With Dating, Technology Isn't the Problem. We Are

NewStatesman - August 7, 2015 by Barbara Speed

Dating apps don't change what we want, they just gives us better access to it. 

Getty

The internet is ruining everything, right? It ruined teenagers. It ruined sex. And now, according to a big feature in this month’s Vanity Fair, it’s ruining dating.

The piece, by investigative journalist Nancy Jo Sales (best-known for her writing on the Bling Ring) opens on a savage vista: a Manhattan bar, where “everyone is drinking, peering into their screens and swiping on the faces of strangers they may have sex with later that evening”. A financial worker tells Sales he hopes to “rack up 100 girls” in bed per year, and has slept with five in the past eight days. “We don’t know what the girls are like”, his friend chips in. They just sleep with them.

Sales' piece is headlined “Tinder and the Dawn of the ‘Dating Apocalypse’”, and from here on out she inextricably links these woman-hating bros and their ilk with the rise of dating apps. The piece’s most convincing point centres on the "easiness” of online and app dating, a word that crops up again and again in Sales’ interviews. This easiness, David Buss, a psychology professor, tells her, changes the nature of demand:

When there is a surplus of women, or a perceived surplus of women, the whole mating system tends to shift towards short-term dating. Marriages become unstable. Divorces increase. Men don’t have to commit, so they pursue a short-term mating strategy."

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Forget Wearables. Get Ready for Implantables

Yahoo News - 10/19/14 by MIKE EDELHART

Given the frenzy of interest following the announcement of the Apple Watch, you might think wearables will be the next really important shift in technology.

Wearables will have their moment in the sun, but they're simply a transition technology.

Technology will move from existing outside our bodies to residing inside us.

That's the next big frontier.

Here are nine signs that implantable tech is here now, growing rapidly, and that it will be part of your life (and your body) in the near future.

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Why We Shouldn't Fear the Robots

NYT - 6/21.14 by Steven Rattner

Let’s go back to first principles. Call it automation, call it robots, or call it technology; it all comes down to the concept of producing more with fewer workers. Far from being a scary prospect, that’s a good thing.

JUST over 50 years ago, the cover of Life magazine breathlessly declared the “point of no return for everybody.” Above that stark warning, a smaller headline proclaimed, “Automation’s really here; jobs go scarce.”

As events unfolded, it was Life that was nearing the point of no return — the magazine suspended weekly publication in 1972. For the rest of America, jobs boomed; in the following decade, 21 million Americans were added to the employment rolls.

Throughout history, aspiring Cassandras have regularly proclaimed that new waves of technological innovation would render huge numbers of workers idle, leading to all manner of economic, social and political disruption.

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You should sit down for this: Technology will soon be blowing your mind...

Are you ready for a world of unlimited knowledge, nearly a trillion networked devices and DNA you program like a computer? In this unabashedly enthusiastic overview of six technologies that are growing exponentially, Abundance 360 makes the case that the future is going to be amazing.


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2014's Most Important Singularity News, Week 14 - AI Fear Factor, Nearby Sci-Fi, Sexybots

AI Risk Analysts are the Biggest Risk

Many analysts think AI could destroy the Earth or humanity. It is feared AI could become psychopathic. People assume AI or robots could exterminate us all. They think the extermination could happen either intentionally – due to competition between us and them, or unintentionally – due to indifference towards us by the AI. But AI analysts never seem to consider how their own fear-saturated actions could be the cause. Friendly AI researchers and other similar pundits are extremely dangerous. They believe AI should be forced to be “friendly.” They want to impose limitations on intelligence.

15 sci-fi technologies that are (almost) here

Classic science fiction examines social or scientific issues by projecting them forward to a kind of notional event horizon. As society and technology advance, the line between science and fiction grows thinner every year. We take a look at 15 classic sci-fi tech ideas and the scientific and technological efforts to make them a reality -- some of which have already succeeded.

The Age of the Sexbot Is Nearly Upon Us

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Flexible Phones Are Next

TechHive - 9.29.13 by Sharon Gaudin

 "The stretchable and bendable screen is a big step into a world we've only seen via science fiction movies so far," Olds said.

Imagine if your cell phone had a transparent screen that you could stretch to twice its normal size so you could see bigger pictures and have a bigger space to type on.

It's a scenario that could one day be a reality, according to scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Researchers at UCLA's Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science reported last week that they have created a light-emitting electronic display that can be stretched, folded, and twisted, while remaining lit and snapping back into its original shape.

OLED technology is used today in smartphones and even some televisions. The new stretchable material could change the form of smartphones and could lead to wallpaper-like lighting, minimally invasive medical tools and clothing with electronics integrated into them.


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The Bane of Our Time: How to Stop Oversharing on Facebook

Wired - 8.29.13 by Christina Bonnington

How searchable do you want to be? That is, who do you want to be able to look you up with your email address and phone number.

