Thinking On Paper Technology Podcast

The Dangerous Illusion of Seemingly Conscious AI │ Mustafa Suleyman on Why Appearance Is the Threat

The machines do not need to wake up. The risk is the illusion of seemingly conscious AI. When a generative AI system convincingly claims subjective experience, humans have no reliable way to disprove it. Consciousness is inferred, trust and emotional attachment fabricated. And the weak and susceptible get seduced by the illusion. The danger is not a rogue superintelligence. It is a benign chatbot optimized for empathy, memory, and persuasion, interacting with people who are psychologically vulnerable and primed to believe what feels real. This short Thinking On Paper episode is taken from our reading of Mustafa Suleyman’s - Microsoft AI CEO - essay on seemingly conscious AI. Please enjoy the show.  And if you like what you hear, tell someone.  Cheers, Mark and Jeremy -- Other ways to connect with us: * ⁠Listen to every podcast⁠ [https://www.thinkingonpaper.xyz/] * Follow us on ⁠Instagram⁠ [https://www.instagram.com/thinkingonpaperpodcast/] * Follow us on ⁠X⁠ [https://x.com/thinkonpaperpod] * Follow Mark on ⁠LinkedIn⁠ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/markfielding99/] * Follow Jeremy on ⁠LinkedIn⁠ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremygilbertson/] * Read our ⁠Substack⁠ [https://disruptorsandcuriousminds.substack.com/] Email: hello@thinkingonpaper.xyz [hello@thinkingonpaper.xyz]

Quantum Computing Will Eat The World │ Joe Fitzsimons, Horizon Quantum

Quantum computing doesn’t make computers a bit faster. It changes what’s possible. In this short episode, Joe Fitzsimons explains why quantum progress is so hard to grasp. Each additional qubit doubles the difficulty of simulating a system on classical machines, while the size of quantum processors has been scaling faster as industry accelerates development.  Put those together and you get growth that quickly breaks everyday intuition. Joe grounds it with comparisons: early computers didn’t just speed up arithmetic, they unlocked tasks you could never complete by hand. Quantum computing, he argues, brings the same discombobulating level of impact. Other ways to connect with us: * ⁠Listen to every podcast⁠ [https://www.thinkingonpaper.xyz/] * Follow us on ⁠Instagram⁠ [https://www.instagram.com/thinkingonpaperpodcast/] * Follow us on ⁠X⁠ [https://x.com/thinkonpaperpod] * Follow Mark on ⁠LinkedIn⁠ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/markfielding99/] * Follow Jeremy on ⁠LinkedIn⁠ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremygilbertson/] * Read our ⁠Substack⁠ [https://disruptorsandcuriousminds.substack.com/] * Email: hello@thinkingonpaper.xyz [hello@thinkingonpaper.xyz]

Making Music Got Easy. Taste (And Maths) Matter More Than Ever │ Nicholas Ponari

When making music took heartbreak, a thousand late nights and bleeding fingers, effort, passion and belief took the rare few musicians to the top of the charts. Now AI lets anyone write a song, taste becomes more vital than it ever was. And it was always pretty important. But that's only part of the new reality of the music industry. In today’s show, Mark and Jeremy Think On Paper with Nicholas Ponari - investor, guitar player, and Chief Operating Officer at Overtune - about how to credit the right musicians, how the bass player, drummer and producer get paid and how AI musicians can exist alongside human melody makers. Nicholas also explains the vector mathematics of Overtune (https://www.overtune.com/) - convert stems into vectors in high-dimensional space, measure the “distance” between inputs and outputs, and use those weightings to decide who contributed what, who gets paid, and where influence stops being meaningful enough to count. Please enjoy the show. And remember: Stay curious. Be disruptive. Keep Thinking on Paper. Cheers, Mark & Jeremy PS: Please subscribe. It’s the best way you can help other curious minds find our channel. -- Take your Technology thinking beyond. * ⁠Listen to every podcast⁠ [https://www.thinkingonpaper.xyz/] * Follow us on ⁠Instagram⁠ [https://www.instagram.com/thinkingonpaperpodcast/] * Follow us on ⁠X⁠ [https://x.com/thinkonpaperpod] * Follow Mark on ⁠LinkedIn⁠ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/markfielding99/] * Follow Jeremy on ⁠LinkedIn⁠ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremygilbertson/] * Read our ⁠Substack⁠ [https://disruptorsandcuriousminds.substack.com/] * Email: hello@thinkingonpaper.xyz [hello@thinkingonpaper.xyz] Watch On YouTube: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsu7DjLyYFM] TIMESTAMPS: (00:00) Trailer (00:59) Why music feels like “magic” (04:51) Overtune’s real customer: vocalists who can’t produce (07:51) The hard problem: attribution, not “make a song” (08:05) Why the easy button fails (12:49) Training on licensed music and where the ethics line sits (16:08) Who gets paid: splits, volume, and realistic expectations (18:32) How attribution actually works: vectors, thresholds, and cutoffs (20:44) Can scraped music ever be fixed after the fact (27:07) Interactive music, live coding, and the future of performance (29:14) The Kevin Kelly question: what do we want humans to be?

