possible service to those that use the products in this new market, what should they do? Is it possible to see and and find exampl...

Has the time come for universal basic income from being a niche initiative that only a few people have understood and embraced, to be deployed everywhere? Basic income initiatives have enjoyed experimentation all over the world over the course of the past 10 years. And with the pandemic, they have seen a decisive acceleration and a rollout in many different nations. It might have been the case tha...

Sometimes an idea is both big, and valuable, and also important: this has been the case for Alex Torrenegra, who created Torre, in the $1 trillion global market of HR technology, where still four billion people of working age are without any digital support for their professional lives, even a simple online profile, and where a platform servicing just 5% of its full potential, like LinkedIn with i...

The labels of extrovert and introvert represent the extremes of a spectrum. In reality we are all ambiverts, dynamically adjusting our filters as needed. Communicating, whether creating output speaking or writing, or input through listening and reading, requires both cognitive effort and physical energy. It is a necessary component of our lives. When we are born, we are all naturally extroverts: h...

My friend Scott Mize died last week from the consequences of a stroke that he received while walking around San Francisco a few days earlier. Maybe because we die for the first time, breaking a chain of life billions of years long, it is shocking. Or maybe my life is particularly lucky, and with the exception of my father who died young, death of friends and close relatives was not that much part...

What are you selling? A product or service that are the embodiment of your ideas: then you are an entrepreneur. The resources needed to enable entrepreneurs, money: then you are an investor. The expertise that you earned with time, and your time itself: then you are an employee, if dependent on others, or a consultant if independent. I have never defined myself as a consultant, as I would always p...

The modern production and distribution of content requires updated support mechanisms, starting with the legal layer of copyright agreements. Creative Commons represents an innovative approach of pre-negotiated licenses, where from complete control, to complete release in the public domain, the content creator can decide what is the right set of freedoms to endow to the recipient.

The latest generation of objects in our world acquire new capabilities without having to be redesigned and manufactured from scratch. Instead, the features we didn’t know they could have are brought alive by improving the software layer that they all possess.

The ideal of sustainability can’t be seen as a static goal, which represents the end of our efforts, once reached. In practice, all complex systems need to constantly adjust their parameters to support themselves in their changing environment. And in the process, their components will change, and evolve. If from the point of view of the system as a whole we can observe this continuity, it is only...

We have to maintain and nurture the curiosity we naturally exhibited as children. Even if we are bombarded by messages that want us to conform, from schools that impose uniform behaviors and learning rhythms, to workplaces that put us in specific boxes both physically and in measuring our inputs, our individuality and the different ways that it can flourish, are important and enriching, not only t...

Even if you are not a science fiction author, you are now living in a science fictional world, where your daily life is unthinkable. If you were to meet yourself from four months ago, and give updates, even in vague terms about today, you would not believe what you are hearing. However, in a new environment, where extreme variability makes scenarios with low probability become real, being able to...

Flooded by increasing amounts of data, we need ever more evolved tools to be able to interpret them and to act upon them. Artificial Intelligence tools, based on natural language processing, image recognition using neural networks, and via many other approaches, are assisting us to understand the information, including what we ourselves produce. Today computer based image classification has a supe...

Startups meet investors pitching their projects, using a presentation deck to illustrate the challenge they want to solve, the solution they want to implement, and several other elements of a successful presentation. The process and the structure of these meetings has been often unclear to startups, and in today’s world need to adapt to a new reality. I’ve started with Network Society Ventures a n...

Is thinking of your home as a spaceship a useful maybe even practical metaphor? As we execute carefully planned Extra Vehicular Activities (EVAs: the weekly grocery shopping in masks and gloves), our account of inputs and outputs and the circular nature of flows of our homes may become clear. And realizing how that works in our homes, may lead us to a more immediate perception that the same applie...

Society wants to incentivise creativity and private enterprise. Copyrights patents and trademarks have emerged as a protection of what we today call intellectual property. There are plenty of examples when these serve a useful purpose, however excessive extensions to the expiration of copyright as well as harmful patent trolls show the negative side of this arrangement. Open source software and ha...

The lack of adequate response by so many governments to the pandemic, even when plenty of positive and negative examples were already available from other countries that have been impacted before them, is a sign that maybe the mental models that are applied to the decision making are inadequate. The pandemic is not merely exponential. As it is impacting with its assault on multiple supporting infr...

We gain new skills by making mistakes, as we put in practice the changes needed in what we observe. The opportunity to share the process accelerates it, because the feedback can arrive from outside observers, whose independent point of view will enrich ours. That is what I have been doing now for two weeks, streaming live each day, learning how to use the software and hardware tools, how to integr...

As we look out on the world, trying to understand it, we structure our knowledge of the information collected, across several dimensions. Spatial, temporal, static, dynamic, and reflect the organization of the information in our theories and experiments. We aim to make them reliable and reproducible, to serve as a firm basis for the implementation of solutions, engineered to help us achieve our go...

For a long time now technology made it possible for teams whose members are not physically together to collaborate effectively. There are multi billion dollar companies with over a thousand employees, and no offices. With the effectiveness of the social distancing measures due to the COVD-19 pandemic, we are seeing a much wider interest about how to efficiently implement the tools that facilitate...

The experience of online events can evolve to be different, but as real and valuable and that of physical ones. If you are a conference organizer, a speaker, an exhibitor, these days you are scrambling with the restructuring of your activities. What we have to aim for is to recognize the differences between the two options, and build a sustainable ecosystem of online events. In the process we may...