Robots with guns, curing cancer, breathe
Starting "Black Mirror" dark, with an intermission and ending on the flip-side.
Thing 1 - Robots with guns
You've seen Terminator. But it's not gonna happen in our life times, Z.
Here's an alternate universe.
It starts with a few YouTubers, strapping some Nerf guns on their RaspberryPi powered RC cars. People roast them in comments.
Few short years later, it's 2022. You open your favorite newsletter and this dude is talking about robots with guns. China is deploying robots with machine guns along the border with India.
They do look like those same YouTubers got a bigger budget and more expensive toys. And they are remote controlled. But China will start putting more AI in them and let them make decisions on their own.
How far are we from a Black Mirror episode?
This is happening and it's not fun, but at least they don't look nowhere near as cool as in this video preview.
Thing 2 - Don't forget to breathe
Ok, Z, what the heck?
You've been alive for a while now and breathing is kinda a requirement for that. So you've got a hang of if, and you do it without even having to think about it.
Sighing is a second nature to you as well. Good job.
Now that we've established that you're an A+ breather, here's what Thing 2 is about.
Reading on your smartphone makes you dumb(er than necessary). (Yeah, me too)
It's because when you read on your phone, you don't sigh as much, your prefrontal cortex gets overactive and your understanding of the content drops.
Two solutions to this:
- Do long-form reading on larger screens or paper
- Deliberately sigh (double inhale, exhale) every 2-4 minutes.
Just. Breathe.
Thing 3 - Video game for cancer research
You could help cure cancer. Yeah, for real.
You've heard about "herd immunity" before. (Perks of living in a global pandemic?) But have you heard of herd intelligence?
Me neither. But you get the concept.
People spent 14% of their time on video games in 2020. That's bananas.
Gaming professionals and researchers from several institutions with long names made a game that harnesses that power to cure cancer.
How?
When 30,000 players completes 50 games each, they reveal the reference map of the 20,000 genes in a T-47D breast-cancer cell line.
"Anyone with a smartphone from anywhere in the world can download GENIGMA for free and make a direct contribution to research, lending their logic and dexterity to the service of science"
- Elisabetta Broglio of Spain’s National Center for Genomic Analysis.
How's that for finishing on a positive note?
(source 1, source 2, source 3)
Now that we're feeling good again, Ima turn off these headphones and sigh for a few times before heading out. Definitely not thinking about killer robots.
Cheers, Zvonimir