Category Archives: Futurist

Busted

MIT has placed tenured mechanical engineering professor Seth Lloyd on administrative because of a failure to disclose ties to Jeffrey Epstein, the deceased and disgraced financier accused of sex trafficking and other crimes.

Over the years, Epstein donated $225,000 to Lloyds research and also gave him a personal gift of $60,000, according to an extensive report about Epsteins connections to MIT that the university released Friday. Lloyd hid the source of the donations by processing them through various administrators ultimately tainting his research by linking it to Epsteins disgraceful legacy.

The news about Lloyd and his subsequent suspension is just the latest in a string of grim revelations regarding MITs ties to Epstein. While Lloyd admitted to having visited Epstein in prison, Epsteins influence on the university extended far beyond one engineering professor.

Joi Ito, the since-resigned director of the MIT Media Lab also accepted and obscured the source of hundreds of thousands of dollars from Epstein and millions more that were funneled through Epsteins company. Computer scientist Richard Stallman also resigned in the wake of controversy surrounding off-color comments he made about the scandal.

As news about Epsteins contributions to MIT continued to break, university president Rafael Reif vowed to donate an amount equivalent to Epsteins donations to a charity supporting victims of sexual abuse.

So far, Reif has committed to donating $850,000. But as InsideHigher Ed reports, he hasnt yet determined what organization its going to support.

READ MORE: More Epstein Fallout at MIT [Inside Higher Ed]

More on Epstein and MIT: Bizarre MIT Meeting About Jeffrey Epstein Ends in Tears, Yelling

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MIT Suspends Another Professor for Epstein Ties - Futurism

With your arms around the future; And your back against the past the Moody Blues

Wyoming was on my mind, even though I was basking in 70-degree temperatures in Texas recently. Let me explain:

One of the high points of our annual New Years trip to see Dallas relatives is my yearly visit with the smartest person I know.

Of the 301,000 employees at Hewlett Packard a few years ago, one special employee stood out, their lone futurist, Jeff Wacker.

He is retired now and working on a book.

He also used to live in the same neighborhood as our daughter in Allen, TX.

A Nebraska native, Jeff would fit comfortably in Wyoming. His values and those of the Cowboy State pretty much line up. If his wife Nancy did not have some health issues, he might be living right now on the family homestead near Sidney, an area he calls eastern Wyoming.

He has the same typical bad news for fossil fuels we Wyomingites all are hearing. But he blames it on an amazing future of batteries and even exotic fuel sources like anti-matter.

Wacker feels strongly that the hysteria about global warming is over-stated. He is an expert on just about everything. He challenges folks who believe Al Gores theories to dig into where that 90 percent of scientists . . . story came from. Instead, he says we are in a 1,000-year cycle and the heating of the earth occurs 600 years after CO2 increases.

As a futurist, he thinks on a global scale and in big pictures. He worries about eternal life. We are very close to providing a path where people dont have to die, that one of the biggest future problems will be should we die and how should we die? Suicide?

He also says the future of work could be the biggest issue of the 21st century. Automation, unique robots including microscopic nanobots, and Artificial Intelligence will continue to erode the job market. I have a friend who says we will always need people to keep the robots running really? We already have robots that repair other robots, he says. He divides all the various technologies into five areas:

Nanotech is the creation of super tiny robots that can float around inside your bloodstream and keep you healthy. He sees billions of nanobots taking care of the trillions of cells in the body.

Biotech will see cures and inventions occurring at fantastic rates in the near future and far future. Again, he really believes a huge problem for the youngest people living on the planet today is how do they want to die? He believes young people in the near future have the potential to live as long as they want to.

Robotech is already changing the world. What will people do when there are no jobs? Typical workweek might be 26 hours or less. He says three-fourths of all manufacturing jobs are already gone and not coming back.

Infotech leaves him discouraged especially when it comes to social media. He quotes a favorite author who said, When everybody is an author, there are no editors.

He thinks amazing sensors will be developed on a micro level while, on a macro level, the world will be covered with satellites similar to the doomsday prediction of the Terminator movies, which saw all those troubles caused by a structure called SkyNet.

