Future Jist 19
Your weekly curation of 4 impactful future-oriented stories.
🧠️Gabe Newell has big plans for brain-computer interfaces in gaming: Neural interfaces have gained quite a bit of traction recently first and foremost due to Neuralink; the Elon Musk co-founded Neurotech firm whose ambition is to implant a chip inside your head as a way to upgrade you so you become invulnerable to AI overlords…?
Valve, the genre-defining, groundbreaking game studio, and more specifically its president seek to want to ride the wave of potential that neural interfaces hold. What greater sensory experience could exist than that which lies within the currents and synapsis of our brains? Anime fans may be getting Sword Art Online vibes from this while others may be reminded of Ready Player One and/or Tron. (859 words)
🚀️A Fight Over GameStop’s Soaring Stock Turns Ugly: In what is probably my favorite story of the week, we find that the autists at r/WallStreetBets basically fucked around with a multi-billion dollar hedge fund(as of the time of writing, more hedge funds seem to be suffering at r/WSB’s behest). The tool, mechanism, pawn in this bloodbath happens to be Gamestop, the near defunct game retailer. If there is one lesson to be learned, it is that the Stock Market has and will always be completely detached from the realities of the average individual. The fact that policymakers seek to the moods of the rich to set standards for the rest of the population seems to me absurd in the first place. (1396 words)
🧟️Microsoft patent would let us chat with the departed: It would seem to me that technology advancing and becoming “indistinguishable” from “magic” would include said magic being necromancy. Microsoft filed a patent a while ago(2017, approved this month) that sought to create chatbot versions of deceased individuals that would scrape social media information and other points of data to build a model of them. In cases where these models could not respond to questions or prompt based on said scraped data, inference engines would seek to fill in the details. Little needs to be said on the ethical implications this would unleash upon the world. But for many, the mannerisms of those long gone would serve a welcome reprieve from the harshness their inexistence has brought onto them. (764 words)
⚛️Using drones to create local quantum networks: Chinese scientists at differing institutions sought to make a sort of LAN(Local Area Network) with Quantum Entangled particles. They split photons with one attached to a drone and the other to a grounded station. The particles(entangled) would then be pointed at each other using motorized devices to ensure the data was transmitted. A quantum internet definitely seems to be on the horizon. (365 words)
If you’re new to this newsletter, why not subscribe? Enjoy articles like this and many more. The best part? It’s entirely free!
Share this article and help others find this amazing content.
Want to help keep this newsletter alive? You can support us on Patreon.
Thanks for reading and till next time.