This past weekend alone there were more than two dozen articles in the various papers I read highlighting the risks surrounding AI, how it is going to dismantle the American workforce, cause the wealth gap to widen even further, destabilize the economy, and even lead to nuclear holocaust.
“YOU WON’T BELIEVE what’s coming,” warned the title of a January 2023 video from the Inside China Auto YouTube channel. “Europe’s premium car makers aren’t ready for this,” warned another video from the same channel, uploaded in July.
Previously on Technology:
This past weekend alone there were more than two dozen articles in the various papers I read highlighting the risks surrounding AI, how it is going to dismantle the American workforce, cause the wealth gap to widen even further, destabilize the economy, and even lead to nuclear holocaust.
There’s plenty of debate about the definition of the metaverse, but we find it more useful to take a practical view and focus on the productive use cases that it enables. The metaverse is based on the convergence of multiple technologies and the proliferation of data and content, which combine to create value for users. In the case of consumers, the result might be a virtual-reality (VR) gaming platform, while for business it could be a machine-learning algorithm that incorporates multiple diverse data sets to provide better insights and improve decision making.
All tournament long, match balls will contain a sensor that collects spatial positioning data in real time — the first World Cup to employ such a ball-tracking mechanism. This, combined with existing optical tracking tools, will make VAR (video assistant referees) and programs like offside reviews more accurate and streamlined than they’ve ever been. Combining these two forms of tracking has long been a holy grail of sorts in technology circles, and FIFA’s use of the ball sensor in particular will serve as a highly public test case over the next four weeks.
But the benefits have been mutual; China has gained a lot from Tesla as well. The company has been responsible for imposing the “catfish effect” on the Chinese EV industry—meaning it’s forced Chinese brands to innovate and try to catch up with Tesla in everything from technology advancement to affordability. And now, even Tesla needs to figure out how to continue being competitive in China because domestic brands are coming at it hard.
‘I can’t remember anything’ is a common complaint these days. But is it because we rely so heavily on our smartphones? And do the endless alerts and distractions stop us forming new memories?
As prices drop and availability increases, some of the last road blocks to mass adoption of electric vehicles is range anxiety and charging times. But a prototype test track in Italy solves both of those issues by borrowing the same technology that makes it easy to charge your smartphone.
One central problem in our commerce is the outsized role of middlemen. Amazon, Walmart, Vizient, CVS, Google - these are monopolists, yes, but their specific mechanism for exerting monopoly power isn’t controlling production of some item, but in putting themselves in the middle of transactions and taxing one or both sides.
A core pillar in the study of network effects is Metcalfe’s Law, where “the systemic value of compatibly communicating devices grows as a square of their number” (to cite one definition). Said plainly, each time a user joins an app with a network behind it, the value of the app is increased to n^2; if a network has 100 nodes and then doubles to 200, its value doesn’t double, it quadruples.
As AI and robotics continue to advance, there are concerns that machines could soon replace humans in a wide range of occupations. Now there’s a new way to tell how likely your job is to be taken over by robots or AI, and what job to shift to if you are at risk.
Industrial robots have been a fixture on manufacturing lines for decades, but they have generally been dumb and dangerous, incapable of operating outside of highly controlled environments and liable to injure human workers unless safely caged.
Just under a year ago, one of the biggest production facilities for cultured meat opened in Israel. Future Meat Technologies’ Rehovot plant produces 500 kilograms of lab-grown meat per day (that’s equivalent to about 5,000 burger patties). Last week, plans for an even bigger facility were revealed, this one in the US. Its specific location has yet to be finalized, but the project will bring cultured meat production to an unprecedented scale.
s there any limit to the ambition and hubris of big tech firms? In October Mark Zuckerberg renamed Facebook Meta and described humankind’s new future in virtual worlds. On January 18th Microsoft, worth more than $2trn, decided it wasn’t big enough and bid $69bn for Activision Blizzard, a video-games firm, in its biggest-ever deal. These decisions are part of a vast new investment surge at five of America’s biggest firms, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta and Microsoft—call them maama. Together, they have invested $280bn in the past year, equivalent to 9% of American business investment, up from 4% five years ago.
The NFT market will likely suffer a similar fate – but not, as some might think, because of environmental concerns. To be sure, NFTs consume considerable amounts of energy, because cryptocurrencies like Ethereum and Bitcoin are “mined” using networks of computers with a large carbon footprint – one that grows with every transaction. But when it comes to understanding what will bring down the NFT market, climate impact is a red herring. The real problem is that the current NFT boom is built on a foundation of sand.
As the internet has evolved, its influence on us has been profound, shaping everything from what we read, the products we purchase, the entertainment we watch and how we communicate. It seems to know everything about us – our likes, dislikes, friends, shopping habits and favourite cat videos. This intimate knowledge could be inferred as good or bad. You can be targeted with advertisements for products you didn’t know you wanted and be suggested news articles you didn’t know you wanted to read. This personalization can be convenient but also invasive.
Early forms of additive manufacturing, or 3d printing as it is popularly called, began to emerge in the 1980s. But it took more than a decade for the technology to start taking off. Initially, it was used to make prototypes. Now, intricate components are routinely 3d-printed in plastic and metal, for use in products ranging from jet engines and robots to cars.
