Insights March 16th, 2018

In The Future of Blockchain-based Elections we look at Sierra Leone’s recent election, VW’s battery shock, a mind-uploading service, making music with machine learning, and Nikolas Badminton on surveillance technology in China.

Sierra Leone just ran the first blockchain-based election

The citizens of Sierra Leone went to the polls on March 7 but this time something was different: the country recorded votes at 70% of the polling to the blockchain using a technology that is the first of its kind in actual practice.
The tech, created by Leonardo Gammar of Agora, anonymously stored votes in an immutable ledger, thereby offering instant access to the election results.
“Anonymized votes/ballots are being recorded on Agora’s blockchain, which will be publicly available for any interested party to review, count and validate,” said Gammar. “This is the first time a government election is using blockchain technology.”
Read more at TechCrunch

VW Just Gave Tesla a $25 Billion Battery Shock

Volkswagen AG secured 20 billion euros ($25 billion) in battery supplies to underpin an aggressive push into electric cars in the coming years, ramping up pressure on Tesla Inc. as it struggles with production issues for the mainstream Model 3.

The world’s largest carmaker will equip 16 factories to produce electric vehicles by the end of 2022, compared with three currently, Volkswagen said Tuesday in Berlin. The German manufacturer’s plans to build as many as 3 million of the cars a year by 2025 is backstopped by deals with suppliers including Samsung SDI Co., LG Chem Ltd. and Contemporary Amperex Technology Ltd. for batteries in Europe and China.
Read more at Bloomberg

A startup is pitching a mind-uploading service that is “100 percent fatal”

Next week, at YC’s “demo days,” Nectome’s cofounder, Robert McIntyre, is going to describe his technology for exquisitely preserving brains in microscopic detail using a high-tech embalming process. Then the MIT graduate will make his business pitch. As it says on his website: “What if we told you we could back up your mind?”
Read more at MIT Technology Review

Making music using new sounds generated with machine learning

Here we see Doug from the Google Brain Team talk about Magenta. One project, NSynth Super, is an open source experimental instrument that gives musicians the ability to explore completely new sounds generated by the NSynth machine learning algorithm