Thinking On Paper Technology Podcast

Eight billion uses of augmented reality happen on Snapchat every day. Salesforce uses AR to onboard new staff. In this episode, Thinking on Paper looks at what those two realities say about augmented reality in 2026.Michael Guerin, CEO of Imvizar, starts in the post–Pokémon Go era. Snapchat delivers AR at massive scale, yet most users never label it as augmented reality. If you use Instagram or Snapchat, you already use AR through lenses and filters. The technology works because it sits inside existing behaviour rather than announcing itself.Salesforce reaches the same outcome through a different route. Guerin explains how AR replaces slide-heavy onboarding with a shared, QR-led experience. New hires move through the building, absorb the culture in context, and retain more than they would from another presentation.This approach rests on what Guerin calls spatial storytelling.AR now shows up in brand activations, tourist sites, museums, and sporting events, but quality depends on process. Guerin starts with the site, then designs user movement. He places visuals, plans interaction, and writes narrative last. AR fails when it behaves like static video. It succeeds when movement and place carry the experience.Imvizar sees its strongest results in museums and tourism. Guerin describes work at Spike Island, a former Irish prison, where AR places visitors inside scenes from the site’s past and draws emotional response directly from the space.Please enjoy the show.Stay curious.Keep Thinking on Paper.Mark and JeremyPS: 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 podcast⁠Follow us on ⁠Instagram⁠Follow us on ⁠X⁠Follow Mark on ⁠LinkedIn⁠Follow Jeremy on ⁠LinkedIn⁠Read our ⁠Substack⁠Email: [email protected](00:00) The Story of Augmented Reality(03:46) Snapchat & AR Post-Pokemon Go(06:24) Snoop Dogg In A Wine Bottle(08:12) Salesforce AR(13:13) What Is Digital Storytelling?(17:07) AR In Tourism(18:25) Designing The Spike Island AR Experience(22:49) How To Do AR Well(26:26) Meta, AI And AR Glasses (29:40) Privacy(32:33) Mark's Terrible Thought Experiment(33:58) What do we want humans to be?

Every Technology podcast predicts the future. For the last episode of 2025, Thinking On Paper is going backwards. And it's not even our own work, like Open AI scraping the internet for IP, we're borrowing (stealing) the learnings of Tom Whitwell.Tom is a reformed journalist, reformed consultant and now designs electronic musical instruments. He wrote this blog on the 52 things he learned in 2025: https://medium.com/@tomwhitwell/52-things-i-learned-in-2025-edeca7e3fdd8We choose our favourite lessons across AI, energy, labor, culture, psychology, and... checks notes... shrimps.Some are encouraging. (air pollution deaths falling).Some are weird. (the economics of human blood products).Most sit somewhere in-between.Please enjoy the show.And remember: Stay curious. Be disruptive. Keep Thinking on Paper.Cheers, Mark & JeremyPS: Please subscribe. It’s the best way you can help other curious minds find our channel.Think On Paper with us: ⁠Listen to every podcast⁠Follow us on ⁠Instagram⁠Follow us on ⁠X⁠Follow Mark on ⁠LinkedIn⁠Follow Jeremy on ⁠LinkedIn⁠Read our ⁠Substack⁠Email: [email protected](00:00) Disruptors & Curious Minds(01:15) Deaths From Air Pollution(01:56) UK Tax Breaks Via Farms(02:29) Meteorite Radio Stations(04:03) Turn Mercury Into Gold(06:10) Manipulative AI Apps For Nurses(07:43) Bin Laden's Casio Watch(08:31) Radioactive Shrimps(08:53) Apple's Air Demo Cock-Up(10:10) Does Jeremy Wear Crocs?(11:13) What Is Raw Dogging(12:00) Human Blood Products(12:36) Relaxed Mowing(13:20) Bugles At Funerals(13:55) Robot Hands Need Fingernails(14:40) First Names Affect Your Job(15:27) Retrospect VHS(16:04) Attractive Servers Earn More(17:21) Hong Kong Phone Service(17:33) McDonald's Loses First Place(19:26) Shrimp Farming(20:35) Peanut Allergies are Falling(20:55) The Serial Killer Epidemic(21:17) Namibian Politics(21:50) Big Doors In LA(22:40) Escape Your Mind With Writing (23:43) HP Printer Ineptitude(24:25) British Chaos(25:20) Thank You Tom Whitwell

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 podcast⁠Follow us on ⁠Instagram⁠Follow us on ⁠X⁠Follow Mark on ⁠LinkedIn⁠Follow Jeremy on ⁠LinkedIn⁠Read our ⁠Substack⁠Email: [email protected]

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 podcast⁠Follow us on ⁠Instagram⁠Follow us on ⁠X⁠Follow Mark on ⁠LinkedIn⁠Follow Jeremy on ⁠LinkedIn⁠Read our ⁠Substack⁠Email: [email protected]

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 & JeremyPS: Please subscribe. It’s the best way you can help other curious minds find our channel.--Take your Technology thinking beyond.⁠Listen to every podcast⁠Follow us on ⁠Instagram⁠Follow us on ⁠X⁠Follow Mark on ⁠LinkedIn⁠Follow Jeremy on ⁠LinkedIn⁠Read our ⁠Substack⁠Email: [email protected] On YouTube: 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?