Will teacherbots applied with artificial intelligence be doing our job one day? Will they do it better than us? Jude Barback takes stock of some of the recent thinking around the future of education.
Continue reading… “Should we make way for the teacherbots?”
Nearly half of all public buses will be electric by 2025 and China will emerge as the market leader.
All over the world, municipalities are making a push for cleaner buses.
Continue reading… “Almost half of all buses will be electric by 2025”
A section of the electronic skin developed by scientists at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Biomedicine just took another leap forward. University of Colorado Boulder scientists created so-called electronic skin—e-skin for short. The e-skin is a thin, semi-transparent material that can act like your skin through measuring temperature, pressure, humidity and air flow. The new material, which was detailed in a study published Friday in Science Advances,could make better prosthetics, improve the safety of robots in the future and aid development of other biomedical devices.
Continue reading… “Biomedicine: Self-Healing, Recyclable Electronic Skin”
By Deb Frey: City jobs will be lost to automation earlier than those in the wider job market, new research reveals.
The first wave of automation arriving in the next two to three years will hit financial and professional services hardest compared to other industries, according to the analysis of more than 200,000 jobs across 26 counties by PwC.
Continue reading… “Robots are coming for financial services jobs first”
Clinically, we understand death to mean the state that takes hold after our hearts stop beating. Blood circulation comes to a halt, we don’t breathe, our brains shut down—and that’s what divides the states we occupy from one moment (alive) to the next (dead).
In Altered Carbon, the body no longer matters. As one character quipped: “You shed it like a snake sheds its skin.” That’s because the human consciousness has been digitized, and can be moved between bodies—both real and synthetic.
Continue reading… “Will we ever be able to upload a mind to a new body?”
Think that human augmentation is still decades away? Think again.
Continue reading… “World leaders just decided that the next step in AI is augmenting humans”
Anca Dragan has a cool name, an impressive CV and an important job. While many roboticists focus on making AI better, faster and smarter, Dragan is also concerned about robot quality control. In anticipation of robots moving into every area of our lives, she wants to ensure our interactions with robots are positive ones. The computer scientist and robotics engineer is a principal investigator with UC Berkeley’s Center for Human-Compatible AI. “One particular area of interest is the problem of value alignment,” says Dragan. “How do you ensure that an artificially intelligent agent–be it a robot a few years from now or a much more capable agent in the future–how do you make sure that these agents optimize the right objectives? How do we teach them to optimize what we actually want optimized?”
Continue reading… “Keeping robots friendly: Meet the woman teaching AI about human values”
Electric cars won’t only be good for the environment — they’ll be good for your power-hungry tendencies, too. As per a new report from the New York Times, companies are looking to turn away from the traditional 12-volt systems to provide the juice for these cars of the future, and looking to a 48-volt standard instead.
Continue reading… “48-volt systems could be the new standard in the future’s vehicles”
Stuart Anderson and his son Cedar have invented a new bee hive which collects honey via taps and without having to disturb the bees.
Three years ago, a father and son in Australia finally unveiled a device they had spent a decade inventing: a beehive that releases honey via a tap, without needing to handle the bees.
Consumer Reports reported that Samsung and Roku Smart TVs were vulnerable to hacking through a web-based attack.
Millions of smart TVs sitting in family living rooms are vulnerable to hackers taking control — and could be tracking the household’s personal viewing habits much more closely than their owners realize, according to a new Consumer Reports investigation.
Continue reading… “Your smart TV is watching you watching TV, Consumer Reports finds”
By delving into the futuring techniques of Futurist Thomas Frey, you’ll embark on an enlightening journey.
Learn More about this exciting program.