Robotics is rapidly being transformed by advances in artificial intelligence. And the benefits are widespread: We are seeing safer vehicles with the ability to automatically brake in an emergency, robotic arms transforming factory lines that were once offshored and new robots that can do everything from shop for groceries to deliver prescription drugs to people who have trouble doing it themselves.
Some years ago, tired of scrolling through Netflix in search of something we hadn’t seen yet, I suggested to my partner that we play a video game instead. Not the gaming type, she wasn’t too keen on the idea, but I promised something where she didn’t have to “aimlessly collect things”. The game we played was Dear Esther, which is part of the burgeoning trend in “literary video games”
2019 is drawing to a close and that means there’s another decade about to end. Depending on who you ask. Let’s not go there, we’ve had that argument once already in the Stuff offices. So, for the purposes of not arguing, there’s another decade about to end. Which is a perfect time to look back at all the things that made it a decade. In tech, anyway.
Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker, the final film in the epic Star Wars series, will hit the big screens on December 19. Science fiction in general – and Star Wars in particular – is a hugely popular genre, much because of the titillating possibility that the mind-blowing technology we see on screen could one day work.
Facebook-owned Oculus has rolled out some new features for Facebook on the VR platform. The catch? By using them, you’re agreeing that your (first-party, Facebook says) VR usage will be subject to Facebook scrutiny.
Hardly a week goes by without a report announcing the end of work as we know it. In 2013, Oxford University academics Carl Frey and Michael Osborne were the first to capture this anxiety in a paper titled: “The Future of Employment: How susceptible are jobs to computerisation?”.
Phones, tablets and laptops are usually at the top of many teenage wish lists at Christmas. But parents often worry that giving their children a mobile phone might mean they never see them again. Will they stay locked away in their room for the whole Christmas break? It turns out that might not be such a bad thing.
What we want is to make our lives more comfortable, more convenient, more glamorous and yet simpler. The luxury we relish from the benefits of a smart home far outweigh the costs, like the difference between the first smart phone and the Nokia 3310.
Across the world, the conversion of information into a digital format – also called “digitalisation” – has increased productivity in the public and private sectors. As a result, virtually every country in the world is working towards a digital economy.
Modern society has given significant attention to the promises of the digital economy over the past decade. But it has given little attention to its negative environmental footprint.