2019 – Page 85 – Impact Lab

World leaders at Davos call for global rules on tech

February 2, 2019

DAVOS, Switzerland — Leaders of Japan, South Africa, China and Germany issued a series of calls on Wednesday for global oversight of the tech sector, in a clear signal of growing international interest in seizing greater regulatory supervision of an industry led by the United States.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan said his country would use its chairmanship of the Group of 20 nations this year to push forward a new international system for the oversight of how data is used. Data governance will be the theme when the group’s presidents and prime ministers gather in June in Osaka for their annual summit meeting.

The emphasis will be on expanding World Trade Organization rules to encompass trade in data as well as goods and services, he said. “I would like Osaka G20 to be long remembered as the summit that started worldwide data governance,” Mr. Abe said in a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

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Engineering, Environment, Inventions

Undersea basecamp for ocean explorers

February 2, 2019

New submersible “tent” lets divers nap, eat, and decompress beneath the waves

SINCE THE DAWN of the modern SCUBA age ushered in by Jacques Cousteau in the early 1940s, ocean explorers have been seeking new ways to stay under the sea for longer stretches. Restricted by tank size and human physiology under pressure, SCUBA divers must periodically come up for air, sometimes within just minutes of hitting bottom.

Enter the Ocean Space Habitat, conceived of as sort of underwater “basecamp.”

Designed and recently patented by National Geographic explorer Michael Lombardi and Winslow Burleson, an associate professor at New York University, the inflatable Ocean Space Habitat is a portable life-support system for divers who want to go deeper and stay longer than conventional SCUBA allows.

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Alternative Transportation, Automobiles, Aviation, Boeing, Science & Technology News, Transportation, Uber

12 awesome flying cars and taxis currently in development

January 31, 2019

These flying cars want to take your commute to new heights

We were promised that the future would bring flying cars, right? We were. And the good news is that tech entrepreneurs around the world are finally getting started on creating what are commonly known as VTOL (Vertical Take-Off and Landing, pronounced vee-toll) vehicles designed at car size.

Of course, no one is ready for flying cars quite yet. There’s no infrastructure to support them, and a whole new set of auto laws would have to be drawn up to regulate them (like personal drones, but a thousand times worse). The first commercial VTOLs we will see won’t be hanging out at the local auto dealer—they’ll be taxi services built to shuttle people from part of a city to another.

Here’s all the current projects that want to put you in the seat of a flying car.

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Analysis, Automobiles, Driverless cars, Driverless vehicles

A study on driverless car ethics offers a troubling look into our values

January 31, 2019

To figure out how autonomous vehicles should respond during potentially fatal collisions, a group of scientists set out to learn what decisions human drivers would make.

The first time Azim Shariff met Iyad Rahwan—the first real time, after communicating with him by phone and e-mail—was in a driverless car. It was November, 2012, and Rahwan, a thirty-four-year-old professor of computing and information science, was researching artificial intelligence at the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology, a university in Abu Dhabi. He was eager to explore how concepts within psychology—including social networks and collective reasoning—might inform machine learning, but there were few psychologists working in the U.A.E. Shariff, a thirty-one-year-old with wild hair and expressive eyebrows, was teaching psychology at New York University’s campus in Abu Dhabi; he guesses that he was one of four research psychologists in the region at the time, an estimate that Rahwan told me “doesn’t sound like an exaggeration.” Rahwan cold-e-mailed Shariff and invited him to visit his research group.

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Amazon.com, Automation, Electric Vehicles, Shopping

Amazon has made its own autonomous six-wheeled delivery robot

January 31, 2019

Amazon is entering the robot delivery game with an electric hamper on wheels it’s calling the Amazon Scout. The e-commerce giant is the latest company to try its hand at this sort of automated, last-mile delivery solution, following a crop of startups, as well as experiments by larger firms like Domino’s Pizza and PepsiCo.

Details about the Scout are thin on the ground, but the design looks similar to existing robots. In fact, the Scout looks almost identical to devices from Starship Technologies, an Estonian startup that was an early entrant to the field. (In a statement to The Verge after this story was published, a spokesperson for Starship Technologies said “[w]e’re huge believers in autonomous delivery robots. As the company that created this category, it’s great to see others realizing the potential.”)

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Alternative Transportation, Automobiles, Aviation, Transportation

Japan is getting serious about flying cars

January 31, 2019

The country’s once-envied government skunk works has set its sights on speeding up the arrival of aerial taxis and trucks.

Japan often appears stuck in yesterday’s vision of tomorrow. Flip phones are common enough that they’re cited as the exemplar of a phenomenon called Galapagos Syndrome, referring to the country’s tendency to stick with technologies endemic only to its islands. Another anachronism, Yahoo, remains wildly popular. Tokyo of the 1980s may have inspired the futuristic cityscape of Blade Runner, complete with flying cars, but the fax machines that were cutting-edge when the film came out remain ubiquitous tools today.

