20 Crucial Terms Every 21st Century Futurist Should Know

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We live in an era of accelerating change, when scientific and technological advancements are arriving rapidly. As a result, we are developing a new language to describe our civilization as it evolves. Here are 20 terms and concepts that you’ll need to navigate our future.

Back in 2007 I put together a list of terms every self-respecting futurist should be familiar with. But now, some seven years later, it’s time for an update. I reached out to several futurists, asking them which terms or phrases have emerged or gained relevance since that time. These forward-looking thinkers provided me with some fascinating and provocative suggestions — some familiar to me, others completely new, and some a refinement of earlier conceptions. Here are their submissions, including a few of my own.

1. Co-veillance

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Futurist and scifi novelist David Brin suggested this one. It’s kind of a mash-up between Steve Mann’s sousveillance and Jamais Cascio’s Participatory Panopticon, and a furtherance of his own Transparent Society concept. Brin describes it as: “reciprocal vision and supervision, combining surveillance with aggressively effective sousveillance.” He says it’s “scrutiny from below.” As Brin told io9:

Folks are rightfully worried about surveillance powers that expand every day. Cameras grow quicker, better, smaller, more numerous and mobile at a rate much faster than Moore’s Law (i.e. Brin’s corollary). Liberals foresee Big Brother arising from an oligarchy and faceless corporations, while conservatives fret that Orwellian masters will take over from academia and faceless bureaucrats. Which fear has some validity? All of the above. While millions take Orwell’s warning seriously, the normal reflex is to whine: “Stoplooking at us!” It cannot work. But what if, instead of whining, we all looked back? Countering surveillance with aggressively effective sousveillance — or scrutiny from below? Say by having citizen-access cameras in the camera control rooms, letting us watch the watchers?

Brin says that reciprocal vision and supervision will be hard to enact and establish, but that it has one advantage over “don’t look at us” laws, namely that it actually has a chance of working. (Image credit: 24Novembers/Shutterstock)

2. Multiplex Parenting

This particular meme — suggested to me by the Institute for the Future's Distinguished FellowJamais Cascio — has only recently hit the radar. “It’s in-vitro fertilization,” he says, “but with a germline-genetic mod twist.” Recently sanctioned by the UK, this is the biotechnological advance where a baby can have three genetic parents via sperm, egg, and (separately) mitochondria. It’s meant as a way to flush-out debilitating genetic diseases. But it could also be used for the practice of human trait selection, or so-called “designer babies”. The procedure iscurrently being reviewed for use in the United States. The era of multiplex parents has all but arrived.

In three to five years, a baby will be born with two genetic mothers and one father. This could prove to be a boon for polyamorous families of the… Read…

3. Technological Unemployment

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Futurist and scifi novelist Ramez Naam says we should be aware of the potential for “technological unemployment.” He describes it as unemployment created by the deployment of technology that can replace human labor. As he told io9,

For example, the potential unemployment of taxi drivers, truck drivers, and so on created by self-driving cars. The phenomenon is an old one, dating back for centuries, and spurred the original Luddite movement, as Ned Ludd is said to have destroyed knitting frames for fear that they would replace human weavers. Technological unemployment in the past has been clearly outpaced (in the long term) by the creation of new wealth from automation and the opening of new job niches for humans, higher in levels of abstraction. The question in the modern age is whether the higher-than-ever speed of such displacement of humans can be matched by the pace of humans developing new skills, and/or by changes in social systems to spread the wealth created.

Indeed, the potential for robotics and AI to replace workers of all stripes is significant, leading to worries of massive rates of unemployment and subsequent social upheaval. These concerns have given rise to another must-know term that could serve as a potential antidote: guaranteed minimum income. (Image credit: Ociacia/Shutterstock)

4. Substrate-Autonomous Person

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In the future, people won’t be confined to their meatspace bodies. This is what futurist and transhumanist Natasha Vita-More describes as the “Substrate-Autonomous Person.” Eventually, she says, people will be able to form identities in numerous substrates, such as using a “platform diverse body” (a future body that is wearable/usable in the physical/material world — but also exists in computational environments and virtual systems) to route their identity across the biosphere, cybersphere, and virtual environments.

