What’s Next — 3d Printing, Fairness, Travel

What’s Next — 3d Printing, Fairness, Travelby Jordan Gonen

by Jordan Gonen

Hello there 👋

Truly cannot believe how fast time is flying. Is there anything new you are excited about?

Quite a few interesting articles below. Hope you enjoy!

11.6.2017

Articles to Read.

These Giant Printers are Meant to Make Rockets:

Tim Ellis and Jordan Noone are both in their mid-20s, and it shows. The two aerospace engineers are energetic, optimistic, and so ambitious they can’t help sounding a little bonkers.

In a small factory a couple of miles from Los Angeles International Airport, Ellis and Noone have spent the past two years working to build a rocket using only 3D printers. Their startup, Relativity Space Inc., is betting that removing humans from the manufacturing equation will make rockets way cheaper and faster to produce. The going rate for a rocket launch is about $100 million; Relativity says that in four years its price will be $10 million. “This is the right direction,” says Ellis, the chief executive officer, during the first-ever press tour of the company’s headquarters. “The 3D printing and automation of rockets is inevitable.”

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If ever you feel yourself getting too invested in one side a complex issue, sit and write out, point for point, the case for the other side.

The Hidden Forces Behind Toutiao: China’s Content King:

Toutiao, one of the flagship products of Bytedance*, may be the largest app you’ve never heard of–it’s like every news feed you read, YouTube, and TechMeme in one. Over 120M people in China use it each day. Yet what’s most interesting about Toutiao isn’t that people consume such varied content all in one place… it’s how Toutiao serves it up. Without any explicit user inputs, social graph, or product purchase history to rely on, Toutiao offers a personalized, high quality-content feed for each user that is powered by machine and deep learning algorithms.

The Role of Human Emotions in he Future of Transport:

A new era of connected mobility is emerging, transforming journeys into tailored experiences, designed around the individual preferences of each human undertaking them. With this development — especially the automation of driving — we see a series of challenges around issues like trust, understanding, agency and control.

For us to become comfortable with mobility services tech, not only to optimise our transport experience but to do so without killing us, requires a long, hard look at human-machine interaction.

The Fairness Principle:

If you could redesign society from scratch, what would it look like?

How would you distribute wealth and power?

Would you make everyone equal or not? How would you define fairness and equality?

And — here’s the kicker — what if you had to make those decisions without knowing who you would be in this new society?

Philosopher John Rawls asked just that in a thought experiment known as “the Veil of Ignorance” in his 1971 book, Theory of Justice.

Why Medium Chose Claps:

So the claps mechanism is the closest thing to a real rating system without making it feel like a rating system. Making it feel organic and something you didn’t have to think about too much that really captured that degree and variability of sentiment. It’s per user, so it’s relative to if you give one to three claps to everything, then we parse that out. We parse out the [subscription] money that is earmarked for your subscription based on that. And if I give, like, 30 claps to everything, we parse it out relative to my claps.

The World’s Most Valuable Resource is Data:

This abundance of data changes the nature of competition. Technology giants have always benefited from network effects: the more users Facebook signs up, the more attractive signing up becomes for others. With data there are extra network effects. By collecting more data, a firm has more scope to improve its products, which attracts more users, generating even more data, and so on. The more data Tesla gathers from its self-driving cars, the better it can make them at driving themselves — part of the reason the firm, which sold only 25,000 cars in the first quarter, is now worth more than GM, which sold 2.3m. Vast pools of data can thus act as protective moats.

What’s Next for Egg Freezing:
The key takeaway from these facts is to show what I previously mentioned: While a variety of factors has pushed childbirth later into people’s lives, evolution has not kept pace. And while routes such as adoption continue to be a very viable option, there are reasons to believe that women will increasingly rely on egg freezing.

Debating Where Tech Is Going To Take Finance:

The point of most innovations in consumer finance has been precisely to reduce its presence in our lives: Instead of talking to a bank teller to get money, you use an ATM. Instead of physically walking into a broker’s office to talk about which stocks to buy, you buy index funds through a web page. Or, now, you click to enroll in an app and it does all of your asset-allocating and stock-picking and tax-harvesting and so forth for you. I think that a lot of financial technology is heading in the direction of perfecting that vanishing act, so that in 20 years you’ll just think about financial things less than you do now.

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