Futurist.tech

Hello Future Fans,

It is rare that I come across a new development that has the potential to drive truly radical and explosive change. I recently had the pleasure of this feeling when I discovered the interview with Mary Lou Jepsen in the (February 18) archives on my favorite podcast, After On.

Mary Lou has a storied career across some of the world’s greatest tech companies, including Alphabet’s ‘X’ moonshot lab and Facebook (working on Oculus). She has a PHD in Optical Physics from Brown University, has been a professor at both MIT and RMIT, has generated 200 or so patents, and was the founder of the ‘One Laptop Per Child’ project. She was recognized in TIME magazine’s “Time 100” as one of the 100 most influential people in the world and also as a CNN top 10 thinker. She has the credentials to pull off something big.

Mary Lou founded a company called ‘Open Water‘, and the technology being developed there has truly stunning potential that might revolutionize medical diagnosis and, potentially, be a realistic ‘neural lace’-style technology i.e. a technology that can connect our brains to each other and the global network in real time, at scale.

The Open water technology leverages holographic principles to map structures inside the body, in real time, at micron accuracy. The method uses near-infrared light shone at the body; a very small percentage goes straight through the flesh and the rest is scattered as it interacts (collides) with our biology. Amazingly, the scattered light can be captured by regular phone-scale optical sensors and re-constructed via algorithms, providing a real-time high-definition view of the smallest components of our bodies. The technology appears to be so sensitive that it can even detect the behaviour of individual neurons. This is exciting enough (phew!), however there is also some chance that the technology could use light to directly interact with the body, providing localised treatments and even – admittedly at a long shot / over the much longer term – implant / create memories and information in the brain. Continue reading “Brain-to-brain & brain-to-cloud communications … and an explosive health care improvement”

• Overall, over 2018-2022, jobs may increase rather than decrease
• There will be rapid shifts in the types of jobs and skills that are needed by the market
• There is a very large re-training requirement across the workforce

• The percentage of work done by humans vs machines is shifting quickly
• Skills shortages will drive a more geographically distributed workforce

Continue reading “Wake-up call: The World Economic Forum’s “Future of Jobs” Report”

Hi Future Fans,

I’ve been tracking some pretty exciting advancements and future promise in the area of electronics & computing, and thought it would be interesting to write a piece on this. It is a bit of a dense topic and is rather fascinating (in my opinion 😉). I hope you enjoy …

I’ve discussed a few times that progress in many fields is driven by the combination of increases in computing power (think Moore’s Law), advancements towards new methods (e.g. new computing architectures), and advancements in related fields (e.g. AI impacting many other fields). These drivers can multiply to push progress much faster than with any one driver alone.

This post will focus on the second of these three elements (new methods), as this driver is picking up pace and becoming more central to our progress over time.

Continue reading “An Electronics Revolution”

Hi Future Fans,

There has been a ton of great news out there in the last weeks. I will start posting some of the content I’ve earmarked, but today I wanted to touch on this useful & interesting Singularity Hub article about how exponential progress works and how hard it is for the average person to think about it correctly.

https://singularityhub.com/2018/07/15/why-most-of-us-fail-to-grasp-coming-exponential-gains-in-ai/#sm.0000gd3m7uhzrd45seh1949ynbo4v

The reason I’ve chosen that article is that most of the really interesting stories and advancements I talk about here are in areas that are experiencing exponential progress. The simplest example is the growth in computing power, where there has been a steady trend of doubling computing capability every 2 years or so. Think about that for a moment – roughly every two years we will have doubled the entire capability that we developed over the history of computing. That is rather ridiculous and is also a very well established trend.

Continue reading “Exponential thinking”

Hello Future Curious Folks,

It’s been a while since my last post. Life and travel gets in the way sometimes, and sometimes a bit of time at yet-another-airport-lounge is the perfect time for some future gazing.

