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Nothing illustrates China’s meteoric rise as some well chosen numbers.

By the end of the 1990s, China had come to dominate the mainstays of geopolitical power in the 20th century – coal and steel production. As a consequence, it leapt to the top of the Compositive Index of National Capability, which uses military expenditure, military personnel, energy consumption, iron and steel production, urban population, and total population as a proxy of national power. Still, one could legitimately argue that all of these factors are hardly relevant today. While Germany’s fourfold preponderance in steel production over Russia may have been a critical number in 1914, China’s eightfold advantage in steel production over the US by 2014 is all but meaningless in any relevant comparison of national power. The world has moved on.

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Geordie’s perspective of AI on QC…


By Piper McGowin

Meanwhile as everyone was busy arguing over the bread and circus elections, the CIA was busy funding a computer so powerful that it is described as “tapping into the fundamental fabric of reality” and the man who owns the company says being near one is like “standing at the altar of an alien God.”

Mercedes-Benz Vans and drone tech startup Matternet have created a concept car, or as they’re calling it a Vision Van, that could change the way small packages are delivered across short distances.

The Vision Van’s rooftop serves as a launch and landing pad for Matternet’s new, Matternet M2 drones.

The Matternet M2 drones, which are autonomous, can pick up and carry a package of 4.4 pounds across 12 miles of sky on a single battery charge in real world conditions.

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Silicon Valley, or the Greater Bay Area, is the 18th largest economy in the world, more than half the size of Canada’s economy and bigger than Switzerland, Saudi Arabia or Turkey. This is because the region has become the world leader in research and development of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, robotics, software and virtual reality.

“Software is eating the world,” said Silicon Valley investor Marc Andreessen famously in 2011. It was controversial but prescient.

Five years later, software-driven machines and drones perform surgery, write news stories, compose music, translate, analyze, wage war, guard, listen, speak and entertain. The world’s biggest box office hits — animated films such as “Frozen” or special effects in Hollywood blockbusters like “Star Wars” — are made using software.

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A new technique uses the curious physical laws of the nano-scale itself to “program” nanobots. Welcome to the future of nanotechnology.

Nanorobotics has long been touted as one of the most promising “miracle technologies” of the future. But one of the fundamental problems with such extreme miniaturization is how to “program” nanobots—after all, you can’t very well shrink computer circuitry to fit within nanometer-scale technology.

But now, two researchers, Joseph Wang of UC San Diego and Jennifer Balazs of the University of Pittsburgh, may have found an ingenious way to circumvent this problem. Forget computer controls and artificial intelligence programming—let the laws of physics at the nano-scale do all the programming for you.

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