Elon Musk has suggested Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Lightning II fighter jets, which are a key part of the Morrison government’s $200 billion investment in defence, would “have no chance” against an autonomous drone in the battlefield.
“The fighter jet era has passed,” Mr Musk said at the US Air Force’s Air Warfare Symposium in Florida.
“Drone warfare is where the future will be. It’s not that I want the future to be this – it’s just, this is what the future will be.”
You don’t normally think of freight tractors in terms of visual appeal: they are enormous machines meant to haul stuff all across the world, so whether they’re pretty or not is of no consequence.
But that doesn’t mean that they can’t be pretty, though. When it comes to good looks, this concept from Art Lebedev Studio takes the crown: there is simply no prettier truck cab out there, real or only in concept stage. This is no coincidence, either: the design team specifically set out to show the world that you can have both brawn and beauty in a single truck cab. And brains, to boot.
Meet Gruzovikus (which literally means truck in Russian), the electric, self-driving truck cab that hauls merchandise from point A to point B, and looking fabulous while doing it. It’s the result of 43 days’ of work for the team at Art Lebedev Studio, and it remains the most startling and impressive concept to this day, a few good months after it was made public.
Clearly, the future of transport is electric and autonomous. This truck has them both, with a good dose of good looks to go. It’s incredibly slim, to the point where it forms an L shape when viewed from the side. It has no windows or doors, because it doesn’t need any. All it has is a giant computer screen that houses the computer, the sensors and the cameras, and everything else needed to make long-distance travels safe.
IBM thinks quantum supremacy is not the milestone we should care about.
Google’s most advanced computer isn’t at the company’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, nor anywhere in the febrile sprawl of Silicon Valley. It’s a few hours’ drive south in Santa Barbara, in a flat, soulless office park inhabited mostly by technology firms you’ve never heard of.
An open-plan office holds several dozen desks. There’s an indoor bicycle rack and designated “surfboard parking,” with boards resting on brackets that jut out from the wall. Wide double doors lead into a lab the size of a large classroom. There, amidst computer racks and jumbles of instrumentation, a handful of cylindrical vessels—each a little bigger than an oil drum—hang from vibration-damping rigs like enormous steel pupae.
On one of them, the outer vessel has been removed to expose a multi-tiered tangle of steel and brass innards known as “the chandelier.” It’s basically a supercharged refrigerator that gets colder with each layer down. At the bottom, kept in a vacuum a hair’s breadth above absolute zero, is what looks to the naked eye like an ordinary silicon chip. But rather than transistors, it’s etched with tiny superconducting circuits that, at these low temperatures, behave as if they were single atoms obeying the laws of quantum physics. Each one is a quantum bit, or qubit—the basic information–storage unit of a quantum computer.
Late last October, Google announced that one of those chips, called Sycamore, had become the first to demonstrate “quantum supremacy” by performing a task that would be practically impossible on a classical machine. With just 53 qubits, Sycamore had completed a calculation in a few minutes that, according to Google, would have taken the world’s most powerful existing supercomputer, Summit, 10,000 years. Google touted this as a major breakthrough, comparing it to the launch of Sputnik or the first flight by the Wright brothers—the threshold of a new era of machines that would make today’s mightiest computer look like an abacus.
Citroën is launching the Ami, a new ~$6,000 mini electric car that can cost just $20 per month and it can be legally driven by a 14-year-old can in France.
We call it an electric car because it looks like a small city car, like a smart, but Citroën is calling Ami a “light quadricycle.”
It’s accessible to people from 14 years old in France, though the French automaker says that only 16-year-olds on average are going to be allowed to drive in most European countries. Another advantage (or risk depending on how you look at it) is that in some places, you won’t even need a driver’s license to get behind the wheel of an Ami.
Intrusive ‘wellness’ policies and rules on off-duty behavior are becoming widespread.
