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What We Owe The Future is available now — you can get it wherever you get your (audio)books or here: https://www.amazon.com/What-Owe-Future-William-MacAskill/dp/…atfound-20
This video was sponsored by the author, Will MacAskill. Thanks a lot for the support.

Sources & further reading:
https://sites.google.com/view/sources-civilization-collapse/

At its height, the Roman Empire was home to about 30% of the world’s population, and in many ways the pinnacle of human advancement. Rome became the first city in history to reach one million inhabitants and was a center of technological, legal, and economic progress. An empire impossible to topple, stable and rich and powerful.
Until it wasn’t anymore. First slowly then suddenly, the most powerful civilization on earth collapsed. If this is how it has been over the ages, what about us today? Will we lose our industrial technology, and with that our greatest achievements, from one dollar pizza to smartphones or laser eye surgery? Will all this go away too?

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Did you know there’s a silent war going on inside your home? Alternating current (AC) electricity comes in from the grid, but many of your appliances and lighting run on direct current (DC). Every time you plug in a TV, computer or cell phone charger, power must be individually converted from AC to DC — a costly and inefficient process. Purdue University researchers have proposed a solution to the problem by retrofitting an entire house to run on its own efficient DC-powered nano-grid.

The project to transform a 1920s-era West Lafayette home into the DC Nanogrid House began in 2017 under the direction of Eckhard Groll, the William E. and Florence E. Perry Head of Mechanical Engineering, and member of Purdue’s Center for High Performance Buildings. “We wanted to take a normal house and completely retrofit it with DC appliances and DC architecture,” Groll said. “To my knowledge, no other existing project has pursued an experimental demonstration of energy consumption improvements using DC power in a residential setting as extensively as we have.”

We could one day charge our phones and tablets wirelessly through the air, thanks to newly developed technology.

Researchers have used infrared laser light to transmit 400mW of light power over distances of up to 30 meters (98 feet). That’s enough juice to charge small sensors, though in time it could be developed to charge up larger devices such as smartphones too.

All this is done in a way which is perfectly safe – the laser falls back to a low power mode when not in use.

You need to wait till 2023 to get them though.

Lenovo has unveiled its T1 Glasses at its Tech Life 2022 event and promises to place a full HD video-watching experience right inside your pockets, a company press release.

Mobile computing devices have exploded in the past few years as gaming has become more intense, and various video streaming platforms have gathered steam. The computing power of smartphones and tablets has increased manifold. Whether you want to ambush other people in an online shooting game or sit back and watch a documentary in high-definition, a device in your pocket can help you do that with ease.

However, what is missing is the large screen experience; with the T1 Glasses, Lenovo wants to deliver just that.

But with such a rapid expansion into this new virtual world, will it be safe, regulated and, is it something we should fear or accept with open arms?

We talk to David Reid, a Professor of AI and spatial computing at Liverpool Hope University to see what to expect from the future of the metaverse.

There’s a few definitions. You can think of it from a technological viewpoint, where it’s simply the successor of the internet. Computers once took up big rooms, but they’ve shrunk until we got things like pocket-sized smartphones that you constantly interact with. The metaverse takes this a step further, making the actual environment you interact with virtual, removing the interface of computers completely.

Researchers have discovered a new method for correcting errors in the calculations of quantum computers, potentially clearing a major obstacle to a powerful new realm of computing.

In conventional computers, fixing is a well-developed field. Every cellphone requires checks and fixes to send and receive data over messy airwaves. Quantum computers offer to solve certain that are impossible for conventional computers, but this power depends on harnessing extremely fleeting behaviors of subatomic particles. These computing behaviors are so ephemeral that even looking in on them to check for errors can cause the whole system to collapse.

In a paper outlining a new theory for error correction, published Aug. 9 in Nature Communications, an interdisciplinary team led by Jeff Thompson, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Princeton, and collaborators Yue Wu and Shruti Puri at Yale University and Shimon Kolkowitz at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, showed that they could dramatically improve a quantum computer’s tolerance for faults, and reduce the amount of redundant information needed to isolate and fix errors. The new technique increases the acceptable error rate four-fold, from 1% to 4%, which is practical for quantum computers currently in development.

By | Sep 1, 2022 | Artificial Intelligence

When Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone in 2007, no one understood at the time how disruptive that device would be to existing technology. Now with rumors of Apple launching their augmented reality (AR) smart glasses products next year, people are speculating about how disruptive this technology will be.

Since iPhones are one of Apple’s primary revenue streams, they may be cautious about releasing a product that may encroach on their own turf. However, as we’ll suggest below, it may not be an either/or situation for users.

We might be too close to wirelessly charging our mobile devices anywhere.

Researchers from Sejong University have developed a new system to transmit power over 30 meters using infrared light wirelessly. During laboratory tests, researchers demonstrated that the new system could transfer 400 mW of light power. For now, this amount of power is enough for charging sensors; however, further progress could mean enough high levels to charge mobile phones in various public places.

The research has been published in Optics Express.


In Optics Express, researchers describe a new wireless laser charging system that overcomes some of the challenges that have hindered previous attempts to develop safe and convenient on-the-go charging systems.