Friday Futures: VR pain relief, the end of privacy and white-collar AI

VR medicine
Image credit: chombosan / Shutterstock.com

Welcome to Friday Futures, our weekly guide to the latest visions of  The Future from around the web. Because who doesn’t want to know the future before it happens (maybe)?  This episode: how VR can relieve your pain (literally), the end of privacy thanks to smart cities, and how AI may decimate China’s white-collar workforce before it goes after the blue-collar workers.

Can VR solve chronic pain?

Cedars-Sinai is one of an increasing number of hospitals testing how virtual reality could improve patient outcomes. Brennan Spiegel is one of the clinical researchers leading that charge. He’s focusing his efforts on something much more universal than the occasional psychosomatic suffocation: pain. Discover more at Wired…

Will an IBM breakthrough make computers 200 times faster?

A team from IBM Research claims to have made a breakthrough in computational memory by successfully using one million phase change memory (PCM) devices to run an unsupervised machine learning algorithm. Read on at Futurism …

Logitech is developing a VR keyboard

Logitech is building a new system that will allow people to use a keyboard while immersed in virtual reality. They are launching the system, called Bridge, to a limited number of developers. Have a look…

Smart cities will basically kill privacy

Efforts to develop cities into smart cities promise to make them cleaner, safer, more sustainable, and more efficient. But ethicists have a different concern: How can citizens maintain privacy when data is being collected from all around them? Read more…

Here is a question for top geneticist John Hardy

Where is the complexity of human beings “stored”, in the light of the fact that humans do not have significantly more genes than, for example, worms? (Also, how do we cure Parkinson’s Disease?) Listen to the podcast…

AI will replace China’s white-collar workers first

Kai-Fu Lee, one of China’s best-known technologists and investors, thinks artificial intelligence is about to supplant many millions of the country’s office workers. “This replacement is happening now, and it’s happening in a true, complete decimation,” Lee told a conference at MIT last week. “In my opinion, the white-collar workforce gets challenged first—blue-collar work later.” Learn your fate …

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