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nikolasfuturist · 8 years ago

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Each week Nikolas Badminton, Futurist Speaker, summarizes the top-5 future looking developments and news items that I find to be inspiring, interesting, concerning, or downright strange. Each day he reads through dozens of blogs and news websites to find those things that we should be aware of.

In Exponential Minds’ Future Trends – Plantoid Blockchain we look at how SV is erasing your individuality, Primavera De Filippi’s new species on the blockchain, startup gym pods in China, winning the cyborg olympics, and cyborg pop with Viktoria Modesta’s ‘Prototype’.

How Silicon Valley is erasing your individuality

Along with Facebook, Microsoft and Apple, these companies are in a race to become our “personal assistant.” They want to wake us in the morning, have their artificial intelligence software guide us through our days and never quite leave our sides. They aspire to become the repository for precious and private items, our calendars and contacts, our photos and documents. They intend for us to turn unthinkingly to them for information and entertainment while they catalogue our intentions and aversions. Google Glass and the Apple Watch prefigure the day when these companies implant their artificial intelligence in our bodies. Brin has mused, “Perhaps in the future, we can attach a little version of Google that you just plug into your brain.”

Read more at Washington Post

Primavera de Filippi – Plantoid & DAOS: Blockchain Based Life Forms

Artist & researcher Primavera De Filippi has created a new species. It’s called Plantoid, and it’s difficult to describe in a single sentence. At first glance, it appears to be a mechanical sculpture, but taking a closer look it reveals itsself more as a mechanical creature. Primavera tells the story of the Plantoid as a “distributed autonomous organisation” or DAO, which is a quasi-legal entity that exists as executable code on the blockchain. Every Plantoid implements its own DAO, allowing it to interact with the real world.

Startup launches gym pods across China

There’s now another way to keep fit in China, as the Chinese company Misspao has launched the ‘pod gym’, a mini-gym just large enough for one. The initial launch has been such a success that Misspao plan on installing 1,000 of the pods across the streets of China by the end of the year.

Although the gyms are very compact, there’s still enough space within them for a treadmill, screen (for music, TV or movies), an air purifier and a range of portable fitness accessories. The pods are also cleaned on a regular basis by a team of maintenance technicians. Booking a place in one of the pods is very simple. There is a companion smartphone app that handles all the bookings and payments and then the user scans in a QR code when they arrive at the pod to gain entry. The pods are very reasonable too, with costs working out to be about USD 0.25 a minute.

Currently there are no plans to launch the pods outside of China, but if they prove to be as successful as Misspao hope they will be, then a worldwide release is almost a certainty.

Read more at Springwise

How We Won Gold in the Cyborg Olympics’ Brain Race

Our group in the brain-machine interface lab at the other Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), in Geneva, fielded the Brain Tweakers team to compete in the Cybathlon’s Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) Race. Gold medalist Poujouly was one of our two pilots, both of whom propelled their avatars through a racecourse by mind power alone. As with any BCI system, signals recorded from the pilot’s brain were fed into a decoding algorithm that translated the signals into commands. In this case, the commands were used to control the pilot’s avatar, but other BCI systems could be used by people with severe motor impairments to control a variety of devices—including wheelchairs, prosthetic limbs, and computer cursors.

The Cybathlon criteria allowed for only noninvasive BCI systems, which use electrodes placed on the scalp to pick up neural signals; experimental systems that use electrodes implanted in the brain tissue weren’t permitted. Noninvasive systems pick up noisier neural signals, but paired with the right signal processing software, they can yield information that is good enough to work with—and they don’t bring along the medical risks of brain surgery.

Teamwork was key to our success. We developed the technology with feedback from Poujouly and our other pilot, Eric Anselmo; they helped us determine the mental commands that gave them intuitive and reliable control of their avatars. Our system also created a symbiotic relationship between man and machine, in which the pilots and the BCI software adapted to each other during the training process. Both of our pilots made it to the final race, and Poujouly’s gold medal offers definitive proof that we had a winning strategy.