WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF As technology gets smaller the world’s first true Smart Contact Lenses get closer than ever, and there are plenty of companies hungrily watching the space.   Interested in the future and want to experience even more?! eXplore More. The bleeding edge US military research organisation Defense...

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF As network speeds increase, and latency falls, it opens up a whole new world of possibilities for the future of remote working.   Interested in the future and want to experience even more?! eXplore More. Recently there have been a flurry of developments in the construction...

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF DeepFakes might look fun but as the technology to create them becomes more accessible they’ll become a tool that people use to undermine trust in democracy and institutions.   Interested in the future and want to experience even more?! eXplore More. Mark Zuckerberg may be famed...

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF As the number of connected devices increases we need new ways to prevent them from being hijacked by cyber criminals.   Interested in the future and want to experience even more?! eXplore More. While we embrace the way the Internet of Things (IoT) already is making...

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Artificial Intelligence and robotics are helping China deliver healthcare in new ways.   Interested in the future and want to experience even more?! eXplore More. China is increasingly in love with technology, and the government, for a variety of reasons, is keen to develop and deploy...

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF As drone swarms become more common we need new ways to control them.   Interested in the future and want to experience even more?! eXplore More. Ever since drones became a thing the standard practice for piloting one has been one operator for each unmanned vehicle....

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF We often think of materials as static things, but what if they were alive?   Interested in the future and want to experience even more?! eXplore More. The line between man made materials and living organisms is getting more blurred as time goes by, and it...

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF As the Earth’s population grows, and as climate change threatens to displace hundreds of millions of people the UN are now seriously considering building floating cities.   Interested in the future and want to experience even more?! eXplore More. In the future it’s not just NASA...

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF As computers are embedded into everything, from wearables and clothing, to even human cells, they’ve got to get smaller – and they are.   Interested in the future and want to experience even more?! eXplore More. As transistors get ever smaller, with 7nm transistors now going...

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF As the costs of accessing space fall by multiples of a hundred it might not be long before you too consider space as your next vacation.   Interested in the future and want to experience even more?! eXplore More. Following on in the footsteps of other...

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF As the barriers to creating high quality DeepFake content disappear soon we’ll all be able to create our very own DeepFakes.   Interested in the future and want to experience even more?! eXplore More. Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have made it far easier to...

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Developing games worlds takes up a huge amount of money, time and effort, but now even newbies can generate realistic environments in seconds and for free.   Interested in the future and want to experience even more?! eXplore More. Recently Nvidia showed off an Artificial Intelligence...

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF As we embed AI into every corner of our digital society we need to start asking hard questions about what happens when they “go beyond their programming” and “evolve” spontaneously.   Interested in the future and want to experience even more?! eXplore More. Artificial Intelligence (AI)...

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF AI is taking on more and more challenges, and “grunt work,” and now it’s starting to design our cities and communities.   Interested in the future and want to experience even more?! eXplore More. For the past couple of years, as I’ve watched the rise of...

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF As healthcare and robotics merge, from Robo-Surgeons to Nanobots, we need to find new ways to help them navigate to where they’re needed.   Interested in the future and want to experience even more?! eXplore More. Surgeons have used robots operated by joysticks for more than...

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF As AI gets better at creating realistic content, of any form, without human assistance it will have an immeasurable and revolutionary impact on every corner of society and business.   Interested in the future and want to experience even more?! eXplore More. We all know that...

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF One day AI’s will be able to create photorealistic video content of anything and everything all by themselves, this is one step in that journey.   Interested in the future and want to experience even more?! eXplore More. Recently Artificial Intelligence (AI) and so called Creative...

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Neural networks see the world differently to humans, which is why they can be corrupted using relatively simple trickery.   Interested in the future and want to experience even more?! eXplore More. A prolific cyber security research firm has announced that it’s managed to make Tesla’s self-driving car...

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF In the future it will be taken for granted that materials can self-heal, and they’ll be able to do it in a multitude of ways.   Interested in the future and want to experience even more?! eXplore More. In a world first researchers at MIT in...

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF This is one of the first combinations of 3D Printing and Self-Healing materials, and it’s how many materials could be made in the future.   Interested in the future and want to experience even more?! eXplore More. Recently teams of researchers showed off their self-healing computer...

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Most AI Machine Vision models are still very heavy and cumbersome and need lots of training data, but newer lightweight Capsule models are leaner and faster.   Interested in the future and want to experience even more?! eXplore More. If you want to blame someone for...

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Irrespective of whether vehicles drive themselves delivery companies still have to solve the “last mile” problem, and this is one of their ideas.   Interested in the future and want to experience even more?! eXplore More. As we all order more and more stuff from Amazon...

