Other references 2013-2015

June 2013: Brother David Steindl-Rast TED talk on happiness and gratitude

• The one thing all humans have in common is that each of us wants to be happy, says Brother David Steindl-Rast, a monk and interfaith scholar. And happiness, he suggests, is born from gratitude. An inspiring lesson in slowing down, looking where you’re going, and above all, being grateful.

July 2013: Dan Whaley | The Revolution Will Be Annotated

• introduction to the Hypothes.is tool used for public/private annotations of the web

August 2013: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant

January 2014: The End of Labor: How to Protect Workers From the Rise of Robots

July 2014: Lattice-free prediction of three-dimensional structure of programmed DNA assemblies

• MIT-created computer model enables design of complex 3D DNA structures

July 2014: Why Artificial Emotional Intelligence Really Matters

• research out of USC that finds that people are much more willing to discuss their problems with virtual avatars than they are with real people. The key reasons for this stem from the program’s superior abilities in building rapport (largely through empathetic listening with facial expressions and nodding) and because the test subjects felt that the avatar would not judge them (which a human might)

September 2014: Against Sharing

• Uber is part of a new wave of corporations that make up what’s called the “sharing economy.” The premise is seductive in its simplicity: people have skills, and customers want services. At its core, the sharing economy is a scheme to shift risk from companies to workers, discourage labor organizing, and ensure that capitalists can reap huge profits with low fixed costs.

October 2014: The Working Nation

• opinion by David Brooks: Western economies have stopped delivering broad and growing prosperity

December 2014: It’s Time to Intelligently Discuss Artificial Intelligence

December 2014: German researchers discover a flaw that could let anyone listen to your cell calls.

• SS7 global mobile phone network for routing calls, texts and services which was designed in the 1980s is riddles with vulnerabilities

December 2014: What Happens to Society When Robots Replace Workers?

January 2015: The Deep Mind of Demis Hassabis

January 2015: Yes, It Really is Different This Time

February 2015: Debunking the Debunking of “Humans Need Not Apply” and More

March 2015: Energy-generating fabric set to power battery-free wearables

• Energy-generating fabric set to power battery-free wearables

March 2015: First all-digital radio transmitter

• The Pizzicato digital radio transmitter consists of an integrated circuit outputting a single stream of bits, and an antenna – with no conventional radio parts or digital-to-analogue converter

March 2015: nterview: Neil Jacobstein Discusses Future of Jobs, Universal Basic Income and the Ethical Dangers of AI

April 2015: The innovators: build and launch your own satellite … for £20,000

April 2015: Aluminum battery from Stanford offers safe alternative to conventional batteries

April 2015: The dystopian lake filled by the world’s tech lust

• Hidden in an unknown corner of Inner Mongolia is a toxic, nightmarish lake created by our thirst for smartphones, consumer gadgets and green tech

April 2015: The world’s first robotic kitchen prepares crab bisque

• the Moley Robotic Kitchen is essentially two very expensive robotic arms, with two even dearer fully articulated biomimetic humanoid hands

April 2015: What if One Country Achieves the Singularity First

• The first person or group to experience the singularity will protect and preserve the power and intelligence they’ve acquired in the singularity process—which ultimately means they will do whatever is necessary to lessen the power and intelligence accumulation of the singularity experience for others. That way the original Singularitarians can guarantee their power and existence indefinitely.

April 2015: Michael Liebreich presentation at Bloomberg New Energy Financial Summit 2015

May 2015: Engineered virus protects bacteria while eliminating antibiotic resistance

• using CRISPR/Cas9 to create a virus that gives bacteria something that’s useful to them, but gets rid of antibiotic resistance at the same time

May 2015: Researchers first to create a single-molecule diode

• researchers have designed a new technique to create a single-molecule diode, and, in doing so, they have developed molecular diodes that perform 50 times better than all prior designs

June 2015: Artificial Intelligence Solved the Mystery of Flatworm Regeneration

• AI relied on an algorithm that continuously simulated and modified possible flatworm gene networks—much too complex and time consuming a task for humans. After three days, the computer found a model of the flatworm’s gene network that fit with the results of over a centuries worth of studies.

June 2015: Beyond Automation

July 2015: Can computers replace lawyers? A Silcon Valley company says yes

• Modria software is being used to guide people through their divorces and solve complaints about damaged delieveries

July 2015: Computer program fixes old code faster than expert engineers

• Helium system revamps and fine-tunes code without ever needing the original source, in a matter of hours or even minutes.

July 2015: Futuristic brain probe allows for wireless control of neurons

• The device is made out of soft materials that are a tenth the diameter of a human hair and can simultaneously deliver drugs and lights.

