Our physical world is now technology-enabled by the digitization of everything from books to movies to tools—such as the flashlights, cameras, calculators, day planners, music players, and bus schedules that now reside on our smartphones. The Internet and digital technology is most powerful when it is married back into our physical world; when atoms and bytes converge. This intersection also happens to be the source of greatest potential for the Internet of Things (IoT). For the past several years, we’ve heard and talked a lot about how smart things are getting smarter through Moore’s law and the exponential advances in core digital components. More
Tag Index / Showing 1 - 5 of 5 results for “Moore’s Law”
Jaron Lanier on Facebook and the Creepy Possibilities for Virtual Reality
When Facebook announced last week that it had agreed to acquire Oculus VR, “the leader in virtual reality technology,” for $2 billion, techies and journalists everywhere wondered: What does Jaron Lanier think of this? Lanier, the dreadlocked futurist now working at Microsoft Research, was a virtual reality pioneer—he coined the term. More recently, he’s been a prolific critic of so-called Web 2.0 companies like Google and Facebook, bucking very publicly against their business models in books like "Who Owns the Future?" The Fiscal Times spoke with Lanier this week to get more of his thoughts about the deal, Mark Zuckerberg’s vision, and the future of virtual reality. Among his insights: “The biggest variable as to how creepy Facebook will be in the future is whether Zuck has kids or not.” More
What’s Next in the Techonomy?
In the last few decades, we have witnessed exponential technological growth and change. However, as we enter the second half of the metaphorical chessboard, it remains unclear how that technology will reshape our economy, political systems, and collective future. One thing is clear: in the hands of existing institutions—firms, schools, non-profits, civic institutions and governments—this awesome technology will achieve only a fraction of its potential. More
Consumer Genetics Starts to Pay Off
One of the biggest hopes when the $3 billion Human Genome Project launched two decades ago was that it would one day put lots of basic genetic information into the hands of the general public. It's taken a long time, and many argue that the whole project was a waste of money. But in research labs and technology incubators, real advances are underway. The nascent field of consumer genetics is starting to fulfill the potential of the Human Genome Project. More
Why Drug Development is Failing – and How to Fix It
The information technology industry has been living by Moore’s Law ever since 1965, when Intel co-founder Gordon Moore came up with the rule of thumb that the number of integrated circuits that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit doubles every 18 months to two years. Contrast this with pharmaceuticals. In a paper published in a recent issue of Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, a wholly different development trajectory was posited, named “Eroom’s Law” (Moore’s Law spelled backwards): the cost of developing a new drug roughly doubles every nine years. More
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