Impact Lab – Page 524 – A Laboratory of the Future Human Experience

AI, Artificial Intelligence, Employment, Science & Technology News

AI won’t take your job, people will

November 25, 2019

Machine intelligence, also known as artificial intelligence (AI) is going to have both an awesome and an unfortunate impact on our posterity. Let’s explore one possible way AI may impact the future of work, and how it may dramatically change how we train our workforce.

A brand manager needs an advertisement. So, the brand manager sends a brief to the senior art director (in-house or at an agency) and asks for something amazing to be created. On or before the deadline, the brand manager and the art director meet to review the work. The brand manager is presented with three approaches, and after a number of meetings, a number of revisions, and revelations, they agree on a final product.

This is a process that has repeated itself for more than a century, and AI is not going to stop it (today).

Continue reading… “AI won’t take your job, people will”

Big Problems, Engineering, Environment, Science & Technology News

Why the world is running out of sand

November 25, 2019

It may be little more than grains of weathered rock, and can be found in deserts and on beaches around the world, but sand is also the world’s second most consumed natural resource.

A South African entrepreneur shot dead in September. Two Indian villagers killed in a gun battle in August. A Mexican environmental activist murdered in June.

Though separated by thousands of miles, these killings share an unlikely cause. They are some of the latest casualties in a growing wave of violence sparked by the struggle for one of the 21st Century’s most important, but least appreciated, commodities: ordinary sand.

Trivial though it may seem, sand is a critical ingredient of our lives. It is the primary raw material that modern cities are made from. The concrete used to construct shopping malls, offices, and apartment blocks, along with the asphalt we use to build roads connecting them, are largely just sand and gravel glued together. The glass in every window, windshield, and smart phone screen is made of melted-down sand. And even the silicon chips inside our phones and computers – along with virtually every other piece of electronic equipment in your home – are made from sand.

Continue reading… “Why the world is running out of sand”

Computer Security, Crime, Crime Prevention, Science & Technology News

Cybercrime booms as scammers hack human nature to steal billions

November 24, 2019

Cyberscams are getting more sophisticated.

The secret to comedy, according to the old joke, is timing. The same is true of cybercrime.

Mark learned this the hard way in 2017. He runs a real estate company in Seattle and asked us not to include his last name because of the possible repercussions for his business.

“The idea that someone was effectively able to dupe you … is embarrassing,” he says. “We’re still kind of scratching our head over how it happened.”

It started when someone hacked into his email conversation with a business partner. But the hackers didn’t take over the email accounts. Instead, they lurked, monitoring the conversation and waiting for an opportunity.

Continue reading… “Cybercrime booms as scammers hack human nature to steal billions”

Augmented Reality, communication, Life Skills, New Viewpoints, Science & Technology News, Wearables

Smart glasses, smart designer babies and the future of work

November 24, 2019

John B. Goodenough, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry last month, struggled to learn to read. “Back then,” he says, “You were just a backwards student.”

His experience is still all too common, yet he and many like him demonstrate clearly that dyslexia is not a definitive barrier to career achievement. We must ask ourselves if our entry level recruitment and education systems should always depend on literacy.

Continue reading… “Smart glasses, smart designer babies and the future of work”

government, Legal Issues, Money Talk, Science & Technology News

The great American tax haven: why the super-rich love South Dakota

November 24, 2019

Late last year, as the Chinese government prepared to enact tough new tax rules, the billionaire Sun Hongbin quietly transferred $4.5bn worth of shares in his Chinese real estate firm to a company on a street corner in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, one of the least populated and least known states in the US. Sioux Falls is a pleasant city of 180,000 people, situated where the Big Sioux River tumbles off a red granite cliff. It has some decent bars downtown, and a charming array of sculptures dotting the streets, but there doesn’t seem to be much to attract a Chinese multi-billionaire. It’s a town that even few Americans have been to.

The money of the world’s mega-wealthy, though, is heading there in ever-larger volumes. In the past decade, hundreds of billions of dollars have poured out of traditional offshore jurisdictions such as Switzerland and Jersey, and into a small number of American states: Delaware, Nevada, Wyoming – and, above all, South Dakota. “To some, South Dakota is a ‘fly-over’ state,” the chief justice of the state’s supreme court said in a speech to the legislature in January. “While many people may find a way to ‘fly over’ South Dakota, somehow their dollars find a way to land here.”

Continue reading… “The great American tax haven: why the super-rich love South Dakota”

Analysis, Big Problems, government, Money Talk, Science & Technology News

$69 trillion of world debt in one infographic

November 23, 2019

Two decades ago, total government debt was estimated to sit at $20 trillion.

Since then, according to the latest figures by the IMF, the number has ballooned to $69.3 trillion with a debt to GDP ratio of 82% — the highest totals in human history.

Which countries owe the most money, and how do these figures compare?

Continue reading… “$69 trillion of world debt in one infographic”

Automation, Computer Security, Driverless cars, Science & Technology News

Here’s how quantum computer supremacy will impact self-driving cars

November 23, 2019

Quantum supremacy, achieved?

