ROBOTS: The robot trade is booming in China
Georgina Prodhan | Business Insider/Reuters
“A race by carmakers to build plants in China along with wage inflation that has eroded the competitiveness of Chinese labor will push the operational stock of industrial robots to more than double to 428,000 by 2017.”
AI: I’ll Be Back — The Return of Artificial Intelligence
Jack Clark | Bloomberg
“Like Scaled Inference, many of the AI startups aren’t developing Skynet-like systems or human-like machines and instead are focused on making clever tools to solve specific corporate problems.”
MEDIA: Has 24/7 junk news left us hungry for true stories?
Sarah Smarsh | AEON
“We don’t consume news all day because we’re hungry for information – we consume it because we’re hungry for connection. That’s the confusing conundrum for the 21st century heart and mind: to be at once over-informed and grasping for understanding.”
FUTURE OF WORK: Where Did All the Retail Jobs Go?
Derek Thompson | City Lab
“As Radio Shack’s story shows, when companies go to war against price and convenience, they tend to lose—first go the jobs, then goes the company.”
GENETICS: Your DNA Is Nothing Special — It’s time to relax about genetic testing.
Chip Rowe | Nautilus
“There is no ‘gene for Alzheimer’s’ or ‘gene for breast cancer.’ Researchers were focused on single genes early on but have shifted focus to arrays of genes and how they conspire with each other and the environment, rather than scanning for lone assassins in the crowd.”
SPACE: Off-World 3-D Printing Is How Humans Will Colonize Space
Steven Kotler | Newsweek
“Made in Space’s next iteration will be able to print with multiple materials, including both plastics and metals, which means that sometime in the next five years, 60 percent of the parts in use on the ISS will be printable. And just behind this version is the real game changer: a 3-D printer capable of printing electronics.”
FUTURE OF MONEY: Platforms, not products, are the way to bring financial services to the poor
Leo Mirani | Quartz
“The growing ubiquity of mobile phones offers something tangible to tie to their identities. And what people do with their mobile phones can help financial providers get a sense of their financial acumen.”
SOCIAL MEDIA: Twitter Finally Reveals Its Plan to Make Money From All Those Free Tweets Posted Everywhere
Garett Sloane | AdWeek
“It is clear why Twitter is looking to expand its ad business off its own ad platform, a strategy it started wholly embracing when it bought the ad network MoPub in 2013: It needs to find larger audiences than it attracts on its own.”
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