We’re still decades — if not centuries — away from being able to transfer a mind to a supercomputer. It’s a fantastic future prospect that… Read…

"This person would form identities," she told me. "But they would consider their personhood, or sense of identity, to be associated with the environment rather than one exclusive body." Depending on the platform, the substrate-autonomous person would upload and download into a form or shape (body) that conforms to the environment. So, for a biospheric environment, the person would use a biological body, for the Metaverse, a person would use an avatar, and for virtual reality, the person would use a digital form.

5. Intelligence Explosion

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If you want to know about the future of artificial intelligence then you must read documentary filmmaker James Barrat’s new book Our Final… Read…

It’s time to retire the term ‘Technological Singularity.’ The reason, says the Future of Humanity Institute's Stuart Armstrong, is that it has accumulated far too much baggage, including quasi-religious connotations. It's not a good description of what might happen when artificial intelligence matches and then exceeds human capacities, he says. What's more, different people interpret it differently, and it only describes a limited aspect of much broader concept. In its place, Armstrong says we should use a term devised by the computer scientist I. J. Good back in 1967: the “Intelligence explosion.” As Armstrong told io9,

It describes the apparent sudden increase in the intelligence of an artificial system such as an AI. There are several scenarios for this: it could be that the system radically self improves itself, finding that as it becomes more intelligent, it’s easier for it to become more intelligent still. But it could also be that human intelligence clusters pretty close in mindspace, so a slowly improving AI could shoot rapidly across the distance that separates the village idiot from Einstein. Or it could just be that there are strong skill returns to intelligence, so that an entity need only be slightly more intelligent that humans to become vastly more powerful. In all cases, the fate of life on Earth is likely to be shaped mainly by such “super-intelligences”.

Image credit: sakkmesterke/Shutterstock.

6. Longevity Dividend

While many futurists extol radical life extension on humanitarian grounds, few consider the astounding fiscal benefits that are to be had through the advent of anti-aging biotechnologies. The Longevity Dividend, as suggested to me by bioethicist James Hughes of the IEET, is the “assertion by biogerontologists that the savings to society of extending healthy life expectancy with therapies that slow the aging process would far exceed the cost of developing and providing them, or of providing additional years of old age assistance.” Longer healthy life expectancy would reduce medical and nursing expenditures, argues Hughes, while allowing more seniors to remain independent and in the labor force. No doubt, the corporate race toprolong life is heating up in recognition of the tremendous amounts of money to be made — and saved — through preventative medicines.

Google has announced Calico, a new company that will focus on health and well-being. But its ultimate purpose is to radically extend the human… Read…

Biotechnologist Craig Venter — the first scientist to map the human genome and create synthetic life — now wants to dramatically extend the human… Read…

7. Repressive Desublimation

This concept was suggested by our very own Annalee Newitz, editor-in-chief of io9 and author ofScatter, Adapt And Remember. The idea of repressive desublimation was first developed by by political philosopher Herbert Marcuse in his groundbreaking book Eros and Civilization. Newitz says:

It refers to the kind of soft authoritarianism preferred by wealthy, consumer culture societies that want to repress political dissent. In such societies, pop culture encourages people to desublimate or express their desires, whether those are for sex, drugs or violent video games. At the same time, they’re discouraged from questioning corporate and government authorities. As a result, people feel as if they live in a free society even though they may be under constant surveillance and forced to work at mind-numbing jobs. Basically, consumerism and so-called liberal values distract people from social repression.

