Rise of the Machines: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Robots & Automation
Automating the Human Experience: How Technology Is Transforming and Challenging Our Humanity
Automation is no longer a future vision; it’s the present moment quietly reshaping everything from how we work and travel to how we think and feel. Artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics, and autonomous vehicles aren’t just tools, they’re participants in the human story. The question is: how do we ensure they make that story better?
The Machines Are Learning
At its core, machine learning is about optimization. These systems are trained to continually refine their internal logic in pursuit of the highest possible percentage of correct answers to a given set of problems. But in order to train the machine, the answers must first be known, humans set the boundaries, define the problems, and validate the outcomes.
That’s the irony of automation: it depends on us to teach it how to replace us.
AI and machine learning are now embedded across industries—marketing, finance, legal, logistics, making decisions faster and more accurately than any person could. The payoff is efficiency. The cost, however, is a growing distance between human intention and machine execution.
From Robots to CoBots
Automation isn’t limited to code. It’s moving into the physical world through robots and co-bots (collaborative robots that share workspace with humans).
In warehouses, Fetch Robotics, founded by Melonee Wise, builds mobile robots that work alongside people, retrieving goods, mapping floors, and managing logistics. Wise once said that if the average person still struggles to understand a web browser, adding robots to the equation is a usability mountain. Her point: the challenge isn’t just building technology—it’s building trust.
Meanwhile, Amazon continues to refine its fulfillment centers with autonomous systems that blur the line between human and machine labor. The choreography is astonishing—and unsettling.
The Road Ahead
Automation has wheels, too. Autonomous vehicles, from ride-sharing cars to long-haul freight trucks, are already on the road.
Companies like Waymo, Uber, GM, and Ford are competing to mass-produce self-driving cars. The scenarios are complex: population density, infrastructure, regulations, and cultural readiness all determine how fast we adopt them.
In freight, Uber Freight and Tesla are tackling an industry defined by driver shortages and rising costs. Driverless trucks could revolutionize supply chains—but they also raise questions about what happens to the millions of people who make their living behind the wheel.
At the University of Michigan’s MCity, engineers are simulating real-world traffic scenarios to test these vehicles in a controlled environment. It’s a reminder that innovation isn’t just about building—it’s about learning safely before scaling globally.
The Human Equation
Stephen Hawking once warned that “the automation of factories has already decimated jobs in traditional manufacturing, and the rise of artificial intelligence is likely to extend this job destruction deep into the middle classes, with only the most caring, creative or supervisory roles remaining.”
Elon Musk echoes that concern, calling AI “the biggest risk we face as a civilization.” He advocates for proactive regulation, before it’s too late.
Mark Zuckerberg, on the other hand, sees AI as essential progress: “I think people who are naysayers and try to drum up these doomsday scenarios... it’s really negative and in some ways pretty irresponsible.”
Three perspectives, one theme: the future of work and humanity is being redefined.
The Challenge
Automation’s effects on mankind are both profound and paradoxical.
Disadvantages:
- Shrinking workforce: Oxford predicts up to 47% of U.S. jobs could be lost to automation.
- Ethical dilemmas: How should a self-driving car choose between two bad outcomes?
- Infrastructure shifts: Who designs the road signs robots will read?
- Environmental and social consequences: As efficiency rises, so do new forms of waste and inequality.
Advantages:
- Higher productivity, quality, and consistency
- Lower costs and increased safety
- Predictive analytics that enable smarter decisions across sectors
- The challenge isn’t whether automation will happen—it’s whether we’ll evolve fast enough to guide it.
Transforming the Human Experience
At shark&minnow, we believe transformation begins with people. Technology should not replace the human experience—it should elevate it. That starts with principles designed not to resist automation, but to reclaim humanity within it:
- Vicarious Experience (Research & Empathy): Understand how people feel before you design what they’ll use.
- Appreciation (Enlightenment & Insight): See technology as a reflection of our values, not a substitute for them.
- Constellation (A Plan for Moving Forward): Connect ideas, data, and people toward a shared vision.
- Thoughtful Design: Make complexity invisible and humanity visible.
- Contagious Content: Spark conversation that connects people, not just algorithms.
- Global Citizenship: Use innovation to improve lives across communities, cultures, and continents.
Automation is inevitable. Humanity is optional. The future depends on which we choose to invest in.
