Futurism

Are Insects the Future of Food?

Emily Anthes braves locusts, beetles, mealworms and more as she asks whether eating insects is the answer to feeding ever more humans and livestock. At first my meal seems familiar, like countless other dishes I’ve eaten at Asian restaurants. A swirl of noodles slicked with oil and studded with shredded chicken, the aroma of ginger…

A Comedy Club Is Using Facial Recognition to Charge by the Laugh

Never more shall you pay full price for a sub-par comedian. A comedy club in Spain is using tablets with facial recognition software to figure out how much to charge its customers. The future is now. As with all really important advancements, this one was spurred on by taxes. The Barcelona club Teatreneu introduced this…

12 Technologies We Need To Stop Stalling On And Develop Now

The pace of technological change is governed by many factors — including public demand. Which is why we need to be demanding more. Here are 12 transformative technologies whose development should be expedited right now. Top image: Conceptual space elevator (Credit: Obayashi Corporation) To make this list meaningful, I only included those items that are…

What If You Awoke One Morning Transformed Into A Robot?

Acclaimed Japanese director Oriza Hirata is releasing a stage production of Kafka’s surrealist classic The Metamorphosis. But in this production, our tortured protagonist does not wake to find himself transformed into a bug. Instead, he’s an android. And remarkably, an actual robot gets to star in the show. In Kafka’s original story, traveling salesman Gregor…

This ​DARPA Video Puts You In The Cockpit Of Its Tank Of The Future

DARPA believes the future of tank warfare won’t be heavily armored lumbering beasts, but fast-moving, agile vehicles, augmented by “intelligent systems” to avoid incoming threats. A newly released video shows how a head-up display would project an array of information directly into the field of view of the driver. According to a DARPA statement released…

What About Life Today Will Most Confuse Future Archeologists?

Some things (like a Lost episode or the freeway system) really only make sense in context. So what about our lives today is mostly likely to cause a confused archeologist 1,000 years in the future to give up in despair? Will it be some leftover signage that they’ll struggle to explain? Or will the archeology…

Are We Overthinking the Dangers of Artificial Intelligence?

Futurists and science fiction authors often give us overly grim visions of the future, especially when it comes to the Singularity and the risks of artificial superintelligence. Scifi novelist David Brin talked to us about why these dire predictions are often simplistic and unreasonable. Illustration: Jim Cooke Our civilization faces no shortage of risks in…

How Hard Can a Robot Hit You Before It Becomes Illegal?

This is a question that is already becoming relevant as robots enter the workforce in larger numbers. And the answers proposed by standards bodies are about as strange as it gets. Over at Technology Review, Tom Simonite reports on a discussion at last week’s Robot Industry Association conference about new rules for robot safety proposed…

Legendary Designer Syd Mead Says We Should Stop Saying “Wearable Tech”

With his work on Blade Runner and other movies, designer Syd Mead did as much as almost anybody to shape our vision of the future. And in a new interview with Fast Co Design, he explains why the term “wearable technology” is meaningless — and what it takes for wearables to become must-wears. Here’s an…

Yes, science fiction can save the world. That’s the subtext (or just the plain old text) of this new collection of articles at Slateabout why we need science fiction to spur our creative efforts and next great scientific collaborations as a species. Spend the afternoon reading them all!

What Would It Take to Turn New York into a Megacity?

Something bizarre happened overnight: New York City’s population grew to the size of Shanghai’s, swelling from 8 million people to 24 million. It’s like a natural disaster, but this tidal surge is made of human needs. Here’s how we’ll rebuild the city to make room for them all. Illustration by Imperial Boy Though the rapid…

Margaret Atwood Is Writing A Book That Will Be Published In 100 Years

A thousand spruce trees have just been planted in a forest near Oslo. In a century, the trees will be cut down and made into paper to print books that have never been read before. The project is called the Future Library, and Margaret Atwood has agreed to contribute the collection’s first work. The Future…

Government Robots Will Decide If Your Thai Food Is Authentic

Is the food at your neighborhood Thai place authentic? Thailand wants to know. The country is set to unveil two robots designed to evaluate whether traditional Thai dishes like pad thai, green curry, and massaman curry have been prepared according to government-standardized recipes. Yes, really. Photo Credit: stu_spivak via flickr “It is found that the…

We Can All Give Up Now: The Robot Cheerleaders Have Come to Take Over

And they’re adorable. This is it, right? This is how the robot apocalypse happens: With a vanguard of cheerleaders doing synchronized routines with color-changing pom poms. We’ll be too distracted when the overlords follow. The video is promotional work for Murata Manufacturing, designed to show off their new sensors. There’s also an intended message of…

Watch This Droplet Move Through A Maze By Itself

Well this is something you certainly don’t see every day. It’s a tiny droplet of alcohol that’s autonomously navigating a maze in an effort to reach a target. The researchers who set up the experiment say it could lead to some interesting new technologies. We don’t typically think of droplets — simple spheres of fluid…

At Long Last, An Invisibility Cloak We Can Believe In

By using simple, inexpensive, and readily available materials, researchers at at the University of Rochester have developed an optical system that can actually hide objects in the visible spectrum of light. Cloaking devices are a kind of holy grail for physicists. The ability to hide objects from plain sight would be a remarkable achievement with…

Dispatches from the Yacht War of 2035

You could make a lot of cash if you were a yacht captain with military training and a death wish. Defending the perimeter of a coastal estate wasn’t the cushy job it was back in the twenties. But there was a certain thrill in launching a missile from the deck of a ship whose bathroom…

These Are Plans for the First City in Antarctica

As the climate warms and the human population spreads out, it makes sense that eventually we’ll want a city in Antarctica. That’s why Argentinian architect Amancio Williams designed this futuristic city for the frozen continent. According to Fosco Lucarelli at architecture blog Socks, the Argentinian government asked the future-minded Williams to consult on this design…

This A.I. Can Tell Which Neighborhood Is Safe Better Than You Can

Imagine you’re dropped in the middle of an unknown city and you need to find a restaurant in a safe area using only the visual cues around you. Sounds hard, right? Well, researchers at MIT have developed an algorithm that can do it — and it consistently outperforms humans. Looking at the image above, can…

A Sculpture Shows a City’s Mood By Translating Tweets Into Colored Goo

Monolitt is an Oslo art exhibit created by Norwegian artists Syver Lauritzsen and Eirik Haugen Murvoll. The waist-high object identifies the emotions in tweets, matches the emotion to a predetermined color, and oozes that color in paint out of the top. It’s like city-wide techno-mood ring. Only cooler than that description. In the artists’ video,…