8. Intelligence Amplification

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With much of our attention focused the rise of advanced artificial intelligence, few consider the potential for radically amplified human… Read…

Sometimes referred to as IA, this is a specific subset of human enhancement — the augmentation of human intellectual capabilities via technology. “It is often positioned as either a complement to or a competitor to the creation of Artificial Intelligence,” says Ramez Naam. “In reality there is no mutual exclusion between these technologies.” Interestingly, Naam says IA could be a partial solution to the problem of technological unemployment — as a way for humans, or posthumans, to “keep up” with advancing AI and to stay in the loop.

9. Effective Altruism

This is another term suggested by Stuart Armstrong. He describes it as

the application of cost-effectiveness to charity and other altruistic pursuits. Just as some engineering approaches can be thousands of times more effective at solving problems than others, some charities are thousands of time more effective than others, and some altruistic career paths are thousands of times more effective than others. And increased efficiency translates into many more lives saved, many more people given better outcomes and opportunities throughout the world. It is argued that when charity can be made more effective in this way, it is a moral duty to do so: inefficiency is akin to letting people die.

10. Moral Enhancement

On a somewhat related note, James Hughes says moral enhancement is another must-know term for futurists of the 21st Century. Also known as virtue engineering, it’s the use of drugs and wearable or implanted devices to enhance self-control, empathy, fairness, mindfulness, intelligence and spiritual experiences.

11. Proactionary Principle

This one comes via Max More, president and CEO of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation. It’s an interesting and obverse take on the precautionary principle. “Our freedom to innovate technologically is highly valuable — even critical — to humanity,” he told io9. “This implies several imperatives when restrictive measures are proposed: Assess risks and opportunities according to available science, not popular perception. Account for both the costs of the restrictions themselves, and those of opportunities foregone. Favor measures that are proportionate to the probability and magnitude of impacts, and that have a high expectation value. Protect people’s freedom to experiment, innovate, and progress.”

12. Mules

Jamais Cascio suggested this term, though he admits it’s not widely used. Mules are unexpected events — a parallel to Black Swans — that aren’t just outside of our knowledge, but outside of our understanding of how the world works. It’s named after Asimov’s Mule from the Foundation series.

13. Anthropocene

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Another must-know term submitted by Cascio, described as “the current geologic age, characterized by substantial alterations of ecosystems through human activity.” (Image credit: NASA/NOAA).

14. Eroom’s Law

Unlike Moore’s Law, where things are speeding up, Eroom’s Law describes — at least in the pharmaceutical industry — things that are slowing down (which is why it’s Moore’s Law spelled backwards). Ramez Naam says the rate of new drugs developed per dollar spent by the industry has dropped by roughly a factor of 100 over the last 60 years. “Many reasons are proposed for this, including over-regulation, the plucking of low-hanging fruit, diminishing returns of understanding more and more complex systems, and so on,” he told io9.

15. Evolvability Risk

Natasha Vita-More describes this as the ability of a species to produce variants more apt or powerful than those currently existing within a species:

One way of looking at evolvability is to consider any system — a society or culture, for example, that has evolvable characteristics. Incidentally, it seems that today’s culture is more emergent and mutable than physiological changes occurring in human biology. In the course of a few thousand years, human tools, language, and culture have evolved manifold. The use of tools within a culture has been shaped by the culture and shows observable evolvability-from stones to computers-while human physiology has remained nearly the same.

16. Artificial Wombs

Artificial wombs are a staple of science fiction, but could we really build one? As time passes, we’re inching closer and closer to the day when it… Read…

"This is any device, whether biological or technological, that allows humans to reproduce without using a woman’s uterus,” says Annalee Newitz. Sometimes called a “uterine replicator,” she says these devices would liberate women from the biological difficulties of pregnancy, and free the very act of reproduction from traditional male-female pairings. “Artificial wombs might develop alongside social structures that support families with more than two parents, as well as gay marriage,” says Newitz.