Today I’m going to do one more AI post, before moving onto new topics. Whilst AI is a huge field with many implications, one of the most immediately striking is the area of image recognition and the massive strides we’ve taken in this area over the last years. As always, this emerging powerful capability has potential to drive massive benefit and also gives us some potential warnings. Continue reading “AI better than dermatologists at detecting skin cancer”

Hi Future Fans,

It’s about time to move away from AI and back to other topics!

Self-driving vehicles is a topic that I cover here fairly regularly. I do, however, find a lot of variance in the predicted timeframes for self-driving cars to become commonplace. These timelines have to do with regulations as much as the technology itself, and recent fatal crashes by Tesla and Uber are not helping to sway public and government opinion towards a rapid deployment.

Given the uncertainty, one great area to keep an eye on is vehicle orders, and we’ve turned a corner there. Uber took a bit of a gamble late last year by placing an order for 24,000 Volvo XC90 vehicles. Since then, Waymo (part of Alphabet) has made two large orders – for 20,000 Jaguar I-PACE vehicles and 62,000 Chrysler Pacifica minivans. These orders are a very clear indication that meaningful self-driving services are imminent, at least in places like Pheonix or perhaps Dubai, where local regulations will support the establishment of these new self-driving industries. Continue reading “Waymo outpacing Tesla, Uber”

Hi Future Fans,

Following on the theme of AI, this post will dig a little into the world of artificial personal assistants. It is, in part, inspired by the slightly-creepy-and-still-mind-blowing google duplex announcement & demo. In the demonstrations, google’s intelligent assistant makes lifelike calls to real people to make appointments at hairdressers & restaurants (see the below links and listen to the audio).

https://qz.com/1272755/googles-new-artificial-intelligence-duplex-can-negotiate-your-appointments-for-you-with-real-people/

https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/05/duplex-ai-system-for-natural-conversation.html

Existing capabilities like the Amazon echo, google assistant, and Cortana are very much just the start of a capability that will clearly grow exponentially alongside many of the other technologies we discuss here at futurist.tech. Continue reading “The epic rise of artificial personal assistants”

Hi Future Fans,

I’m not going to comment too much on this, however will recommend that you read it. It’s Alphabet’s ‘Founder’s Letter’ penned by Sergey (linked).

https://abc.xyz/investor/founders-letters/2017/index.html

He touches on the ever-increasing power of computation in its many forms, and refers to “the new spring in artificial intelligence (as) the most significant development in computing in my lifetime”.

He describes that we are truly in a technological renaissance, with transformative advances becoming commonplace.

He also describes the weight of responsibility and the deep questions around how these technologies (and AI in particular) will impact the world.

These are all topics that are close to the heart of any futurist!

Hi Future Fans,

The future promises personally-tailored desease & gene therapies, and a world of tiny machines in our blood and cells that will enhance their capabilities.

The linked article is fantastic. It outlines a new method whereby scientists have controlled the movement of a nano-scale machine INSIDE A CELL. The control was capable enough that they could move in the shape of the letters “N” and “M”. Whilst tracing letters isn’t all that helpful, this particular capability is mind-blowing and a good signpost of things to come!

https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-human-os/biomedical/devices/nanobots-glide-through-living-cells

Hello Future Fans,

I’ve not posted for a while, since I’ve been travelling. Today I want to re-connect with one of my favourite topics, being the exponential nature of computing; in terms of power, size, and architectural advancements. I’m surely going to be a little guilty of confirmation bias (a tendency to find information that confirms one’s own world view), however the raw numbers can’t be denied!

Firstly, I wanted to touch on nvidia’s ‘DGX-2’ announcement. This is basically an AI-focused supercomputer-in-a-box. It can be yours for only $399,000.

The DX-2 is remarkable for a few reasons. Firstly, the claimed 2-petaflop (quadrillion calculations) per second puts it in the class of the world’s fastest supercomputers just about 9-10 years ago. IBM’s roadrunner supercomputer, based at Los Alamos National Laboratory, cost $120 million to build and broke the 1-petaflop barrier back in 2008. These things aren’t directly comparable for various reasons; however, the pace of change is both evident and exceptional. Continue reading “Exponential computing”