Over time, our bodies, our food and our environment have become more and more subject to design. As designers, we hold the responsibility and have the unique chance to envision the world – in order to decide which future we want. Because if not us, then who?
The way we interact with the technology in our lives is getting progressively more seamless. If typing terms or addresses into your phone wasn’t easy enough, now you can just tell Siri to do the search or pull up the directions for you. Don’t feel like getting off the couch to flick a switch, or want your house to be lit up by the time you pull into your driveway? Just tell your Echo home assistant what you want, and presto—lights on.
People across the world have been eating insects for thousands of years. We know that approximately 2,000 species are edible and that these insects are eaten in many different ways. The exception to this is the Western world, where insects are not a traditional food. This may be attributed to the fact that merely two per cent of edible insects occur naturally in Europe in comparison to the larger variety available in Asia, Africa and South America.
If you teach a robot to fish, it’ll probably catch fish. However, if you teach it to be curious, it’ll just watch TV and play video games all day. Researchers from Open AI — the singularity-focused think-tank co-founded by Elon Musk — recently published a research paper detailing a large-scale study on curiosity-driven learning. In it, they show how AI models trained without “extrinsic rewards” can develop and learn skills. Basically, they’ve figured out how to get AI to do stuff without explicitly telling it what its goals are.
Checking for new notifications has become a habit that is hard to resist. For some users of social networks it is a kind of an impulse. When receiving and opening notifications, users of social networks get a hit of dopamine which is released in rewarding situations.
Agriculture may be one of the oldest of our technologies. Over time it has developed, changed, revolutionized, industrialized – or simply put, it has evolved. Today’s farms are nothing like those of our grandparents. All the more reason to expect radical changes within our own lifetime.
A team of German researchers published a study earlier this week indicating people can be duped into leaving a robot turned on just because it “asks” them to. The problem is called personification and it could cause our species some problems as machines become more integrated into our society.
Each year we celebrate ecological heroes as part of our ECO Coin Award and this year is no different. The theme for 2018 will focus on food waste. Globally, 30–40% of food produced for consumption is wasted every year. Luckily there are some brilliant ideas out there aiming to tackle this global problem.
Writing is recognised as one of mankind’s foremost inventions and the mechanization of writing is one of these developments that typify what is commonly regarded as the work of genius inventors. However, the typewriter was not ‘suddenly invented’, but emerged from the work of many inventors who all contributed inventive steps.
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