17. Whole Brain Emulations

Whole brain emulations, says Stuart Armstrong, are human brains that have been copied into a computer, and that are then run according to the laws of physics, aiming to reproduce the behaviour of human minds within a digital form. As he told io9,

These days, people worry about robots stealing our jobs. But maybe we should be more concerned about massive populations of computerized human… Read…

They are dependent on certain (mild) assumptions on how the brain works, and requires certain enabling technologies, such as scanning devices to make the original brain model, good understanding of biochemistry to run it properly, and sufficiently powerful computers to run it in the first place. There are plausible technology paths that could allow such emulations around 2070 or so, with some large uncertainties. If such emulations are developed, they would revolutionise health, society and economics. For instance, allowing people to survive in digital form, and creating the possibility of “copyable human capital”: skilled, trained and effective workers that can be copied as needed to serve any business purpose.

Armstrong says this also raises great concern over wages, and over the eventual deletion of such copies.

18. Weak AI

What will happen in the days after the birth of the first true artificial intelligence? If things continue apace, this could prove to be the most… Read…

Ramez Naam says this term has gone somewhat out of favor, but it’s still a very important one. It refers to the vast majority of all ‘artificial intelligence’ work that produces useful pattern matching or information processing capabilities, but with no bearing on creating a self-aware sentient being. “Google Search, IBM’s Watson, self-driving cars, autonomous drones, face recognition, some medical diagnostics, and algorithmic stock market traders are all examples of ‘weak AI’,” says Naam. “The large majority of all commercial and research work in AI, machine learning, and related fields is in ‘weak AI’.”

Naam argues that this trend — and the motivations for it — is one of the arguments for the Singularity being further than it appears.

19. Neural Coupling

In what might be the first documented case of technologically-assisted interspecies telepathy, an international team of researchers has successfully… Read…

Imagine the fantastic prospect of creating interfaces that connect the brains of two (or more) humans. Already today, scientists have created interfaces that allow humans to move the limb — or in this case, the tail — of another animal. At first, these technologies will be used for therapeutic purposes; they could be used to help people relearn how to use previously paralyzed limbs. More radically, it could eventually be used for recreational purposes. Humans could voluntarily couple themselves and move each other’s body parts.

20. Computational Overhang

This refers to any situation in which new algorithms can suddenly and dramatically exploit existing computational power far more efficiently than before. This is likely to happen when tons of computational power remains untapped, and when previously used algorithms were suboptimal. This is an important concept as far as the development of AGI (artificial general intelligence) is concerned. As noted by Less Wrong, it

signifies a situation where it becomes possible to create AGIs that can be run using only a small fraction of the easily available hardware resources. This could lead to an intelligence explosion, or to a massive increase in the number of AGIs, as they could be easily copied to run on countless computers. This could make AGIs much more powerful than before, and present an existential risk.

Luke Muehlhauser from the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) describes it this way:

Suppose that computing power continues to double according to Moore’s law, but figuring out the algorithms for human-like general intelligence proves to be fiendishly difficult. When the software for general intelligence is finally realized, there could exist a ‘computing overhang’: tremendous amounts of cheap computing power available to run [AIs]. AIs could be copied across the hardware base, causing the AI population to quickly surpass the human population.

I’m sure we missed many must-know terms. Please add your own suggestions to comments.

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Jim Campbell’s Sculptural LED Light Installations. Artist Jim Campbell details the inspiration and custom electronics behind his new series of light installations currently on display at Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery in New York City. The exhibition ranges from LED panels that project ultra low-resolution Kodachrome home movies, to topographic LED sculptures created from transparent, molded resin. Source

Ocean Park Jelly Fish Pavilion Interactive Projection. Making use of Unity3D engine, Fatty successfully brings interactivity onto 3D stage to take a closer look the one of the most beautiful creatures in the world.

Apart from more realistic and splendid visual quality, it also applies better physic simulation to each of the 16 Sea Jelly.

