Lifeboat Foundation

A new report warns of potentially major disruption to UK employment from the coming wave of AI. An estimated 11% of tasks are already exposed to current AI, a figure that could rise to 59% during a second wave. But there could also be opportunities for economic growth.

From the discovery and use of fire in the Stone Age, through to the handheld smartphones of today, technology has improved our living standards and is the foundation of modern society. Yet unmanaged technological change comes with risks and disruptions. The current wave of technology including generative AI – described by some as the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” – promises transformative benefits, while at the same time bringing potential disruption through its impact on wage inequality, wealth inequality, and job displacement.

Portable AI-powered devices that connect directly to a chatbot without the need for apps or a touchscreen are set to hit the market. Are they the emperor’s new clothes or a gamechanger?

New app for smartphones to detect forgery in documents with the pilot project expected to be deployed in Zurich later this month.

Advances with photoswitches could lead to a smartphone that’s soft and flexible and shaped like a hand so you can wear it as a glove, for example. Or a paper-thin computer screen that you can roll up like a window shade when you’re done using it. Or a TV as thin as wallpaper that you can paste on a wall and hardly know it’s there when you’re not watching it.

Photoswitches, which turn on and off in response to light, can be stitched together to replace the transistors used in electronic devices that control the flow of the electric current.

Commercial silicon transistors are brittle, nontransparent, and typically several microns thick, about the same thickness as a red blood cell. In contrast, photoswitches are one or two nanometers, about 1,000 times thinner. They can also be mounted on graphene, a transparent, flexible material.

The experimental authorization means SpaceX can test its cellular Starlink system statewide in California, Texas, and Hawaii.

AR-Smart glasses: 2029. Will look like just a normal pair of sunglasses. All normal smartphone type features. Built in AI systems. Set up for some VR stuff. An built in earbud / mic, for calls, music, talking to Ai, etc… May need a battery pack, we ll see in 2029.

The smart glasses will soon come with a built-in assistant.

Without understanding how gravity affects time, the GPS location in your phone would get progressively less accurate until you end up in the wrong location.

The demonstration at 22 Bishopsgate was part of the Lord Mayor of London Alderman Professor Michael Mainelli’s mayoral theme, ‘Connect to Prosper’

The demonstration was the first in a series of showpiece exercises, which will run for the duration of the Lord Mayor’s tenure. The Experiment Series seeks to showcase innovation and invention in the City of London and promote and celebrate the many ‘knowledge miles’ within the Square Mile.

OLED panels have been around for quite some time, but now we are starting to see them come to gaming monitors, raising concerns about burn-in issues.

OLED pixel technology has been used in smartphones and TVs for many years now, and with each iteration of the technology, improvements are being made to the quality of the panel, particularly with the reduction of known problems. But now we are starting to see the gaming industry be blessed with gorgeous QD-OLED panels, and the brands behind these new gaming monitors are rolling out features such as MSI’s OLED Care technology to reduce the chances of debilitating issues such as burn-in.

Imagine performing a sweep around an object with your smartphone and getting a realistic, fully editable 3D model that you can view from any angle. This is fast becoming reality, thanks to advances in AI.

Researchers at Simon Fraser University (SFU) in Canada have unveiled new AI technology for doing exactly this. Soon, rather than merely taking 2D photos, everyday consumers will be able to take 3D captures of real-life objects and edit their shapes and appearance as they wish, just as easily as they would with regular 2D photos today.

In a new paper appearing on the arXiv preprint server and presented at the 2023 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) in New Orleans, Louisiana, researchers demonstrated a new technique called Proximity Attention Point Rendering (PAPR) that can turn a set of 2D photos of an object into a cloud of 3D points that represents the object’s shape and appearance.