Nearly a decade after she stopped smoking, Mabel Battle still has the last pack of cigarettes she ever bought. She keeps it as a reminder of all the gray Ohio winter workdays she spent standing outside her office with the other shivering smokers getting a nicotine fix.
The cigarette pack is a testament to her willpower, she says: after countless failed attempts, she finally quit. However, her success at giving up is also a striking result of a contentious corporate experiment. What finally prodded her into her decision was a fear that her habit might threaten her employment. “I wanted to keep my job more than I wanted to smoke cigarettes,” says Battle.
The Cleveland Clinic, where Battle works as a health unit coordinator, has been a leader in corporate anti-smoking initiatives. It first banned smoking on its 170-acre campus in 2008, and followed that up with a new policy to chemically screen job applicants for nicotine and refuse employment to those who test positive. Workers such as Battle who were on staff before the ban would not be fired for smoking in their free time, but she could see the culture changing.
Researchers from the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) at the University of Waterloo report the first occurrence of directly splitting one photon into three.
The occurrence, the first of its kind, used the spontaneous parametric down-conversion method (SPDC) in quantum optics and created what quantum optics researchers call a non-Gaussian state of light. A non-Gaussian state of light is considered a critical ingredient to gain a quantum advantage.
“It was understood that there were limits to the type of entanglement generated with the two-photon version, but these results form the basis of an exciting new paradigm of three-photon quantum optics,” said Chris Wilson, a principle investigator at IQC faculty member and a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Waterloo.
“Given that this research brings us past the known ability to split one photon into two entangled daughter photons, we’re optimistic that we’ve opened up a new area of exploration.”
Near the foot of San Francisco’s California Street stand the august stone pillars of a bank dating to the 19th century. A few paces away sit the offices of Coinbase, the largest American exchange for cryptocurrencies like bitcoin. It’s a beehive of software engineers and young marketing executives. There, the worlds of by-the-books banking and crypto-anarchism collide.
In style and philosophy, Brian Armstrong, the 37-year-old billionaire cofounder and CEO of Coinbase, is in the camp of the financial anarchists. He sits, jammed alongside lieutenants, in a row of tiny desks resembling library carrels. He wears a black T-shirt, black pants and shiny white sneakers. He talks about a brave new world in which we are liberated from the shackles of giant banks and government-controlled money supplies. During an expansive interview, this usually reserved and press-shy entrepreneur declares why he got into this business: “I wanted the world to have a global, open financial system that drove innovation and freedom.”
In warehouses, call centers, and other sectors, intelligent machines are managing humans, and they’re making work more stressful, grueling, and dangerous
On conference stages and at campaign rallies, tech executives and politicians warn of a looming automation crisis — one where workers are gradually, then all at once, replaced by intelligent machines. But their warnings mask the fact that an automation crisis has already arrived. The robots are here, they’re working in management, and they’re grinding workers into the ground.
The robots are watching over hotel housekeepers, telling them which room to clean and tracking how quickly they do it. They’re managing software developers, monitoring their clicks and scrolls and docking their pay if they work too slowly. They’re listening to call center workers, telling them what to say, how to say it, and keeping them constantly, maximally busy. While we’ve been watching the horizon for the self-driving trucks, perpetually five years away, the robots arrived in the form of the supervisor, the foreman, the middle manager.
These automated systems can detect inefficiencies that a human manager never would — a moment’s downtime between calls, a habit of lingering at the coffee machine after finishing a task, a new route that, if all goes perfectly, could get a few more packages delivered in a day. But for workers, what look like inefficiencies to an algorithm were their last reserves of respite and autonomy, and as these little breaks and minor freedoms get optimized out, their jobs are becoming more intense, stressful, and dangerous. Over the last several months, I’ve spoken with more than 20 workers in six countries. For many of them, their greatest fear isn’t that robots might come for their jobs: it’s that robots have already become their boss.