Energytech may see more change than any other sector. Look back 200 years to 1820. We have advanced 2,000 years in the past 200 years. This will just accelerate, he concludes. He also credits it to the gradual warming of the climate over those two centuries. We went from horse and buggy to planning a Mars launch today.

In 1820, the most valuable material on earth was aluminum because it was only created when lightning would strike bauxite. A nine-inch pyramid-shaped piece of aluminum is used as the cap of the top of the Washington Monument, for example.

Having this chat with Jeff Wacker left my head spinning. We are heading into a strange new world that sounded both hopeful and daunting to me.

Wacker really is worried about the robots with artificial intelligence taking over. When it happens, it will happen exponentially, so we probably will not know what hit us until it has already happened! On that dreary note, Happy New Year and Happy New Decade.

Check out additional columns at http://www.billsniffin.com. He has published six books. His coffee table book series has sold 34,000 copies. You can find more stories by Bill Sniffin by going to CowboyStateDaily.com.

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Fossil fuel issues, nanobots, and the end of work as we know it - Kemmerer Gazette

Open Sesame

On Tuesday evening, Trump complained that Apple refuses to help law enforcement investigate violent and drug-related crimes.

The previous day, Attorney General William Barrhad criticized Apple for refusing to unlock the Pensacola Naval Air Station shooters iPhones or provide a backdoor that would allow the government to do so directly, according toCBSNews.

While Trumps tweet blasts Apple over that refusal, the company says its been actively collaborating with law enforcement, according to a statement published in Input Mag.

Its already possible to crack some iPhones encryption, especially since the shooters used older models with outdated security, 9to5Mac reports. And while Apple says it fulfilled the FBIs requests, it wont let the FBI access the shooters communications directly. Apples logic: implementing backdoor access would make investigators jobs easier, but it would also create a major threat to the safety and privacy of all iPhone users.

Apple toldInput that The queries resulted in many gigabytes of information that we turned over to investigators. In every instance, we responded with all of the information that we had.

We have always maintained there is no such thing as a backdoor just for the good guys, reads Apples statement. Backdoors can also be exploited by those who threaten our national security and the data security of our customers.

READ MORE: Apple responds to AG Barr over unlocking Pensacola shooters phone: No. [Input News]

More on privacy: Big Tech Splits Over Privacy Issues, at Least on the Surface.

Link:
Trump Demands That Apple Give Government Access to iPhones - Futurism

That Sticky-Icky in Space

On Sunday, a SpaceX Dragon capsule docked with the International Space Station hauling nearly three tons of cargo. SpaceXs next ISS resupply mission is scheduled for March 2020, and while that trip might not include any super-buff mighty mice, itll be packing something equally unique: cannabis.

On Tuesday, agri-tech company Front Range Biosciences announced plans to send cannabis to the ISS. No, its not space-shipping weed to get astronauts high. Instead, itll send plant cultures of hemp, the legal cannabis strain with low levels of compound THC.

The cultures will remain in an ISS incubator for 30 days while BioServe Space Technologies (a Front Range project partner) monitors them remotely from the University of Colorado, Boulder.

After their 30 days in space, the cannabis cultures go home to Earth so Front Range can see what effect, if any, microgravity and space radiation had on their gene expression.

There is science to support the theory that plants in space experience mutations, Front Range CEO Jonathan Vaught said in a release. This is an opportunity to see whether those mutations hold up once brought back to earth and if there are new commercial applications.

READ MORE: A Company Is Sending Cannabis and Coffee to Space to See if They Mutate [Motherboard]

More on cannabis: Seven Ways Cannabis Legalization Will Make the Future Better

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SpaceX Is Delivering Cannabis to the Space Station - Futurism

Solar U.S.A.

Elon Musk is talking, again, about his idea to turn 10,000 square miles in the U.S. desert into a solar farm that can power the entire nation. In a Saturday Twitter reply to an article by Treehugger about Bill Gates questioning the efficiency of solar power, Musk fired back that all you need is a 100 by 100 mile patch in a deserted corner of Arizona, Texas or Utah (or anywhere) to more than power the entire USA.

