Anywhere Competes With Silicon Valley, Bangalore, Beijing And London

The next tech hub? Anywhere

This is an interesting development. The trend should only grow larger. The thing about casual clothes is if you wear them like a uniform, that defeats the purpose. Remote work and distributed teams have not made the office obsolete. I believe there is a tremendous value to face time. But distributed teams make sense at many levels. Cost is tops.

Office space costs money. Also, if you are not limited by geography, the team you will build will be more capable. There will be associated cost savings.

Commuting costs time. Instead of commuting for two hours (or more), why not work a few hours extra?

The downside is accountability might be compromised. But they will be compromised on site as well. If you do it right, productivity can go up instead.

If your team is active on various social media platforms, they can hope to get to know each other pretty well.

It is not either or. If I were to build a primarily distributed team, I would want them to meet in person often, at least once a year, preferably more than that.

Remote Workers And Nomads Represent The Next Tech Hub

Amid calls for a dozen different global cities to replace Silicon Valley — Austin, Beijing, London, New York — nobody has yet nominated “nowhere.” But it’s now a possibility. ...... startups that are fully, or almost fully, remote, with employees distributed around the world ..... Automattic, Buffer, GitLab, Invision, Toptal and Zapier all have from 100 to nearly 1,000 remote employees ..... nomadic founders with no fixed location

Google Spent 2 Years Researching What Makes a Great Remote Team. It Came Up With These 3 Things

Google ... has nearly 100,000 workers spread over 150 cities in more than 50 countries (on five continents). ..... "We were happy to find no difference in the effectiveness, performance ratings, or promotions for individuals and teams whose work requires collaboration with colleagues around the world versus Googlers who spend most of their day to day working with colleagues in the same office" ..... remote work has the potential to greatly lower costs for your business, while keeping workers happier. .... Get to know your people. .... Set clear boundaries. ..... Forge connections. ......... arrange opportunities to bring the full team together in one location as often as you can. Make these meetings special, celebrating the team and its hard work.

Five Ways To Create A Culture Of Trust And Productivity In Distributed Teams

workers demanding greater flexibility about when, where and how they work. ....... 70% of global professionals spend at least one day a week working remotely. With geography and time zones no longer a barrier, remote or distributed work is becoming what we simply call “work.” ...... Transitioning to a remote workforce, whether fully or partially distributed, gives you access to a larger pool of talent and has been linked to increased productivity and improved employee satisfaction ....... 1. Invest in onboarding. ...... 2. Set clear objectives. ....... Our team creates a transparent document each quarter to decide each department's objectives and key results (OKRs) aligning with the company’s overall OKRs, a process modeled off of GitLab’s transparent management style. ......... 3. Use the right tools. .... Slack .. Zoom .. Google Docs ... Trello .. Asana .... Meeting Owl ....... 4. Provide consistent feedback. .... Weekly one-on-one check-ins are one critical tool to develop trust through regular informal conversations with your direct reports. ..... 5. Include the element of fun. ..... Consider organizing a company retreat once or twice a year for employees to join together for team bonding activities. ..... Partially remote and fully distributed teams will soon become the norm as technology continues to merge our virtual and real worlds. ... the shift to remote working can mean teams are more diverse, productive and satisfied

AI And The Spiritual Angle

If the human being is just body and brain, like the limbs move, and the brain performs mental tasks, then AI that might perform faster mental tasks is a threat. But human limbs move, cars move faster. Cars do kill people, but we don't think of them as threats. It is drivers, not cars. Cars don't have their own will.

The body, mind, heart and soul hierarchy that the scriptures offer is the reality. That is how things are. You do have a soul. Your mind is a space suit you wear. To be on earth. Then AI is just like cars. Cars move. Fast. AI will perform mental tasks. But AI is not heart. There is no AI soul. The exercise of free will resides deeper than the brain.

Should you worry about AI? Well, shouldn't you worry about cars? You should. You should worry about cars, you should worry about guns, you should worry about nuclear weapons, you should worry about AI. Of course, you should.

Someone could program an AI machine to go kill people. But then drones already do.

Technology is not the solution to humanity's problems. Technology can go either way. Humanity is the solution to humanity's problems. The human will is set straight and strengthened spiritually.