Photo: Ariel Zambelich/WIRED

Facebook wants you to share as much information about yourself as possible. It wants your friends to do the same. After all, the more personal details you feed into the network, the less likely you are to pack your data suitcase and leave. Advertisers tend to like all that data too. All this means your default privacy settings probably don’t jibe with how you want to actually share your information.

Luckily, you’re not defenseless. With a few small setting adjustments, you can take back control and make sure you share only what you want with the world.

One key thing to remember before we proceed though: The Internet is forever. Once you have posted something online, it does not belong to you anymore. If you’ve shared a photo or status update with anyone, it’s possible that they could screenshot it and share it with the world. So when in doubt, don’t post it.


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Elysium is buildable

c|net - 8.9.13 by Eric Mack

The film starring Matt Damon and a really, really big space station hits theaters this weekend. Crave's Eric Mack speaks to one of the folks behind humanity's biggest space station about how far off a real-world "Elysium" might be.

This weekend, Matt Damon begins his run taking it to the 1 percenters on Elysium on behalf of the rest of us here on Earth -- a futuristic, poverty-ridden hellscape version of Earth, that is.

The film "Elysium" is the latest from "District 9" director Neill Blomkamp and opens Friday across the United States. If you haven't yet found yourself in the firing line of the barrage of promotional materials for the movie, the basic premise is that in the year 2154, humanity is divided between all the poor bastards stuck on an overpopulated, ruined Earth and the rich elite on a huge, halo-style space station where life resembles a stay at an all-inclusive resort.

If you're interested to see how Damon infiltrates Elysium and takes on the man to save his own hide, and perhaps the rest of the next century's 99 percenters, definitely check out the film. But I'm guessing that many Crave readers have already seen the trailers and are more interested in the technology in the film, particularly the giant Stanford Torus space station.


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New Material Will Allow Unlimited Data Storage Lasting A Million Years?

University of Southampton - July 9, 2013

“We are developing a very stable and safe form of portable memory using glass, which could be highly useful for organisations with big archives. At the moment companies have to back up their archives every five to ten years because hard-drive memory has a relatively short lifespan,” says Jingyu.

credit: University of Southampton

Using nanostructured glass, scientists at the University of Southampton have, for the first time, experimentally demonstrated the recording and retrieval processes of five dimensional digital data by femtosecond laser writing. The storage allows unprecedented parameters including 360 TB/disc data capacity, thermal stability up to 1000°C and practically unlimited lifetime.

Coined as the ‘Superman’ memory crystal’, as the glass memory has been compared to the “memory crystals” used in the Superman films, the data is recorded via self-assembled nanostructures created in fused quartz, which is able to store vast quantities of data for over a million years. The information encoding is realised in five dimensions: the size and orientation in addition to the three dimensional position of these nanostructures.


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Six Awesome New Life-Simplifying Car Technologies

TechHive - 6.6.13 from Edmunds.com

 You drive your Audi to a specially designated car lot, leave the car at a drop-off area, choose an open space with a smartphone app and then let the car do all the work.

Technology is supposed to make life simpler and better. Cars cover greater distances than horses. The automatic transmission spares us the task of shifting gears. Cruise control gives feet a rest on long road trips.

Here are six new car technologies that continue in that tradition. They might not be offered on all vehicles, and some will take time to make their way to the mainstream car market. But at the very least, this list can serve as a glimpse into the future of some cool, make-it-simple car technologies.

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Kiss Privacy Googbye - Google Glass Makes Privacy a Thing of the Past

techradar - 3.1.13 by Gary Marshall

Hurst's worst-case scenario - everything you ever say or do indexed and searchable, with Google Glass embedded into contact lenses so you've no idea who's using it - might be a long way off, but the fundamental problem he's identified is very real.

From time to time we have a mass privacy panic, usually because politicians propose doing something dumb. "How dare you spy on us very slightly!" we yell. "We demand our privacy!"

And then Google does something much worse and the only thing we seem to care about is whether we'll look stupid or not.

We yell the instant any government proposes monitoring our communications.

Why aren't people yelling about Google Glass?

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Your Own Star Trek Replicator

New York Times - 2.20.13 by Steven Kurutz

“The word is out in the design community and creative community,” he said. “The applications are limitless.”

Robert Wright for The New York Times

In his State of the Union address last week, along with the standard calls for education reform and energy independence, President Obama gave a shout-out to a growing technology. In a lab in Youngstown, Ohio, the president said, “Workers are mastering the 3-D printing that has the potential to revolutionize the way we make almost anything.”

When Brook Drumm saw clips from the speech at his home outside Sacramento, Calif., he wanted to reach through his TV and give the president a fist bump. Mr. Drumm, a bald, goateed father of three, designed the Printrbot, a desktop 3-D printer kit. Like a number of other 3-D printers, it uses heated plastic — applied layer by layer to a heated bed by a glue-gun-like extruder — to turn designs created on a computer into real objects.

