Remember what I said yesterday about messaging bots becoming the main way you interact with tech services?
Now, when you tap the More button in Messenger for iOS or Android, youâll see Dropbox as an available source. With the Dropbox app installed on your phone, you can share any file in your Dropbox without having to leave the Messenger app.
Source: Share Dropbox files directly from Facebook Messenger | | Dropbox Blog
Just seeing the difference in emoji presentations is revelatory in itself. But then it gets even more interesting. GroupLens researchers asked subjects to rate 22 anthropomorphic emoji from five platforms by sentiment, using a scale that ranged from strongly negative (-5) to strongly positive (5). And hereâs where you start to see where âgrinning face with smiling eyesâ goes so very wrong. Appleâs average sentiment ranking was almost -1, while Microsoft, Samsung, LG, and Google all were 3 or above.
Source: That Emoji Does Not Mean What You Think It Means
My wife (and almost all of my close friends that I’d use emoji with) is an iOS user and I’m an Android user… that’s led to a few miscommunications before we realized that the emoji we were sending “cross-platform” didn’t carry the same intended meaning.
Perhaps that’s one of the beautiful aspects of emoji and symbolic language additions… the meanings are left to the receiver to first decrypt and then to import meaning into based on their own background, experiences, culture (and operating system).
“Is everything going to become a bot? I donât think so. Thereâll probably still be static apps for professional and authoring tools; Photoshop and CAD and Excel and Evernote arenât going away; and video games will still be video games. Most of the squishy stuff in the middle, though, will go conversational. Anything that involves collaboration, communications, consumption, organization, etc. will probably become a bot. I think bots will replace 80% of what we use at work and half of what we use at home.”
Source: A Charge of Bots â The Tech World As We Know It Is About To Be Rewritten â Medium
As I’ve said before, it’s time for social organizations (churches, nonprofits, some businesses) to think through what the coming years of tech will bring… and one of the major revisions we’re going to see is the way we interact with tech. Messaging bots will be the driving force behind that.
When I use “messaging” and “bots,” I’m not referring to what we consider tools such as Facebook Messenger or Slack now. I’m also referring to interactions such as the voice driven Amazon Echo (or Siri, Google Now, Microsoft’s Cortana etc). Bots will interact seamlessly with our lives from our music selections to our banking to the status of our HVAC home systems. Here’s a good rundown on bots from Re/Code.
There was a time when we thought software keyboards (such as on the now ubiquitous iPhone) would “never catch on.” The same with laptops. And a computer mouse. And color screens. And computers in your home. And punch cards.
Voice, gesture, and messaging bots will be the norm. Just as if you walk into our home now, the primary way to start playing music involves the salutation “Alexa,” followed by what you’d like to hear, rather than our previous practice just a few short months ago of having to go over to a computer keyboard and type in a search. It happened seamlessly and Amazon’s Echo, along with Siri, is just a sign of what’s to come.
Will everything we do with / on computers be taken over by bots and messaging? Of course not. To paraphrase Steve Jobs, some people need trucks but most everyone can get by with a car. You probably don’t launch Photoshop or complicated accounting software that often. If you do, don’t worry.
The point is, the way we interact with all of this tech we surround ourselves with is about to dramatically change. Think ahead for what that means for your business, church, group, and workflow.
“Wikimedia and Facebook have given Angolans free access to their websites, but not to the rest of the internet. So, naturally, Angolans have started hiding pirated movies and music in Wikipedia articles and linking to them on closed Facebook groups, creating a totally free and clandestine file sharing network in a country where mobile internet data is extremely expensive…”
Source: Angolaâs Wikipedia Pirates Are Exposing the Problems With Digital Colonialism | Motherboard
Fascinating article.
If the developing world wants to use our internet, they must play by our rules, the thinking goes.
âWe believe that a computer that can read and understand stories, can, if given enough example stories from a given culture, âreverse engineerâ the values tacitly held by the culture that produced them,â they write. âThese values can be complete enough that they can align the values of an intelligent entity with humanity. In short, we hypothesise that an intelligent entity can learn what it means to be human by immersing itself in the stories it produces.â
Source: Robots could learn human values by reading stories, research suggests | Books | The Guardian
Our stories are important. Our ability to have, interpret, and produce intuition is seemingly something very human. However, we’re finding out that’s not necessarily the case.