Today, the automotive world is changing. EV startups, notably Tesla, have ripped Toyota’s game plan to shreds. They’re moving at lightning speed, taking daring steps with new technology and breaking the old business models.
Corner stores don’t look like much. Maybe the one nearest to you has dusty shelves lined with bags of chips and cookies, and the cashier sitting next to the cigarettes and mini–shampoo bottles only takes cash. In some places, these mom-and-pop shops are simple roadside stalls or kiosks. They have largely operated the same way for decades: Many still order their products over the phone and manage their books on paper.
Humans are very good at inventing commodities, and we’ve been at it for a long time. See that pebble over there? Well, that’s a better pebble than all these others, and if you give me something in exchange for it, I’ll let you take ownership. It’ll be your pebble, forever. And soon there will be a market in pebbles, a pebble community, pebble exhibitions and auctions filled with pebble speculators, pebble exchanges, and pebble artists.
In 1970, Marvin Minsky, recipient of the Turing Award (“the Nobel Prize of Computing”), predicted that within “three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being.” Fifty-two years later, we’re still waiting. The fundamental roadblock is that, although computer algorithms are really, really good at identifying statistical patterns, they have no way of knowing what these patterns mean because they are confined to MathWorld and never experience the real world. As Richard Feynman famously explained, there is a fundamental difference between labeling things and understanding them.
India’s identification and digital payments infrastructure can show business and government leaders worldwide how to work together to improve financial inclusion and economic growth.
The shift to cloud-based subscription models is creating even more value in a thriving sector.
The Covid-19 pandemic — and the social distancing it required — presented the ultimate test for many of the fundamental aspects of customer’s retail shopping experiences: no fitting rooms, no contact with retail agents, no cash payments, and no in-store testing of products. While many parts of the U.S. economy have now reopened in the wake of the pandemic, retailers have learned an important lesson: we need faster, safer, and better in-store experiences that retain and enhance the important elements of closeness and interactivity with products, agents, and the store environment
The Pentagon undoubtedly draws up various scenarios for how conflict between China and the U.S. might develop. Most of them would involve a Chinese move against Taiwan. But Taiwan and China have co-existed in intense but bloodless antagonism for seven decades without tipping into real war. The crucial question is: What would trigger an actual Chinese military adventure?
To persist, life must reproduce. Over billions of years, organisms have evolved many ways of replicating, from budding plants to sexual animals to invading viruses.
Facebook has a clear mission: Connect everyone in the world. Clarity is good, but in Facebook’s case, it has also put the company in a bind because the mission — and the company’s vision for creating value through network effects — has also become the source of its biggest problems.
A new Alphabet company will use artificial intelligence methods for drug discovery, Google’s parent company announced Thursday. It’ll build off of the work done by DeepMind, another Alphabet subsidiary that has done groundbreaking work using AI to predict the structure of proteins.
Or maybe the best description of the metaverse was given by Neal Stephenson, who coined the word in his book Snow Crash, where it refers to a shared virtual space inhabited by both humans and digital “daemons". Stephenson famously said he was just “making shit up". Maybe that’s what it is.
It’s hard for us to fathom exponential change – but our inability to do so could tear apart businesses, economies and the fabric of society.
Companies are rethinking product design to ease the current supply chain disruption, and the ones sure to follow.
Space has progressively become essential to our everyday life, enabling weather forecasts, live event broadcasts, financial transactions, and car navigation. It also is key to a high number of critical economic sectors, like agriculture, transport, utilities, and financial services, and increasingly to national security.
The metaverse has the potential to bring fulfilment, economic opportunity and equity to people. Provided a handful of companies are prevented from dominating it, the virtual world may overcome the shortcomings of the physical one—a hope born of the recognition that digital environments are actually real places.
The tech industry recently appeared to be sitting on cloud nine. One record after another fell when quarterly results were reported three months ago. Revenues had grown by 40% on average compared with the same period a year ago and profits by 90% for the five Western technology titans—Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft, collectively known as GAFAM.
How much could a cluster of pixels possibly be worth? More pointedly, why is it worth anything at all? The explosion of NFTs and their accompanying marketplaces have left many baffled, incredulous, and deeply skeptical. But while NFTs may be fetching eye-popping, eyebrow-raising valuations, there is a logic to how — and when — they create value
Microsoft and IBM each dominated their generation of tech, and they each lost that dominance, not because of anything they did, nor because of anti-trust, but because the business they controlled stopped being the centre of tech.
The obvious analogy to Facebook’s announcement that it is renaming itself Meta and re-organizing its financials to separate “Family of Apps” — Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp — from “Facebook Reality Labs” is Google’s 2015 reorganization to Alphabet, which separated “Google”, including the search engine, YouTube, and Google Cloud, from “Other Bets.”
“Semiconductors are a hot topic these days,” Gelsinger continued. “What aspect of your life is not being increasingly driven by digital transformation? If there was any question on that, COVID eliminated it.”
Scientists temporarily attached a pig’s kidney to a human body and watched it begin to work, a small step in the decades-long quest to one day use animal organs for life-saving transplants.
