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A year ago, I walked onto a stage in St

John’s, Newfoundland, and told a room full of circus artists they were not entertainers.

They were context creators.

The argument goes like this. Content is now infinite. AI can produce more of it in a second than you could consume in a lifetime. So content is not king anymore. It is a commodity, and commodities get cheap.

What stays expensive is meaning. And meaning does not live inside the content. It lives in the frame around it.

Change the context, and you change the story. Change the story, and you change the future.

In this keynote, I make the case for #STEAM over #STEM, for why technology is the How and never the Why, and for why the circus tent is the most honest metaphor we have for the age of #AI: risk, awe, vulnerability, transformation, and a safety net that may or may not be there when you let go of the bar.

Continue reading “A year ago, I walked onto a stage in St” | >

Cybersecurity for the CSuite and Shareholders: Cyber Risk Is Business Risk

Chuck Brooks argues that cybersecurity has fully shifted from an IT function to a core business, governance, and fiduciary responsibility. In an era defined by AI, quantum computing, connected infrastructure, and expanding digital dependencies, cyber risk is now enterprise risk — directly tied to bu

From Militarized Patriarchy to FemaleCentric Societies in Space

Expanding humanity into outer space would represent one of the greatest transitions in human history. If millions of people eventually live and work in space, the social structures familiar to us today are likely to evolve into very different forms. Predicting those structures is difficult. Few, if any, could have predicted the profound societal transformation that occurred in Europe following the Industrial Revolution. The transition from extended families living within largely rural and feudal systems to nuclear families living in densely populated industrial cities and democratic states is now well studied, yet it would have been difficult to foresee before it occurred.

Similarly, when hunter-gatherer communities began settling permanently and developing agricultural villages, their social structures changed dramatically. We understand many aspects of this transformation today, but those living before the transition could hardly have predicted its consequences.

This article attempts to connect the consequences of large human populations living in space with the possible evolution of societies both on Earth and beyond it. One major consequence considered here is the possible abolition—or fundamental transformation—of the military institution, along with other highly hierarchical institutions.

New quantum computing method broadens spectroscopy of hard-to-model matter

Scientists could have a new way to explore the hidden behavior of matter, thanks to research involving Queen Mary University of London that uses a quantum computer to carry out a new form of computational spectroscopy.

Spectroscopy is an important scientific technique used to understand the properties of matter. By analyzing how materials and molecules respond to energy or light, researchers can gain insights into their structure and behavior. Computational approaches can complement these experiments by allowing scientists to investigate and predict properties using theoretical models and simulations.

However, quantum systems can be exceptionally difficult to model using conventional computers. The new research, published in Nature Communications, develops a generalized approach to quantum computational spectroscopy that allows researchers to study a much broader range of quantum systems.

Observing the vibrations of neighboring atoms with an atomic-scale double slit

Efficiently controlling heat generation has become a major challenge as the semiconductors used in smartphones, computers and similar devices have become higher-performing and more miniaturized. The way heat is transmitted is determined by the vibration of the atoms that constitute a material, but it is not easy to directly examine, at the atomic scale, how neighboring atoms vibrate in coordination with one another.

A research group made up of Director and Professor Naoya Shibata, JSPS Research Fellow Koudai Tabata, Associate Professor Taketo Seki and Project Associate Professor Ryo Ishikawa, all of the Institute of Engineering Innovation, School of Engineering, The University of Tokyo, has succeeded in an atomic-scale double-slit experiment that treats neighboring atoms as “two slits” and demonstrates that it is possible to read out the vibration of atoms from the fringe pattern formed by electrons. Their paper is published in the journal Nature.

The double-slit experiment makes use of a phenomenon in which waves passing through two narrow slits overlap and create a pattern of bright and dark fringes. Since the British physicist Thomas Young first performed it using light in the early 19th century, it (Young’s experiment) has been known as a fundamental experiment demonstrating the wave nature of light. If this experiment could be reduced to the atomic scale inside a material, it would allow direct investigation of the arrangement and motion of atoms at the level of a single atomic bond, but an atomic-scale double-slit experiment of this kind has never been realized.

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