Future clothes. đ
Sales of jackets and vests with built-in fans are climbing as more places endure stifling temperatures.
Category: futurism – Page 710
William MacAskill: âThere are 80 trillion people yet to come. They need us to start protecting themâ
All those numbers seem incalculably abstract but, according to the moral philosopher William MacAskill, they should command our attention. He is a proponent of whatâs known as longtermism â the view that the deep future is something we have to address now. How long we last as a species and what kind of state of wellbeing we achieve, says MacAskill, may have a lot to do with what decisions we make and actions we take at the moment and in the foreseeable future.
That, in a nutshell, is the thesis of his new book, What We Owe the Future: A Million-Year View. The Dutch historian and writer Rutger Bregman calls the bookâs publication âa monumental eventâ, while the US neuroscientist Sam Harris says that âno living philosopher has had a greater impactâ upon his ethics.
We tend to think of moral philosophers as whiskery sages, but MacAskill is a youthful 35 and a disarmingly informal character in person, or rather on a Zoom call from San Francisco, where he is promoting the book.
Why Amazon Scholar Yossi Keshet remains âexcited about speechâ
New speech representations and self-supervised learning are two of the recent trends that most intrigue him.
Your next wooden chair could arrive flat, then dry into a 3D shape
Wooden objects are usually made by sawing, carving, bending or pressing. Thatâs so old school! Today, scientists will describe how flat wooden shapes extruded by a 3D printer can be programmed to self-morph into complex 3D shapes. In the future, this technique could be used to make furniture or other wooden products that could be shipped flat to a destination and then dried to form the desired final shape.
The researchers will present their results at the fall meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS).
In nature, plants and some animals can alter their own shapes or textures. Even after a tree is cut down, its wood can change shape as it dries. It shrinks unevenly and warps because of variations in fiber orientation within the wood. âWarping can be an obstacle,â says Doron Kam, a graduate student who is presenting the work at the meeting, âbut we thought we could try to understand this phenomenon and harness it into a desirable morphing.â
A fireproof wood achieves the highest class in burning test thanks to an invisible coating
It can also solve the carbon intensity problem in the construction industry.
Researchers at the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore have invented an invisible coating that can be applied to wood to make it fireproof.
Modern-day buildings are built largely using concrete, steel, and glass, which are at low risk from fires. However, the production of these materials is a carbon-intensive process. Mass-engineered timber is a solution to this problem as wood harvested from sustainably managed forests has a lower carbon footprint than steel and concrete. Additionally, it allows for faster construction at lower costs, making it the ideal component for future constructions.
Stop dissing pessimismâitâs part of being human
In todayâs society, being happy and having an optimistic attitude are social expectations that weigh heavily on how we live and the choices we make.
Some psychologists have pointed out how happiness has evolved into an industry. In turn, this has created what I call a happiness imperative, the social expectation that we should all aspire to happiness.
But this can be an obstacle to happiness. This is why, as a researcher in philosophical pessimism, I argue that if we actually want to live better lives, pessimism is the philosophical system that can help us achieve it.
Tropical Disturbance Moves Ashore Near Northern Mexico, South Texas
Tropical showers are possible for the Lower Rio Grande Valley through early Sunday, but tropical development is no longer expected. â Articles from The Weather Channel | weather.com
New chip ramps up AI computing efficiency
However, AI functionalities on these tiny edge devices are limited by the energy provided by a battery. Therefore, improving energy efficiency is crucial. In todayâs AI chips, data processing and data storage happen at separate places â a compute unit and a memory unit. The frequent data movement between these units consumes most of the energy during AI processing, so reducing the data movement is the key to addressing the energy issue.
Stanford University engineers have come up with a potential solution: a novel resistive random-access memory (RRAM) chip that does the AI processing within the memory itself, thereby eliminating the separation between the compute and memory units. Their âcompute-in-memoryâ (CIM) chip, called NeuRRAM, is about the size of a fingertip and does more work with limited battery power than what current chips can do.
âHaving those calculations done on the chip instead of sending information to and from the cloud could enable faster, more secure, cheaper, and more scalable AI going into the future, and give more people access to AI power,â said H.-S Philip Wong, the Willard R. and Inez Kerr Bell Professor in the School of Engineering.