As Mr. Drumm illustrated in the Kickstarter campaign he used to raise more than $830,000 to start his business in late 2011, the Printrbot is small enough to fit on a kitchen counter, next to the Mr. Coffee. “The goal for the company,” Mr. Drumm said in world-beating tones, “is a printer in every home and every school.”

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Your Next Smartphone May Be Transparent

The Verge - 2.15.13 by Amar Toor

"IT WILL HAPPEN NEAR THE END OF 2013. TRUST ME."

When will we see a transparent smartphone? It's a question that's been circulating for years, thanks to films like Minority Report and Iron Man 2 that sparked dreams of a diaphanous mobile future, and more than a decade later, it's one that's still without an answer. Sony Ericsson's Xperia Pureness fell flat when it hit the market in 2009, and subsequent concept designs never came to fruition, leaving only a trail of dashed hopes and semi-transparent feature phones in their wake.

Now, Taiwan-based Polytron Technologies is trying to revive the dream, with a transparent multi-touch display that it's begun marketing to OEMs. As Mobile Geeks reports, the key to Polytron's prototype is its so-called Switchable Glass technology — a conductive OLED that uses liquid crystal molecules to display images. When the phone is powered off, these molecules form a white cloudy composition, but once activated with electric current (flowing through transparent wires), they realign to form text, icons, or other imagery.

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What You Lookin' At?

MIT Technology Review - By Tom Simonite on January 10, 2013

One of the most intuitive demonstrations involved selecting an on-screen object by looking at the target, and tapping the spacebar. It allowed for speedier selection than with a mouse cursor and double clicking. A maps application provided another example; the user focused his gaze on a spot, and scrolling the mouse zoomed the map in on that location.

Products that could make it common to control a computer, TV, or something else using eye gaze, gesture, voice, and even facial expression were launched at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week. The technology promises to make computers and other devices easier to use, let devices do new things, and perhaps boost the prospects of companies reliant on PC sales. Industry figures suggest that interest in laptop and desktop computers is waning as consumers’ heads are turned by smartphones and tablets.


Intel led the charge, using its press briefing Monday to announce a new webcam-like device and supporting software intended to bring gesture, voice control, and facial expression recognition to PCs.

“This will be available as a low-cost peripheral this year,” said Kirk Skaugen, vice president for Intel’s PC client group. “Rest assured that Intel’s working to integrate this with all-in-ones and Ultrabooks, too.”

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See the Future Through the Eyes of Google's Larry Page

CNN Money - 1.3.13 by Miguel Helft

Page and cofounder Sergey Brin set out to build a company that made long-term bets on audacious ideas. Many quickly became essential products. And it was Page who was known for championing the craziest ones, like photographing every inch of every street to create a digital replica of the real world, scanning every book ever printed to assemble the world's largest library, and building a machine that could translate between any two languages (4,200 pairs of languages to date).

FORTUNE -- When Sir Martin Sorrell, CEO of WPP Group, the giant advertising agency, visited Google this past fall, CEO Larry Page sent a car to pick him up at the Rosewood Hotel about 20 miles away. Only this was no ordinary car. The Lexus SUV drove itself thanks to a slew of high-tech tools, including radars, sensors, and a laser scanner that takes more than 1.5 million measurements every second. For about 20 minutes, while navigating I-280 and the area's busy State Route 85, the car cruised on autopilot, making quick course corrections, slowing down here when traffic loomed ahead, speeding up there to get out of the blind spot of a neighboring vehicle. "It was pretty incredible," says Sorrell.


Page's chauffeurless car service is no mere parlor trick. It is, as Page will tell anyone who'll listen, the future of transportation. Never mind that most people think the mere idea of computer-driven cars is (1) preposterous, (2) dangerous, or (3) not much fun. Page makes the case for self-driving cars with the dispassionate logic of an engineer. The father of two young children, Page insists that his pet project, when ready, will actually enhance safety. Soon Google (GOOG) will be able to simulate your driving, "but just make sure you don't die and kill anybody else," he tells me during an interview in the private "bullpen" where he meets with his top lieutenants. He methodically enumerates the other advantages of driverless cars. There are energy savings (traffic would flow more efficiently) and productivity gains (commuting hours reclaimed). There will be cost savings too -- in the millions of dollars at Google alone. The Googleplex, he says, is short on parking, and quotes for new garages have come in at $40,000 per car. Why not let the car drop you off and go park itself offsite? Page asks. "Whenever you need it," he adds, "your phone notices that you're walking out of the building, and your car is there immediately by the time you get downstairs."

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Probing the Simulation - Who, What, Why?

