And this is, to all appearances, going to be the new dominant superpower.

Originally shared by Raja Mitra

This is seriously chilling stuff and an Orwellian fantasy come true. Several other states, India in the lead are pushing actively towards implementing an all-pervasive surveillance state.

Imagine a society in which you are rated by the government on your trustworthiness. Your “citizen score” follows you wherever you go. A high score allows you access to faster internet service or a fast-tracked visa to Europe. If you make political posts online without a permit, or question or contradict the government’s official narrative on current events, however, your score decreases. To calculate the score, private companies working with your government constantly trawl through vast amounts of your social media and online shopping data.

When you step outside your door, your actions in the physical world are also swept into the dragnet: The government gathers an enormous collection of information through the video cameras placed on your street and all over your city. If you commit a crime—or simply jaywalk—facial recognition algorithms will match video footage of your face to your photo in a national ID database. It won’t be long before the police show up at your door.

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/02/china-surveillance/552203/

Holy crap.

Via Raja Mitra.

Originally shared by Fast Company

China is now monitoring employees’ brainwaves and emotions – The Orwellian-as-all-get-out practice is being conducted using “emotional surveillance technology” by both businesses in China and the country’s military, reports the South China Morning Post. The tech uses small wireless sensors embedded in employees’ hats that can monitor brainwaves. That brainwave data is then analyzed by AI to tell when an employee is tired, anxious, or even full of rage. One company using the brain-monitoring…

http://ht.ly/ErGK50hcMZj

I explore these ideas and more in my novella Gu (http://csidemedia.com/gu), which is about “the last manufactured thing”.

Originally shared by Singularity Hub

Stuff 3.0: The Era of Programmable Matter https://suhub.co/2JEmeD5

Of interest to me for a couple of reasons, one being that in the book I’m currently working on, Capital Crimes, I have a steampunk version of what’s described here as “Fedcoin”. It’s called the Realm Ledger, and it’s basically “what if the government ran a transactional computer system that kept track of everyone’s payments to each other, and their internal accounting as well, and didn’t charge you for it, because knowing exactly what the entire economy was doing would be so valuable?”

Via Singularity Hub.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610809/lets-destroy-bitcoin/

Soft robotics – the inflation with air isn’t just for movement, but also protects it from humans and vice versa, and enables it to sense touch.

https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/27/this-soft-robotic-arm-is-straight-out-of-big-hero-6-its-even-from-disney/

‘DNA recorders would capture audiovisual data automatically. “You could paint it up on walls, and if anything interesting happens, just scrape a little bit off and read it—it’s not that far off.”’

I’ve thought for a while that the distinction between biological and silicon intelligence might not ever become a thing – because the artificial intelligences could also be on a biological substrate.

Originally shared by Singularity Hub

The Answer to Today’s Digital Data Deluge May Literally Be in Our DNA https://suhub.co/2KhtTs3 by Peter Diamandis

Bose-Einstein condensates, y’all.

Originally shared by Singularity Hub

Scientists Discover How to Harness the Power of Quantum Spookiness by Entangling Clouds of Atoms https://suhub.co/2HwMt1H

In case you care about your dragons being vaguely plausible.

Originally shared by Kam-Yung Soh

The science of dragon fire. “No fantasy world is complete without a fire-breathing dragon. But if dragons were real, how might they get that fiery breath? Nature, it seems, has all the parts a dragon needs to set the world on fire. The creatures just require a few chemicals, some microbes — and maybe tips from a tiny desert fish.”

https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/blog/technically-fiction/nature-shows-how-dragons-might-breathe-fire