Ensuring Japan doesn’t fall behind the technological curve has for decades been the job of the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry, a powerful agency housed in a squat modern office block in Tokyo’s orderly government quarter, a few blocks south of the jagged moat surrounding the Imperial Palace. The building is orthogonal in every respect, a uniform stack of concrete threaded with long, featureless corridors. The bureaucrats here guided Japan’s postwar economic miracle, a boom that gave the world the transistor radio, the Walkman, and the Prius—and almost no transformative innovations since. None of the automakers championed by METI are today on the leading edge of robotic driving. For the most part, Japan’s faded tech companies can’t lay claim to either smartphone or internet greatness.

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Alternative Transportation, Automation, Aviation, Transportation

Boeing’s flying car has taken off

January 31, 2019

Boeing’s Driverless Flying Taxi Completes Test Flight.

A Boeing Co. flying car designed to whisk passengers over congested city streets and dodge skyscrapers completed its first test flight on Tuesday, offering a peek into the future of urban transportation the aerospace giant and others are seeking to shape.

A prototype of its autonomous passenger air vehicle completed a controlled takeoff, hover and landing during the test conducted in Manassas, Virginia, the maker of military and commercial jets said in a statement Wednesday. Propelled by electricity, the model is designed for fully autonomous flight, with a range of as much as 50 miles, Boeing said.

The Chicago-based plane maker and arch rival Airbus SE are among a slew of companies racing to stake a claim on flying cars and parcel-hauling drones, which have the potential to be the next disruption to sweep the aerospace industry. Boeing’s push was boosted by a 2017 acquisition of Aurora Flight Sciences, whose projects include a new flying taxi it is developing with Uber Technologies Inc.

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Amazon.com, Automation, Latest Trend, Shopping

Amazon Go, one year old, has attracted a lot of cashierless imitators

January 31, 2019

Mighty AI spent much of its first five years building software that helps self-driving cars recognize real-world objects. The Seattle startup went so far as to open a Detroit office to cozy up to the auto industry.

Then last February, Mighty AI’s sales team received an unusual request: Instead of identifying pedestrians and cars, could they track items plucked from store shelves by shoppers? A few months later, Mighty AI signed a deal to do just that, joining the race to help brick-and-mortar retailers keep pace with Amazon.com Inc.

A year ago, the e-commerce giant opened a cashierless convenience store called Amazon Go, marking its biggest effort yet to change the way people shop in the physical world. Today a fleet of companies are working to replicate elements of Go or invent other ways of streamlining store operations.

Many are startups like Mighty AI, but established giants are wading in, too. Walmart has been testing Go-style technology, and Kroger and Microsoft recently announced a joint venture to bring elements of the e-commerce shopping experience to the grocery store.

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Amazon.com, Shopping, United Parcel Service, UPS

UPS and Latch are expanding in-building deliveries to 10 more cities

January 30, 2019

After launching apparently successful pilot runs in San Francisco and New York, UPS announced today plans to expand its in-building delivery service to 10 additional U.S. cities. In mid-2019, the parcel service will be adding Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston, Dallas, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Boston, Miami and Seattle.

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China, government, Human Behavior, Science & Technology News

China reportedly made an app to show people if they’re standing near someone in debt — a new part of its intrusive ‘social credit’ policy

January 31, 2019

A province in northern China developed an app to tell users whether they are within a 500-meter radius of someone in debt, state media said.

It’s called a “map of deadbeat debtors,” the China Daily state-run newspaper reported.
It hopes to get citizens to monitor the so-called debtors and report them to authorities if they seem “capable of paying their debts.”

It’s part of China’s invasive “social credit” system, designed to judge a person’s trustworthiness. People have already been punished by it.

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communication, Internet, mobile apps, Money Talk

Kakao Pay passes 20 trillion won transaction mark for 2018

January 29, 2019

Chat giant Kakao’s mobile payment app surpassed 20 trillion won, or $17.7 billion, in transactions during 2018, cementing itself as the undisputed sector leader in South Korea.

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China, Internet, Science & Technology News, Tourism

Millions of Chinese tourists are spurring the growth of mobile pay overseas

January 29, 2019

Just as overseas luxury stores have hired Mandarin-speaking staff to serve Chinese tourists, more tourist destinations may feel the need to accept Chinese mobile payment such as Alipay and WeChat Pay.
Three-fourths of supermarkets and convenience stores in Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand now accept Chinese mobile payment, according to a Nielsen survey released Monday in cooperation with Alipay.
The adoption rate has increased rapidly in the last two years, and last year more Chinese tourists used mobile pay abroad than cash, the report said.

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