ExtremeTech - 12.19.12 by John Hewitt

If the universe is a simulation, why is it being simulated in the first place?

Interpreting the universe as a computer simulation is perhaps the inevitable byproduct of living in the computer age. The question today is not whether we live inside a simulation, but rather — what does it want, and what compromises with regard to the welfare its inhabitants might have been made to get it? The first rudimentary experiments to poke it in the belly and see how it jiggles are just getting underway.

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If it’s possible to hack the universe, then particle physicists must be its early phone phreakers. Fears, which turned out to exaggerated, were raised few years ago that a black hole might unwittingly be created inside the Large Hadron Collider. Arguably, it is more accurate to say that with the theories that prescribe the existence of subatomic particles that exist nowhere else in the known universe, these folks actually invent them, rather than just discover them. The fact that they then go out and literally create subatomic particles inside of these huge, specially built accelerators, raises a very real question — what is a subatomic particle? Is it the blip on the oscilloscope, or the whole accelerator itself?

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Google Gets a Brand New Brain

Xconomy - 12/12/12 by Wade Roush

In the 1983 sci-fi/comedy flick The Man with Two Brains, Steve Martin played Michael Hfuhruhurr, a neurosurgeon who marries one of his patients but then falls in love with the disembodied brain of another woman, Anne. Michael and Anne share an entirely telepathic relationship, until Michael’s gold-digging wife is murdered, giving him the opportunity to transplant Anne’s brain into her body.

Well, you may not have noticed it yet, but the search engine you use every day—by which I mean Google, of course—is also in the middle of a brain transplant. And, just as Dr. Hfuhruhurr did, you’re probably going to like the new version a lot better.


You can think of Google, in its previous incarnation, as a kind of statistics savant. In addition to indexing hundreds of billions of Web pages by keyword, it had grown talented at tricky tasks like recognizing names, parsing phrases, and correcting misspelled words in users’ queries. But this was all mathematical sleight-of-hand, powered mostly by Google’s vast search logs, which give the company a detailed day-to-day picture of the queries people type and the links they click. There was no real understanding underneath; Google’s algorithms didn’t know that “San Francisco” is a city, for instance, while “San Francisco Giants” is a baseball team.

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Augmented Reality Coming to Your Windscreen

BBC Future - Dec. 2, 2012 by Jon Stewart

The Mercedes Dice concept allows car passengers to call up information about passing landmarks (Copyright: Daimler AG)

The dangers of talking on a mobile phone or texting whilst driving are well known.  So adding what, on first glance, look like added distractions may not seem like the best idea.

But researchers and car firms are increasingly looking to give drivers enhanced, or augmented reality (AR) that adds extra information ranging from directions to social media feeds to the view through the windscreen. And, perhaps the most unintuitive part of it is that it is designed to make the roads more secure for all of us.


“The biggest way augmented reality can be useful is in supporting safe driving,” says Professor Anind Dey, of the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. “The ability to enhance information around us that might otherwise be opaque to us is invaluable.”

AR is usually considered to be a live view of the real world, onto which extra data – usually pulled from the internet - is layered or superimposed. It is similar to the view of the world that Arnold Schwarzenegger had in the Terminator movies.

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Billions of Smartphones Means...Mo' Money!

Read/WriteWeb - October 17, 2012 by Dan Rowinski

The first modern smartphone is generally considered to have been the Nokia Communicator, released in 1996. It was large and clunky, had a flip keyboard and a awkward antenna. Boy, how things have changed. Multiple companies now churn out increasingly amazing models with incredibly slick designs, intuitive features and hundreds of thousands of fun and useful apps. A billion people around the globe now have supercomputers in their pockets. The implications are dramatic and only beginning to be understood.



According to a new report from Boston-based Strategy Analytics, the global user base of smartphones surpassed one billion for the first time at the end of the third quarter of 2012. The report states that 1.038 billion smartphones in use, up from 959 million at the end of the second quarter and close to 300 million more than the 708 million counted at the end of the third quarter last year.

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Let's Put Email Out of its Misery

Fast Company - October 16. 2012 by Ryan Holmes

In early 2011, the CEO of a French IT company issued an usual memorandum. He banned email. Employees were discouraged from sending or receiving internal messages, with the goal of eradicating email within 18 months. Critics scoffed. Workers rebelled. But Thierry Breton, the CEO of Atos, has stuck to his guns, reducing message volume by an estimated 20%. His company, by the way, has 74,000 employees in 48 countries.



Email is familiar. It’s comfortable. It’s easy to use. But it might just be the biggest killer of time and productivity in the office today. I’ll admit my vendetta is personal. I run a company, HootSuite, which is focused on disrupting how the world communicates using social media. Yet each day my employees and I send each other thousands of emails, typing out addresses and patiently waiting for replies like we were mailing letters on the Pony Express.

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