Lifeboat Foundation

How competing software, hardware and political ideology could accelerate existing divisions in humanity into the future

It’s been great to get people’s thoughts and feedback on the last article on “The iPhone 20”. Some of your responses considered that given Apple’s business model is effectively a walled garden, this makes any integration with the human body very unlikely in the future.

That’s why in this article, rather than focusing on Apple, I’ll look to explore some of the ways tech companies and organisations (including government bodies) will compete on software, hardware and protocols that will shape humanity’s journey to 2029, which may accelerate our existing divisions that stifle collaboration and splinters our future societies.

In part three of Hello World Shenzhen, Bloomberg Businessweek’s Ashlee Vance heads out into a city where you can’t use cash or credit cards, only your smartphone, where AI facial-recognition software instantly spots and tickets jaywalkers, and where at least one factory barely needs people. This is the society that China’s government and leading tech companies are racing to make a reality, with little time to question which advancements are net positives for the rest of us.

Part One — Inside China’s Future Factory.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLmaIbb13GM

Continue reading “Inside China’s High-Tech Dystopia” »

Space rocks come crashing down to Earth with somewhat startling regularity, and when they do they often create a big boom. When a meteorite detonates in Earth’s atmosphere it produces an explosion which researchers call bolides, or simply “fireballs.”

Most of the time, a fireball appears and disappears before anyone is quick enough to grab their smartphone and record it, so we’re left with dash cam videos and still images from stationary cameras to give us a glimpse of the event. Last week, a fireball came crashing down in Cuba and, in a rare treat, we actually get to hear it.

(CNN) — The north magnetic pole has been drifting so fast that it could be a problem for smartphone maps and navigation systems.

The pole has been the friend of navigators for millennia, beckoning compass needles from virtually every point on the planet. And unlike the geographic north pole, which is fixed, the north magnetic pole has been slowly migrating over time — moving across the Canadian Arctic toward Russia since 1831.

But its swift pace toward Siberia in recent years at a rate of around 34 miles per year has forced scientists to update the World Magnetic Model — used by civilian navigation systems, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and US and British militaries — a year ahead of schedule.

Continue reading “Earth’s magnetic north pole is hurtling toward Russia” »

AI may quickly point out a corrupt official, but it is not very good at explaining the process it has gone through to reach such a conclusion.

“We just use the machine’s result as reference,” Zhang Yi, an official in a province that’s still using the software, told the SCMP. “We need to check and verify its validity. The machine cannot pick up the phone and call the person with a problem. The final decision is always made by humans.”

Algorithmic Justice

Continue reading “China Built an AI to Detect Corruption and Officials Shut it Down” »

Very soon we might be able to say good riddance to the overheating laptops, phones and tablets that we deal with every day. Electrons carry information around circuits but lose energy as heat during transmission. Electrons are the best thing we have right now for computing, but in the near future we could wave goodbye to electronics and welcome photon, or light, communication that will be both faster and cooler. There are still few hurdles before we can get this technology in every home and every pocket, but one of its limitations was just solved by the development of a new metamaterial.

A metamaterial is a substance that has properties not observed in nature. In this case, the special property is its refractive index, a value that describes how light propagates through a medium. Take water or glass, for example, which cause light rays to bend as they travel through them. This is why pools always look shallower than they actually are.

The new metamaterial has a refractive index of zero, which means that the light phase in the material can travel infinitely fast. This doesn’t mean that relativity is violated by this material, though. Light has a “group velocity,” the velocity at which the wave propagates into space, and a “phase velocity,” the velocity at which the peaks of the waves move with respect to the wave.

Continue reading “New Metamaterial Transmits Light With No Energy Loss” »

Where we’re going, we don’t need batteries.

Using the new device is almost like harvesting electricity out of thin air.

#OpenAccess #FullArticle The results of a new clinical trial have shown the safety and efficacy of the interoperable Artificial Pancreas System smartphone app (iAPS), which can interface wirelessly with leading continuous glucose monitors (CGM), insulin pump devices, and decision-making algorithms. The clinical trial and the app, which runs on an unlocked smartphone, are described in an article published in Diabetes Technology & Therapeutics (DTT), a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers.

Diabetes Technology & TherapeuticsVol. 21, No. 1Original ArticlesFree AccessSunil Deshpande,…

Photo: Roy Allela

Twenty-five-year-old Kenyan engineer and innovator, Roy Allela, has created a set of gloves that will ultimately allow better communication between those who are deaf and those who are hearing yet may not necessarily know sign language. The Sign-IO gloves in essence translate signed hand movements into audible speech.

Allela’s gloves feature sensors located on each finger that detect the positioning of each finger, including how much each finger will bend into a given position. The glove connects via Bluetooth to an Android phone which then will leverage use the text-to-speech function to provide translated speech to the hand gestures of a person signing.

Continue reading “Meet The Kenyan Engineer Who Created Gloves That Turn Sign Language Into Audible Speech” »