Good Day! This is my weekly newsletter, with a dose of insights into the future. The topic of this newsletter is the exponential times we live in, hence the title of f(x) = e^x, which is the (natural) exponential function.

You can visit The Digital Speaker to book me as a keynote speaker for your next event or to hire me as a future tech coach for your CEO. I have also published my trend predictions for 2022, and I am giving away20 free copies of my new book: Step into the Metaverse - last chance to register!

What are the Dangers of the Metaverse?

My latest article:

Technology is neutral. It can bring prosperity to humanity or bring pain and destruction to society. The metaverse will not be any different. We can expect any of the crimes committed in the real world to take place, and potentially explode, on the immersive internet.

As a species, we have gotten very good at moving fast and breaking things but less capable at going slow and thinking first. Just like the current internet has caused a flood of problems, we can expect the metaverse to be the same or even see the current problems extrapolated.

The challenges in the metaverse will be plentiful. Therefore, we need to think carefully about avoiding making the same mistakes as we did when building Web 2.0 and focus on building an open, safe metaverse.

Three Useful Nuggets of Information

My weekly tips from around the web to get you thinking.

1. The 'Benjamin Button' effect - can we reverse aging? 🐁

The molecular biologist David Sinclair is working hard on turning aging into a disease that can be cured, and he has already done so with mice. Next will be humans. (CNN)

2. How decentralized and trustless is Bitcoin really?

The founding principles are not standing the test of time as researchers find out that the cryptocurrency is not egalitarian, decentralized and anonymous, as suggested, something I wrote about in 2017. (NY Times)

3. Robots are taking over factories in South Korea 🤖

A law meant to be a triumph for workers' safety had the opposite effect in South Korea, with factories replacing humans with robots as they fear lawsuits. (Rest of world)

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