It took Da Vinci 16 years to paint the Mona Lisa. Some say he needed 12 years just to paint her lips.
There is no truth to the rumors that slow Internet was the cause.
But Da Vinci, a polymath who dabbled in botany, engineering, science, sculpture, and geology as well as painting, surely would have appreciated a new text-to-image generative vision transformer developed by Google Research.
Here’s my new article for Aporia Magazine. A lot of wild ideas in it. Give it a read:
Regardless of the ethics and whether the science can even one day be worked out for Quantum Archaeology, the philosophical dilemma it presents to Pascal’s Wager is glaring. If humans really could eradicate the essence of death as we know it—including even the ability to ever permanently die—Pascal’s Wager becomes unworkable. Frankly, so does my Transhumanist Wager. After all, why should I dedicate my life and energy to living indefinitely through science when, by the next century, technology could bring me back exactly as I was—or even as an improved version of myself?
Outside of philosophical discourse, billions of dollars are pouring into the anti-aging and technology fields—much of it from Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area where I live. Everyone from entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerburg to nonprofits like XPRIZE to giants like Google is spending money on ways to try to end all diseases and overcome death. Bank of America recently reported that they expect the extreme longevity field to be worth over $600 billion dollars by 2025.
Internet of Things technology is expanding quickly across industries. The growth is unsurprising—after all, the data derived can drive improvements in productivity and customer service, speed up innovation, lead to cost savings by powering predictive maintenance, and more. Businesses can implement IoT technology to monitor their internal systems, manage their equipment or enhance the consumer products they sell.
However, whether a business develops and manages its own products and systems or purchases equipment and service from a vendor, it must be aware of the challenges that can come with IoT tech, which include addressing the increased cybersecurity risk, managing a potentially massive influx of data and more. Below, 15 members of Forbes Technology Council share some of the challenges they foresee for businesses implementing IoT technologies in the next few years and how those issues can be overcome.
NASA and a team of partners has demonstrated a space-to-ground laser communication system operating at a record breaking 200 gigabit per second (Gbps) data rate. The TeraByte InfraRed Delivery (TBIRD) satellite payload was designed and built by[MIT Lincoln Laboratory]. The record of the highest data rate ever achieved by a space-to-Earth optical communication link surpasses the 100 Gbps record set by the same team in June 2022.
[NASA] and a team of partners has demonstrated a space-to-ground laser communication system operating at a record breaking 200 gigabit per second (Gbps) data rate. The TeraByte InfraRed Delivery (TBIRD) satellite payload was designed and built by [MIT Lincoln Laboratory]. The record of the highest data rate ever achieved by a space-to-Earth optical communication link surpasses the 100 Gbps record set by the same team in June 2022.
TBIRD makes passes over an ground station having a duration of about six-minutes. During that period, multiple terabytes of data can be downlinked. Each terabyte contains the equivalent of about 500 hours of high-definition video. The TBIRD communication system transmits information using modulated laser light waves. Traditionally, radio waves have been the medium of choice for space communications. Radio waves transmit data through space using similar circuits and systems to those employed by terrestrial radio systems such as WiFi, broadcast radio, and cellular telephony. Optical communication systems can generally achieve higher data rates, lower loses, and operate with higher efficiency than radio frequency systems.
The latest recruit at SpaceX is a software engineer who passed its “technically challenging” and “fun” interview process.
What’s different about Kairan Quazi is that he’s just 14 years old.
He said in a LinkedIn post on Thursday: “I will be joining the coolest company on the planet as a software engineer on the Starlink engineering team. One of the rare companies that did not use my age as an arbitrary and outdated proxy for maturity and ability.”
SpaceX set to bring child prodigy on board as a software engineer for its Starlink division in July. Take a look!
Reels started as Instagram’s solution for competing with TikTok and soon launched on sister-site Facebook — a natural expansion. Meta is now testing Reels on a less expected medium: the Meta Quest. Its VR headset works for internet browsing, watching movies, games and more — but the addition of typically-vertical Reels presents a different viewing experience than these more malleable (and typically screen-wide) options.
Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the update through a 13-second video on Meta’s Instagram Channel. It featured a Reel from influencer Austin Sprinz’s Instagram account in which he visited the world’s deepest pool. The immersive video is a good choice for VR, taking the viewer underwater into a seemingly bottomless space — and is certainly better than a cooking or dance Reel.
The Reels update comes ahead of Meta Quest 3’s fall release and follows Apple’s new AR/VR Vision Pro headset announcement. Though, with Quest 3’s pricing starting at $499, compared to the Vision Pro’s $3,499, the pair don’t exactly fall into the same category. Meta’s VR headset line first launched as Oculus Quest and subsequently Oculus Quest 2 before the second-generation model was rebranded as Meta Quest 2. The Meta Quest Pro followed soon after the name change. As for Reels, there’s no timeline for if and when it will leave the testing phase and become available across Meta Quest headsets.
“Intelligence supposes goodwill,” Simone de Beauvoir wrote in the middle of the twentieth century. In the decades since, as we have entered a new era of technology risen from our minds yet not always consonant with our values, this question of goodwill has faded dangerously from the set of considerations around artificial intelligence and the alarming cult of increasingly advanced algorithms, shiny with technical triumph but dull with moral insensibility.
In De Beauvoir’s day, long before the birth of the Internet and the golden age of algorithms, the visionary mathematician, philosopher, and cybernetics pioneer Norbert Wiener (November 26, 1894–March 18, 1964) addressed these questions with astounding prescience in his 1954 book The Human Use of Human Beings, the ideas in which influenced the digital pioneers who shaped our present technological reality and have recently been rediscovered by a new generation of thinkers eager to reinstate the neglected moral dimension into the conversation about artificial intelligence and the future of technology.
A decade after The Human Use of Human Beings, Wiener expanded upon these ideas in a series of lectures at Yale and a philosophy seminar at Royaumont Abbey near Paris, which he reworked into the short, prophetic book God & Golem, Inc. (public library). Published by MIT Press in the final year of his life, it won him the posthumous National Book Award in the newly established category of Science, Philosophy, and Religion the following year.
Passengers of Singapore Airlines can now stay connected to free internet at an altitude of 12,000 meters.
In simpler times, during a flight journey, one could switch off the cellular, read a good or a bad book, enjoy a glass of questionable wine, watch a movie in a different language using the in-flight entertainment system, or simply nod off. Or one could even dare to converse with a fellow passenger (gasp).
And now, more and more airlines have… More.
FreshSplash/iStock.
