Lifeboat Foundation

By Andy Greenberg — Wired

The new generation of “maker” tools like 3-D printers and milling machines promises to let anyone make virtually anything—from prosthetic limbs to firearms—in the privacy and convenience of his or her own home. But first, those tools have to get to customers’ homes. That’s going to be difficult for at least one new machine with the potential to make homemade firearms, because FedEx is refusing to deliver it.

Last week FedEx told firearm-access nonprofit Defense Distributed that the company refuses to ship the group’s new tool, a computer controlled (CNC) mill known as the Ghost Gunner. Defense Distributed has marketed its one-foot-cubed $1,500 machine, which allows anyone to automatically carve aluminum objects from digital designs, as an affordable, private way to make an AR-15 rifle body without a serial number. Add in off-the-shelf parts that can be ordered online, and the Ghost Gunner would allow anyone to create one of the DIY, untraceable, semi-automatic firearms sometimes known as “ghost guns.”
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By Jason Dorrier — Singularityhub

We tend to think of cars as a mature technology. They’re good enough to be boring. But something weird is happening. Silicon Valley is eyeing the car business. First it was Tesla, Google—even Uber. Now, it’s Apple.

According to Bloomberg, Apple has a team of 200 secretly working on a car. They’ve evidently been luring talent away from Tesla with lucrative bonuses and comp. And battery-maker A123 Systems filed a lawsuit against Apple for poaching its employees. The rumor? Apple’s aiming to develop an electric car by 2020.

It sounds bizarre—but it might not be that crazy.
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Quoted: “Blockchains are thus an intriguing model for coordinating the full transactional load of any large-scale system, whether the whole of different forms of human activity (social systems) or any other system too like a brain. In a brain there are quadrillions of transactions that could perhaps be handled in the universal transactional system architecture of a blockchain, like with Blockchain Thinking models.”

Read the IEET brief here > http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/swan20150217

Written by Victoria Turk — Motherboard

In 2013, researchers Carl Frey and Michael Osborne of the Oxford Martin School dropped the bombshell that 47 percent of U​S jobs were at risk of computerisation. Since then, they’ve made similar predicti​ons for the UK, where they say 35 percent of jobs are at high risk.

So what will our future economy look like?

“My predictions have enormously high variance,” Osborne told me when I asked if he was optimistic. “I can imagine completely plausible, incredibly positive scenarios, but they’re only about as probable as actually quite dystopian futures that I can imagine.”
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By Jason Dorrier — Singularity Hub

As a kid, I devoured Star Trek: The Next Generation, and though it now appears nearly as campy as the original series did back then, I still love it. But Star Trek led me astray. I thought exploration for the sake of exploration would get us to the stars. Now, I’m not so sure. Fifty years in, and we humans are still stuck in low-Earth orbit.

First comes a smattering of fiery idealists blazing trails and climbing peaks. The risks are high and the returns are individual fame, newly detailed maps, and a general sense of awe.

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By: Press Trust of India — The Indian Express

A robot-staffed hotel, said to be the world’s first, is set to open in Japan in July where guests checking into the futuristic facility will be greeted and served by remarkably human-like robots.

Huis Ten Bosch, a theme park in typical Dutch style in terms of its architecture in Nagasaki Prefecture has unveiled plans to open the modern hotel with robot staff and other advanced technologies to significantly reduce operating costs.
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Georgina Prodhan, Reuters — Business Insiders

China will have more robots operating in its production plants by 2017 than any other country as it cranks up automation of its car and electronics factories, the International Federation of Robotics (IFR) said on Thursday.

Already the biggest market in the $9.5 billion (6 billion pound) global robot trade — or $29 billion including associated software, peripherals and systems engineering — China lags far behind its more industrialized peers in terms of robot density.

China has just 30 robots per 10,000 workers employed in manufacturing industries, compared with 437 in South Korea, 323 in Japan, 282 in Germany and 152 in the United States.

But 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, the IFR estimates. Read more

Jake Swearingen — The Atlantic

Since its debut in 2012, Google Glass always faced a strong headwind. Even on celebrities it looked, well, dorky. The device itself, once released in the wild, was seen as half-baked, and developers lost interest. The press, already leery, was quick to dog pile, especially when Glass’s users quickly became Glass’s own worst enemy.

Many early adopters who got their hands on the device (and paid $1,500 for the privilege under the Google Explorer program) were underwhelmed. “I found that it was not very useful for very much, and it tended to disturb people around me that I have this thing,” said James Katz, Boston University’s director of emerging media studies, to MIT Technology Review.
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The recently concluded Bitcoin & the Blockchain Summit in San Francisco on January 27 came up as a vivid source of both anxiety and inspiration. As speakers tackled Bitcoin’s technological limits and possible drawbacks that can be caused by impending regulations, Bitcoin advocate Andreas Antonopoulos lifted up everyone’s hope by discussing how bitcoins will eventually survive and flourish. He managed to do so with no graphics or presentations to prove his claim, just his utmost confidence and conviction that it really will no matter what.

On the currency being weak

There have been statements about Bitcoin’s technology surviving, but not the currency itself. Antonopoulos, however, argues that Bitcoin’s technology, network, and currency are interdependent with each other, which means that one element won’t work without the other. He said: “A consensus network that bases its value on the currency does not work without the currency.”

On why Bitcoin works

Continue reading “Bitcoin’s Unique Features Lighten Up its Ambiguous Future” »