December 20: Pi Phone, Metaverse, Omicron

USE SUBGOALS TO ACHIEVE YOUR MOONSHOT
Oxford Invited an AI to Debate Its Own Ethics—What It Said Was Startling
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through December 18)
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Scientists spot water ice under the 'Grand Canyon' of Mars "We found a central part of Valles Marineris to be packed full of water — far more water than we expected."
DRONE STARTUP TO FLY PALLETS WITHOUT PILOTS Dronamics will test a radical new vision of long-range cargo transport in Europe

The Metaverse Will Need 1,000x More Computing Power, Says Intel chipmaking giant Intel, the metaverse is on its way—but it’s going to take a lot more technology than we currently have to make it a reality, and the company plans to be at the forefront of the effort. .........

And what does “a persistent 3D virtual world” even mean?

....... Neal Stephenson’s book Snow Crash, published in 1992, was where the term “metaverse” first appeared; there, it described a 3D virtual world people could visit as avatars; they accessed this virtual world with virtual reality headsets that connected to a “worldwide fiber-optics network.” Another well-known reference is the 2011 book or 2018 movie Ready Player One. .......... the simplest way to describe the metaverse is as a connected network of 3D virtual worlds that is always “on” and happening alongside our real-world lives. ...... we can think of the metaverse as a “quasi-successor state to the mobile internet,” which will build on and transform the internet as we currently experience it. .........

“an even more immersive and embodied internet.”

....... powering the metaverse will require a 1,000-fold improvement on the computational infrastructure we have today ......... “You need to access to petaflops [one thousand teraflops] of computing in less than a millisecond, less than ten milliseconds for real-time uses” ....... “Your PCs, your phones, your edge networks, your cell stations that have some compute, and your cloud computing need to be kind of working in conjunction like an orchestra.” .......... “We believe that the dream of providing a petaflop of compute power and a petabyte of data within a millisecond of every human on the planet is within our reach”

Omicron Is a Dress Rehearsal for the Next Pandemic America’s response to the variant highlights both how much progress we have made over the past two years — and how much work remains. ........ Omicron is one more sign that the current pandemic, which has now claimed the lives of nearly 800,000 Americans, is not over. ...........

“We know that there are pathogens worse than SARS-CoV-2 that are emerging and re-emerging and waiting for their moment to take off”

.............. “We have this Balkanized health care system, and the system is a giant mess” ....... Just as a more equitable distribution of vaccines might help squelch the next variant of concern, preventing the next big global outbreak will require ensuring that every country has the resources to detect and respond to emerging pathogens. ........

The United States is a large and fractured country — politically polarized and burdened with glaring inequities, rampant misinformation and disinformation, and a considerable distrust of public officials.

These are enormous, thorny problems and are much harder to address than ensuring that labs have the capacity to detect Omicron or any new pathogen. ........ “I’m confident in our ability to detect the variant,” Dr. Fauver said. “What I’m not confident in is our ability to do anything about it. We’re detecting the Delta variant every single day, every time we sequence.” .......

Scientists are finding more Omicron cases every day, and the variant could soon overtake Delta.