Smartphone Navigatin , picture by Henry Perks, taken from unsplash. People with smartphones , picture by Rawpixel. We collect personal stories about urban landmarks and future ideas for the sustainable development of cities worldwide. Do you want to be part of Urban Hub? Subscribe Visit us on Facebook. Some of the most exciting discoveries and inventions became launching pads for a new era of innovation in computers, electronics, manufacturing, and medicine. URBAN HUB takes a look at ten technological advances that are so revolutionary they will continue to shape our lives well into the future.
VR and the future. Alison Powers talks Atlanta. Using fewer resources for bigger change — What makes the world go around? Innovative technology. And in mobility, building, energy and manufacturing, especially green innovations are changing how people interact with and shape their environment.
Electricity Would any new advancements have been possible without the breakthrough of electricity? Harnessing the power of nature for technical advancement. The laser Discovered in , lasers were so before their time, scientists were not even certain where exactly they could be applied. Lasers transform our lives on every wavelength. The trend is to label and monitor cells, organelles and molecules and their interactions, using increasingly sophisticated tools, in real time. Not a meeting goes by without someone presenting a movie of their favourite protein dashing around a cell sometimes even screened along with matching music , and these images are beginning to change our views of the dynamic nature of some of the most fundamental cell biological processes see, for example, page of this issue.
Because of the importance of technical advances across subdisciplines, Nature Cell Biology has recently introduced a new section, comprising Technology Review articles, which has so far included reviews of in vivo electroporation Nature Cell Biol. This section is dedicated to reviewing technological advances that have already contributed to an increasing understanding of many fields of cell biology, and are expected to continue to do so.
These articles provide sufficient technical details to allow a deeper understanding of the techniques described, and give insight into current and possible future applications. We will continue to keep our readers abreast of new technological advances, and future Technology Reviews will cover a wide range of topics, including quantitative GFP technology.
From time to time, you will also find original research papers in the journal that represent an outstanding technological development. A paper on page of this issue, for example, takes single-molecule-imaging technology one step further — into living cells — opening up new avenues for monitoring protein—protein interactions in real time. An Article published last month showed that RNAi can be used to investigate developmental processes in mammalian embryos Nature Cell Biol.
We need to rewrite it in keeping with the dramatic shifts in employment and leisure time that are taking place. People have to understand we are witnessing a fundamental interruption of the current cycle where people are paid for their work and spend their money on goods and services.
When a considerable portion of human labor is no longer necessary to run the economy, we have to rethink income generation, employment, and public policy. Our emerging economic system means we will not need all the workers that we have. New technologies will make these individuals obsolete and unemployable.
In this situation, it is important to address the policy and leisure time issues raised by persistent unemployment or underemployment. There is a danger of disruptions and unrest from large groups of people who are not working.
That creates poverty and social dissatisfaction and runs the risk of instability for the society as a whole. Stability cannot be enforced through a police presence or having wealthy individuals live in gated communities. There needs to be ways for people to live fulfilling lives even if society needs relatively few workers.
We need to think about ways to address these issues before we have a permanent underclass of unemployed individuals.
This includes a series of next steps for society. There needs to be continuous learning avenues, opportunities for arts and culture, and mechanisms to supplement incomes and benefits other than through full-time jobs. Policies that encourage volunteerism and reward those who contribute to worthy causes make sense from the standpoint of society as a whole. Adoption of these steps will help people adapt to the new economic realities. I wish to thank Hillary Schaub for outstanding research assistance on this project.
A more extended discussion of these issues can be found in Darrell M. Brookings Institution Policy Report, October, Eitan Wilf. Andrei A. Kirilenko and Andrew W. Norton, , Darrell M. Click Enter. Login Profile. Es En. Economy Humanities Science Technology. Multimedia OpenMind books Authors. Featured author. David Gelernter. Latest book. Work in the Age of Data. Economy Global Economy.
Estimated reading time Time 19 to read. Emerging technologies, such as industrial robots, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, are advancing at a rapid pace. These developments can improve the speed, quality, and cost of goods and services, but they also displace large numbers of workers.
This possibility challenges the traditional benefits model of tying health care and retirement savings to jobs. In an economy that employs dramatically fewer workers, we need to think about how to deliver benefits to displaced workers.
