The Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Stockholm witnessed 2400 individuals and 160 companies from 90 different nations signing a pledge suggesting they will “neither participate in nor support the development, manufacture, trade or use of lethal autonomous weapons”. Notable companies such as Deepmind and Xprize were among the list that signed the pledge. The move comes at a time when workers at internet giants have begun expressing concerns over government contracts that will use AI for warfare. Notable among these is Project Maven from Google that helps the US military detect drone images. Amazon and Microsoft have also been providing facial recognition technology to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Given that these are only ‘pledges’ and its actual enforcement or impact on policy may see multiple challenges, there's good reason to be sceptical of the results of these initiatives. For now, we can see it as an interesting move towards making more people aware about the risks involved in governments pursuing AI for weapons development. 

The internet may be contributing to global warming. According to John Harris’ piece in The Guardian, about 70% of the world’s online traffic passes through Loudoun County in the United States. Over 3000 tech companies base their server infrastructure in the region due to low susceptibility to natural disasters and competitive electricity prices. The power company powering this infrastructure sources close to 97% of its energy from resources such as coal, gas and nuclear power. The story remains the same for most cloud first server providers such as AWS and Azure. Although there have been initiatives from Google, Facebook and Microsoft to move towards greener infrastructure, a lot remains to be done to enable this transition. More on the matter in this piece in The Guardian.

One could argue that “freemium” has been the foundation upon which many internet businesses have been built upon in the past. First pioneered by Gillette in 19th century, the model involves giving users a product for free ( a razor in the case of Gillette) and charging users for added services ( i.e -blades). The model is common across enterprises of all sizes and nature - be it telephone carriers or internet based entities such as Dropbox. In the token economy, airdrops do the function of on-boarding users with a free token and giving users a reason to engage with platforms. This practice that enabled many internet behemoths such as Evernote and MailChimp in Web 2.0 may well have great utility as start-ups set out to build the decentralised web. Learn more about how network effects can accelerate user acquisition in freemium models here.