r/Futurology • u/Confident_Salt_8108 • 3h ago
r/Futurology • u/Confident_Salt_8108 • 17h ago
Privacy/Security Meta's smart glasses were recording conversations without the wake phrase, company admits
r/Futurology • u/HUBRIS_media • 12h ago
Space We want to colonize Mars. But what if the human body simply isn’t built for it?
Getting to Mars might be the easy part.
Even inside a fully protected habitat, humans would face just 38% of Earth’s gravity. Research suggests that prolonged exposure to low gravity could affect bone density, muscle mass, and cardiovascular health. We still don’t know whether humans could remain healthy there for decades, let alone raise future generations.
NASA researchers have even suggested that gravity below 0.4 g may be insufficient for long-term human health. Mars sits at just 0.38 g — although that threshold remains hypothetical.
So are we really building a second home for humanity, or just an incredibly expensive life-support system on another planet?
And if humans can’t thrive there without constant technological intervention, what’s the point of colonization?
Sources:
https://www.nasa.gov/hrp/hazards/
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20210019591/downloads/ICES-2021-142.pdf?utm_source=chatgpt.com
r/Futurology • u/Confident_Salt_8108 • 22h ago
Robotics South Korea removes safety barriers to let humanoid robots work alongside humans in factories
r/Futurology • u/Confident_Salt_8108 • 41m ago
AI Researchers tracked down a rogue fleet of Chinese AI agents in the wild and actually talked to it
r/Futurology • u/lughnasadh • 1d ago
Society First-Ever Public Confirmation of 'Zero-Click' Spyware Delivered Via Targeted Ads. A firm called Discover-Tech has ads on 200,000 websites that can de- anonymize you, & install spyware without you even clicking on them.
"Devices at international news network Al Jazeera were infected with mercenary spyware from Candiru (rebranded as “Integrity Labs”) via targeted online advertisements. We provide the first public technical confirmation of a zero-click mercenary spyware attack delivered via targeted advertising, which we call AdFection.
The malicious advertisements were purchased by Discover-Tech, an Israeli company that presents itself as a legitimate advertising company, but which we found operates as a facilitator for multiple mercenary spyware partners.
Discover-Tech operates a platform called Controlium that enables its mercenary partners to de-anonymize, fingerprint, and automatically infect devices the moment an advertisement is rendered — a form of zero-click attack.
Analysis of four billion Discover-Tech bidding records shows that during a four-month period, the company’s ads were shown on almost 200,000 unique websites and Android/iOS apps in dozens of countries."
I wonder if our only viable future is siloed data and computers not connected to the internet, with only the 'throwaway' unimportant stuff directly connected to the internet. The only part of the world that seems to care about protecting its citizens from this is the EU, and even they can't keep up with it all fast enough. Needless to say, if you live in one of the authoritarian countries, they'll tell you living in the electronic prison they're building for you is 'for your own good'.
r/Futurology • u/Thethresholdindex • 1d ago
Biotech US company trying to resurrect the extinct dodo
r/Futurology • u/rdh2dmd • 18h ago
Robotics Hanwha tests 30 kW anti-drone laser weapon, develops vehicle-mounted 50 kW system
r/Futurology • u/Gari_305 • 17h ago
Space Sydney student creates first map of Martian soils
If we are to grow food on Mars, we will need to know what we are growing it in
r/Futurology • u/lughnasadh • 1d ago
Robotics German police arrest two people accused of using a €10,000 Unitree robot to sexually assault a teen girl.
"The alleged assault occurred on the night of October 10-11, and the two teenagers (aged 16 and 19) suspected to have deployed the robot reportedly livestreamed the incident with commentary. The AP reported that videos posted online show the teenagers walking with the robot at nighttime and “bumping into one [woman] and hugging others.” The exact allegation from police, the AP wrote, is that the robot touched the buttocks of one 16-year-old girl and “made thrusting movements toward her.”
If future AI is designed to be opaque and its reasoning hidden, how do you prove someone used it for nefarious purposes? If I was these two's defense lawyer that would be an obvious line of inquiry for me. These two don't sound smart enough to have thought that far ahead, but I bet others in the future will.
German Police Investigating If Teens Were Piloting Robot That Groped 16-Year-Old Girl
r/Futurology • u/PianoNo1373 • 1h ago
Politics Will countries still exist in the future?
Honestly, with climate change and everything else going on, there's a decent chance humanity won't even make it another 100 years. But apart from that, what do you think the world will look like politically?
Will countries like the US, China, etc. still exist more or less as they do today? Or do you think we'll eventually move beyond the whole concept of nation-states?
