H+ Weekly - Issue #4
In today's issue - USA challenges Japan, singularity, holograms, Mark Zuckerberg talks about telepathy and more.
USA CHALLENGES JAPAN TO GIANT ROBOT DUEL
Japanese had built a battle robot. Americans also had built a battle robot. If you ever watched any movie about giant robots you know what’s coming next.
So far the Japanese side didn’t accept nor reject the challenge.
WHAT IF ONE COUNTRY ACHIEVES THE SINGULARITY FIRST?
Achieving technological singularity will be a big think. It would have the same impact that internet had, times million. Zoltan Istvan writes in his article for Motherboard what might happen if one country or group of people gain such power.
I like the explanation of singularity as “the rapture of the nerds”. Quite accurate.
A HOLOGRAM THAT YOU CAN TOUCH
Holograms are awesome. Everyone is waiting to have one. Now we are a one step closer to make them come true.
Researchers had shown a midair 3D laser display (a fancy way to say hologram) which you can touch and it reacts when you touch it. The images are very small (no more than 8 cubic millimeters), but the holographic screen we’ve seen in sci-fi movies are now a real thing.
Now we have to make the equipment smaller and make the images bigger, and we can be designing things like Tony Stark.
THE FUTURE OF FACEBOOK AND TECHNOLOGY ACCORDING TO MARK ZUCKERBERG
Mark Zuckerberg ran a Q&A session on his profile, where he was answering questions about Facebook and about the future. For us, the most interesting parts were Mark was talking about VR, AI and “sending thoughts over internet”, which some people are referring to as telepathy. He also explained how Facebook’s AI will be better than humans.
ALGORITHM DETECTS NUDITY IN IMAGES
And you can check the algorithm here: https://isitnude.com. If you are interested how it works, folks from Algorithmia, who designed the nudity detector, wrote a post explaining how it works.
WHY YOU SOON WON’T OWN ANYTHING AND WHY THAT’S A GOOD THING
With the recent rise of “as a service” models we are slowly owning less and less things. It started with software, but then it went into music and movie industry, now it’s moving into other areas.
For example, some people are predicting that with autonomous cars we will stop owning cars. Instead, we will rent them using some Uber-like app. Cars will become a service.
In his article, Veikka Lahtinen claims that things on-demand are a good thing for a couple of reasons. It’s more cost and material effective in global scale and it reduces the number of unused things. It sounds good, but there is one problem – you don’t own the thing and not owning a thing might be dangerous for you.
WORLD’S FIRST ‘FEELING’ PROSTHETIC LEG REVEALED
Professor Hubert Egger of the FH Upper Austria (University of Applied Sciences) shows the world’s first prosthetic leg that’s able to “feel” the ground and send that information back to the human. Slowly, but steadily, prosthetic limbs are getting more like real limbs from flesh and bones.
ELON MUSK FUNDS AI SAFETY PROJECTS
Elon Musk, who’s warning all the time against AI demons, recently donated 7 million dollars to the Future of Life Institute to help them make sure AI will be beneficial for humans.
COULD YOU TRANSFER YOUR CONSCIOUSNESS TO ANOTHER BODY?
Is it possible? What would it require? How far are we from that technology? Guys from ASAPScience explore the possibility of downloading and uploading human consciousness.
CAN AN ALGORITHM HIRE BETTER THAN A HUMAN?
Remove all the humans! Because humans are biased and they can hire someone who they like instead of someone who’s a good fit. And there are startups which want to change it to make a world a better place.