[LooseWire Blog] The Future of Work Rethought + A Battery-less Future?
Dear Subscriber, hope you're well. This week I wrote about The Future of Work and explored about A Battery-less Future. The pieces are below.
As ever, thoughts, comments, ideas and brickbats welcome on the above, or anything else on your mind tech-related, but not required -- and unsub details at the bottom (you're on this infrequent list because we've talked in the past, we're friends or both, but I won't be offended if it's one email newsletter too much.)
Jeremy
Follow me on Twitter
Let's connect on Linkedin
PS: I've been a guest on Maverick Dreamers and Thinkers with Chloe Cho and discussed the Internet of Things (IOT), A Far-Fetched Future or a Present-Day Reality? Listen to the podcast here.
The Future of Work Rethought
I recently did two things I hadn’t done before. One was to cancel my membership at a co-working space. The other was to meet, face to face, my virtual assistant of seven years. I belatedly realised the two events were connected: the freelance world, once a parallel universe hidden from view, is fast switching places with the real one, and governments, companies and families should take note.
It’s tempting nowadays to think that technology is redefining work, and not in a good way. AI and robotics are stealing away work from top to bottom, from lawyers to assembly lines. Gig platforms like Uber and Deliveroo are slicing up jobs into ever smaller chunks, making robots of us before the jobs are actually handed over to robots. And technology outsources what can be outsourced.
But I realise this is just one side of things. Who are all these people to whom this work is outsourced?
| Read more |
A Battery-less Future?
At what point can we ditch batteries, the last encumbrance to our wireless nirvana?
The biggest single block on a wireless, connected future where everything everywhere is attached to chips and sensors which relay, receive and act on instructions from afar is power. And that means either that the device is connected to the electricity grid (which probably means you don’t need it to be wirelessly connected) or it has a battery in it. Which will need charging or replacing.
Long-range low-power technologies like low-powered wide-area networks have gone some way to solving this problem — instead of a power-hungry 4G modem you have a simple chip that sends only the most necessary data and runs off a battery that can run for years — but that doesn’t solve the problem of more complex or power-hungry devices that need to communicate more frequently and more loquaciously. These endpoints will need someone to service them. Internet of Things, Interrupted.| Read more |
Volocopters, UAMs and eVTOLS
You don’t think of Singapore as a place where traffic jams and poor infrastructure make you want to take to the skies, but in terms of friendly regulators and investment boards, it’s certainly the place to start.
German-based Volocopter opened an office in Singapore in January 2019 and has plans to expand in South East Asia. The company has recently presented their VoloCity – the next generation eVTOL (that’s electric vertical take-off and landing to you and me) air taxi and recently announced Series C funding. Investors include Daimler, Geely, Intel Capital, BtoV, and Manta Ray Ventures.
| Read more |
Find LooseWire on the following channels:
You can unsubscribe from this list.
*|IF:REWARDS|* *|HTML:REWARDS|* *|END:IF|*