In this collection, sponsored by BBVA through its knowledge community OpenMind, expert contributors explore a variety of timely technology issues and trends. Among them: the growth of big data, the impact of the networked economy, the cultural change created by online games, and the evolving politics of the Internet.
Paleoanthropology studies the origin and evolution of man and tries to reconstruct the history of biological and cultural changes experienced by our ancestors since the lines that have led to humans and chimpanzees split some six million years ago. One of the main bodies of evidence on which the study of human evolution draws is…
The past decade, and particularly the past few years, has been transformative for artificial intelligence, not so much in terms of what we can do with this technology as what we are doing with it. Some place the advent of this era to 2007, with the introduction of smartphones. At its most essential, intelligence is…
Michelle Baddeley is Director and Research Professor at the Institute for Choice, University of South Australia. Today, it seems as though everyone is talking about behavioral economics. Governments are embedding behavioral insights into policy. Commercial businesses are using it to inform their marketing strategies. Lessons from behavioral economics are informing relationships between employers and employees.…
In the last decade, there has been dramatic progress in exploring the cosmos. Highlights include close-up studies of the planets and moons of our solar system, the realization that most stars are orbited by planets, and that there may be millions of Earth-like planets in our galaxy. On a still larger scale, we have achieved…
“Data are the lifeblood of decision-making and the raw material for accountability,” states the UN Data Revolution report. New technologies are leading to an exponential increase in the volume and types of data available, creating unprecedented possibilities for informing and transforming society and protecting the environment. Governments, companies, researchers and citizen groups are in a…
What exactly brought down the Berlin Wall? Those who see the end of the Cold War as a product of structural forces that pushed the Soviet Union into oblivion are unlikely to see the end of that civilizational struggle as the well-deserved reward for the patient work done by social movements, dissidents, and their foreign…
New political media are forms of communication that facilitate the production, dissemination, and exchange of political content on platforms and within networks that accommodate interaction and collaboration. They emerged in the late 1980s when entertainment platforms, like talk radio, television talk shows, and tabloid newspapers, took on prominent political roles and gave rise to the…
Advances in computing power, methods of computing and machine learning all hugely expand the type of tasks that can be addressed and successfully resolved by machines. At the same time, the unprecedented uptake of lightweight technologies, the diffusion of digital platforms and social media, grant the current online environment a social dimension that was only…
Now, a new wave of technology threatens to automate vast swaths of existing jobs, with the trend set to push even more workers into un- and under-employment. The result is an increasingly large surplus population that has neither the means to survive outside of capitalism nor the jobs to survive within it. While it is…
Evidence of technological change, led by advances in digital technologies, is all around us. One must only bear witness to the increasing sophistication of cell phones and computer systems; digital platforms transforming information and communication; and expanding uses of robotics and artificial intelligence. Technology is a key engine of productivity growth, allowing humans to achieve…
We are living in an era of “mega-change”, in which social, economic and political models are no longer fixed, and this causes insecurity and fear: fear of others, fear of the future. Moreover, today’s accelerated technological change makes it even more difficult to predict the future of the global economy. There are differences in opinion…
Since the dawn of medicine, aging has been doctors’ foremost challenge. Three unsuccessful approaches to conquering it have failed: treating components of age-related ill health as curable diseases, extrapolating from differences between species in the rate of aging, and emulating the life extension that famine elicits in short-lived species. SENS Research Foundation is spearheading the…
While the raw abilities of these computers have improved at an exponential rate over many orders of magnitude, the rate at which human jobs have been displaced has remained modest and relatively constant. This is reasonably because human jobs vary enormously in the computing power required to do those jobs adequately. This suggests that the…
Before the IoT moniker dominated, his vision of “ubiquitous computing” could take many names and flavors as factions tried to establish their own brand (“Things That Think” at the Media Lab, “Project Oxygen” at MIT’s Lab for Computer Science, “Pervasive Computing,” “Ambient Computing,” “Invisible Computing,” “Disappearing Computer,” etc.), but it was all still rooted in…