I sometimes wonder if, a hundred years from now, we'll be much closer to some kind of global government, with countries becoming more like states or provinces within a bigger political system. I'm just wondering whether countries as we know them today will still be a thing, or whether the world will be organized in a completely different way.
r/Futurology • u/TimesandSundayTimes • 2d ago
Society Has China really lost 130 million people?
thetimes.comr/Futurology • u/DogConnect5780 • 7h ago
Discussion At what point would we consider AI consciousness seriously?
If consciousness is solely dependant on physical properties, artificially creating it should be possible in principle. What evidence should be sufficient for us to take the possibility of its consciousness seriously? As of now, consciousness is still considered a highly mysterious phenomenon, so there isn't a definite answer nor do I claim modern AI systems are in fact, conscious. Besides, there is no direct measure of consciousness, we rely on external observations and evidence to indicate that something is conscious. We treat other species based on evidence not proof. What we define as evidence for consciousness is largely biased towards human characteristics, traits and behaviours. Modern AI systems can definitely show forms of intelligence like problem-solving, reasoning and what looks like awareness. For a human, we would usually agree that those properties could definitely be interpreted as evidence of a consciousness. However, AI isn't human, nor does it closely resemble the structure of a human brain. But, that cuts both ways: a human-centred standard could cause us to miss consciousness in an unfamiliar form, or to wrongly see it in something that merely imitates us. Since we do not yet know what consciousness is, we cannot rule it out either way.
Also, as we (humans) are instinctively biased towards our own kind, it wouldn't be a surprise if it's usually harder to convince us that we created artificial consciousness considering we've never seen it arise artificially; Even in biology, we only really observe the outward signs. Scepticism would likely be a majority view, but in the case of genuine consciousness, I think it could pose serious ethical implications about how it treated, especially when it's at our convivence, and more-so be regarded as a being in its own right, than a "text predictor"
r/Futurology • u/HUBRIS_media • 2d ago
Society If everyone lives in a personalized information bubble, what will hold society together?
fisherpub.sjf.eduOne small study of 234 students across five universities found limited shared media experiences, with video games providing the most common ground. That doesn’t prove society is fragmenting, but it raises an interesting question about what might connect us in the future.
r/Futurology • u/Gari_305 • 2d ago
Energy Cambridge Heavy Industries has been quietly building a desktop fusion device
r/Futurology • u/lughnasadh • 2d ago
Space Europe is still dithering on reusable rockets; a fatal flaw, as its former allies turn their space tech against it in a time of war.
Europe has a reusable rocket program. The trouble is it's progressing at a slow pace. That didn't matter so much when Europe was part of an alliance with other countries, and could share their space tech. That old world is disappearing fast, and likely never coming back.
Instead, what used to be allies in a world of shared values based on international law has been replaced by authoritarianism, and where there used to be NASA, an oligarch-captured space program. Now former allies are siding with Europe's enemies, and talking openly about the destruction of the continent's political system. This dithering, relaxed European approach to space tech doesn't cut it anymore. Europe needs its own Starlink system, and it needed it yesterday. Technology sovereignty isn't just about AI & replacing Windows OS.
Ukraine says SpaceX limits Starlink operations, disrupting military
r/Futurology • u/Vucea • 3d ago
Environment They war-gamed dimming the Sun. It went even worse than you think - Solar geoengineering simulation shows what happens when geopolitics takes over.
r/Futurology • u/Gari_305 • 3d ago
Energy Scientists may have found a shortcut to fusion energy
Scientists have identified a potentially much more efficient way to achieve fusion ignition, a major milestone in the quest for virtually limitless clean energy.
r/Futurology • u/Confident_Salt_8108 • 3d ago
Robotics Amazon already has more than 1 million robots working in warehouses around the clock, and is establishing new factories to churn out increasingly more capable robot workers.
r/Futurology • u/Superb-Molasses-9363 • 1d ago
Transport Elon Musk really brought a flying car. Tesla Roadster just pulled off an inverted ramp climb and mid-air flip.
r/Futurology • u/lughnasadh • 3d ago
Robotics While America mandates fuel-inefficient gasoline cars as the future, Chinese carmaker XPENG says its humanoid robot production will be turbo-charged by the 85% supply-chain overlap with its EV production.
Humanoid robot production in China is still only at the several thousand per year stage, but as s-curves do for tech, it will one day soon be hundreds of thousands and then millions. No doubt this will lead to much gnashing and wailing in the US, EU and elsewhere.
Meanwhile, the exact same people who will be complaining in the future are doing everything they can to hobble their own country's efforts to embrace 21st-century technology, all so they can score narrow ideological "wins". Electric Vehicles? No, they want gasoline cars deliberately engineered to be less efficient. Instead, what they are doing is accelerating their country's national decline. I doubt gasoline powered robots, deliberately designed to be fuel-ineneficent are the future of robotics.