Museum visitors can learn about the properties of the Sea Jelly with the two mutli-touch screens installed in the middle of an 8m x 2.5m projection. In the meanwhile you clicked on the screen, a huge version of your selected sea jelly will swim up on the projection, letting you look at them in real close.

An Intelligent Rug That Detects When You Fall And Calls For Help. SensFloor, a large-area sensor system, is based on a textile underlay with a thickness of only 2mm. The sensor system has four integrated radio modules and 32 proximity sensors per square meter. Whenever a person walks across the floor, sensor signals are sent to a control unit and various different types of events are identified: The sensor system differentiates between a person standing or lying on the floor and determines the direction and velocity of movements. Static signal detection and self-test capability are important features for security applications. 

SensFloor switches lights, controls automatic doors, and detects unauthorised intrusion. In health care, SensFloor detects patients leaving their beds or their rooms and transmits alarm signals through indoor call systems or radio components. For high-security applicationslike access control in combination with RFID, SensFloor can count individual people. 

SensFloor can be installed beneath PVC, carpet, and laminate. 

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The Pentagon Basically Wants to Merge You With a Robot

From artificial mammal brains to prosthetics that feel like real limbs, the military’s blue-sky researchers are aiming to bring man and machine closer than ever before.

You’ve probably never looked at a mammal’s brain and thought “Gee, I wish I could yank that out of its skull and shrink it onto a chip.” Nor have you likely gazed upon a colony of ants and remarked “wouldn’t it be great if we could get spy drones to work together like that?”

That’s because you don’t work for the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency, the Pentagon’s way, way out science and technology arm. Their annual budget request, which they made public on Thursday, reads like something out of lost a Philip K. Dick notepad.

DARPA, for the uninitiated, acts as the Pentagon’s blue-sky research agency, always looking beyond the horizon for the technologies which will have the greatest impact in the future. If you’ve ever found yourself wondering, Joker-style, where the U.S. military gets those wonderful toys—like the Internet, global positioning systems and stealth bombers—chances are it started out as idea on a drawing board at DARPA.

This year the Obama administration requests nearly $3 billion DARPA for the research outfit—a nearly $136 million increase over the agency’s last budget year. Tucked away inside that $3 billion are a number of new and fascinating projects: ones to make faster, more cooperative unmanned systems, to mimic parts of the human body for smarter computers, and to even build prosthetics that feel like real hands.

For instance, the $10 million Human and Computer Symbiosis program will teach computers to recognize when it encounters a bit of question that only a trained, flesh-and-blood expert would know—and then ask one of us meatbags for the answer. The computers will shoot a text to a predefined list of experts, learning more about the subject over time. Eventually, the plan is for the computers to become experts themselves and able to provide answers when asked a question.

DARPA’s Cortical Processor, however, takes the human-machine interface a step further by looking to mimic the mammalian neocortex. As it turns out, the cortex in mammals’ brains is pretty darn good at processing large amounts of data in real time and controlling multiple motor functions. Computing power like that can come in handy. So the Cortical Processor program will spend $2.3 million trying to develop a chip that behaves like a neocortex and equip it with a series of algorithms known as Hierarchical Temporal Memory (which are themselves based on the neocortex) to effectively create a cortex on a chip. The resulting chips could be used in battlefield systems such as unmanned aerial vehicles to more quickly make sense of the gobs of data hovered up by the military’s various surveillance sensors. The Cortical Processor builds off the research from a previous DARPA project “SyNAPSE,” which sought to make a chip which could imitate the function of a cat’s cortex. The program managed to produce a chip with “1 million neurons performing behavioral tests in the virtual environment,” according to DARPA.

You’ve probably never looked at a mammal’s brain and thought “Gee, I wish I could yank that out of its skull and shrink it onto a chip.” That’s because you don’t work for the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency.

