Researchers at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) have completed the first successful flight of iRonCub3, marking a major breakthrough in humanoid robotics. The robot lifted off the ground by approximately 50 centimeters and maintained stability throughout the maneuver, demonstrating controlled flight with a human-like form.
iRonCub3 is the world’s first jet-powered flying humanoid robot designed for real-world environments. The development process, including live flight testing, took around two years. Engineers at IIT developed advanced control systems to manage the robot’s interconnected parts and analyzed its complex aerodynamics to enable stable flight.
The way we sleep, eat and retreat from the world around us is poised for significant transformation, David Eun, Samsung’s Chief Innovation Officer, told this week at Web Summit.
Eun presented a sketch of Samsung’s vision for the house of the future. The aim is to foster experiences on a foundation of technology and innovation, he said, “the likes of which we have never seen before.”
With the advent of 5G, the percentage of connected devices in the home will continue to grow, “and in the near future, the question won’t be how many devices are connected. The question will actually be, how many devices are not connected.”
I had the pleasure of talking with futurist and the managing partner of ChangeistScott Smith recently about some of the biggest macro trends everyone should be aware of today. While these trends had already begun prior to the coronavirus pandemic, in many ways, they accelerated as the world fought to deal with the pandemic and now as we begin to build our post-COVID-19 world. Here are the six future trends he believes everyone should be ready for.
CCS Insights published 100 tech predictions for the next few years, and the COVID-19 pandemic lurks behind many of them.
An ongoing health crisis and a global recession: even for the most attuned of analysts, the past months have brought in a load of unexpected events that have made the coming years especially difficult to envision.
Yet research firm CCS Insights has taken up the challenge and delivered a set of 100 tech predictions for the years 2021 and beyond. The exercise is an annual one for the company, which last year anticipated, among many other things, that the next decade could see the rise of deep fake detection technology, or the adoption of domestic robots in some households.
No one could have predicted where 2020 would take us: The last six months alone have produced more digital transformation than the last decade, with every transformation effort already underway finding itself accelerated, and at scale. While many of my digital transformation predictions from a year ago benefited from this shift, others were displaced by more urgent needs, like 24/7 secure and reliable connectivity. What does this mean for 2021? Will core technologies like AI and data analytics still dominate headlines, or will we see newer, previously emerging technologies take the lead? Only time will tell, but here are my top ten digital transformation predictions for 2021.
LONDON (Reuters) – Nearly two thirds of people in leading Western European countries would consider augmenting the human body with technology to improve their lives, mostly to improve health, according to research commissioned by Kaspersky.
As humanity journeys further into a technological revolution that its leaders say will change every aspect of our lives, opportunities abound to transform the ways our bodies operate from guarding against cancer to turbo-charging the brain.
The Opinium Research survey of 14,500 people in 16 countries including Britain, Germany, France, Italy and Spain showed that 63% of people would consider augmenting their bodies to improve them, though the results varied across Europe.
It might seem strange to be making predictions about 2021, when it’s far from certain how the remainder of 2020 is going to play out. No-one foresaw the world-changing events of this year, but one thing is clear: tech has been affected just as much as every other part of our lives.
Another thing that is clear is that today’s most important tech trends will play a big part in helping us cope with and adapt to the many challenges facing us. From the shift to working from home to new rules about how we meet and interact in public spaces, tech trends will be the driving force in managing the change.
In many ways, Covid-19 will act as a catalyst for a whole host of changes that were already on the cards anyway, thanks to our increasingly online and digital lives. Things will just happen more quickly now, with necessity (long acknowledged as the mother of invention) as the driving force. And should it be the case that – as certain US presidents have predicted – Covid-19 “magically disappears” – the changes it has brought about will not, as we will have learned to do a lot of things more efficiently and safely.
Here’s my overview of how the major tech trend that I identified in my most recent book Tech Trends in Practice, are likely to play out during the next year. Some will play their part in helping us to recover “normality” (whatever that means), while some of them will make it easier for us to understand and navigate a changed reality.
Futurism won’t provide us winning lottery numbers, but it can tell us what the next scenarios may be for your company, market or customers, mapping the biggest threats and opportunities. It can help you contain risks and respond quickly in order to build sustainable success.
In this article, in addition to understanding what Futurism is, you’ll see how it’s related to innovation. You’ll also see how you can apply it to guide your business.
We may not be living on Mars or traveling to work using jet packs, but there’s no doubt the coming decade will bring many exciting technological advances. In this article, I want to outline the 25 key technology trends that I believe will shape the 2020s.
TLDR; don’t pretend a Magic 8 Ball is a useful tool for grownups and don’t build hate machines
Artificial intelligence may be the most powerful tool humans have. When applied properly to a problem suited for it, AI allows humans to do amazing things. We can diagnose cancer at a glance or give a voice to those who cannot speak by simply applying the right algorithm in the correct way.
But AI isn’t a panacea or cure-all. In fact, when improperly applied, it’s a dangerous snake oil that should be avoided at all costs. To that end, I present six types of AI that I believe ethical developers should avoid.
Artist depiction of what electronic contact lenses of the future could look like.
Moore’s law famously says that computer power doubles every eighteen months or so. This is evidenced clearly when graphing computer chip prices and their relative processing speed, power, and memory. In fact, Moore’s law is true even if one includes technology from as far back as 100 years. This means that every year, video games are twice as powerful as those from the year before. The chip in your birthday cards would have been remarkable to Hitler or Churchill in the 1940’s and yet it’s so common to us that we simply throw it away when we’re done with it. A military supercomputer of 1997, worth millions of dollars, has the same power as your Playstation 3 that runs for $130. NASA placed mankind on the moon in 1969 with less computing power than you have in your cellphone.
These chips are transformative. They greatly empower anything that they touch, like some divine force. When they touched phones we got cellphones in return. Cameras became digital cameras, phonograms became iPods, paper money became credit cards, arcade machines became video games, and airplanes became war drones. Yet their potential still hasn’t been reached. These chips can be integrated into everything from clothes to your toilet and even your brain.
Here I’m going to be taking a look at technology you can expect to see in the next 10 to 50 years.
Striving for a frictionless experience for your customers, employees, suppliers, or other stakeholders isn’t just something that the digital era has enabled you to do. At this point, it’s a requirement.
The businesses that will survive after the pandemic are the ones who give us back our time.
FOR A MINUTE there, at the start of the global lockdown, it seemed to be an open question: Would we all be able to get everything we needed delivered? Three months in, while nobody’s getting two-day deliveries anymore, it does seem as if Amazon alone might be able to provide almost all of us with our commodity needs.
Way back before Jeff Bezos began delivering almost everything to everyone, there was another open question: Was ordering just a few things at a time from Amazon bad for the environment? The answer is a little surprising. While it’s obviously more wasteful and damaging to place several small orders as opposed to fewer larger ones, it’s also obvious that having Amazon deliver everything to everyone is a more sustainable option than going to the store ourselves.