The Chain Reaction: Why Blockchain Matters More Than You Think
You’ve probably heard the term blockchain thrown around in conversations about cryptocurrency or the next big thing in tech. But what is it really, and why should anyone outside Silicon Valley care?
At its core, blockchain is a digital ledger, a record of transactions that’s transparent, secure, and built to last. Unlike traditional databases that live on one central server, a blockchain is maintained by distributed databases, think of it as a global network of computers working together. Each one verifies and records transactions using cryptography (from the Greek word kryptós, meaning “hidden secret”).
These transactions are stored in blocks, each connected to the one before it, hence, a block chain. It’s a continuously growing, time-stamped record of everything that’s ever happened on that network.
So, why does this matter?
Because you can track anything, from its origin (genesis) to its current state, with absolute transparency. That makes blockchain an incredibly powerful tool for protecting both tangible and intangible assets, whether you’re dealing with money, medicine, or microgrids.
Let’s look at a few examples:
Financial Institutions
Money is the obvious one. The most famous blockchain application, of course, is Bitcoin. But beyond digital currency, banks and investment firms are exploring blockchain to speed up transactions, reduce fraud, and cut costs associated with intermediaries.
Wall Street
Imagine trading stocks without waiting days for settlement. Blockchain allows trades to clear almost instantly, with full traceability and security baked in.
Diamonds
Companies are using blockchain to trace the origin of diamonds, from the mine to the market, ensuring they’re conflict-free. Each gem gets a digital fingerprint, so you know exactly where it came from.
Smarter Business
IBM and others are experimenting with blockchain for contracts and supply chains, especially in industries like pharmaceuticals. By verifying every handoff along the way, blockchain improves efficiency and reduces the risk of counterfeit goods or lost shipments.
Walmart, for example, began testing blockchain with IBM back in 2016 to improve food safety and traceability. The pilot project, tracking pork in China, was so successful that Walmart later filed a patent to use blockchain for tracking delivery drones.
Smarter Cities
Dubai has an ambitious goal: to conduct most of its government business on blockchain. The idea is to make services more efficient and to attract global enterprise by simplifying record-keeping for trade and logistics. If Dubai succeeds, it could set the standard for how cities of the future operate.
Communications
In a world flooded with misinformation, blockchain can help authenticate sources, identify fake accounts, and restore trust in digital communication.
Energy
Blockchain is powering renewable energy marketplaces and microgrids, allowing communities to trade solar or wind energy directly, peer-to-peer, without the need for a utility middleman.
And this is just the beginning. Many of today’s most transformative technologies are built on open-source foundations, Linux, for example, powers everything from Android to MacOS. Blockchain, too, is an open framework, and that openness may prove to be its superpower.
One fascinating example comes from healthcare. A startup called Patientory is building a secure platform that lets patients and providers share medical data safely and efficiently. It’s a simple idea, give people control of their own health data, but it could completely change how care is delivered. The recent ransomware attacks on major health systems like the NHS show just how urgently this kind of innovation is needed.
In the end, blockchain isn’t just about Bitcoin or buzzwords. It’s about trust, something that’s been eroded in many of our institutions, markets, and systems. By making transactions transparent, verifiable, and permanent, blockchain gives us a way to rebuild that trust, one block at a time.
Unnumbered Sparks
The Technology
Unnumbered Sparks is an interactive art collaboration between artist Janet Echelman and Google creative director Aaron Koblin for TED 2014. The art installation and experience is made from ultralight fibers and hangs from a skyscraper over the water and walkways near the Vancouver Convention Center. According to a blog post by Google Creative Lab’s Jenny Ramaswamy, the interactive lighting “is actually one giant Chrome window, stretched across the 300-foot long sculpture with the help of five high-definition projectors…the result is a crowd-controlled visual experiment on a giant, floating canvas.”
The Creation
Urban Sounds
Mapping the world through sound. In a world dominated by visuals, Sonictravlog invites us to rediscover how we experience place, through sound. The mobile app transforms listening into exploration, allowing users to record, share, and experience the ambient textures of life from across the globe.
Each sound is geotagged and placed on an interactive map, creating a living archive of auditory snapshots. Street musicians in Lisbon, waves crashing in Okinawa, footsteps echoing through subway tunnels in New York, every recording becomes part of a collective symphony of place.
