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An amazing aspect of living in The Fourth Industrial Era is that we are at a new inflection point in bringing emerging technologies to life. We are in an era of scientific breakthroughs that will change the way of life as we currently know it. While there are many technological areas of fascination for me, the meshing of biology with machine is one of the most intriguing. It fuses many elements of technologies especially artificial intelligence and pervasive computing. I have highlighted two frontiers of “mind-bending” developments that are on the horizon, Neuromorphic technologies, and human-machine biology.

Neuromorphic Technologies

Human computer interaction (HCI) was an area of research that started in the 1980s and has come a long way in a short period of time. HCI was the foundation for what we call neuromorphic computing, the integration of systems containing electronic analog circuits to mimic neuro-biological architectures present in the biological nervous system.

Take care of Mother Nature and she will take care of you to live long and prosper in a symbiotic mutually beneficial win/win deal thanks to the economic principle of reciprocity to restore the riches by circulating the love for peace, prosperity, and profit while caring for the birds, bees, and the trees. as we begin to merge with machines as future cyborgs soon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Nature

Reliable Robotics, a startup developing autonomous flight technologies, this week emerged from stealth with $33.5 million in venture capital funding. Cofounder and CEO Robert Rose says the funds will be used to scale production of the company’s products and bring on new engineering talent.

Aviation companies pursuing autonomous transportation include Uber, Boeing, and Honeywell. According to management consulting firm Oliver Wyman, replacing single-pilot operations with autonomous planes could save airlines as much as $60 billion annually. Pandemic headwinds have only reinvigorated the search for cost-cutting opportunities, as Statista estimates airlines will lose at least $314 billion in revenue in 2020.

Looking to expedite their path to market, companies like Xwing, Airbus, and Elroy Air have explored retrofitting existing aircraft rather than developing hardware from scratch. Reliable Robotics, which was founded in 2017 by Rose and VP of engineering Juerg Frefel, aims to develop a platform that imbues any fixed-wing plane with autonomous capabilities.

You’ll be surprised by how much your language shapes your perspective.


There are about 7,000 languages spoken around the world — and they all have different sounds, vocabularies and structures. But do they shape the way we think? Cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky shares examples of language — from an Aboriginal community in Australia that uses cardinal directions instead of left and right to the multiple words for blue in Russian — that suggest the answer is a resounding yes. “The beauty of linguistic diversity is that it reveals to us just how ingenious and how flexible the human mind is,” Boroditsky says. “Human minds have invented not one cognitive universe, but 7,000.”

This talk was presented at an official TED conference, and was featured by our editors on the home page.

Accurate computational prediction of chemical processes from the quantum mechanical laws that govern them is a tool that can unlock new frontiers in chemistry, improving a wide variety of industries. Unfortunately, the exact solution of quantum chemical equations for all but the smallest systems remains out of reach for modern classical computers, due to the exponential scaling in the number and statistics of quantum variables. However, by using a quantum computer, which by its very nature takes advantage of unique quantum mechanical properties to handle calculations intractable to its classical counterpart, simulations of complex chemical processes can be achieved. While today’s quantum computers are powerful enough for a clear computational advantage at some tasks, it is an open question whether such devices can be used to accelerate our current quantum chemistry simulation techniques.

In “Hartree-Fock on a Superconducting Qubit Quantum Computer”, appearing today in Science, the Google AI Quantum team explores this complex question by performing the largest chemical simulation performed on a quantum computer to date. In our experiment, we used a noise-robust variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) to directly simulate a chemical mechanism via a quantum algorithm. Though the calculation focused on the Hartree-Fock approximation of a real chemical system, it was twice as large as previous chemistry calculations on a quantum computer, and contained ten times as many quantum gate operations. Importantly, we validate that algorithms being developed for currently available quantum computers can achieve the precision required for experimental predictions, revealing pathways towards realistic simulations of quantum chemical systems.