In few sectors are the perils of automated management more apparent than at Amazon. Almost every aspect of management at the company’s warehouses is directed by software, from when people work to how fast they work to when they get fired for falling behind. Every worker has a “rate,” a certain number of items they have to process per hour, and if they fail to meet it, they can be automatically fired.
Hamlet Pharma Labs researching a breast milk compound which kills cancer
Swedish scientists from the University of Lund have found promising results from researching the effects of a compound found in breast milk – a substance nicknamed Hamlet (Human Alpha-Lactalbumin Made LEthal To Tumor Cells) – on bladder cancer patients. In the early trials, those injected with the compound began to shed dead tumor cells through their urine within days. The best part is, the Hamlet targeted the cancer cells alone, thus offering an alternative to chemotherapy and radiotherapy treatments which damage both healthy and cancerous cells in the body.
The early trial involved 40 patients with hard-to-treat bladder cancer. All 20 who were given the drug rather than placebo, in six infusions over 22 days, excreted whole tumor fragments in their urine. Then, there was another human trial involving nine bladder cancer patients. These participants were administered five daily doses in the week before surgery to remove their tumor. Eight of them started passing tumor cells in their urine just two hours after being given the drug, and their tumors reduced in size or aggression. None of them suffered any damage to surrounding tissue. The trial was overseen by scientists from Lund University in Sweden and carried out at Motol University Hospital in Prague.
Glamping in zero gravity will cost a few millions bucks at least.
Have you always dreamt of leaving Earth? Are you a member of the two, or better yet three commas club? Well it’s a great time to be alive because after decades of delays, the space tourism industry may finally be taking off. Not just the kind Dennis Tito pioneered in 2001, where you buy a ticket from the Russian government to visit the International Space Station (ISS), but real honest-to-goodness free market tourism with multiple private companies vying to turn your hard-earned millions into an out-of-this-world experience.
SpaceX, which is preparing to launch astronauts to the ISS any month now in its newly human-rated Crew Dragon capsule, announced last week that NASA won’t be the only paying customer for its new vehicle. The private company is also offering to launch up to four private citizens into orbit in late 2021 or 2022. And SpaceX is far from the only company on the verge of starting space tourism operations. Here’s a primer to where and when you can go, and how much it might cost you.
Northwestern University researchers tested their invention on a swarm of 100 robots
Algorithm for self-driving vehicles could reduce traffic and crashes Northwestern University. Researchers have developed an algorithm that could stop self-driving vehicles from getting in crashes and traffic jams. The team from Northwestern University (NU) claims their invention is “the first decentralized algorithm with a collision-free, deadlock-free guarantee.”
The algorithm divides the ground beneath the machines into a grid. The robots learn their position through technology similar to GPS and coordinate their movements through sensors that assess where there’s free space to move.
“The robots refuse to move to a spot until that spot is free and until they know that no other robots are moving to that same spot,” said Northwestern Engineering’s Michael Rubenstein, who led the study. “They are careful and reserve a space ahead of time.”
Climate change, transparency, and nationalism will be driving the workforce 10 years from now.
For decades, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has generated some of the world’s greatest innovators, entrepreneurs, and startups. MIT has built a strong research and engineering culture since its founding in 1861, producing dozens of Nobel laureates along the way. 3Com, Akamai, Bose, Dropbox, Intel, iRobot, Kahn Academy, BuzzFeed, HP, and Qualcomm all have MIT roots. So I always pay attention to the lists published in MIT’s in-house journal, The MIT Sloan Management Review.
Understanding change is at the heart of entrepreneurship. As a founder, you need to spot unmet needs arising from changes in demographics, politics, and innovation. If you fail to do so, you may fail yourself.
Last year, MIT published a list by futurist Andrew Winston of the biggest megatrends that will impact the world by 2030. Winston’s pedigree is extensive; his clients include McDonald’s, Apple, Bank of America, Walmart, HP, Disney, and Cisco. Here is his list (explanations are mine):
