If there’s one thing we all wonder about, it’s the future. Being able to predict the future would come in handy when it comes to running your business and your life. Did you know you could turn to a futurist for answers? (Video)
In the movie Her, the computers don’t demand that their users sit down in front of a screen and type on a keyboard. They connect with them using voice recognition, a tiny earpiece always present in the ear, and an ultra simple handheld device.
Tilt is a platform for people to receive money from a group of friends or colleagues.
Reports of the crowdfunding revolution have been greatly exaggerated.James Beshara, chief executive of a crowdfunding company, acknowledges that the crowdfunding revolution has been greatly exaggerated. “The amount of attention it gets far outweighs the number of people using it,” he says. (Video)
It’s a mistake to worry about us developing malevolent AI anytime soon.
Rodney Brooks – There has been several articles in the press recently, and several high profile people who are in tech but not AI, speculating about the dangers of malevolent AI being developed, and how we should be worried about that possibility. Should we be worried?
Futurists started predicting that in just a few decades machines would be as smart as humans soon after computers evolved in the 1940’s. Every year, the prediction seems to get pushed back another year. The consensus now is that it’s going to happen in … you guessed it, just a few more decades.
Futurist Thomas Frey: A few weeks ago I got into a discussion with some friends centered around this question. “What, in your mind, will be the most powerful entity in the world 100 years from now?”
For centuries, time travel’s been one of man’s wildest fantasies. It has been a popular trend in movies and fiction for a long time, inspiring everything from Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol to H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine to the Charlton Heston shrine that is The Planet of the Apes. And with the opening of the movie Interstellar—n0t to spoil anything—we’re about to fantasize about it even more. (Video)
RFID tags can be found inside the uniforms of NFL players.
Radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips are usually used as security tags on clothes in stores, but this year they can also be found inside the uniforms of NFL players. As the Atlanta Falcons and Detroit Lions descended upon London this weekend, accompanying them were executives from Zebra Technologies, the company behind the RFID-based motion tracking system that the league is implementing this season. (Video)
Will the automobile keep its soul as the industry transforms itself?
At the 1964 New York World’s Fair automakers were center stage. General Motors exhibited the Firebird IV concept car. GM explained how it, “anticipates the day when the family will drive to the super-highway, turn over the car’s controls to an automatic, programmed guidance system and travel in comfort and absolute safety at more than twice the speed possible on today’s expressways.” Ford introduced a vehicle for the more immediate future: the Mustang. With an eye toward the segment that would later be named the baby boomers, the Ford Division’s general manager (a not-yet-40-year-old engineer named Lee Iacocca) explained that the car brought “total performance” to a “young America out to have a good time.” Ford estimated it would sell 100,000 Mustangs during that first year; in fact, it would sell more than 400,000.
By Jared Lindzon: The average transportation speed of American citizens was 4 miles per hour in the year 1850. The primary mode of transportation then was a combination of walking and horse back.