📚 Fact-based optimistic summer reading
Four books that will make your summer more interesting and more optimistic.
💡 Optimist’s Edge: Will the Tesla Bot replace all physical human labor?
Robots that understand and can interact with the surrounding environment will be able to replace all physical human labor, which will lead to a dramatic expansion of the world economy.
🗳️ Strong connection between democracy and prosperity
People living in democracies are richer, healthier and happier. And there is a strong connection between democracy and prosperity, a new report from The Atlantic Council and the Alliance of Democracies shows.
🌅 Obama should feel more hope
Citizens in free countries are richer, happier and healthier than citizens in unfree countries. Barack Obama should use his world-class rhetorical skills to boost confidence in democracy and create hope for its future. Because, as he used to say: There is nothing false about hope.
📱 These people are using technology to strengthen democracy
Eight democracy activists from Ukraine, Venezuela and Georgia presented their web tools to organize democracy movements, expose corruption, bring transparency to elections and help investigative journalism.
💡 Optimist’s Edge: No language barrier
Humanity has been working on machine translation for hundreds of years, but in the last ten years, progress has been exponential. We are close to a world with perfect machine translations of texts, removing a big language barrier for the world.
🔋 Northvolt and the benefit of understanding the future
The story of Peter Carlsson and Northvolt teaches us two lessons: You need to understand the future to see all the possibilities, and you must be a fact-based optimist to grab them.
Warp Impact: 😟 The headset that treats depression with brain stimulation
Brain stimulation can be used against depression, but also to improve the brain's ability. "It is a very exciting field," says Erik Rehn, co-founder of Flow Neuroscience.
🧮 Facit and the peril of not understanding the future
In 1966 Pelé walked the streets of tiny Swedish town Åtvidaberg, as part of a global marketing campaign for the local multinational company Facit. But just six years later Facit was no more, swept away by a disruption in the market: electronic pocket calculators. How could they have missed this?