New Week Same Humans #15
Microsoft's new AI wants to rate your next team meeting. Spotify and TikTok reveal who won 2020. Plus more news and analysis from this week.
Welcome to the Wednesday update from New World Same Humans, a newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.
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💡 This week’s Sunday instalment was about the future of personalisation. Go here to read The Reality Filter Bubble.💡
This week: who won 2020? The internet went wild for Year in Review highlight reels.
Also, Microsoft file some intriguing patents; are you ready to let an AI rate the productivity of your next team meeting?
Also featuring the world’s first infinite music video, a startup that wants to slingshot rockets into space, and why Jimmy Wales is the online Santa we all need this month.
Let’s go!
🙌 That’s a wrap
It’s December. And that means one thing: roundup season. So, were you in tune with global culture in 2020?
YouTube said the top trending video was comedian Dave Chapelle’s 8:46, an extended riff on racial justice and police brutality.
Spotify said Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny was the most popular artist, with 8.8 billion streams.
TikTok said influencer Bella Poarch’s M to the B was the most viral video, with 43 million likes. Make of this what you will.
Meanwhile, dictionary makers Merriam Webster shocked no one with their word 2020 (pandemic, obviously), but gave honourable mentions to defund, schadenfreude, and malarkey.
⚡ NWSH Take: ‘I can’t deal with this pandemic, I’m going to watch some M to the B takes’ is a sentence that would have seemed by turns meaningless and a little alarming to your 2019 self. Kudos for making it through an insane year. // On a practical note, the internet loves an end of year roundup. Spotify’s annual Wrapped is a marketing campaign people actually look forward to. Founders, marketers, creatives: there’s still time to emulate this play.
⏳ Your personal productivity score?
Salesforce’s $28 billion acquisition of messaging app Slack positions the latter to go to war with MS Teams. Not everyone thinks it’s going to work out.
But the future of work news you didn’t see this week?
Newly discovered patent filings reveal Microsoft is working on technology that will allow MS Teams to rate and even predict the productivity and ‘overall quality’ of team meetings.
The Meeting Insight Computing System will use AI, facial recognition and other tools to analyse participant body language, verbal contributions, and environmental factors during both physical and virtual meetings. It will rate past meetings, and offer advice to managers on when to schedule future meetings, who to invite, and how productive the meeting is likely to be.
⚡ NWSH Take: The battle lines are being drawn for an epic conflict. Slack, MS Teams, and Facebook Workplace are readying themselves; but last week we saw how a host of startups are snapping at their heels. // The trend for remote work is set to intersect with rising concerns over surveillance capitalism. Microsoft has already received criticism over its Productivity Score technology, which allows managers new ways to monitor remote workers. These new patents position supercharged surveillance and rating of workers as an even bigger part of the Microsoft strategy. In 2021, expect a growing movement against knowledge worker surveillance.
🎉 Check us out
A minor landmark that I’m absurdly happy about: New World Same Humans has a smart new online home!
The new landing page features some extremely generous quotes from four amazing NWSH readers: thanks to them. You can check it out here.
If you’ve been waiting for the perfect moment to share NWSH with friends and colleagues (I mean, of course you have) then that moment has arrived!
📺 Google plays the bad guy
You saw the big news in AI this week: Alphabet’s DeepMind solved the iconic protein folding problem, an astonishing advance set to transform biology and medicine in the years ahead.
But did see YouTube’s new AI experiment: Infinite Bad Guy?
It’s an amazing homage to the Billie Eilish hit, which has racked up over 1 billion YouTube views and inspired thousands of cover versions on the platform. Infinite Bad Guy allows the user to skip seamlessly between cover versions while, thanks to machine learning, the music stays in sync.
The result is an ‘infinite music video’ that should provoke some deep thinking when it comes to AI content curation.
🗓️ Also this week
🛒 Amazon has hired 427,300 people during the pandemic ($). The New York Times says the retail giant’s global workforce now numbers over 1.2 million.
🎥 A new startup wants to be the Uber for private cinema experiences. The (Any)Thing allows users to book a private mini-cinema and pick their film via an app. The service will launch in the Netherlands next year.
🪐 A secretive space company wants to use massive slingshots to hurl rockets into orbit. California-based SpinLaunch's centrifuge is large enough to contain a football field, and will accelerate rockets to over 5,000 mph.
🙈 A Dutch tech journalist gatecrashed a video call for EU defence ministers (site in Dutch, but Google will translate). Daniel Verlaan exploited a security flaw to break into the call.
📱 The CEO of Samsung says virtual humans are coming to Samsung’s phones before Christmas. The company has been working on a range of AI-fuelled synthetic people called NEONs.
☀️ New Zealand has declared a climate emergency. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern promised a carbon-neutral government by 2025.
😇 All Birds and Patagonia led the growing backlash against Black Friday. IKEA made a similar play, offering to buy back old furniture on the day. An increasing number of brands, keen to stress their higher purpose, are rejecting the annual festival of hyperconsumption.
🐔 Food startup Eat Just say they will be the first company to sell lab-grown meat. The company has received regulatory approval in Singapore for its cell-cultured chicken.
🎅 The founder of Wikipedia is arranging Zoom calls for Santa this year. Jimmy Wales has launched Santa HQ, a new platform that lets children book a live video call with Man Himself.
🌍 Humans of Earth
Key metrics to help you keep track of Project Human.
🙋♀️ Global population: 7,829,450,876
🌊 Earths currently needed: 1.7730234778
🗓️ 2020 progress bar: 92% complete
📖 On this day: On 2 December 2001, US energy company Enron filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy – at the time the largest bankruptcy in US corporate history.
Our playlist
Thanks for reading this week.
It’s only fitting that we go out on a tribute to the most streamed artist of 2020. Bad Bunny, we salute you.
And yes, the NWSH podcast will be on Spotify soon. No doubt Bad Bunny is already worried about his top spot.
In the meantime, our community is growing every day. That means new voices, perspectives, ideas and opinions in the NWSH Slack group.
You can help make our community more diverse, and more useful: all you have to do is share!
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I’ll be back on Sunday. Until then, be well,
David.
P.S Huge thanks to Nikki Ritmeijer for the illustration at the top of this email. And to Monique van Dusseldorp for additional research and analysis.