And now for something completely different.

This is a much less in-the-weeds discussion than I normally get into on my vodcast, and it gets a little heavy at times. You should probably make sure you've had your morning coffee before watching this one.

Tom Chi has played many roles inside and outside the tech industry, including serving as head of #GoogleX, where he helped develop Google Glass and self-driving cars. Now a founding partner at the environmentally focused venture capital firm At One Ventures, Chi has published a book, Climate Capital: Investing in the Tools for a Regenerative Future. The book offers dark warnings about the possible future of humans on Earth amid threefold crises in the environment, the #AIeconomy, and geopolitics and also proposes a framework for change.

In this wide-ranging and provocative interview, Chi puts forth his opinions on why a world in which billionaires are building doomsday bunkers is one in which no one is really winning, and how that would could be re-imagined.

In today's episode, we'll cover…

- White collar jobs and AI

- Demand as a check on corporate power

- Connections between climate change, AI's impact and political unrest

- Chi's proposed skills to address these challenges: critical thinking, creativity, compassion, and community.

#AIandjobs #SaaSpocalypse #climatecrisis

https://youtu.be/q_x4ABcGmBM?si=o0kiSh4qq4VbDpDP

I walked through #Florence once and the whole city felt like an argument I couldn't counter.

It's built from sustainable materials. It's still standing after 2,000 years. And it's one of the most beautiful places on earth. Nobody sacrificed comfort or beauty to build it. They just built with what the land could support and what time could hold.

Tom Chi — Google X founding member, inventor of 77 patents, and now a venture capitalist betting on a regenerative economy — had the same experience. It became the seed of his new book, #Climate Capital: Investing in the Tools for a Regenerative Future.

We spent an hour talking about what that means in practice. A few things that stayed with me: 90% of the cost structure of physical businesses already aligns economic and ecological goals. Less material used = lower costs + less extraction. Less energy = lower processing costs + fewer emissions. The economy and the planet are already pointing the same direction. The 5% that isn't aligned is what the lobbyists fight about — which is why that's all we ever hear.

And then the phrase I can't shake: cognitive despoiling. We spent the 20th century strip mining the physical resources of the planet. Tom thinks we're spending the 21st century strip mining the cognitive resources of humanity — burning through attention, trust, and clear thinking the same way we burned through forests and rivers. The damage is invisible. But it compounds.

This is not a doom-and-gloom conversation. It's a design conversation. And the design problem, Tom argues, is solvable.

Episode is live. marcociappelli.com

— Marco

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/new-book-climate-capital-investing-tools-regenerative-marco-ciappelli-dnqnc

#AnAnalogBrainInADigitalAge #MarcoCiappelli #Podcast #ClimateCapital #TomChi #RegenerativeEconomy #ClimateTech #GoogleX #Sustainability #FourCs #DeepTech #NewBook

Feeling overwhelmed? Ex-Google X trio just raised $6M for TwinMind, an AI 'second brain' that *passively captures background audio* to give you on-the-go summaries. It's like a memory assistant, or a very persistent eavesdropper. Are we ready for this level of AI integration?

Read more: https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/10/ex-google-x-trio-wants-their-ai-to-be-your-second-brain-and-they-just-raised-6m-to-make-it-happen/

#AI #SecondBrain #Privacy #TechNews #GoogleX

OpenAI i Jony Ive usuwają markę „io” z powodu pozwu o znak towarowy

OpenAI i Jony Ive usunęli ogłoszenie współpracy i wideo promujące projekt sprzętu AI po pozwie ze strony firmy IyO, zajmującej się urządzeniami słuchowymi, wywodzącej się z Google X. Spór dotyczy użycia nazwy „io”.

OpenAI oświadczyło, że posty zostały tymczasowo usunięte zgodnie z nakazem sądowym. Firma nie zgadza się z zarzutami i rozważa dalsze kroki. Również zespół Ive’a zapowiedział zdecydowaną obronę — podaje serwis 9to5mac.

Mimo problemów prawnych, partnerstwo OpenAI i Jony’ego Ive’a wciąż jest aktualne. Projekt, wyceniany na 6,5 miliarda dolarów, zakłada integrację zespołu Ive’a z grupą badawczo-inżynieryjną OpenAI w San Francisco.

#AISprzęt #GoogleX #IO #IyO #JonyIve #JonyIveAI #OpenAI #OpenAIHardware #partnerstwoTechnologiczne #projektAI #spórPrawny #startup #znakTowarowy

#Google #GoogleX #AI #Robots #Robotics: "It was early January 2016, and I had just joined Google X, Alphabet’s secret innovation lab. My job: help figure out what to do with the employees and technology left over from nine robot companies that Google had acquired. People were confused. Andy “the father of Android” Rubin, who had previously been in charge, had suddenly left. Larry Page and Sergey Brin kept trying to offer guidance and direction during occasional flybys in their “spare time.” Astro Teller, the head of Google X, had agreed a few months earlier to bring all the robot people into the lab, affectionately referred to as the moonshot factory.

I signed up because Astro had convinced me that Google X—or simply X, as we would come to call it—would be different from other corporate innovation labs. The founders were committed to thinking exceptionally big, and they had the so-called “patient capital” to make things happen. After a career of starting and selling several tech companies, this felt right to me. X seemed like the kind of thing that Google ought to be doing. I knew from firsthand experience how hard it was to build a company that, in Steve Jobs’ famous words, could put a dent in the universe, and I believed that Google was the right place to make certain big bets. AI-powered robots, the ones that will live and work alongside us one day, was one such audacious bet.

Eight and a half years later—and 18 months after Google decided to discontinue its largest bet in robotics and AI—it seems as if a new robotics startup pops up every week. I am more convinced than ever that the robots need to come. Yet I have concerns that Silicon Valley, with its focus on “minimum viable products” and VCs’ general aversion to investing in hardware, will be patient enough to win the global race to give AI a robot body. And much of the money that is being invested is focusing on the wrong things. Here is why."

https://www.wired.com/story/inside-google-mission-to-give-ai-robot-body/

We live in hopeful times, beyond a sci-fi movie
Where Nick Foster shows us what we can do
With his Head of Design for Google X
His brilliance opens us up to all we can be
To help us look forward what can be seen
He'll be speaking at TNW Conference to bring us the chance
To listen and learn and get ready to advance
As we work together for a brighter tomorrow
We’ll look forward, not back, with no sorrow

#nickfoster #googlex #tnwconference #future #ode #poetry

http://thenextweb.com/news/why-the-future-wont-look-like-a-sci-fi-movie