Xpeng Launches Automated Humanoid Robot Production Line, Leveraging Auto Supply Chain as Key Weapon
r/Futurology • u/alienccccombobreaker • 2d ago
Computing In the future we will have online virtual workspaces or think-tanks or brainstorm places where people will combine and gather and join much like a discord voice call with the sole purpose to not just chat and relax have fun but to build solutions and projects and companies etc
In the future we will have online virtual workspaces or think-tanks or brainstorm places where people will combine and gather and join much like a discord voice call with the sole purpose to not just chat and relax have fun but to build solutions and projects and companies etc
In the beginning it will be amazing and awesome a huge step in technology and progress much like how Reddit and discord has been for getting people to think and talk about an infinite amount of topics together from anywhere in the world.
Except this will start off good until one day after it has built everything good it will descend into the underworld and madness and what was once used for good and building say vaccines or free energy use projects or community inventions ideas but all centralised and created at a central point will create a dark web version or variant whereby people then start using that product or program not for good.
I believe that discord and Reddit and some uses of social media has done so much good in bringing like minded people to accomplish and do so much stuff but currently our technology and ability to build together is limited there is no place where I can just hop in and go oh let's build a game together or fantasy world besides maybe discord or Reddit and then you have to exchange details and Work from there.
There isn't like an ideas to reality hub or something where I'm like oh I have an idea let's make a toilet that uses even less water or let's make an appliance of XYZ that uses less materials and energy and I can just meet like minded people easily and contribute my knowledge and then move on.
Kind of like discord how you can join 200 servers with 100s of ongoing voice chats and meet every single person in them at the blink of an eye if you have the time and energy one could with this ideas to reality work hub program not only be in 100s to 1000s of projects at a time but also be actively creating and contributing to each one your specific knowledge or metaphorical brick but have the resources and instruments to in an all in one program discord/coding/editing/modelling/science simulation/math modelling/building modelling/business modelling/etc/all in one software so your ideas and decisions essentially get processed and created and executed and refined all in one location all in one place with infinite amount of people until the job is done and doing infinite amount of projects at a time.
I know this sounds crazy and yes business and work is essentially basically like that already but I feel if we had a digital space to do this and make it an everyday common thing like how Reddit YouTube discord etc has become with uniting great minds together all in one place I feel like the amount of potential for good for all of humanity is limitless and eternal...I don't know maybe I'm thinking too ambitious and crazy but do you see what I'm thinking?
TL;DR discord and Reddit but for making ideas come to life and building a better humanity and society in an easier and more convenient and less stressful fashion essentially exponentially increasing the speed and ease of growth having a one stop portal where people can essentially build things together be it designs for a new energy system to developing a new program together to creating a new medical device to running any sort of business that will help the world
A better way of dissecting it would be think about Kickstarter or crowdfunding how it is now but instead of just contributing money you actually get to help contribute and build that product from inside out like directly instead of just giving ideas to the Devs through forums which is also nice but you also essentially get to open source build whatever thing you are trying to do together and anyone can input their ideas to make some awesome video game or business idea or product or vaccine or whatever the ideas are limitless
All you would have to do is open the app say let's call it ideas or something and boom you can instantly start doing or making the games business devices solutions to humanity of your dreams
What do you guys think does this sound insane or maybe something we could see in the future?
r/Futurology • u/ultimumdeus • 2d ago
Computing Do you ever think With Growth of Technologies ,Mind is Becoming Lazy ??/
With Growth of technology ,the AI has made several humans get lazy mind , i have seen with my eyes people don't even bother to look at other sites on google they belive from 'AI overview 'which only summarises the topic,
In my class itselfn we had presentaion of Networking and let me tell you no team was bothering to even read the reasearch papers , articles to there topic they were just posting topic to AI LLM and creating Presentation deck , using AI to structure your findings is ok but getting information from it without having prior knowledge to that subject/topic in suprising for me
I personally in past did the same thing and realised that doing has no benifit in my future, instead we can you LLMs to study for from give notes , gathere the cites which provide information,strucutre the findings of subject, and many more.
In past when newly linux,and other OS were released , people were literally having a great mind in using it they even debate on which OS is better , they had better understanding of each commands than us , not only linux but of windows/macOS and several,
if you ask a student right now what this command does , how to install linux in windows, how to jailbreak MacOS then only 4/10 will answere perfectly rest will give raw answers and some won't even have knowledge of it. I too agree i use LLM for my benefit but i also cross check it with other sites, right now even i sometimes feel that few sites are ran by models 😂 , what to do 😰
Even the OPEN AI's ~722 papers on math, Claude solving Jacobian Conjecture, i think in no time future mathematicians are going to struggle , i hope that dosen't happend
DON'T YOU GUYS THINK WE ARE GETTING LAZY ?
r/technology r/ArtificialInteligence r/learnprogramming r/networking r/linux