There’s a very subtle but very real history behind Siri (and Google Now and Amazon Echo’s Alexa and Microsoft’s Cortana) having a female voice and persona…
“But because the creatures in these myths are virtually identical to their creators, these narratives raise further questions, of a more profoundly philosophical nature: about creation, about the nature of consciousness, about morality and identity. What is creation, and why does the creator create? How do we distinguish between the maker and the made, between the human and the machine, once the creature, the machine, is endowed with consciousnessâa mind fashioned in the image of its creator? In the image: the Greek narrative inevitably became entwined with, and enriched by, the biblical tradition, with which it has so many striking parallels. The similarities between Hesiodâs Pandora and Eve in Genesis indeed raise further questions: not least, about gender and patriarchy, about why the origins of evil are attributed to woman in both cultures.”
Source: The Robots Are Winning! by Daniel Mendelsohn | The New York Review of Books
I was born in 1978. The C2-8P with its futuristic dual floppy drives was cutting edge tech.
My oldest child was born in 2007. This had just been released and some of the first pictures I have of her were taken with it. She will never know a world without it.
LC was born in 2010, the same year as this. It is revolutionizing how we do everything from teaching and learning to making a medical diagnosis.
And now I have a four month old son who was born the same time this went on sell. He will never know a world that doesn’t include widely available and affordable VR (or AR).
I imagine that we’ll see a similar revolution in our society in the way that iPhone has changed us since 2007 because of virtual reality devices going “mainstream.”
Similarly, things we didn’t think could change are changing rapidly.
We’re seeing our political system transform seemingly overnight. We’re teaching our children with tools such as Coursera and Khan Academy that are replacing the need for highly skilled teachers of content. Even our religious landscape looks very different than it did 10 years ago.
Churches, schools, and politicians are all clamoring to stay relevant and not show signs of aging or becoming obsolete.
However, our bodies age and decline. When we pass mirrors, we still see ourselves in our mind’s eye at the height of our physical (and maybe spiritual) beauty. The wrinkles and scars don’t always register right away. Some of us seek out surgery or vitamins or juice cleanses or yoga to delay the inevitable. Most of us want to delay death.
Yeats would remind us,
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Things fall apart. You will die. Your church will not look the same in ten years as it does today. Your child’s school will teach math differently than you learned math. Donald Trump may become our country’s president.
You will contribute some verse, however. Even after you are long gone as a corporal being, perhaps distant family will think of you or a depiction of you in some not-yet-invented VR machine will allow a great-great-grandchild to interview you for a project.
What about our churches, our schools, and our political system? What will our grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren say about them? Will they be comforting thoughts or will they react like teens in the video above reacted to Windows 95?
You are becoming obsolete. Embrace that and the decay and work for justice and peace in all that you do and with those you choose to worship, learn, or legislate with while you’re here. Worry less about the details that your obsolete brain is telling you matter.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Fascinating read…
“The conclusion is inescapable: we must live our lives to promote the most overall good. And that would seem to mean helping those most in wantâthe worldâs poorest people.
Our rule demands one do everything they can to help the poorestânot just spending oneâs wealth and selling oneâs possessions, but breaking the law if that will help. I have friends who, to save money, break into buildings on the MIT campus to steal food and drink and naps and showers. They use the money they save to promote the public good. It seems like these criminals, not the average workaday law-abiding citizen, should be our moral exemplars.”
Source: An honest thief
//giphy.com/embed/12XMGIWtrHBl5e
“Say hello to a brand new Twitter. The company is planning to introduce an algorithmic timeline as soon as next week, BuzzFeed News has learned. The timeline will reorder tweets based on what Twitterâs algorithm thinks people most want to see, a departure from the current feedâs reverse chronological order.”
Source: Twitter To Introduce Algorithmic Timeline As Soon As Next Week – BuzzFeed News
Welp, there goes Twitter.
Sigh.
Ugh.
Damn.
Evidently, there’s talk of an opt-out, but we’ll see.
We recently began rolling out donation cards to US creators, which let your subscribers and viewers donate directly from your videos. Just add a donation card, pick a nonprofit, and start doing good. You can choose any United States, IRS-validated 501(c)3 public nonprofit organization and they receive 100% of the money donated. Weâre excited to take this first step and look forward to expanding into other countries so creators across the world can power nonprofits they care about.
Source: YouTube Creator Blog: Transform a view into a donation
I could see this being a nice secondary stream of donations for nonprofits and churches in 2016…