A group of seven swimmers was in trouble when an undertow whisked them off to sea. Fortunately, a lifeguard drone was deployed to the rescue.
When a group of seven swimmers found themselves carried off into the ocean by an undertow in Valencia, Spain Wednesday, time was of the essence. Though they successfully managed to alert the lifeguards, rapid response wasn’t guaranteed at 230 feet from the beach. Fortunately, an Auxdron Lifeguard Drone was at the scene and quickly flown to the rescue.
According to New Atlas, Diego Torres remotely piloted the eight-rotor General Drones vehicle. Guided by a lifeguard via radio and assisted by the drone’s camera feed, he managed to reach the swimmers in danger and drop a life jacket which automatically inflated upon deployment. The woman in most immediate need of assistance managed to untether it from the vehicle, and save herself from drowning.
Fifteen years after Billy Beane disrupted Major League Baseball by applying analytics to scouting, corporations are rewriting the rules of recruiting.
The online games were easy–until I got to challenge number six. I was applying for a job at Unilever, the consumer-goods behemoth behind Axe Body Spray and Hellmann’s Real Mayonnaise. I was halfway through a series of puzzles designed to test 90 cognitive and emotional traits, everything from my memory and planning speed to my focus and appetite for risk. A machine had already scrutinized my application to determine whether I was fit to reach even this test-taking stage. Now, as I sat at my laptop, scratching my head over a probability game that involved wagering varying amounts of virtual money on whether I could hit my space bar five times within three seconds or 60 times within 12 seconds, an algorithm custom-built for Unilever analyzed my every click. With a timer ticking down on the screen . . . 12 . . . 11 . . . 10 . . . I furiously stabbed at my keyboard, my chances of joining one of the world’s largest employers literally at my fingertips.
More than a million job seekers have already undergone this kind of testing experience, developed by Pymetrics, a five-year-old startup cofounded by Frida Polli. An MIT-trained neuroscientist with an MBA from Harvard, Polli is pioneering new ways of assessing talent for brands such as Burger King and Unilever, based on decades of neuroscience research she says can predict behaviors common among high performers. “We realized this combination of data and machine learning would be hugely powerful, bringing recruiting from this super-antiquated, paper-and-pencil [process] into the future,” explains Polli, sitting barefoot on a couch at her spartan office near New York’s Flatiron District on a humid May morning, where about four dozen engineers, data scientists, and industrial-organizational psychologists sit behind glowing iMacs.
Last August, 50 employees at Three Square Market got RFID chips in their hands. Now 80 have them.
When Patrick McMullan wants a Diet Dr Pepper while he’s at work, he pays for it with a wave of his hand. McMullan has a microchip implanted between his thumb and forefinger, and the vending machine immediately deducts money from his account. At his office, he’s one of dozens of employees who have been doing likewise for a year now.
McMullan is the president of Three Square Market, a technology company that provides self-service mini-markets to hospitals, hotels, and company break rooms. Last August, he became one of roughly 50 employees at its headquarters in River Falls, Wisconsin, who volunteered to have a chip injected into their hand.
Industrial designer Andrey Avgust hails from Belarus, a country whose currency I admit I’ve never seen. But he’s seen our yankee dollars and recognizes that their design kind of stinks.
For fun Avgust gave U.S. bills a redesign, starting with the material: Polymer.
Technology has forever changed how Americans shop for homes. Thanks to sites like Zillow, Trulia and the dozens of others like them, buyers can now brown se listings, find homes and narrow their search all on their own—without ever calling in an agent.
And with online mortgage lenders cropping up left and right, they can even take it a step further, getting pre-qualified for a loan long before they’ve honed in on that dream home.
But though tech has allowed homebuyers to do all this legwork themselves, in most cases, they’re still forced to go through agents to finalize the transaction. And those agents? They get the same 3% commission they did decades ago—for seemingly doing a fraction of the work.
A controversial study suggests that people become entrepreneurs because they realize they’re worth more than their resumes.
If you asked me why I gravitated to startups rather than work in a large company I would have answered at various times: “I want to be my own boss,” “I love risk,” “I want flexible work hours,” “I want to work on tough problems that matter,” “I have a vision and want to see it through,” “I saw a better opportunity and grabbed it. …”
Once seen as saviours of democracy, tech giants are now viewed as threats to truth. But how did our faith in all things digital turn into an erosion of trust, particularly in the arena of information and politics?
Mark Zuckerberg: ‘Facebook was built to accomplish a social mission – to make the world more open and connected.’
Automation will upend life as we know it. But that doesn’t mean all of our jobs will be completely eliminated. If anything, technology has not liberated people from the drudgery of work. It has created new constraints.
Nothing like putting down an icy cold beer. Except, of course, achieving a higher state of being and eventual transcendence of the Self through the practice of yoga.
Medusa Brewing Company co-founder Keith Sullivan checks on the beer in the brewing area. “There are very few big breweries that have this family, community, connected feel. That’s what we’re selling,” he says.
Right now, it prints proteins. In the far future, it could print human babies on Mars. Craig Venter and Elon Musk have even discussed how printed life could help terraform Mars.
