As the year comes to a close, many are wrapping up projects and reflecting on their achievements. This season holds a unique significance, encouraging us to look ahead, contemplate what the upcoming year holds, and assess how emerging trends will influence our businesses. Are you ready? It’s time for the 2023 wrap-up!
Time management is a skill you can learn. If only you had the time. To be fair, it might seem a lot less crucial than it is. Yet, today’s world is full of time challenges. There never seems to be enough time for anything. People are always in a hurry, everybody is always busy.
Some would love to have more time to spend with family and friends. Others would really enjoy spending that extra time in the gym. Or doing yoga, meditating, learning an instrument. There are some for whom there is never enough time. In fact, the common denominator for all entrepreneurs is that they never have the time. And, with startups as well as with anything else in life, being on time is crucial.
AI is the ominous presence of this century. Artificial Intelligence, looming over us like Frankenstein’s monster. While some fear that our future is in the Matrix, others hope for more of an “I, Robot” version. With three highly principled laws that protect all that is human from any possible harm (including emotional harm). Elon Musk would have you believe we’re already living in a simulation.
The fascination with AI often lingers in our minds because the possibilities seem endless. And various implementations of AI are becoming more and more affordable. Startups can already use AI to play around and figure new ways to boost productivity.
The fourth annual Global Technology Innovation Survey by KPMG predicts a number of technologies that will enable the next revolution in the consumer world. These include including cloud computing (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS), mobility, the Internet of Things (IoT), data & analytics, biotech, 3D printing, cyber security, artificial intelligence/cognitive computing, and digital currency platforms.
Different countries are banking on different things. Everyone agrees that the Cloud is going places, and the easiest to convince is China. Because of their faith in cloud computing, the Chinese are also vying with great enthusiasm for Artificial Intelligence (AI). But this is more common sense than it is insight.
A more important takeaway from the lofty report is the part about
Want to stay relevant as machines gradually take over the world? Pick a job that can’t be automated. The work done by humans is getting systematically replaced by devices as time progresses and technology makes new leaps forward. It’s a fact of life that our society is all too familiar with. But there are still plenty of tasks that will be hard to replace by gadgets.
The jobs that machines fumble over are incidentally the same jobs that make life exciting. Choreographers, fire fighters, chiropractors, art directors, coaches, and many others can breathe a sigh of relief knowing that robots won’t render them irrelevant any time soon
Photo by Franck V. on Unsplash
Stanford this week featured an article about its latest technological feat: artificial skin that can “feel.” That’s right. Professor Zhenan Bao and a few other engineering wizards have put the finishing touches on a material that can replicate human skin and sense touch and pressure and send those signals to the human brain.
The “skin” is made of two layers of rubber, one of which has a flexible circuit printed on it. In between the two layers there’s a
Photo by Alex Knight on Unsplash
Remember when theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking teamed up with other illustrious minds to sign an open letter warning about the potential dangers of Artificial Intelligence? No? Well, he did, and he also agreed to do an AMA (Ask Me Anything) where everyone could pitch in with their own questions and opinions about the future – not necessarily about AI in particular – and now the answers are in.
Hawking is still bent on making his own artificial voice heard about the perils of AI, so he focused on answering the questions that touched this topic in particular. Some highlights:
Photo by Nik MacMillan on Unsplash
Someone took Transcendence very, very seriously. Allegedly, our entire beings will be merged with the cloud via nanobots in less than 15 years from now. That, according to Ray Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google.
If anyone knows anything about information – how it’s stored, managed, and shared across the globe – it’s probably the guys behind the world’s biggest search engine. Speaking at the Exponential Finance conference, the computer scientist touched on many of his decade-old predictions, including one about human nature and our restless need to evolve technologically.
We still rely on hospital staff to tell whether a person – who is under medical treatment and cannot communicate – is in pain. But nurses might soon be able to go on a lunch break without worrying that their mystery coma patient will succumb while they’re munching away.
Researchers at UC San Diego have developed a computer vision algorithm that can assess pain levels by analyzing the patient’s facial expressions. It’s not a first, but the results of this new study are far more promising than ever before.
After reading “Memories, Dreams, Reflections” by Carl Gustav Jung, Iulia instantly knew what she wanted to do in life. Passionate people are lucky like that. They realize from a very early age what they want to become, and they will stay on that path regardless of the hurdles that lie ahead.
A licensed psychotherapist and a certified Aware Parenting Instructor, Iulia Feordeanu didn’t settle for a life in the office. At our monthly Labors of Hercules meetup, she shared with us how she helped create the Association Sol Mentis (which she now runs), an NGO that provides emotional support for vulnerable communities. Most of Iulia’s efforts are geared towards finding ever-more-efficient ways to aid disadvantaged individuals everywhere. She believes helping children who’ve had a bad start in life is the best thing she can do with her expertise. So she’s made it her life’s mission.