He first talked about the idea in 2015, and reiterated them in 2017, as Inverse points out. The batteries you need to store the energy, so you have 24/7 power, is 1 mile by 1 mile, Musk said at the National Governors Association Summer Meeting in Rhode Island in 2017. One square-mile. Thats it.

Musk also linked to a University College London blog post, in which energy researcher Andrew Smith did some back-0f-the-envelope calculations, finding that a 10,000 square kilometer area far smaller than the 100 by 100 mile patch to be clear could generate about 500 Gigawatts at 21 percent efficiency, the average in Northwest Texas. Thats more than the U.S. annual average consumption of 425 GW.

But it would be an extremely expensive mega project as well. If you were to cover the patch with Teslas solar panel-covered Roof tiles, it would still cost about six trillion dollars, according to Popular Mechanics which is about the GDP of Japan.

READ MORE: Elon Musks Plan for One Giant Solar Farm Is a Little Insane, but Not Completely Insane [Popular Mechanics]

More on the idea: Elon Musk Tells National Governors Association How We Could Power the U.S. With Solar

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Elon Musk Is Talking About Powering All of America with Solar - Futurism

Before the end of the year, Turkey will become the first nation to get its hands on a brand new military drone equipped with a machine gun.

Its called the Songar, and it can carry 200 rounds of ammunition. A New Scientist story notes that the drone is accurate enough to hit a human target with every bullet fired from 200 meters (656 feet) away a devastating level of accuracy in the already troubling space of drone warfare.

Songar is the work of Turkish electronics firm Asisguard, and according to the companys website, a human can control the drone from a distance of 10 kilometers (6.2 miles). Using a single controller, they can operate up to three Songars simultaneously during the day or at night, looking through the devices cameras and deciding when to fire their guns.

Asisguard equipped the drone with two systems designed to address the issue of recoil affecting accuracy. One uses a group of sensors that accountfor variablesranging from a targets distance to the current wind speed. The other uses robotic arms to manually move the gun as needed to counteract the recoil.

Songar isnt the first machine gun-equipped drone weve seen, and its easy to see why the devices appeal to militaries: with an armed drone, a soldier can attack the enemy while staying out of harms way.

But as more and more armed drones emerge, it seems like just a matter of time before militaries decide to remove human operators from the equation altogether. In fact, that may already be happening as United States Defense Secretary Mark Esper accused China in November of selling autonomous killer drones to nations in the Middle East.

So, while the drones that Asisguard plans to sell to Turkey later this month might require a human operator, theres a chance the next armed drones the nation adds to its arsenal will be autonomous and thatll be when things get really scary.

READ MORE: Turkey is getting military drones armed with machine guns [New Scientist]

More on drones: New Warfare Drones are Small as a Quadcopter

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Middle Eastern Nation First to Buy Drone Armed With Machine Gun - Futurism

Imagined by Artisitc Director Virgil Abloh, Louis Vuitton Men's 2054 is a luxury lifestyle ready-to-wear collection built for the great unknown.

Fashion has long flirted with futurism. What began as a cutting-edge movement among early-20th century painters and sculptors quickly swept over the design studios and runways of Milan and Paris. It played out as a celebration of everything new, urban and industrialfabrics, designs, colors and cuts that reflected movement and speed.

But what exactly is futurism now that we are living in the future? It is here, in Louis Vuitton Mens 2054 capsule collection: 14 pieces made of 100% water-repellent technical fabrications with transformable features and multifunctional values. In the collection, Artistic Director Virgil Abloh revisits the idea of compressomorphosisfirst introduced in his pre-fall 2019 collection. The term applies to garments accessorized with wrapper bags into which they can be entirely compressed for travel purposes. For instance, the back pocket of an oversized coat unrolls into a life-size tent raised with included tent poles, the coats back-zip adornment transforming into the tent door; a padded over-shirt with multiple zips for adaptation compresses into its own back pocket and morphs into a pillow native to trekking.

The name is a nod to 1854, the year the house was founded, and signals a fusion of the past, present and future. In other words, its clienteles uniform 200 years from its point of origin. The future is now.

Pieces in the Louis Vuitton Mens 2054 collection range from $6,535 for the 3-in-1 parka to $920 for the 3D effect T-shirt, all at Louis Vuitton Design District.

