The interesting part of this to me is that they’re looking at using this tiny, cheap computer for tracking items throughout the supply chain, with a unified view of all of the handoffs.

And the reason that interests me is that in my current WIP, there’s a primitive mechanical/magical computer called the Realm Ledger which does exactly that, among other things. The speculative element is “what if companies didn’t own their own computers, but it was all handled centrally’?

Which isn’t a very interesting question just by itself, so I have a bunch of people trying to break into the Realm Ledger and subvert it, and another bunch of people trying to stop them.

Originally shared by Singularity Hub

IBM’s New Computer Is the Size of a Grain of Salt and Costs Less Than 10 Cents https://suhub.co/2Gui1Us

There’s a trend in these failed predictions: New technology doesn’t fundamentally change the nature of humanity, the nature of work, or how much work there is to do. Or rather, it does so only very slowly.

Of course, the rate of change is speeding up, and there’s often short-term disruption; but if you take a course of not believing either the most dire or the most rosy predictions, you’re unlikely to go far wrong.

http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20180312-historys-unfounded-fears-over-the-future-of-work?ocid=ww.social.link.googleplus

Worth noting.

Originally shared by Winchell Chung

CraftyHominid Are there even touch screens on the ISS?

Chris Hadfield Touch screens don’t work so well when you’re floating weightless.

Touch screens require accurate finger pointing, so your body needs to be stable – seated or standing solidly. On a spaceship you’re normally neither.

https://twitter.com/Cmdr_Hadfield/status/977545261995184130

This article raises similar concerns to Yonatan Zunger’s recent Twitter thread (which was triggered by the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower) about the need for explicit standards of ethics in computer science.

As an arts graduate who’s worked in IT for 20 years and has also studied health science, and as a science fiction writer who writes about how technology and culture shape each other, I’m all in favour of people in general having a broad rather than a narrow knowledge base, and being able to think about and discuss important human and technological questions. In a complex, interconnected world, deliberately cultivating ignorance is dangerous to yourself and others.

I’d love to see an entrepreneur or one of the existing education platforms come up with a set of courses that would introduce everyone to the basics of politics, economics, sociology, anthropology, psychology (with an emphasis on self-understanding, self-efficacy and self-care as well as understanding and communicating with others), effective writing, reading comprehension, study and research skills, computer science, manufacturing and logistics, engineering, project management, accounting, advertising and marketing, popular culture, “high” culture, physics, biology, chemistry, mathematics, history, geography – all in a way that showed how they’re interlinked, and how they all impact our everyday lives.

Via Adafruit Industries.

https://theconversation.com/steam-not-stem-why-scientists-need-arts-training-89788

Fusion power in 15 years? Suuuuure.

Originally shared by Singularity Hub

New MIT Startup Targets Working Fusion Reactor in 15 Years. Can It Be Done? http://suhub.co/2FXGG05

I have several thoughts on this.

1. Why the 100km specification? If you can control it from 100km away, surely you can control it from anywhere? Though lag might be a factor, I suppose.

2. Why is an airline sponsoring this? Do they see the writing on the wall?

3. Hand brake, not hand break.

4. This is a technology I explore in my novella Gu: http://csidemedia.com/gu. Among the implications: if people can live in one country and work in another, that does interesting things to migration, labour, the cost of housing, and people’s relationship to timezones.

Originally shared by Singularity Hub

$10 million XPRIZE Aims for Robot Avatars That Let You See, Hear, and Feel by 2021 http://suhub.co/2HMbx04

Almost three-quarters of the size of the average New York apartment for $10k, and they hope to get it down to four. About to be deployed in El Salvador.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/12/17101856/3d-printed-housing-icon-shelter-housing-crisis

This is well said. Our narratives are often all or nothing, disaster or triumph, because that makes for a better story, but real life generally is not that tidy.

About 20 years ago, I started (but didn’t finish) an SF novel set in the 2020s. I called it Topia, because I wasn’t setting out to write a utopia or a dystopia, but something in between. I still think there’s some space for that in fiction; it’s certainly how things generally work out in reality.

Originally shared by Singularity Hub

What If the AI Revolution Is Neither Utopia nor Apocalypse, but Something in Between? http://suhub.co/2HvWMyB

I’ve heard that, though tractors have been effectively self-driving for a while now, farmers still want to be in the cab because they enjoy being involved in the process. I suppose big agribusinesses don’t care about that, though.

Originally shared by Wayne Radinsky

“The first fully autonomous ground vehicles hitting the market aren’t cars or delivery trucks — they’re ­robo­-farmhands. The Dot Power Platform is a prime example of an explosion in advanced agricultural technology, which Goldman Sachs predicts will raise crop yields 70 percent by 2050. But Dot isn’t just a tractor that can drive without a human for backup. It’s the Transformer of ag-bots, capable of performing 100-plus jobs, from hay baler and seeder to rock picker and manure spreader, via an ­arsenal of tool modules. And though the hulking machine can carry 40,000 pounds, it navigates fields with balletic precision.”

That’s pretty breathless. Let’s see if it can live up to that. I think it may need humans in the loop.

https://www.wired.com/story/dot-power-autonomous-farming/

This is a slightly different material from the “superwood” I featured a while back.

Originally shared by Gideon Rosenblatt

I’m really excited about this. Costing as little as $7.44 per square meter, this new nanoscale material is also biodegradable under the right conditions. It’s also super strong (a strength-to-weight ratio that’s about eight times that of steel) and heat-insulating. This is a material to keep an eye on. It could radically alter the construction industry – and probably has a lot of other applications that we can’t yet see.

http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-nanowood-20180309-story.html