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Solar-Powered Graphene Skin Enables Prosthetics to Feel

The team tested their device on a prosthetic hand. When the skin patches on the skin were enabled, the prosthetic could touch and grab soft objects like a normal hand. But when the skin was not turned on, the hand crushed the objects.

The skin requires just 20 nanowatts of power per square centimeter, according to the paper. Right now, the energy captured by the photovoltaic cells has to be used immediately, but the team has another prototype in development that includes flexible supercapacitors to store excess energy.

They are also working on scaling up the material to cover larger areas of a prosthetic or robot, using a method the team pioneered in 2015 for inexpensively producing large sheets of graphene. Dahiya expects the skin will eventually be produced for just $1 for 5 to 10 centimeters of the material.

Google Chases General Intelligence With New AI That Has a Memory

For a mind to be capable of tackling anything, it has to have a memory.

Humans are exceptionally good at transferring old skills to new problems. Machines, despite all their recent wins against humans, aren’t. This is partly due to how they’re trained: artificial neural networks like Google’s DeepMind learn to master a singular task and call it quits. To learn a new task, it has to reset, wiping out previous memories and starting again from scratch.

This phenomenon, quite aptly dubbed “catastrophic forgetting,” condemns our AIs to be one-trick ponies.

IBM Watson: The Ingredient Brand Helping Inform The Purposeful Business Of Tomorrow

We will be able to embed storytelling directly into business strategy development, tell meaningful and memorable stories that truly connect with employees and customers, craft moments that are personalized and frictionless, and as a bonus, have the ability to harness Watson to optimize distribution across channel, demo and geography.

This is particularly resonant as I believe that just as the last twenty years mandated that every organization strive to be a technology company, the next twenty will command every winning corporation to be a content or media brand. In my view, Watson and AI will be the ingredient brand catalyzing tomorrow’s innovation at leading corporations in many ways; but media for certain will be top of the list, as AI assists them in becoming the top content studios of the future. Smaller businesses can scale these ideas using Watson as well as compelling content creation becomes an increasingly important driver of business strategy.

Tomorrow’s business success stories will be fueled by AI that extends beyond the CTO and areas of pure technology and infrastructure, to the CMO and areas ranging from culture to communication to creativity. The winning formula of the future as articulated by IBM will be creativity + technology = meaningful engagement, and the ability to activate purposeful change.

Exponential Series — Nathan Waters

ES Emerging Technology are delighted to invite you to the second event in our Exponential Series!

Nathan Waters is a futurist, decentralist and entrepreneur. He is the founder of the monthly Ethereum blockchain meetup (SydEthereum) and Australia’s largest independent hackathon (Hackagong).

In this discussion Nathan will be presenting a new project for a blockchain-based economic protocol intended to transition humanity to a post-Capitalist future. We’ll be covering topics such as: runaway automation, technological unemployment, future of work and education, wage slavery, wealth inequality, rising precariat, universal basic income, peer production, platform co-operatives, post-scarcity and decentralised autonomous organisations.

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