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Blog – Page 10847

Jamie Bartlett’s new book Radicals features #transhumanism in his opening chapter. He’s on a book tour and discusses his time on the Immortality Bus for about 10 minutes in this video below:

Society is badly served by the limited set of ideas which occupy our cultural mainstream. To cope with the increasing pace of change, we need big new ideas. Where might these ideas come from?

In this London Futurists presentation, Jamie Bartlett, Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at the think tank Demos, shared his thoughts on a number of “radical” outsiders — a variety of individuals, groups and movements who reject the way we live now, and who are attempting to find alternatives.

Continue reading “Radicals — Outsiders changing the world” | >

Equipped with 3D printers, CNC machines, computers, digital tools and other equipment, a fabrication laboratory, otherwise known as a Fab Lab, is a facility set up to enable people to ‘make anything’. In a bid to provide these capabilities to missions for deep-space exploration, NASA are accepting FabLab proposals from corporate, institutional and charitable teams in the private-sector, due to be reviewed late 2017.

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Future generations are on course to become enveloped in the biggest pension crisis in history, according to the World Economic Forum (WEF), unless policymakers from the world’s leading economies take urgent action.

The Geneva-based organization predicted the challenges of an ageing population could result in the world’s largest economies being forced to tackle a pension time-bomb.

Analysis from WEF showed six countries with the biggest pensions, including the U.S., Canada, U.K., Netherlands, Japan and Australia, as well as the two most densely populated countries in the world – China and India – would face a retirement savings gap in excess of $400 trillion in 2050, up from around $70 trillion in 2015.

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Apple is developing a dedicated processor that will be used to handle AI-related tasks like facial and speech recognition in its products, reports Bloomberg. Citing a source with knowledge of Apple’s plans, the site says the chip is known internally as the “Apple Neural Engine.”

Apple plans to use the chip, which would work alongside the standard processor and the graphics chip, to add more advanced artificial intelligence capabilities into its devices and to offload demanding AI processing tasks that can impact battery life.

An AI-enabled processor would help Cupertino, California-based Apple integrate more advanced capabilities into devices, particularly cars that drive themselves and gadgets that run augmented reality, the technology that superimposes graphics and other information onto a person’s view of the world.

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Biomedical engineering has long been a driver of advances in healthcare. From new technologies to diagnose and treat some of the most complex disease to advances that improve quality of life for everyone, the work taking place in labs around the world right now is likely to change the face of healthcare in both the short- and long-term future.

Although there are literally thousands of different projects taking place at this very moment, there are some definite trends taking place in biomedical engineering.

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Quantum computing and the blockchain both get plenty of attention in 2017, and now researchers in Russia have combined the two to create what they claim is an unhackable distributed-ledger platform.

The new technology, described as the “first quantum-safe blockchain,” promises to make it secure for organizations to transfer data without the fear of hacking from even the most powerful computers, in this case, the emerging field of quantum computing. Quantum computers make use of the quantum states of subatomic particles to store information, with the potential to do some calculations far faster than current computers. There’s some dispute whether we have actually reached that point yet, but companies such as Google Inc. are promising that true quantum computing is just around the corner.

“Quantum computers pose a major threat to data security today and could even be used to hack blockchains, destroying everything from cryptocurrencies like bitcoin to secure government communications,” a spokesperson for the Russian Quantum Center told SiliconANGLE. “Because quantum computers can test a large number of combinations at once, they will be able to destroy these digital signatures, leaving the blockchain vulnerable.”

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