Over the past few years 5G has been a contentious topic. From health concerns, to great economic potential, to wild conspiracy theories, this technology has grasped the minds and imagination of many. But as an innovation that will underpin several other technologies and sectors, its impact has the possibility to be as substantial as it will be broad. Looking beyond the clickbait topics, if 5g is to be rolled out across a large part of the world in the near future, what are the likely social, technological, and economic benefits that will follow?

What is 5G?

Anyone who has used a smartphone in…

“I certainly hope and believe that no great efforts will be put into making machines with the most distinctively human, but non-intellectual, characteristics such as the shape of the human body; it appears to me quite futile to make such attempts and their results would have something like the unpleasant quality of artificial flowers.”

– Alan Turing

Science fiction has been imagining what it would be like to interact with humanoid robots for decades, if not longer. However, the most sophisticated robots today are a far cry from their fictional counterparts. For example, Sophia, the Hansen Robotics humanoid robot has…

Over the last few months you may have read an article or a social media post about a well known person like Grimes, Jack Dorsey, John Cleese, Mark Cuban, Paris Hilton and many others join the NFT frenzy. They have been offering videos, signed tweets, drawings, and even releasing an NFT art gallery, bringing dollars and more importantly attention to this technology as NFTs enter mainstream awareness.

So what exactly are NFTs?

Firstly, non-fungible simply means something is unique and cannot be traded or replaced equally for something else. This means that the object is ensured to be unchanged and…

Ep 58 of the podcast.

Earlier this month Microsoft announced Microsoft Mesh, the new mixed-reality platform that allows people in different physical locations to join collaborative and shared holographic experiences on many kinds of devices.

For those wondering, this is not Hololens. Hololens is the mixed reality headset that has the smartglasses which allow you to see the digital items or holograms on a normal analog environment. Mesh on the other hand is the platform that will enable collaborative experiences in mixed reality by using Hololens, but also with a range of virtual reality headsets, smartphones, tablets and PCs. Think…

As Valentine’s Day was this month I thought it was relevant to look at how automation, specifically in the form of sexbots, might transform the way we interact in and out of bed in the near future. But this begs the question, what is a sex bot?

What is a sex bot?

Whatever name you use: artificial love servant, robot companion, anthropomorphic robotic sex dolls, love droids etc, a sex bot is an ‘evolved’ sex dolls with robotics components.

For anyone who might not know, yes there are sex dolls with robot aspects like speech, and basic head & mouth…

Essentially, Gamestop a brick and mortar company that focused on selling video games in its stores had its stock highly shorted mostly by a number of hedge funds. Meaning that the hedge funds were betting that the price of the stock would go down further and if true they would make a profit once the price dropped. Up to here, this makes sense. Due to the pandemic most brick and mortar companies have been struggling overall, and video game sales have moved substantially towards digital platforms. These two trends would actually lead one to assume that Gamestop, who also hadn’t…

As we are starting a new year I thought it would make sense to take a look back over 2020 and touch on the notable events, technologies, and news pieces related to our automating world to put perhaps the podcast and the discussed themes into greater context.

1. Xenobots

The first ever living robot was created in early January 2020. We’ve looked at industrial and service robots before, but what exactly is a living robot or Xenobot as it’s been called? They [Xenobots] are tiny, submillimetre-sized blobs for lack of a better word, containing between 500 and 1,000 cells that can so…

November 30 Time to read: 10 min

As the holiday season nears, we are of course going to see an uptick in the amount of online shopping, in person shopping, and deliveries for all manner of goods and products. During this year, there have been a few podcast episodes that have focused on the impact that the pandemic has had on tech and automation, but given the time of year, it might be more relevant to look into the recent impacts and improvements regarding automated last mile delivery brought on by both Covid-19 and technological advancements.

Overall idea

“It has been forecasted that online commerce might overtake…