But DARPA doesn’t just want machines to get smarter; it wants them to work better, together. We’re talking about drones, which have already changed how the U.S. wages war. But the potential of drones is far from untapped and this year’s DARPA budget is brimming with research for new ways to leverage advances in robotics. The $5 million “Swarm Challenge” looks to see if a flock of small drones can all play well together. It involves the development of algorithms that would allow a number of small unmanned systems to work in unison and solve problems. Darpa envisions the drone hive-mind could be useful supporting troops in air, ground and maritime operations and could even help out in obstacle-clearing and search and rescue operations.

Drones in the skies get most of the attention these days, but they’re far from the only flavor of unmanned systems the U.S. military is interested in. Undersea unmanned vehicles have been getting increased attention from defense researchers these days but they come with a handful of technological hurdles their airborne colleagues lack. Among them, getting a vehicle to move fast underwater—and developing the energy systems to support it—is particularly tricky. So DARPA’s turning to the action movie-titled “Blue Wolf” program to develop technology that can create a super-fast underwater drone. At a price tag of nearly $14 million, the program looks to leverage the lessons learned from an earlier project, the “underwater express,” which reduces the water’s drag on a vehicle by surrounding it with a bubble of air.

Not all of DARPA’s work is focused on making new gadgets for far-off battlefields. Some of the most important projects in this year’s budget submission have to do with taking care of wounded warriors right here at home. Towards that end, the Prosthetic Hand Proprioception & Touch Interfaces program (shortened as HaPTIx) aims to make better prosthetics for troops and veterans with amputated limbs. Here DARPA is looking to spend $7 million create nerve implants which could offer amputees not just greater motor control and sensory awareness of their prosthetics. It’s a tall order, one involving the development of new nerve interface technologies as well as new surgical techniques. If it’s successful, though, it could provide an important advances in prosthetics for both military and civilian amputees alike.

Of course, just because these projects exist on paper, doesn’t mean they’ll pan out in practice. Part of DARPA’s raison d’etre is to work at the edges of possibility to see what works—and what doesn’t. And feasible or not, it’s a fiscally-constrained Congress which has the final say on funding levels and whether these projects will end up as science fiction or science fact. 

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Robotic fitting rooms and magic augmented reality mirrors

Brick and mortar retail businesses are under immense pressure to innovate now that ecommerce has become a normal part of consumer behavior. Thankfully for retailers, technology can be just as disruptive in a physical store as it can be online.

At the recent DX3 digital marketing conference, self-described ‘Retail Prophet’ Doug Stephens set up an installation to show off the various technologies that can help retail compete with online. Dubbed the ‘Retail Collective,’ the effort aimed to move beyond homogeneous single-brand demonstrations with a collaborative approach.

“I’ve been in the industry a long time, I’ve been to a lot of technology and retail shows, and I’ve never seen anyone put together a tech-agnostic, a brand-agnostic view of the future of retail from a technology standpoint,” Stephens told TNW in an interview. “We put together this elite team of technology companies with the mandate that they had to play nicely together and create an experience that was consistent and immersive.”

The individual pieces of the concept store run the gambit of augmented reality mirrors, metrics and analytics, robotic inventory management, mobile payment and beacons.

The Retail Collective’s experiment approaches the shopping experience from both the consumer and the merchant perspective. Opt-in mobileID tracking, for instance, offers retailers a chance to see the types of data they can look forward to, while demonstrating to consumers the benefits of personalized shopping.

You can imagine having intelligent notifications about products you might like as you wander through a store. When you’re ready to try something on, you can head to the Magic Mirror to have it show you how the clothes will fit. When you enter the fitting room, a robotic compartment whisks the items over. When you’re ready to pay, you can just use your phone to accept the charges and walk out with your new stuff.

“We’re not trying to put together something that’s just cool for the sake of it,” Stephens continued. “We’re trying to put something together that an executive can walk through and say, ‘Okay, I think I get this now.’”

Stephens created his Retail Prophet consultancy after noticing a lack of foresight in the retail industry. Five years later, many of his initial predictions are beginning to come true. For instance, Stephens projected the unraveling of the big box model of retailing.

