Enjoy this week’s stories!
ROBOTS: Why Robots Will Be The Biggest Job Creators In World History
John Tamny | Forbes
“Robots will ultimately be the biggest job creators simply because aggressive automation will free us up to do new work by virtue of it erasing toil that was once essential. ”
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: Striking the Balance on Artificial Intelligence
Cecilia Tilli | Slate
“Alongside increased investment in A.I. and renewed hope in its capabilities, there have been plenty of headlines warning us about the end of mankind, the need for protection from machines, real-life Terminators, and keeping Skynet at bay.”
COMPUTING: Computers are so easy that we’ve forgotten how to create
Samuel Arbesman | AEON
“Which means that, the more important a technology is to our society, the more likely we are to notice its ‘visible seams’. The seams of our technologies are the aspects of our machines that suggest that beneath the shiny surfaces lie complicated innards. Seeing these seams is a hint of understanding what really makes them tick, but we are moving in a direction where designers are trying to hide them.”
VIRTUAL REALITY: To Bring Virtual Reality to Market, Furious Efforts to Solve Nausea
Nick Wingfield | The New York Times
“It is well known that virtual reality headsets can cause motion sickness and eyestrain in people who use them, though the severity varies by person, the type of game being played and the length of time a game is played.”
MEDICINE: Big Data Helps Find the Achilles Heel of Each Individual Cancer
Kat McGowan | Nautilus
“Cancer drugs work (i.e. significantly shrink tumors) a dismal 22 percent of the time, and oncologists have a hard time predicting which one is best for which patient. According to one estimate, $39 billion of the $50 billion spent annually on cancer drugs is wasted in this way. It’s ‘trial-and-error medicine,’ in the phrase of former Roche executive Mara Aspinall.”
INTERNET OF THINGS: The Internet of Things Will Be a Giant Persuasion Machine
Jordan Pearson | Motherboard
“The key, in this vision of the future, is to take the insights into our everyday lives gathered from the streams of data emanating from our interconnected devices and merge them with an actual human who can act on the information they provide.”
[image credit: Sweetie187/Flickr]