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Hydrogen powered and Lithium Ion battery powered electric vehicles have been battling for dominance for years, and now fuel cell technology is starting to hit the roads for real.   Interested in the future and want to experience even more?! eXplore More. It’s been two...

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Dealing with today’s technology can be cumbersome, which is why researchers think things would be better if it could simply read your mind.   Interested in the future and want to experience even more?! eXplore More. Baxter is but a child, a robot child with...

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Over 3.5 billion people on the planet aren’t connected to the internet, for better or worse, and space internet is here to change that.   They’ve finally done it – for years I’ve been talking about how a raft of companies were planning on launching...

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Advances in AI technology mean we have a variety of new ways to educate and train children, all of which could help them learn more, faster.   There’s a lot of technology emerging in the education sector that’s designed to help us learn faster and...

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF People think of the internet as one, global network, but it’s being nationalised and splintering.   Many people think that the internet is one thing, one “amorphous system” that crosses borders, and is, in essence, the digital fabric that unites the world. But, as China...

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF The dye in your jeans, and most of your clothes, comes from countries whose dead rivers run red and blue, but now there’s a way to put an end to it, for good.   Throughout the fall of 2012, Marie-Sarah Adenis and Thomas Landrain toiled...

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF In time the cost and ease of modifying any living organisms genome and genetic makeup, for better and worse, will fall to almost zero, and as gene editing tools become democratised and sought after by Bio-Terrorists, researchers are trying to find the technology’s Kryptonite –...

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF You don’t have to be a celebrity any longer to be turned into a DeepFake, now noone’s safe.   Recently China unveiled the world’s first Artificial Intelligence (AI) news anchor, and Soul Machines showed off their latest and greatest “Digital Human” avatars, one of which...

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Pandora’s Box has been opened, and very soon you won’t be able to tell what content was created by a human, and what was created by a machine.   I’ve been talking about the rise of realistic, people fooling synthetic content that’s created by machines...

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Concrete is a huge contributor to global green house gas emissions, so finding new ways to curb those emissions helps in the bigger battle against climate change.   In an age where we can 3D print houses and entire communities using a range of different...

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Houses used to be expensive and time consuming to build, those days are fast disappearing.   Following on swiftly from the developments in France, where a family became the first in the world to move into their own 3D printed home, and in Dubai who...

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Companies with better brand recognition, and deeper pockets, are cornering the market for AI talent, but now companies want break that hold, and they have a way to do it.   Despite how easy the combination is to mock, the idea of applying the Blockchain...

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Blockchain will let us build new types of companies in new ways, including ownerless companies where funds and profits are divided automatically between individuals.   Slowly, very slowly, we’re seeing the emergence of the world’s first fully autonomous companies, from small hedge funds in Hong...

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF As the world gets more crowded billionaires are lining up to make humans an inter-stellar species, with interesting results.   The plan of Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man, to transport humans from Earth to the Moon and house millions of us in space colonies...

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF As individuals and organisations start becoming more powerful than many governments, people are wondering if private companies can solve humanity’s problems faster.   As I travel around the world, from America to Africa, Europe to the Middle East, and Japan to Singapore, talking to people...

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Being able to see in colour, even during the darkest nights, is a game changer that will have ramifications for multiple industries.   When we think of night vision our minds automatically turn to grainy black and green images. But today things have begun to...

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF As the pace of terrorism accelerates agencies around the world are trying to find the needles in the data haystack that can help them predict attacks before they happen.   In the movie Fast and the Furious 7 movie a secretive US government agency created...

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF In a couple of years time you won’t be able to tell what’s fake from what’s real.   We all love DeepFakes – unless that is you’re a celebrity, a news corporation, or a fan of democracy. But all that asides if you look past...

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF As the Earth’s population and its appetite for protein grows this latest breakthrough will help alleviate famine and hunger.   We are on the cusp of a food production revolution, one that could eradicate global famine and let us make food, of all types, from...

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Being able to create an unhackable computer sounds like science fiction, but that doesn’t stop researchers from giving it a go.   “Unhackable” is a strong word. And so far many of the technologies that people have described as being unhackable, even awesome science fiction...

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF The march of technology never stops, and as users celebrate Gigabit mobile speeds Terabit mobile speeds are already on the drawing board.   While countries around the world are just beginning to roll out their first 5G networks that operate at Gigabbit speeds, technologists at...

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF For a wide range of reasons many people have speaking disabilities, but now a Brain to Speech breakthrough gives them their voices back.   Scientists have announced a breakthrough in Brain Machine Interface (BMI) technology that has, for the first time, let them translate electrical...

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF As we entrust machines with more decision making powers it brings both pros and cons, and being fired by an AI is definitely a con.   There’s been a lot of news coverage about how Artificial Intelligence (AI), robots and Robotic Process Automation (RPA), will,...