The Devil is not fiction. The Devil is an actual being. Only that being is way smarter than any AI could ever be. Because AI is limited to the first four dimensions. The Devil, an angel, is a being from the beyond dimensions.

When Elon Musk wonders out loud if we are living in someone's virtual reality game, he might as well be talking scripture. Yes, this is creation. And there is a higher power. That higher power is not only higher, but it is also the highest possible power.

I was watching a Masa Son video on YouTube yesterday, and he had a slide where he showed an average human being was at 100 in terms of IQ, somebody like Einstein was 200, he said he was somewhere in between. And then he said AI in 20, 30 years might stand at 10,000.

Well, The Devil probably is at a billion.

And God is not at a trillion or a gazillion. God is at infinity.

God's intelligence is as bigger than human intelligence as it is bigger than The Devil's intelligence.

People who worry about some future AI do not actively worry about The Devil who is proactively messing things up. In the Koran The Devil is quoted as saying to the human being, I will talk you into destroying nature that is your home. Look around. Looks like he delivered.

Humanity is at the cusp of the Age of Abundance. The Jews rejected Jesus 2,000 years ago because they associated the Messiah with some kind of an Age of Abundance. But the most important aspect of the Age of Abundance is Universal Spiritual Centeredness (USC), that is every human being putting God at the smack center of their lives.

Yes, Elon, you are living in someone's simulation. God's.

God spoke the world into existence. How much power is that!

Yes, @elonmusk , you are living in someone's simulation. God's. (cc @BillGates) https://t.co/Ckn0uJMJ1Z

— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) March 20, 2019

The David Rubenstein Show: Jeff Bezos

Masayoshi Son

Smart Cities

Imagining the Smart Cities of 2050 https://t.co/foQ40FuZXW via @singularityhub

— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) March 15, 2019

Imagining the Smart Cities of 2050

Riding an explosion of sensors, megacity AI ‘brains’, high-speed networks, new materials and breakthrough green solutions, cities are quickly becoming versatile organisms ........ Over the next decade, cities will revolutionize everything about the way we live, travel, eat, work, learn, stay healthy, and even hydrate. ...... the UAE has invested record sums in its Vision 2021 plan, while sub-initiatives like Smart Dubai 2021 charge ahead with AI-geared government services, driverless car networks, and desalination plants. ...... A trailblazer of smart governance, Estonia has leveraged blockchain, AI, and ultra-high connection speeds to build a new generation of technological statecraft. And city states like Singapore have used complex computational models to optimize everything from rainwater capture networks to urban planning, down to the routing of its ocean breeze. ......... today, your car remains an unused asset about 95 percent of the time. ....... Beyond sheer land, a 90 percent driverless car penetration rate could result in $447 billion of projected savings and productivity gains. ....... Cars-as-a-Service (CaaS) business model, urban sprawl will enable the flourishing of megacities on an unprecedented scale. ........ Using Narrowband-IoT (NB-IoT) for low power consumption, Huawei has recently launched a smart parking network in Shanghai that finds nearby parking spots for users on the go, allowing passengers to book and pay via smartphone in record time. ...... 5G networks .... smart rivers that communicate details of environmental pollution, to IoT and AI-geared drones in agriculture. ....... smart city strategies across blockchain, biometrics, AI, and cloud computing. ........ Alibaba plans to embed seamless mobile payments (through AliPay) into the fabric of daily life, as Tencent takes charge of communications and Huawei works on hardware and 5G buildout (not to mention its signature smartphones). ......... One of the most advanced city states on the planet, Singapore joins Dubai in envisioning a future of flying vehicles and optimized airway traffic flow. ....... air rights to flying car structures built above motorways and skyscrapers. ....... your sky courts, your sky gardens, even your private terraces to your condo [become] landing platform[s] for your own personalized drone. ...... one of our greatest priorities becomes smart city governance. ....... In just over 10 years, the UN forecasts that around 43 cities will house over 10 million residents each. ....... Public sector infrastructure and services will soon be hosted on servers, detached from land and physical form. And municipal governments will face the scale of city states, propelled by an upward trend in sovereign urban hubs that run almost entirely on their own. ........ e-Estonia. ....... Hosting every digitizable government function on the cloud, Estonia could run its government almost entirely on a server. ....... Starting in the 1990s, Estonia’s government has covered the nation with ultra-high-speed data connectivity, laying down tremendous amounts of fiber-optic cable. By 2007, citizens could vote from their living rooms. ......... every stage of the legislative process is available to citizens online, including plans for civil engineering projects. ....... Citizens’ healthcare registry is run on the blockchain, allowing patients to own and access their own health data from anywhere in the world—X-rays, digital prescriptions, medical case notes—all the while tracking who has access. ....... i-Voting, civil courts, land registries, banking, taxes, and countless e-facilities allow citizens to access almost any government service with an electronic ID and personal PIN online. ........ perhaps Estonia’s most revolutionary breakthrough is its recently introduced e-citizenship. ....... we’ve seen thriving village startup ecosystems and e-commerce hotbeds take off throughout China’s countryside, resulting in the mass movement and meteoric rise of ‘Taobao Villages.’ ....... Within the next year, Dubai aims to become the first city powered entirely by the blockchain ....... With a similar mind to Dubai, multiple Chinese smart city pilots are quickly following suit........ One of the most resourceful, visionary megacities on the planet, Singapore has embedded advanced computational models and high-tech solutions in everything from urban planning to construction of its housing units. ......... Even in the realm of feeding its citizens, Singapore is fast becoming a champion of vertical farming. It opened the world’s first commercial vertical farm over six years ago, aiming to feed the entire island nation with a fraction of the land use.