If automation makes jobs less secure in the future, there needs to be a way to deliver benefits outside of employment. In addition, activity accounts can finance lifelong education and worker retraining. No matter how people choose to spend time, there needs to be ways for people to live fulfilling lives even if society needs fewer workers. Emerging Technologies Robots Industrial robots are expanding in magnitude around the developed world. According to a presentation on robots: The early 21st century saw the first wave of companionable social robots.
Impact on the Workforce The rapid increase in emerging technologies suggests that they are having a substantial impact on the workforce. According to them: Technological progress is going to leave behind some people, perhaps even a lot of people, as it races ahead. He argues that: Recent progress in computing and automation is less transformative than electrification, cars, and wireless communication, and perhaps even indoor plumbing. Benefits Outside of Jobs If we end up in a situation with many people unemployed or underemployed for significant periods of time, we need a way to provide health care, disability, and pension benefits outside of employment.
Provide Activity Accounts for Lifetime Learning and Job Retraining We should consider the establishment of activity accounts for lifetime learning and job retraining. Incentives for Volunteerism The trends cited in this analysis suggest that we need to consider income supplements or benefit eligibility through vehicles other than full-time jobs. Conclusion To summarize, advanced societies are at a major turning point in terms of how we think about work, leisure, and social benefit delivery.
Acknowledgments I wish to thank Hillary Schaub for outstanding research assistance on this project. Possible Futures and the Future We Want. Download Kindle Download EPUB 3. Download PDF 1. Do you want to stay up to date with our new publications? In fact, quite a few newly industrialized countries have been active and successful in the area of software pro-. By the same token, developed countries that do not recognize and act on these trends will be unable to compete in this area.
As telecommunication services become global in scale, issues of standardization and of maintaining interoperability between systems and equipment have become extremely important.
Standardization, however, is difficult to achieve for several reasons. First, the pace of innovation in telecommunication technology is very fast. Standards set too early may jeopardize future innovation, and if set too late, they are never used. Second, because of networking, telecommunications require extensive standardization in software and hardware. A large amount of software at each switching center has to be standardized to attain economies of scale, ease of maintenance, and interoffice signaling.
To enable communication between terminals and computers, sophisticated software standards known as communication protocols have to be developed and implemented. As equipment becomes more sophisticated, more software has to be standardized. Third, because new products are designed by competing industries, their specifications tend to be diverse.
This makes it particularly difficult to establish a single standard in such areas as computers, terminals, and video packages, where powerful market forces and emerging technologies make existing products and specifications obsolete. Fourth, conflicts of interest may occur between countries or groups of countries in trying to establish a single standard, because such a standard would benefit some countries more than others.
Hence, questions of fairness and political considerations must be addressed along with the technical issues. Standardization in telecommunication technology requires a great deal of collaboration and compromise between governments, common carriers, and manufacturers.
It also requires a thorough understanding of the state of the art, as well as insight into the future activities of all participants, not only governments, common carriers, and manufacturers, but also academicians and user representatives. If it is impossible to establish a single standard, compatibility or interoperability between standards should be maintained to make interconnection possible. The open system interconnection OSI is typical of efforts to ensure interoperability between computers and terminals of different makes and models.
One encouraging note is that, despite two world wars and other international conflicts, worldwide standardization activities have continued and even accelerated in recent years. Standardization is an important area of inter-. Telecommunication systems are subject to a variety of external and internal disturbances. Internal disturbances range from chance and wear-out failures of components to hardware and software design errors not detected by testing. Extensive studies of physical phenomena contributing to component failure have led to better component structure and fabrication techniques.
Progress in large-scale integrated circuit technology under strict quality control has drastically reduced electronic device failure. Progress in redundancy techniques now makes it possible for a system to continue operating even when some of its subsystems fail. Automatic diagnosis and plug-in repair techniques have reduced the repair time for complex systems remarkably. As hardware becomes more and more reliable, attention has been focused on software reliability.
In most cases, software failure is caused by some imperfection that was not detected at the testing or debugging stage. These imperfections range from simple coding errors to complex mistakes or misconceptions in software design. Although various techniques have been developed to avoid errors in design and coding, making testing and debugging easier and more nearly complete, software is still less reliable than hardware because it is produced predominantly by humans, who make mistakes more often than machines do.
Security has also been addressed through various techniques that provide secure telecommunication services. Although switching centers and computers are protected by various means from unauthorized access, fire, and some natural disasters, telecommunication systems are still vulnerable to theft. For instance, a microwave link can be intercepted by a highly sensitive receiver from a distance of a few kilometers with a low probability of detection, and a satellite link can be intercepted anywhere.
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