The app offers two ways to listen and create. Timer Mode acts as a personal sound diary, automatically capturing short clips over time to document the evolving rhythms of daily life. Navigate Mode transforms travel into collaboration, letting users record along specific routes, contribute to friends’ journeys, and compare how each ear perceives the same space.
Sonictravlog isn’t just a tool, it’s a new kind of travelogue. One where stories are told not through images or words, but through the universal, unfiltered language of sound.
Radiohead Releases PolyFauna App
Radiohead has never been a band content to simply release music, they build worlds. With PolyFauna, the group once again blurred the line between art, technology, and consciousness.
Developed in collaboration with design studio Universal Everything, PolyFauna is a mobile app inspired by the sessions for The King of Limbs and built around the sonic landscape of the song “Bloom.” It’s less a game or a traditional interactive experience, and more an ambient ecosystem, an evolving visual and auditory field that reacts to touch, motion, and presence.
Users explore an abstract environment of swirling forms, shifting colors, and organic soundscapes. Guided only by a floating red dot, the experience is meditative and surreal, a living sketch of Radiohead’s imagination rendered in code.
At its core, PolyFauna draws from early computer life experiments and the idea of subconscious creation. It’s an experiment in digital ecology, one where users don’t consume art, they inhabit it. The screen becomes a portal into a generative dream state, where every gesture ripples through a synthetic world built on rhythm and randomness.
While PolyFauna may not reach the narrative complexity of Björk’s Biophilia or the technical innovation of Arcade Fire’s Just a Reflektor, it stands apart in its quiet ambition. It’s not about control or achievement, but surrender, a reminder that in Radiohead’s universe, interaction is another form of listening.
Thom Yorke announced the launch of the app via a blog post on February 11th:
We have made an app called PolyFauna.
PolyFauna is an experimental collaboration between us (Radiohead) & Universal Everything, born out of The King of Limbs sessions and using the imagery and the sounds from the song Bloom.
It comes from an interest in early computer life-experiments and the imagined creatures of our subconscious.
Your screen is the window into an evolving world.
Move around to look around.
You can follow the red dot.
You can wear headphones.
ACTIONABLE!NSIGHTS
- Mash-up: Radiohead × Universal Everything
- Creative Medium: Music as interactive art
- Digital Behavior: Exploration as participation
- Experience Design: Generative environments
- Cultural Intersection: The subconscious meets code
The Pulse of a City
Pulse of the City is an interactive public art installation installed in five locations in Boston that turns pedestrians' heartbeats into music. It combines art, design and technology to promote the use and celebration of public space in an uplifting and imaginative way.
From the artist, George Zisiadis:
We designed music that would complement different heart rate levels. The unit detects your pulse and then an algorithm determines the best sounds to play for you. That music then plays in synchronization to the beat of your pulse and adapts in real-time. The result is music from your heart!
Release Early, Often, and with Rap Music
“How much impact can you have with the least lines of code – that was important to hackers. But I think that same kind of thinking applies to making anything ... I think it can be applied to any creative pursuit.” - Evan Roth
We have been fans of Evan Roth for a few years now, projects like the open source music video for "Brooklyn Go Hard" by Jay Z and The EyeWriter have opened our eyes to the great cultural impact technology and digital experiences can have on the individual, and the world.
Artists are Hackers
Check out the Ideas Worth Spreading or #pirateTED project from Evan Roth's collective, Free Art & Technology Lab (F.A.T.).
Brooklyn Go Hard
The EyeWriter
However, it was the article "Evan Roth: the badass artist hacking popular culture" by The Guardian, that reminded us why he has been so prolific, and successful at changing the world around us - hacking. Hacking is a mindset, a way of mashing up seemingly unrelated ideas and creating something new that minimizes friction or effort, providing alternative cultural perspectives or solutions to problems. We have called this mindset of divergent thinking The Mashup Class, however it was born of the open source movement.
“For me [open source] ideas really resonated outside of just making software,” Roth says. He subscribes wholeheartedly to the idea of maximizing cultural impact with the least amount of effort – an idea that came from code." - Evan Roth
This also made us think more about the industry we work in, advertising and marketing, and how it is broken. Specifically, a presentation our dear friend, Gareth Kay, Chief Strategy Officer at Goodby Silverstein & Partners, shared at Cannes Lions 2013. In order for our industry to thrive, Gareth argues that we must move beyond advertising, and become hackers.
