“Amazon delivered a lovely update on its ‘Prime Air’ project today — almost exactly two years after it showed the first iteration of its drone.”
Category: business – Page 307
Russell also signed the letter, but he says his view is less apocalyptic. He says that, until now, the field of artificial intelligence has been singularly focused on giving robots the ability to make “high-quality” decisions.
“At the moment, we don’t know how to give the robot what you might call human values,” he says.
But Russell believes that as this problem becomes clearer, it’s only natural that people will start to focus their energy on solving it.
It seems evident that Microsoft is joining other top tech companies in betting on quantum computing with a clear business strategy in mind: to become the market leader in software development platforms for quantum computing. If quantum computers become the next supercomputing revolution in 2025, Microsoft stock will take a quantum leap.
Self-driving cars could disrupt the airline and hotel industries within 20 years as people sleep in their vehicles on the road, according to a senior strategist at Audi.
Short-haul travel will be transformed and the hassle of getting to and from airports eliminated, said Sven Schuwirth, vice president of brand strategy and digital business at the German car brand.
Business travellers will be able to avoid taking domestic flights to meetings and will sleep and work in their cars en route instead of checking into city-centre hotels, he said.
“When the world’s smartest researchers train computers to become smarter, they like to use games. Go, the two-player board game born in China more than two millennia ago, remains the nut that machines still can’t crack.”
Tianjin is building the world’s largest animal cloning factory, aiming to produce one million cattle embryos annually, state media reported yesterday.
According to a Xinhua, mainland scientists have signed a deal to establish a 200 million yuan (HK$242 million) commercial animal cloning centre in the Tianjin Economic-Technological Development Area, a government-sponsored business development park.
Its main building was already under construction and due to be completed by June next year, the report said. Among the animals it will clone are sniffer and pet dogs, high-grade beef cattle, racehorses and “non-human primates”. These animals will be used for commercial services and improving breeds.
“We’ve learned that Google’s revamped Google Glass project, dubbed Project Aura, is working on a wearable with a screen—and at least one without.”
For some people the idea of being operated on by a robot might sound horrifying, particularly if there isn’t even a doctor in the room to check that everything is running smoothly. Surgery is in any case a risky business that few would undertake willingly if it wasn’t absolutely necessary, and it seems unlikely that the spectacle of an enormous machine with mechanical arms attached to surgical scalpels would reassure anyone about having to undergo an operation. However, the use of robotic surgery has spread rapidly in recent years and for some types of operations it is becoming the standard. While there is a lot of controversy surrounding the topic, many doctors see surgical robots as a vital tool to provide better medical care and lower the risks associated with surgery.
History of robotic surgery
The roots of robotic surgery go back to the mid-1980s, when a robotic surgical arm was first used to perform a neurosurgical biopsy. Two years later, the first robot-assisted laparoscopic (i.e. keyhole) operation was conducted, a cholecystectomy. The following years saw continued advances in the area of robotic surgery, which was used for a growing range of surgical procedures. One of the earliest robotic surgical systems to enter into general use was the ROBODOC system, which came on the market in the early 1990s and allowed surgeons conducting hip replacements to mill the femur with more precision that would have been conventionally possible.
You’ve got the Lamborghini and the Learjet, the houses and quite possibly the palaces; Erdem designs your dresses and you’ve got heaps of diamonds. What next? Well, adornment can only take you so far: what good is that Lech heli-skiing pad when your knees are shot? What’s the point in building a multibillion-pound business when you’re unwittingly courting a heart attack? As technology evolves ever more rapidly, ultra high net worth individuals are turning their attention inward, investigating how to stall the ageing process, and spending serious money to load their dice against death.
Across the road from Harrods sits Omniya clinic, a calm, contemporary white space amid the hustle of Knightsbridge. At street level it is a luxuriously reimagined pharmacy, whose curated selection includes recent launches from Hollywood’s favourite ‘cosmeceutical’ brands Zo Skin Health and Dr Levy. ‘I wanted to create a place that brings the newest advancements in medical and regenerative health to London,’ says co-founder Danyal Kader, a former lawyer, radiant with bien-être. He was so depressed by the difficulty of finding the best medical treatment for his father, who suffers from a heart condition, that he decided to create his own one-stop conduit to wellness. ‘We optimise the lives our clients can lead, body, mind and soul.’ To this end, he has brought together a team of leading specialists who analyse the health of their clients in the most minute and sophisticated detail — a kind of space-age human MOT.
One of these is cellular ageing specialist Dr Mark Bonar. As his title suggests, Bonar is passionate about the very specific degradations that happen in the cells of the body as we age — and still more excited about the new ways he can use to slow such deterioration. Consider, for example, telomeres. ‘Telomeres are the caps on the ends of our DNA,’ Bonar explains. ‘A bit like the plastic on the end of a shoe lace, they prevent the ends from fraying. By measuring their length in the lab we can determine how well the body is ageing’ — for instance, if at 30, you show the wear and tear you’d expect in a 40-year-old. ‘The length can also inform you about your risk of various kinds of disease such as breast or bowel cancer.’