Future of Cities Part 2 - Visions of the Future

Future of Smart Cities - Part 1

Each week alone, an estimated 1.3 million people move into cities ...... By 2040, about two-thirds of the world’s population will be concentrated in urban centers. Over the decades ahead, 90 percent of this urban population growth is predicted to flourish across Asia and Africa. ....... As data becomes the gold of the 21st century, centralized databases and hyper-connected infrastructures will enable everything from sentient cities that respond to data inputs in real time, to smart public services that revolutionize modern governance. ....... As 5G connection speeds, IoT-linked devices and sophisticated city AIs give birth to trillion-sensor economies, low latencies will soon allow vehicles to talk to each other and infrastructure systems to self-correct......... China’s Nanjing .... Hangzhou, home to e-commerce giant Alibaba, has now launched a “City Brain” project, aiming to build out one of the most data-responsive cities on the planet. ..... “the City Brain can detect accidents within a second” allowing police to “arrive at [any] site [within] 5 minutes” across an urban area of over 3,000 square miles. ....... Yet aside from self-monitoring cities and urban AI ‘brains,’ what if infrastructure could heal itself on-demand. Forget sensors, connectivity and AI — enter materials science. ....... The U.S. Department of Transportation estimates a $542.6 billion backlog needed for U.S. infrastructure repairs alone.....And as I’ve often said, the world’s most expensive problems are the world’s most profitable opportunities. ........ bio-concrete that can repair its own cracks. ...... Mixed in with calcium lactate, the key ingredients of this novel ‘bio-concrete’ are minute capsules of limestone-producing bacteria distributed throughout any concrete structure. Only when the concrete cracks, letting in air and moisture, does the bacteria awaken. ....... “What makes this limestone-producing bacteria so special is that they are able to survive in concrete for more than 200 years and come into play when the concrete is damaged. ........ The implications of self-healing materials are staggering, offering us resilient structures both on earth and in space........ Some have even posited graphene’s use in the construction of 30 km tall buildings. ........ nano- and micro-materials are ushering in a new era of smart, super-strong and self-charging buildings. ........ Revolutionizing structural flexibility, carbon nanotubes are already dramatically increasing the strength-to-weight ratio of skyscrapers. ...... the creation of commercializable solar power-generating windows. ...... silicon nanoparticles to capture everyday light flowing through our windows. Little solar cells at the edges of windows then harvest this energy for ready use. ..... Leading the pack of China’s 500 smart city pilots, Xiong’an New Area (near Beijing) aims to become a thriving economic zone powered by 100 percent clean electricity.