The news recently was agog with the claim that the so-called and highly sought “quantum supremacy” had been achieved via an effort undertaken by Google researchers.

Not everyone agreed though that the Google effort warranted waving the superlative supremacy flag.

That’s not to say that the use of their 54-qubit Sycamore processor wasn’t notable, and in fact, does provide another handy stride toward achieving viable quantum computing, but whether it was the vaunted moment of true supreme magnificence is something that many would argue is premature and supremely debatable.

Continue reading… “Here’s how quantum computer supremacy will impact self-driving cars”

Electric Vehicles, Environment, Green Friendly, Science & Technology News, Transportation

Large ‘Tesla ships’ all-electric container barges are launching this autumn

November 23, 2019

The Dutch company Port-Liner is building two giant all-electric barges dubbed the ‘Tesla ships‘. The company announced that the vessels will be ready by this autumn and will be inaugurated by sailing the Wilhelmina canal in the Netherlands.

The 100 million-euro project supported by a €7m subsidy from the European Union is expected to have a significant impact on local transport between the ports of Amsterdam, Antwerp, and Rotterdam.

Continue reading… “Large ‘Tesla ships’ all-electric container barges are launching this autumn”

Machine Learning, Robotics, Robots, Science & Technology News

Using imitation and reinforcement learning to tackle long-horizon robotic tasks

November 22, 2019

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a widely used machine-learning technique that entails training AI agents or robots using a system of reward and punishment. So far, researchers in the field of robotics have primarily applied RL techniques in tasks that are completed over relatively short periods of time, such as moving forward or grasping objects.

A team of researchers at Google and Berkeley AI Research has recently developed a new approach that combines RL with learning by imitation, a process called relay policy learning. This approach, introduced in a paper prepublished on arXiv and presented at the Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) 2019 in Osaka, can be used to train artificial agents to tackle multi-stage and long-horizon tasks, such as object manipulation tasks that span over longer periods of time.

Continue reading… “Using imitation and reinforcement learning to tackle long-horizon robotic tasks”

3D Printer, Engineering, new technology, Science & Technology News

Multimaterial 3-D printing manufactures complex objects, fast

November 22, 2019

Multimaterial multinozzle 3D printheads. Credit: Nature (2019). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1736-8

3-D printers are revolutionizing manufacturing by allowing users to create any physical shape they can imagine on-demand. However, most commercial printers are only able to build objects from a single material at a time and inkjet printers that are capable of multimaterial printing are constrained by the physics of droplet formation. Extrusion-based 3-D printing allows a broad palette of materials to be printed, but the process is extremely slow. For example, it would take roughly 10 days to build a 3-D object roughly one liter in volume at the resolution of a human hair and print speed of 10 cm/s using a single-nozzle, single-material printhead. To build the same object in less than 1 day, one would need to implement a printhead with 16 nozzles printing simultaneously!

Continue reading… “Multimaterial 3-D printing manufactures complex objects, fast”

Healthcare, new technology, Robotics, Robots, Science & Technology News

Robot overlords? More like co-verlords. The future is human-robot collaboration

November 22, 2019

Davinci surgical system at Magdeburg University Hospital

It’s the classic trope of buddy cop movies: you introduce two characters with little in common aside from the job that they do. Maybe one’s old and the other’s young. Maybe one’s black and the other’s white. Maybe one’s a maverick and the other is a stickler for doing things by the book. At first they don’t get along. Perhaps one is new to the precinct and the other fears that they’re being phased out as a result. But, wouldn’t you know it, they turn out to be a great team. The strengths of one are the weaknesses of the other. The police chief might get pissed at their zany antics, but they’re much better friends than they are enemies. Could the same be true of humans and their relationship with robots?

The typical narrative, as cliché as any Lethal Weapon buddy cop movie ripoff, is that robots are here to steal our jobs. Unless you’re one of the people lucky enough to be building or selling the robots, you should view robots as the flashy new rival in town, hovering in the wings to replace you. But while there are certainly jobs that robots will take from humans (hopefully the dirty, dull, and dangerous jobs humans don’t really want), there are plenty of other jobs in which robots working alongside humans could greatly increase human productivity.

In doing so, they won’t just augment our abilities; they’ll make it possible to scale jobs in a way that was unimaginable in the pre-robot age.

Continue reading… “Robot overlords? More like co-verlords. The future is human-robot collaboration”

Banking, Latest Trend, Money Talk, Science & Technology News

The invisible company powers almost the entire finance industry

November 21, 2019

The days of going to a bank are coming to an end.

In the past 10 years, 15,000 bank branches have shut their doors for good. And foot traffic to banks has fallen by 50%. Bank branches are shutting down left and right for a simple reason… They’re useless!

These days, you can deposit a check by taking a photo with your phone. You can open a bank account or order a new credit card in five minutes over the internet. You can even take out a mortgage without ever seeing a human banker, thanks to disruptive services like Quicken Loans.

And it’s not just banks. Digital disruption is eating away at every “old” business model in finance. Everyone from stockbrokers to financial planners is under assault.

Continue reading… “The invisible company powers almost the entire finance industry”