A Stark Warning to the Advertising Industry
This has been the obvious path for all advertising and marketing professionals, however very few have realized how to change relative to the world around them, instead they have complained. More frustrating, is the fact that they didn't even apply their own expertise (i.e. creative problem solving) to their own industry to foresee the dramatic shift, or even react. The world needs less mad men and more creative problem solvers. Now, let's get to work.
Making Big Data Small
Living in a digital world, we track everything. From the miles we run with MapMyRun to calories burned with Nike+ to how we sleep with Jawbone Up. But that's just the passive data generated from life, that doesn't even begin to describe the mass amounts of data that fill our everyday lives, from stock prices, product sales, climate change and beyond. Data becomes even more cumbersome as we start to consider all the meta-data. However, data is amazing. We have the opportunity to track and monitor data, and then translate these complex data sets into valuable information that provide insight, and guide our future decisions and behavior. By making big data small, we can begin to see the world around us in new ways. Below are a few of our favorite TEDTalks that simplify big data and highlight the beauty of insight.
Hans Rosling
"The best stats you've ever seen."
Deb Roy
"The birth of a word."
Aaron Koblin
"Visualizing ourselves ... with crowd-sourced data."
Jean-Baptiste Michel & Erez Lieberman Aiden
"What we learned from 5 million books."
David McCandless
"The beauty of data visualization."
Shyam Sankar
"The rise of human-computer cooperation."
Nate Silver
"Does racism affect how you vote?"
Jamie Heywood
"The big idea my brother inspired."
Malte Spitz
"Your phone company is watching."
Chris Jordan
"Turning powerful stats into art."
IBM Watson at Your Service. One Step Closer to Passing the Turing Test.
IBM has recently unveiled the IBM Watson Engagement Advisor, "a technology breakthrough that allows brands to crunch big data in record time to transform the way they engage clients in key functions such as customer service, marketing and sales." Brands such as the Royal Bank of Canada and market research organizations such as Nielsen, are taking notice.
According to IBM:
The IBM Watson Engagement Advisor is a first of a kind system designed to help customer-facing personnel assist consumers with deeper insights more quickly than previously possible. Delivered through cloud-delivered services and online chat sessions, IBM Watson will empower a brand's customer service agents to provide fast, data-driven answers, or sit directly in the hands of consumers via mobile device. In one simple click, the solution's "Ask Watson" feature will quickly help address customers' questions, offer feedback to guide their purchase decisions, and troubleshoot their problems.
Watch out Apple, Google and Microsoft; the IBM Watson Engagement Advisor is now infringing on your territory for voice recognition and artificial intelligence technology. Who will beat the Turing Test first?
For me, the great opportunity is not only in augmenting the customer experience, but also analyzing it, revealing frustrations, pain points and also opportunities to improve the experience as customers interact with the digital interface. Further, organizing data and allowing users to access it conveniently and learn quickly is immensely important.
According to IBM:
“Around the globe and across platforms, Nielsen provides insights into what consumers watch and buy—helping marketers engage with their customers in the smartest possible way," said Randall Beard, Global Head, Advertiser Solutions for Nielsen. "Our work with IBM’s Watson is the latest from the Nielsen Innovation Lab, founded to advance research in advertising effectiveness. Watson's unique capacity to uncover insights from Big Data by simply posing a question in natural language is incredibly powerful. Using Watson, we will explore the ways we can help agencies and their client brands more effectively engage with consumers across devices and improve the impact of their advertising and media plans.”
The race has begun. Who will develop a world-class solution to not only organize big data sets and make information intuitively accessible, but also provide an interface that can pass the Turing test? Only then will a victor be crowned.
Beat 2012
DJ Mark Ronson will be traveling the world to meet up-and-coming athletes in order to intentionally record their passively generated music, or record the sounds they make when they compete in their sport.
I'm a huge fan of intentionally passive music composition, it's absolutely brilliant and always inspires me. I hope this inspires you as well. This anthem will be created for Coca-Cola in preparation for the summer Olympics in London. The track will be used in advertising, but I think the documentary, directed by Kim Gehrig, will be much more interesting.