Future

Socratic Bot

This is a follow-up from my earlier post.

This is really entertaining. It is also depressingly addictive. Self-indulging as well: what a luxury it is to be able to engage in a polite, seemingly rationale discussion with s̶o̶m̶e̶o̶n̶e̶ ̶w̶h̶o̶ something that can reply almost instantly to each point, yet can wait with an infinite patience for my responses.

It also is a great support for fictional Socratic dialogues(*) - a very effective medium to convey philosophical ideas by guiding a student to reach the conclusion through their own reasoning. I used it with ChatGPT to talk about “regulatory narrow focus” which is an issue I have been looking in for a very long time.

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Chatbot consulting

Earlier this year, Diapason participated in the organisation of the CreativeAI_Sydney symposium. At this time, public attention on generative AI was growing exponentially, and focused very much on Dall-E2, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion (in the order they entered the spotlight), i.e. ‘prompt to image applications’. Most of our discussions gravitated around the this fundamental question: “Can AI be an artist (and therefore be a threat to existing artists) - or is AI only a tool that artists can use”. This question had been answered 5 years ago almost to the day in in the field of medical imagery AI with the idiom Rads who use AI will replace rads who don’t, although this is still open to interpretation.

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TRIZ

Brilliant example of Innovation. Moving our energy grids away from fossil fuel comes with many challenges, among them the storage of energy at the yearly/seasonal scale. There are several existing solutions already developed, based on different principles. But pushing these solutions further is raising other, new challenges: using more rare materials creates further environmental damage and generate politico-economic incidents. Some tech may be dangerous at large scale, or too costly, or have a too large footprint.

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2050 Crossroads

2050 Crossroads

A book by Hicham Naim

I believe anticipation is a fundamental part of innovation.

There are plenty of futurist magazine articles that promise us a life of luxury, comfort and performance thanks to all sorts of new technology developments based on bench prototypes and university lab press releases.

This is very common with generalist ’tech’ press, that will cover vehicles and transportation, space travel, housing, leisure etc. Healthtech and medtech are no stranger to this trend (I plead guilty. My linkedin feed is full of neurotech news). And that’s justifiable. It’s not possible not to feel emotional when seeing videos of deaf patients hearing for the first time their love ones (thx cochlear implants), or accident victims with a severed spinal cord who can feel/move their lower limbs. The list goes on, and this can only trigger a biased-but-understandable techno-optimism. Techno-optimism is not bad per se. It is on the opposite a necessary quality for entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs cannot pull through the amount of work, research, pivots and trials it takes to put an innovation on the market without a deep belief in their technology.

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