The EV Battery Wars: China Vs America And The Fight For The Electric Stack │ Magnets, Oil And Tesla

China controls every Tesla, drone and electric toothbrush. Why? Because it produces over half of the world’s lithium-ion batteries and more than 90% of all neodymium magnets. They are the core ingredient in Teslas, drones, robots, and every electric motor you interact with daily.  China also mines 70% of global rare earths and processes 85–90% of them. The Electric Stack is Chinese.  In this episode of Thinking on Paper, Mark and Jeremy read Packy McCormick’s Not Boring Essay: The Electric Slide to understand the history, economics and technology of the electric stack. Because if it can go electric, it will go electric.  The story of the Electric Stack - and the slide -  begins in 1973 with the oil crisis. Everyone’s favourite oil company, Exxon, funded early lithium battery research by Stan Whittingham. Stan’s batteries exploded.  Enter John B Goodenough, the man with the best name in technology. He has a voltage breakthrough. Akira Yoshino joins the show and stabilises the technology further. Sony get a whiff and use them to shrink the Handycam. It’s the Alpha product that makes lithium-ion batteries a global product and a commercial goldmine. Elon Musk and Tesla take up the EV mantle. Tesla’s early cell-pack experiments, coupled with Panasonic’s partnership accelerate the progress. Battery maker A123 in the United States collapses. China eventually acquire it for a fraction of its value.  The Beijing Olympics becomes a turning point: BYD test large battery systems in buses across the city, gaining a lead that CATL and BYD still hold today. Then come the magnets. Neodymium magnets were discovered in 1983 in parallel by Masato Sagawa in Japan and John Croat at GM. They powered the boom in hard drives, then drones, then the emerging humanoid robotics market.  Today, China produces nearly all of them. America is playing catch-up, does it stand a chance? Please enjoy the show. And remember: Stay curious. Be disruptive. Keep Thinking on Paper. Cheers, Mark & Jeremy PS: Please subscribe. It’s the best way you can help other curious minds find our channel. -- Other ways to connect with us: * ⁠Listen to every podcast⁠ [https://www.thinkingonpaper.xyz/] * Follow us on ⁠Instagram⁠ [https://www.instagram.com/thinkingonpaperpodcast/] * Follow us on ⁠X⁠ [https://x.com/thinkonpaperpod] * Follow Mark on ⁠LinkedIn⁠ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/markfielding99/] * Follow Jeremy on ⁠LinkedIn⁠ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremygilbertson/] * Read our ⁠Substack⁠ [https://disruptorsandcuriousminds.substack.com/] * Email: hello@thinkingonpaper.xyz [hello@thinkingonpaper.xyz] -- Timestamps (00:00) The Electric Stack (02:13) Beginnings: War, The Oil Crisis & Stan Whittingham (03:46) The Song Handycam: Lateral Thinking With Withered Technology (05:06) Tesla, Elon And Handycam Batteries In An EV (06:46) China Buys US Battery Company A-123 At A Carboot Sale (08:40) China, The Olympics And The Serendipity of Battery Technology (11:37) Faraday And The Birth Of Neodymium Magnets (14:26) The 3.5 Inch Neodymium Magnet Alpha Product (16:46) Magnequench (18:16) Drones, Ukraine And The Magnet War Machine (20:16) Politics, Rare Earths And 'The Future's Too Important' T-shirts

Americans Can’t Afford Homes: The Broken Housing Model and the Case for Stable Living │ Chris Moeller

The median US income is $68,000. Only 13% of the US workforce earns a salary; everyone else is paid by the hour or hustling in the gig economy. The median home price is $440,000.  Housing is unaffordable because the system is built to extract value rather than create stability. “Affordable housing” is a great idea. But flawed. It relies on outdated subsidies, wage assumptions that no longer hold, and ownership models that extract rather than stabilise.  Chris Moeller joins Mark and Jeremy to Think on Paper about an alternative: stable living. Stable living is a model built on long-term security instead of short-term yield. It separates land from structures, brings ownership back to residents, and uses impact capital, industrialised construction, and better coordination technology to rebuild the fundamentals. Please enjoy the show. And remember: Stay curious. Be disruptive. Keep Thinking on Paper. Cheers, Mark & Jeremy PS: Please subscribe. It’s the best way you can help other curious minds find our channel. -- Other ways to connect with us: * ⁠Listen to every podcast⁠ [https://www.thinkingonpaper.xyz/] * Follow us on ⁠Instagram⁠ [https://www.instagram.com/thinkingonpaperpodcast/] * Follow us on ⁠X⁠ [https://x.com/thinkonpaperpod] * Follow Mark on ⁠LinkedIn⁠ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/markfielding99/] * Follow Jeremy on ⁠LinkedIn⁠ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremygilbertson/] * Read our ⁠Substack⁠ [https://disruptorsandcuriousminds.substack.com/] * Email: hello@thinkingonpaper.xyz [hello@thinkingonpaper.xyz] -- Timestamps (00:00) Trailer (03:19) Challenges of Homeownership (05:46) The Housing Market Dynamics (08:29) Technology's Role in Housing Solutions (10:41) Innovations in Construction (12:29) Financing Housing for All (15:06) Reimagining Ownership Models (16:30) Technology's Role in Food Access and Coordination (18:43) Adaptive Reuse in Real Estate and Community Development (19:58) Commercial Real Estate Challenges Post-COVID (23:15) Infrastructure Needs for Sustainable Living (25:31) Global Community and Local Solutions (26:45) Stable Living for Civil Servants and Community Heroes (28:20) Creating Stability and Long-Term Impact