FUTURE

Singularity Summit 2011 roundup. Ray Kurzweil (credit: Singularity Institute) The tone of the Singularity Summit 2011 in New York was set by Ray Kurzweil, who presented many examples of accelerating developments, countering the arguments presented by Microsoft’s co-founder Paul Allen in a recent article, The Singularity Isn’t Near.

Robots vs. humans James McLurkin introduced the concept of swarms of small, light, and cheap robots that communicate with each other, solve problems collaboratively, and call others for help. Economists See More Jobs for Machines, Not People. Internet of Things Exceeds The Internet of People [Infographic] While we were asleep at the switch learning to "plus one" on Google, the Internet of Things (IOT) just exceeded the number of people that reside on the planet.

Beyond just smartphones and tablets, that number of "things" that connect to the Internet will only continue to scale as the growing number of connected gizmos, appliances - and even cows - are coded and catalogued to send messages to the Web. Dave Evans at Cisco noted that "there are more devices tapping into the Internet than people on Earth to use them. " How is that possible you ask?

Well an infographic the firm just published provides us insight with a visual snapshot of the increase in "things" connected to the Internet - and how they will serve us in the very foreseeable future. In the graphic novel satire, "Facebucks & Dumb F*cks," Z-Man (aka Mark Zuckerberg) is outraged that he might be outdone by the Chinese in the race to jump on the "Internet of Things" band-wagon. Robot builds its own body from sprayable foam - tech - 19 October 2011. Video: Watch foambot in action as it sprays on its own body LIKE a sculpture that springs to life, a new type of robot makes its own body parts using spray-on foam.

Such a design could one day be useful in situations in which the exact type of robot needed is not known beforehand, such as space exploration or reconnaissance. Created by Shai Revzen and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania Foambot consists of a wheeled "mothership" platform along with several simple joint modules capable of powered bending and flexing. The platform has an on-board supply of chemical reagents and a spray nozzle; when mixed, the reagents expand into hard urethane foam. Technology Is One Path Toward Sustainability. A case for modernization as the road to salvation by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus Illustration: Thom Lang / Corbis SOMETIME AROUND 2014, Italy will complete construction of seventy-eight mobile floodgates aimed at protecting Venice’s three inlets from the rising tides of the Adriatic Sea.

The massive doors—twenty meters by thirty meters, and five meters thick—will, most of the time, lie flat on the sandy seabed between the lagoon and the sea. But when a high tide is predicted, the doors will empty themselves of water and fill with compressed air, rising up on hinges to keep the Adriatic out of the city. Nowhere else in the world have humans so constantly had to create and re-create their infrastructure in response to a changing natural environment than in Venice. Jacque Fresco: Pioneering Utopia. Part. 1. EmailShare 53EmailShare Source: Jacques Fresco is 95 years old.

He is a self-educated structural designer,a philosopher of science and society, a conceptual artist, a futurist and an educator. He has written and researched expansively on a panoply of subjects including the holistic design of sustainable cities, energy efficiency, management of natural resources advanced automation, cybernated technology and how science can be applied for the benefit of society. To hear Fresco talk is to be entranced. When asked in an interview whether there “was something specific [he] experienced that made [him] first begin thinking about alternate forms of living“, he had the following to say: Living through the 1929 Great Depression helped shape my social conscience. This video was shot over a decade ago, and the world is barely closer to fulfilling his dream. There is no greyness, smog, smoke or pollution in your vision… right? Source: And when you switch on the news, there’s no conflict. Source: EmTech: Get Ready for a New Human Species. The ability to engineer life is going to spark a revolution that will dwarf the industrial and digital revolutions, says Juan Enriquez, a writer, investor, and managing director of Excel Venture Management.

Thanks to new genomics technologies, scientists have not only been able to read organisms’ genomes faster than ever before, they can also write increasingly complex changes into those genomes, creating organisms with new capabilities. Enriquez, who spoke at Technology Review’s EmTech conference on Tuesday, says our newfound ability to write the code of life will profoundly change the world as we know it. Because we can engineer our environment and ourselves, humanity is moving beyond the constraints of Darwinian evolution.

The result, he says, may be an entirely new species. Enriquez is the author of the global bestseller As the Future Catches You: How Genomics & Other Forces Are Changing Your Life, Work, Health & Wealth. TR: Why do you think there is going to be a new human species?