“That idea of the whole retail market shifting and the balance of power moving back to the smaller niche and speciality retailers and the internet of course has unfolded and will continue to unfold,” he said.

IQMetrix’s virtual XQ Shelf

The end of big box may seem obvious now, but Stephens said that many observers called the idea rubbish when he posed it in 2009.

Looking ahead to the future, Stephens believes retail stores are turning into media outlets. As more consumers browse goods at shops and then go online to buy them, it’s becoming more difficult for stores to directly measure their sales impact.

“We’re going to have to start treating the store experience as a media experience and measure it on the basis of the impressions it generates and how engaging and compelling those experiences were,” he noted.

Stephens believes stores could transition to charging brands an ad rate for displaying their items. Rather than just taking a cut of sales, retailers will serve as ambassadors that participate in a sale even if takes place when the customer gets online back at home. Convincing customers to buy a product in store is no longer just about coupons and foot traffic.

While some have predicted the downfall of retail in general, Stephens remains positive about the industry.

“Software eats retail? I don’t believe that. Software hunts for average experiences in the marketplace and annihilates them,” he said. “It’s a matter of retailers ramping up that experience so that it becomes valuable.”

To get an outside view of the collective’s endeavors, we spoke to FK Funderburke, Senior Director of Omnichannel Experiences at Acquity Group, a part of Accenture Interactive.

Funderburke agreed that, based on what he’s seen, the installation is “right at the front” of where the future of retail is heading.

“Look at things like the Magic Mirror…You’re giving them a concierge like experience,” he said. “What you’ve done is you’ve taken something that used to be routinized and mundane. You’ve brought the power of a digital online experience right into the dressing room.”

Funderburke said he’s “cautiously optimistic” about retail’s future.

“Most people say this is a hard time to figure out what to do. I look at it where this is a place where the future is so wide open that there are a tons of things to do,” he said. “It’s much more of a fun place to be than it is a scary place.”

Similar to Stephens, Funderburke asserted that retailers that don’t innovate and embrace changing consumer behavior will go out of business. However, retailers that can bring together the online and home components in-store will thrive.

“The new reality is customers are always connected. The barrier between physical and digital is gone. With the new innovations coming, you have mass customization. I only have to build one Magic Mirror but it is a unique, personalized experience for every single person that walks in there.”

As merchants achieve a seamlessness between the physical and digital worlds, they’ll be able to create a more powerful relationship with their customers by using data to make content and offers more relevant.

For retailers who balk at the hardware and software costs of integrating new technology into their stores, Funderburke believes “the cost of not doing these things is much higher than the cost of doing these sorts of in-store experiences.”

Considering some of the poor shopping experiences I’ve had at big-box retailers lately – mismanaged inventory, apathetic employees, long  lines and unkept shelves, to name a few – it’s tempting to declare retail as doomed to die at the hands of Amazon’s coming drone army. Still, I fully expect to be walking into stores and buying stuff for many years to come, especially if retailers can see fit to incorporate some of these new technologies.

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Human moves rat’s tail with thoughts alone. Seung-Schik Yoo of Harvard Medical School in Boston and colleagues created a non-invasive brain-to-brain interface that allowed human participants to move a rat’s tail with their thoughts via EEG and focused ultrasound signals. Source

Probably The Most Versatile Quadruped Robot: HyQ. The versatile quadruped robot HyQ demonstrates its motion skills that range from planned motion over uneven terrain to highly dynamic motions. Some of the highlights are: chimney climbing, lateral disturbances by 23kg boxing bag, planned motion over stepping stones and pallets, and a flying trot. All experiments are executed on the same machine. There are no physical springs in the legs or body of HyQ, all compliance results from active adjustment of stiffness and damping (by software). The high-performance joint torque control is a key element to achieve such a wide range of stable motions. 

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