Lifeboat Foundation

Before I started working on real-world robots, I wrote about their fictional and historical ancestors. This isn’t so far removed from what I do now. In factories, labs, and of course science fiction, imaginary robots keep fueling our imagination about artificial humans and autonomous machines.

Real-world robots remain surprisingly dysfunctional, although they are steadily infiltrating urban areas across the globe. This fourth industrial revolution driven by robots is shaping urban spaces and urban life in response to opportunities and challenges in economic, social, political, and healthcare domains. Our cities are becoming too big for humans to manage.

Continue reading “Robot Cities: Three Urban Prototypes for Future Living” »

Jump to media player The connection will have speeds of between 10 and 100 times faster than 4G.

Investors are sounding the alarm after a little-known U.S. government agency green lit what could be the next trillion-dollar technology.

This tight-lipped agency, known as DARPA, has a history of developing some of the most transformative technologies known to man. But what many don’t realize is that it can PAY to follow DARPA’s biggest projects.

In fact, one DARPA-funded venture was a computer network designed to provide interconnectivity among users – we now call this network the internet.

Continue reading “The U.S. government’s ‘high tech Holy Grail’” »

‘Google should not be in the business of war’: Over 3,000 employees pen letter urging CEO to pull out of the Pentagon’s controversial AI drone research, citing firm’s ‘Don’t Be Evil’ motto…

More than 3,000 Google employees have penned an open letter calling upon the internet giant’s CEO to end its controversial ‘Project Maven’ deal.

Continue reading “Google employees pen letter denouncing controversial AI drone project” »

The US Army today released documents detailing plans to build a large-scale battlefield platform dubbed the “Internet of Battle Things.”

Technically Incorrect offers a slightly twisted take on the tech that’s taken over our lives.

With so much fake news slithering around the web all year, is it still possible to enjoy April Fools’ Day?

Continue reading “This weird-looking plane isn’t a joke” »

Three years in, what I find most incredible about e-Residency is that it actually works.

Estonia’s quest to become a “digital nation”

To better understand how e-Residency came about, let’s go back almost 30 years, to 1991. Estonia had just won independence from the Soviet Union and was in the early stages of building a market-oriented economy from scratch. At the time, leaders were quick to identify the potential of the internet and open source collaboration tools (interestingly this was less out of principle, and more for the simple reason that they had no money to pay for Microsoft Office). They decided to become the world’s premier “digital nation.” A favorite quote I’ve heard in Estonia: “What do you think of when you hear the word Slovenia? Nothing. Precisely! We don’t want to be Slovenia.”

Continue reading “One of Estonia’s first ‘e-residents’ explains what it means to have digital citizenship” »

SpaceX has a green light from the FCC to launch a network of thousands of satellites blanketing the globe with broadband. And you won’t have too long to wait — on a cosmic scale, anyway. Part of the agreement is that SpaceX launch half of its proposed 4,425 satellites within six years.

The approval of SpaceX’s application was not seriously in doubt after last month’s memo from FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, who was excited at the prospect of the first U.S.-based company being authorized to launch a constellation like this.

“I have asked my colleagues to join me in supporting this application and moving to unleash the power of satellite constellations to provide high-speed Internet to rural Americans,” he wrote at the time. He really is pushing that “digital divide” thing. Not that Elon Musk disagrees:

Continue reading “FCC approves SpaceX plan for 4,425-satellite broadband network” »

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