David Alayón

🧠 These 4 skills can make the world better after COVID-19. To handle the aftermath of COVID-19 and tackle the world's biggest issues, we need to change the way we make decisions and become more knowledgeable about the future. Futures literacy, anticipation, systems thinking and strategic foresight are increasingly essential skills.

🖥 Reducing CO2 at the click of a button (ES) In just one minute, Google can emit more than 30,000 kilos of CO2 into the atmosphere. We know that industry and cars pollute, but so do the Internet and the cloud. What tools do users have at their disposal to reduce their environmental footprint?

🤖 Does conscious AI deserve rights? Does AI—and, more specifically, conscious AI—deserve moral rights? In this thought exploration, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, ethics and tech professor Joanna Bryson, philosopher and cognitive scientist Susan Schneider, physicist Max Tegmark, philosopher Peter Singer, and bioethicist Glenn Cohen all weigh in on the question of AI rights.

🔬 Will science ever run out of steam? (ES) The astonishing speed with which scientists are achieving effective vaccines against covid-19 is a historic milestone that is being pointed to as proof positive of the effectiveness of science and the technology supported by it. However, for some time now there have been voices announcing that science is running out of steam precisely because of its success. That is, it is reaching the limits of the scientifically knowable. They see signs of this in a certain slowdown of theoretical progress in recent decades. But is this perception in line with reality?

🔮 100 reports and forecasts of 2021. Google Drive Folder of reports on 2021 Trends from across agency, consulting and business industries. “We hope that it empowers you with resources from our community, to make the best decisions in the next decade of uncertainty and immense opportunity.”

🧟‍♀️ Can the assault on the Capitol, snowfall in Madrid and a zombie apocalypse help us deal with complexity? Heavy Mental is the podcast of Javier Recuenco, Miki and myself, a space where we talk about apparently absurd topics as rigorously as possible. In this 13th episode we talk about order and chaos, the difference between complicated and complex, anticipation and futures, Snowden and Taleb, Stacey's matrix and the Cynefin framework, zombies vs the infected, Mr. Wolf and House, George A. Romero and Charlie Brooker...

💡Critical thinking: beyond intelligence. Critical thinking depends on many cognitive abilities, some of which are not assessed by intelligence tests. Certain personality traits also play a role. Some of the strategies that foster critical thinking can be exercised, such as assessing the reliability of information. This is conducive to personal and professional success.

🔦 The Only Three Trends That Matter: A Minimum Specification for Future- Proofing. Trend mapping and analysis are common practice for organizations. However, the emphasis on trends, and the sheer volume of predictions about the future, might be creating confusion about what society should prioritize. Introducing a minimum specification for future-proofing may help cut through the noise and surface what is needed for us to ensure a sustainable, viable future for humanity. 

🦾 DeepMind's AI biologist can decipher secrets of the machinery of life. An AI system (AlphaFold) developed by UK-based company DeepMind has achieved the long-sought-after goal of accurately predicting the shape of proteins from their sequence alone, a key part of understanding how the machinery of life works. In a competition, AlphaFold was able to match two-thirds of the results achieved by humans doing expensive and time-consuming lab experiments.

🌊 The 8th Continent: Slovak designer wins top prize for ocean station prototype that removes plastic. A prototype ocean cleaning facility by Slovak designer Lenka Petráková has scooped the highest award in an architectural competition for projects posing creative solutions to environmental challenges. Called The 8th Continent, the floating station designed to solve one of the world’s most pressing pollution problems: ocean plastic waste.