July 2015: Your body, the battery: Powering gadgets from human “biofuel”

• researchers are using our heat, movement, blood, sweat and tears to provide mico-amounts of power for electical devices

July 2015: New molecular transistor can control single electrons

• a tiny, reliable transistor assembled from a single molecule and a dozen additional atoms. The transistor reportedly operates so precisely that it can control the flow of single electrons

July 2015: How hackers can take over nuclear power plants

• vulnerabilities found in Industrial Ethernet Switches (IES), the devices that create the internal networks that are vital for the function of modern factories, refineries, ports, and countless other industrial environments

July 2015: The ‘New Silicon’ That Could Drastically Cut Data Centre Power Consumption

• Gallium nitride semiconductors aim to reduce data centre and consumer electronics power consumption by 20 percent by 2025

July 2015: Researchers demonstrate the world’s first white lasers

• More luminous and energy efficient than LEDs, white lasers look to be the future in lighting and light-based wireless communication.

July 2015: 3D Printed Models Helped Surgeons Prepare for World’s First Pediatric Bilateral Hand Transplant

July 2015: Brain-controlled prosthesis nearly as good as one-finger typing

• Years of work yield technique that continuously corrects brain readings to give people with spinal cord injuries a more precise way to tap out commands by using a thought-controlled cursor

August 2015: MIT builds a 3D printer that can use 10 materials at once

August 2015: AI: In search of the sarcasm algorithm

• Bannam’s latest attempt at solving this problem [PDF], along with Noah A. Smith and sponsored by the National Science Foundation, was around 85% accurate at detecting sarcasm on Twitter. The study took into account context, paying attention to things like the tweeter, the tweetee, and the relationship between them. It also drew on information from the tweeter’s profile and tweet history, in order to increase accuracy.
• http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~nasmith/papers/bamman+smith.icwsm15.pdf

September 2015: Nine of world’s biggest banks join to form blockchain partnership

• JP Morgan, State Street, UBS, Royal Bank of Scotland, Credit Suisse, BBVA and Commonwealth Bank of Australia
• https://www.corda.net

September 2015: This AI algorithm can match the average American on real SAT questions

• GeoS from the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) was able to score 49% accuracy on official SAT geometry questions, and 61% in practice questions
• http://geometry.allenai.org/assets/emnlp2015.pdf

September 2015: Big Tech Has Become Way Too Powerful

September 2015: Light-based memory chip is first to permanently store data

• first permanent optical memory on a chip

September 2015: Bioweapons … for dummies?

• syntheic biology poses a risk but garage biology is not as easy as it sounds

October 2015: Crucial hurdle overcome in quantum computing

• development of a two-qubit logic gate - the central building block of a quantum computer - and, significantly, done in silicon

November 2015: Starship Technologies bets its wheeled robots, not airborne drones, will deliver your groceries

November 2015: Pioneering Neuroscientists Breach the Blood-Brain Barrier

• In this new procedure, a chemotherapy drug is introduced to a patient’s blood without any apparent means to reach a brain tumor. Then, microscopic bubbles smaller than red blood cells that can pass seamlessly through the circulatory system are produced in a patient’s bloodstream. Finally, pulses of ultrasound targeted on blood vessels in the brain interact with the microscopic bubbles to cause small openings in the blood-brain barrier. This allows the chemotherapy drugs to reach the tumor through the barrier’s targeted openings.

November 2015: This Desktop Edible Insect Hive Grows Your Daily Protein At Home

• raise your own mealworms at home with automatic climate controlled hive

December 2015: As Robots Grow Smarter, American Workers Struggle to Keep Up

December 2015: A Harvard professor says he can cure aging, but is that a good idea?

December 2015: Finland to pay every citizen $1,100 per month and scrap all other benefits in effort to reduce unemployment rate

December 2015 Create Your Favourite Actor From Nothing But Photos

• What Makes Tom Hanks Look Like Tom Hanks paper
• https://youtu.be/ladqJQLR2bA

December 2015: Facebook’s open-sourcing of AI hardware is the start of the deep-learning revolution

December 2015: Progress! New CMOS chip can process both light and electricity

• https://youtu.be/JAe_xQyFI4k

December 2015: Empathy with strangers can be learned

• We can learn to empathize with strangers. Surprisingly positive experiences with people from another group trigger a learning effect in the brain, which increases empathy. As researchers from the University of Zurich reveal, only a handful of positive learning experiences already suffice for a person to be-come more empathic.

December 2015: Humans can empathize with robots

• Researchers have presented the first neurophysiological evidence of humans’ ability to empathize with a robot in perceived pain. Event-related brain potentials in human observers, reflecting empathy with humanoid robots in perceived pain, were similar to those for other humans in pain, except at the beginning of the top-down process of empathy.

https://assembly.com/

• Your complete China ground operations solution. Powered by Slack. Flat fee. No commissions. Sourcing, Inspections, Laboratory testing, Site Visits, Translation, Logistics and more

http://www.snowdentreaty.org/

• a proposed treaty that would curtail mass surveillance and protect the rights of whistleblowers

https://mycroft.ai/

• open source AI assistent similar to Amazon and Google home assistant products

http://robobrain.me/

• Robo Brain is a large-scale computational system that learns from publicly available Internet resources, computer simulations, and real-life robot trials. It accumulates everything robotics into a comprehensive and interconnected knowledge base. Applications include prototyping for robotics research, household robots, and self-driving cars.