Woebot, the World’s first AI counsellor, manages 2 million conversations a week
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Mental health issues seem to plague modern society, but the number of people who seek out professional help is minimal, so companies are developing AI counsellors that are free and accessible anywhere 24/7 Mental health has been increasingly on people’s minds, if you’ll excuse...
Futurist keynote, London: The Future of Investing, STOXX Annual Conference
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF There has, arguably, never been a better time, or a risker time to invest in today’s markets, but as every industry undergoes titanic transformation investors who are ill advised, or who lack the right vision, could quickly find themselves on the wrong end of tomorrow’s...
Israeli Robo-Lawyer trashes top US lawyers in head to head competition
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Today we have contracts for everything it seems, and on top of that lawyers are expensive, and not everyone has access to them, Robo-Lawyer AI’s are helping democratise law and change that paradigm. Lawyers are pretty good at law-related activities, after all, it’s their...
New Cancer “Vaccine” wipes out cancer in mice, human trials next
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Cancer ruins millions of lives every year, but now, thanks to an army of researchers and new powerful technologies and tools it might just be possible we’re seeing a tiny chink of light at the end of the tunnel. The eradication of cancer has...
AI can identify dangerous lung diseases as well as trained doctors
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Chest diseases claim millions of lives a year and being able to diagnose them faster will potentially help doctors save hundreds of thousands of lives. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is starting to make a dent in the multi-trillion dollar healthcare industry, from being able to...
New air conditioning breakthrough cools buildings without using any energy
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Air conditioning that can cool buildings without using any energy is the holy grail of aircon, and now the technology’s arriving. Heat naturally flows from hot things to cold things, it’s just a fact of life, and physics, and since there are few places...
AI is helping create realistic “Fake news!” videos and it’s going to be a problem
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF The ability of “unethical actors” to create realistic looking video and audio of famous people to generate “Fake news!” is accelerating exponentially and politicians are already way behind the curve. Over the past couple of years, even before “Fake news!” became the monster topic...
DNA encryption arrives to protect your genome from prying eyes
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF We are increasingly sharing our DNA data online, and sometimes you don’t want everyone to see everything, so now researchers have developed the world’s first DNA Encryption product. When we talk about “security” it’s probably fair to say that not many people think about...
Stanford just built the world’s first Flash Organisation
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF With fully automated, and crowdsourced organisations already here the only type of organisation that noone seems to have been able to create yet is a Flash Organisation, but that could soon change We’ve all heard about the rise of Distributed Autonomous Organisations (DAO), that don’t...
World first as scientists create the first Black Hole on Earth
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF It can be said that science fiction writers have a love affair with black holes, and now a team of American scientists have managed to spontaneously create a molecule sized one here on Earth. Black holes are without question the most powerful objects in...
Artificial intelligence identifies skin cancer as well as trained doctors
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Every year tens of millions of people around the world are diagnosed with skin cancer, and Stanford’s artificial intelligence app could save tens of thousands of lives. It’s scary enough making a doctor’s appointment to see if a strange mole could be cancerous so...
New brain research discovers people are great at predicting what’ll go viral
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Why does anything go viral? Ask a million people and a million people will have a million different answers, but according to new research the real answer’s inside your head. I have to admit that as I read through the science behind this news,...
New brain reading computer lets paralysed patients communicate by thought
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Many people take the ability to communicate for granted, but millions of people aren’t as fortunate, but new computing systems are breaking down the walls. Those crazy researchers at Stanford University have done it again – not content building virtual reality avatars with three arms...
Researchers prove your smart watch can flag when you’re getting ill
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Every doctor will tell you that the earlier you can detect and diagnose disease the better your chances of recovery, and the swifter it will be, now smart devices might know you’re ill before you do. Wearables have been struggling to find a “killer...
Entrepreneurs think blockchain is the future of cloud computing and HPC
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Everything changes, whether we call it disruption or something else, but as the world becomes increasingly distributed, as the plumbing of the internet continues to change, we can now see a way to disintermediate the giant cloud providers, build global supercomputers and move to the...
Scientists may have discovered the algorithm for Human intelligence
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF It seems algorithms rule the world, now scientists think they have identified the algorithm responsible for human intelligence, if true then it could revolutionise artificial intelligence. Little might you realise but as you read this article there’s a good chance your brain is running...
Researchers create human VR avatars with three arms to improve productivity
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Many people forget that virtual reality is just that – virtual, as a result it’s often easy to forget that the rules of the real world don’t have to apply in the virtual one. Researchers at Stanford University think that having a third arm...
This rookie used brainwaves to control a plane flying around the skies of Seattle
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF As we continue to unravel the mysteries of our brain and how it operates we will inevitably be able to harness it and use it to communicate, control and interact directly with the people and things around us, and in us. Earlier this week...
The end of all disease by 2115, Zuckerberg shows off the team hoping to cure the world
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Many big moonshots fail not because of the technology but because of the lack of coordination and for, perhaps the first time ever, we now have both thanks to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative A while ago I wrote an article about how, given all...
Scientists have found a way to turn your body into a computer
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF A chemical computer, one that doesn’t use electrical signals to communicate, means that we now, potentially, have a way to send computer instructions around the human body that won’t interfere with our nervous system. You probably take it for granted that the devices that...
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