Robotic butlers that can cook dinner for the family won’t exist anytime soon. But that doesn’t mean technologists aren’t aiming to help out in the kitchen. A swath of companies, from appliance giants to gadgets startups, are fielding devices that help prepare meals and shop for groceries so families can eat more healthily. Here’s a look at some of the most promising devices so far.
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In Silicon Collar I had several examples of how machines can turn employees into “super workers”
Some of the most impressive super workers profiled in the book are the coaches and players at the Golden State Warriors. 3 NBA finals in a row, and more to come according to many commentators and a whole slew of team and individual records.
I wrote in the book about how with missile tracking technology and wearables the team keep innovating
“For Kirk Lacob, Assistant General Manager of the team, part of his job is to scout and introduce technologies infused with rich data to help make his players more competitive. It's a version of automation in the sports world. It's also leading to jokes as to whether Curry is a 3-point shooting robot.”
The PowerRay, a submersible drone attached to a fishing line, can take a lot of the guesswork out of fishing. The fish finder spots fish, relays their position to the user, and attracts them with a built-in light and a bait drop.
In my book, Silicon Collar I argued driverless cars are a long way off because our infrastructure, laws, ethics are just not evolving as quickly as car technology. Also, it will be a long time before humans give up their love for driving. But in the meantime, the quest for autonomous driving is having a important unintended consequence – cars are becoming safer, as McKinsey writes:
Around the world, the number of ADAS systems (for instance, those for night vision and blind-spot vehicle detection) rose from 90 million units in 2014 to about 140 million in 2016—a 50 percent increase in just two years. Some ADAS features have greater uptake than others. The adoption rate of surround-view parking systems, for example, increased by more than 150 percent from 2014 to 2016, while the number of adaptive front-lighting systems rose by around 20 percent in the same time frame.
They also have an image of technology increasingly available in cars.
One of the most enjoyable things at the Plex conference in Atlanta earlier this month was a chance to listen to and spend a few minutes chatting with Mike Rowe, the host of the Discovery series, Dirty Jobs which profiled all kinds of interesting jobs cleaning sewers, mucking coal and worse.
He is a very entertaining speaker. Importantly, he is humble. He did not record the shows as a high minded TV host. He acted like an apprentice to each of the workers he profiled. As his mother says in his book, Profoundly Disconnected, “if there was a joke to be made, it would always be on Mike, never at the expense of the people he worked with. I liked that”
In listening to him I found so much in common in what I found in my research for Silicon Collar. We have inflicted many manmade wounds on the job economy and yet we are hysterical about machines killing jobs.
Here is what he told Bill Maher
“We’ve got millions of people looking for work and millions of jobs that nobody wants. College graduates are a trillion dollars in debt and struggling to find employment in their field of study. Meanwhile, 88 percent of all the available jobs don’t require a four-year degree. They require specific training. So what do we do? We push a four-year degree like it’s some sort of a Golden Ticket. We remove vocational education from high schools at the time we need it most. We’re lending money we don’t have to kids who can’t pay it back, educating them for jobs that no longer exist. I’m no expert, but I’d say that’s profoundly disconnected.”
I particularly like his poster which you can order here (along with his book) which positions the modern day blue collar worker as more self-fulfilled than a white collar college graduate.
We need a lot more of this thinking.
The research found that cybersecurity insurance will be the greatest potential driver of new premiums, totaling US$64 billion by 2025, followed by product liability insurance (US$14 billion) and public infrastructure insurance (US$3 billion).
These three new business lines include:
After a few months of development, Heliograf debuted last year. An early version autopublished stories on the Rio Olympics (image below of the tweets it sent); a more advanced version, with a stronger editorial voice, was soon introduced to cover the election. It works like this: Editors create narrative templates for the stories, including key phrases that account for a variety of potential outcomes (from “Republicans retained control of the House” to “Democrats regained control of the House”), and then they hook Heliograf up to any source of structured data—in the case of the election, the data clearinghouse VoteSmart.org. The Heliograf software identifies the relevant data, matches it with the corresponding phrases in the template, merges them, and then publishes different versions across different platforms. The system can also alert reporters via Slack of any anomalies it finds in the data—for instance, wider margins than predicted—so they can investigate. “It’s just one more way to get a tip” on a potential scoop, Gilbert says.
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