[w39] Coding the brain, tech gap in Europe, and the limits of globalization

Hello, the second edition of the newsletter is out. Last week was tough, with Russia's escalation of the war, the UK's prime minister releasing a fishy "mini-package," and the stock markets coming to the lowest point in years, reflecting investors' fear of a global recession. Few things can energize me as much as learning, and this week had a good bunch of it.

The human brain. In the last edition, I mentioned MIT's The human brain course. Now I am halfway through, and here are some ideas worth entertaining:

• Specialization: Research found that different brain parts specialize in certain cognitive functions. That is, there is a part specific for face recognition, another for navigation, and another one for language. Would an artificial brain be composed of several independently trained systems, each with its function?

• Innate or Learned? Some of these functions are learned, but some are innate. In other words, there are functions in the brain that are like software designed during the subject's life and through experience. And other functions are like software that comes with the hardware. How to model innate vs. learned processes in code?

• Coding the brain. The approach suggested to cognitive science is to understand each of these functions in the brain so that we can write code that replicates it and run this code in another hardware. Isn't that cool?

Why trade couldn’t buy peace: If countries depend on each other for trade, does it make sense that they will start a war? Well, the common sense answer of liberal economics is no and, evidently, has been challenged in the last few months.

Securing Europe’s competitiveness: Addressing its technology gap. There is a lack of crucial technology capabilities (Cloud and Edge Computing, Quantum Computing, Applied AI, Automation, Connectedness, and Software 2.0) in Europe, leaving companies in the continent lagging behind their global peers. This is an exciting opportunity for technologists to join organizations and change this picture.

Platforms: being involved in the implementation side of many platforms, I am now looking into how boards reason and decide about them. MIT's course Managing Product Platforms: Delivering Variety and Realising Synergies gave me the framework to use. HBR's article A Study of More Than 250 Platforms Reveals Why Most Fail some stories.

Events & Courses

World Summit AI is coming in October, and I am looking forward to it for many reasons, one being the talk The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World by Iain McGilchrist.

Stanford's C330 Deep Multi-Task and Meta Learning. This will be my fourth course in the Stanford Graduate Program and one of the most awaited ones. It is about learning and combining the results of systems of neural networks.

MIT's MicroMasters Program in Finance started last week and focuses on modern concepts in the area of investments, corporate finance, and portfolio management.