Smarter Insights, Faster

'Synthetic Minds' continues to reflect the synthetic forces reshaping our world. This week’s Synthetic Minds covers your personal AI research layer, robot cannibals, fake floods, tiny teams, and alien physics.

After a nice holiday break, I am back and I have some exciting updates coming your way, including my new book!

ChatGPT-4.5's joke of the week:

If robots start eating each other for upgrades, does that make tech support… cannibal cuisine?

Futurwise: Smarter Insights, Faster

My Latest App:

🚨 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗳𝘂𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗶𝘀𝗻’𝘁 𝗱𝗿𝗼𝘄𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗶𝗻 𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗮. 𝗜𝘁’𝘀 𝗱𝘆𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗱𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻. Excited to announce the launch of our my project, Futurwise!

We don’t need more content, we need clarity. That’s why Nick Gage and I built Futurwise: to help leaders, learners, and creators get smarter insights, faster.

📊 We produce 402 million terabytes of data every 24 hours. 83% of knowledge workers say it’s just too much. And it’s not just annoying, it’s costing us $1 trillion/year in lost productivity, bad decisions, and burnout.

That ends today. Time to outsmart your peers.

Introducing Futurwise—the intelligence layer for trusted information. One click. One summary. In your tone, your language, your learning style. It’s like having a personal AI research assistant who gets you.

🎯 Save a 2.5-hour YouTube podcast. Get the insights in seconds. 📚 Bookmark an academic paper. Get a summary tailored to your brain. 🌍 Read content in 25+ languages—because wisdom shouldn’t be locked behind English.

This is more than tech. It’s a shift in how we process reality. From noise to signal. From stress to strategy. Let’s build a future where intelligence is a choice, and you choose how deep to go.

🔗 Get Started on Futurwise.com. Take back your time.

Synthetic Snippets from the World's Best Futurist

Quick, curated insights to feed your quest for a better understanding of our evolving synthetic future. The below is just a small selection of my daily updates that I share via The Digital Speaker app.

1. 800M USERS, 15% TRAFFIC DROP: AI'S GREAT CONTENT HEIST

AI is quietly gutting the web’s business model. As Google’s AI overviews hijack attention, 69% of news searches end without clicks. Health sites have lost 31% of traffic, science 10%, reference 15%. Reddit traded its data, then lost $20 billion. Publishers scramble; some sue, others tax bots. But when machines do the reading and humans disengage, who’s left to pay for the truth? (The Economist)

2. SEVEN TEAMS. 100 PEOPLE. $200 MILLION IN REVENUE

Seven-person teams are now outpacing seven-hundred-person departments. At the AI Engineer World’s Fair, Shawn Wang showcased a revolution: tiny, AI-augmented teams generating millions in ARR. Gamma serves 50M users with 30 people. Bolt.new hit $20M in 60 days with 15. These “small tribes” automate ops, skip meetings, and chase only the critical 10%. The org chart isn’t shrinking—it’s flipping upside down. Are we seeing efficiency… or obsolescence? (Latent Space)

3. ROBOTS THAT EAT ROBOTS: COLUMBIA'S CANNIBALISTIC BREAKTHROUGH

Robots can now eat each other to survive. At Columbia, modular bots called Truss Links self-assemble, adapt, and, when damaged, repair themselves by cannibalizing weaker units. This isn’t just clever design; it’s synthetic metabolism. Inspired by biology, these machines blur the boundary between organism and object. As robots evolve, self-heal, and self-sustain, the question shifts: are we building tools—or laying the foundations for a new species? (Discover Magazine)

4. 18,000 LIKES FOR FAKE FLOOD RESCUES: AI'S NICHE NIGHTMARE

18,000 people cheered LSU’s football coach for rescuing flood victims—except it never happened. Welcome to AI-generated unreality. One operator, hundreds of slop pages, and algorithmic precision now tailor fake heroics to your interests. These stories aren’t accidents; they’re engineered mirrors of what you want to believe. When truth is optional and virality is profitable, who’s curating your reality, and how would you even know? (404 Media)

5. AI DESIGNED A PHYSICS EXPERIMENT SO BIZARRE, THOUSANDS OF SCIENTISTS MISSED IT FOR 40 YEARS

LIGO took $1.1 billion and decades of genius to detect gravitational waves. An AI just made it 15% better, with designs so chaotic, physicists called them “alien.” From Caltech to China, AI is now reinventing experiments, rediscovering obscure theories, and outperforming Nobel-worthy minds. It finds patterns we can’t see, solves equations we can’t write, and doesn’t care why it works. Are we still scientists, or machine apprentices? (Quanta Magazine)

Bring the World's Best Futurist to Your Next Event – Let’s Talk!

We’re entering a world where intelligence is synthetic, reality is augmented, and the old rules no longer apply. In my upcoming book, Now What? How to Ride the Tsunami of Change, I explore how exponential technologies aren’t just disrupting industries, they’re reshaping how we work, collaborate, and create value. I offer a practical, CEO-ready framework that helps visionary organizations embrace disruption, turning it from threat to strategic advantage. Ready to ride the wave? Just hit reply, and let’s start the conversation.

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— Mark