Photography by: Courtesy of Louis Vuitton

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Virgil Abloh Merges Fashion and Futurism with the Louis Vuitton Men's 2054 Collection - Ocean Drive Magazine

December 12th 19__Dan Robitzski__Filed Under: Future Society

This week alone, there were four high-profile cases of creeps hacking into Amazon Ring cameras that families had installed inside their homes and using them to harass or spy on them.

In one, a man used the cameras speaker to harass a family with racist comments and by triggering their alarm, according to The Cut. In others, predators spied on and communicated with children through the cameras that had been installed in their bedrooms. The takeaway: putting a poorly-secured smart camera inside your home can readily put your family at risk.

A spokesperson for Ring told The Cut that the hackers didnt actually bypass the cameras security systems.Instead, they said, the individual users had used easily-guessed passwords or failed to enable security protocols like two-factor authentication.

But it seems unfair to expect customers to also become cybersecurity experts before buying their cameras wouldnt it be trivial for Amazon and Ring to make two-factor authentication a default setting or even a requirement for camera access?

READ MORE: Terrifying Videos Show Men Hacking Into Home Security Cameras [The Cut]

More on Ring: Smart Doorbells That Call The Police Are Going to Endanger Some Innocent People

Up Next__Report: Facial Recognition Should Be Banned From Everyday Life >>>

Originally posted here:
Watch Terrifying Creeps Hack Ring Cameras and Spy on Families - Futurism

See Clearly Now

Every year, the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society releases a reportabout all the studies published within its pages that attempted to determine the cause of extreme weather events that year.

Ever since the first annual report was published in 2011, an increasing trend has emerged: more and more fires, disastrous storms, and other events have been identified as symptoms of worsening climate change around the world, according to E&E News. Its a troubling pattern that drives home unfortunate realities: climate change means more than rising temperatures, and we can expect more meteorological devastation in the future.

The latest report analyzed studies that were published over the course of 2018. Of those, an overwhelming majority causally linked the weather in question to climate change.

Only one paper didnt, according to E&E News, but that may have been due to a limited data set not because climate change wasnt to blame.

Some of the studies found that the extreme weather events that they were analyzing were only possible in a world with a changing climate. For instance, a 2017 heat wave near Australia couldnt have possibly happened unless climate change was real and driving the wave itself.

And as our worsening climate creates entirely new weather problems, we may be stuck an ever-rising amount of new storms.

READ MORE: Climate change is influencing more disasters study [E&E News]

More on the environment: Scientists Are 99.9999 Percent Sure Humans Caused Climate Change

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Study: Many Extreme Weather Events Were Caused by Climate Change - Futurism

This figure is the end of the world for the average people. It reflects a rather depressing picture: The state and the economy are advancing by storm but the workers are almost not benefitting from this progress and are left behind. It is almost a catastrophe.

Thats Dr. Roey Tzezana, a future studies researcher at Tel Aviv University and a research fellow at Brown University, referring to the growing gap between labor productivity and wages, as seen in this chart:

In other words, as automation continues to render jobs obsolete, the divide between the rich and everybody else will only continue to grow, and the middle class as we know it will cease to exist. Such a scenario will create a society of extreme pockets of wealth and those who can barely get by.

And thats a problem for everybody, he said.

It doesnt match the ideas of democracy because democracy is based on the middle class, Tzezana told Haaretz. It is harder for workers from the lower class to vote in an intelligent manner and make intelligent decisions. It is a situation that over time does not enable the continuation of democracy as we know it.

He used an example of a factory with 1,000 workers scaling back to just 100 by keeping those with high-level skills to operate the machines that replace the lower-level workers, who are then relegated to service jobs at markedly less pay.

This is not the problem of just one or two people, Tzezana continued. When a lot of people experience this drop, we are talking about an economic crisis: It is not just a problem only for those who cant pay their mortgages 60% of the sales of most companies are to the general public and if the public cant afford to buy a new computer, the entire economy enters a crisis.

To listen to more from Tzenana, check out his TED Talk:

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End of the world: This futurist has some grim news for the middle class - MarketWatch