Drexel’s microswimmer robots (bottom) are modeled, in form and motion, after spiral-shaped Borrelia burgdorferi bacteria (top), which cause Lyme Disease (credit: Drexel University)
Lately, media around the web has been bracing for robots — not time-traveling robots per se, but robot workers. Specifically, the increased sophistication of artificial intelligence and improved engineering of robotics has spurred a growing concern about what people are going to do when all the regular jobs are done by robots.
A variety of solutions have been proposed to this potential technological unemployment (we even had an entire Future of Work series dealing with this topic in March), many of which suggest that there will still be things that humans can do that robots can’t, but what are they? Read more
Another 2.3 billion people are expected to be added to the planet in just 35 years. “By 2050, new systems for food, water, energy, education, health, economics, and global governance will be needed to prevent massive and complex human and environmental disasters,” explains Jerome Glenn, CEO of The Millennium Project. As Pope Francis said in His Encyclical Letter, “Halfway measures simply delay the inevitable disaster.”
The “2015−16 State of the Future” reviews the global situation and future prospects in a broad range of areas from environment to business and technology, and global ethics. Its executive summary states that:
Chemical-to-electrical-to-chemical signal transmission. A conventional neuron (upper panel) senses chemical signals (orange circles), which trigger an electrical pulse of membrane depolarization (action potential) along the axon, causing chemical release at the axon terminals (blue circles). This process can be mimicked (lower panel) by a chemical biosensor (for glutamate or acetylcholine) connected to an axon-mimicking organic electronic ion pump that transmits electrons/ions and generates chemicals — forming an organic electronic biomimetic neuron. (credit: Daniel T. Simon et al./Biosensors and Bioelectronics)
I’m excited to share this 12-min video on transhumanism and my presidential campaign (at 7 min mark). This video just came out, but the Good Mythical Morning (with over 7 million YouTube subscribers) videos often get over 1 million views and 3,000+ comments. This will likely be one of the most popular videos on transhumanism this year, and it’s really funny!
Are you the kind of person who spends a lot of time pondering when machine learning will finally give us humans a run for our money? Or exactly how the technology behind a pulse simulator works? We had a feeling you might be. So what other questions or ideas about the future of technology keep you up at night? This is your chance to have them answered/discussed by two leaders in the field of future tech: Brain Games host and futurist Jason Silva and Matt Grob, CTO of Qualcomm and holder of more than 70 patents relating to wireless communication and cell technology.
This is a rewritten story I’m publishing for the first time on The Huffington Post. It’s part of my goal to get other communities involved with supporting transhumanism: