| LIVE STREAMING, BIONICS, MICROGRAVITY MANUFACTURING, VIDEOS FROM THE FUTURE Live Streaming's Gulf War Moment Farhad Manjoo argues that the past week was live streaming's Gulf War moment. "Historians of television news often cite the 1991 Gulf War as the breakthrough moment for cable--a conflict that proved there was a market for round-the-clock coverage of the sort that CNN was offering. For most humans, last week's police shootings, the subsequent protests and the mass assassination of police officers in Dallas were a tragic commentary on modern American race relations. But for that subspecies of humans known as television executives, the events might also have functioned as an alarming peek at a radically altered future. "What we saw last week was live streaming's Gulf War, a moment that will catapult the technology into the center of the news--and will begin to inexorably alter much of television news as we know it. And that's not a bad thing. Though it will shake up the economics of TV, live streaming is opening up a much more compelling way to watch the news.... "Streaming news stretches our collective point of view, showing us perspectives from people who might otherwise have been ignored by the news, and from places where television cameras would never have happened to be." This is just another step in the creation of the Zuckerberg News Bureau. But this has not yet demonstrated a market for live-streaming; all it indicates is a potential collapse in the market for cable TV. --- We Have the Technology A quiet revolution in prosthetics and bionics is leading to a whole generation of bionic athletes, including Stacey Kozel, a woman who is paralyzed from the waist down, but who is now hiking the Appalachian Trail with the help of a kind of robotic knee brace. The key figure here is Hugh Herr. "Indeed, some might argue that these bionic limbs and 'orthotronic' braces are facilitating physical activity that is beyond a human being's natural biological capacity. Hugh Herr, head biomechatronics researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, himself a double-amputee and a designer of prosthetics and bionic legs, is one of those people.... "Herr has moved beyond simple augmentations and began working in the field of 'biomechatronics,' which aims to integrate human physiology with electromechanics in order to, as he said in a 2014 TEDTalk, create 'structures that could extend beyond biological capability.' Bionic integration--attaching or implanting electromechanics into the body--Herr believes, is 'beginning to bridge the gap between disability and ability, between human limitation and human potential.'" I don't intend to use this newsletter as a political soapbox, but I can't help pointing out that as a pro-free-marketer, I've often been challenged with the question of what will happen to the disabled under capitalism. What we actually see is that thanks to the technology and innovation possible in a capitalist system, fewer and fewer disabilities are going to actually disable us. --- There's plenty more at our main page, including--were we just discussing capitalism?--some interesting discussions about bringing manufacturing and property rights to space. Inside Facebook's AI Engine Room
This AI Toy Truck Is the Future of Robotics
Bionic Athletes Are Conquering the World
GE "Doubles Down" on Cell Therapy, Biotech
Will Blockchain Take Over Banking's Back End?
Made In Space Tests Microgravity Manufacturing
Can There Be Real Estate on the Moon? Check it all out. --- The Future Channel When you check our main page, be sure to scroll down to our videos section, or click on the "Video" tab in the black bar at the top of the page. The videos are compiled--if you're feeling fancy, you can even say "curated"--by RealClearFuture's Brian Willett, and he has stocked that section with some really interesting demonstrations of new technology. In light of the section on bionics above, I particularly recommend the videos on the "Luke Skywalker" prosthetic arm and the force-multiplying robo-glove.
Some day, we're all going to be cyborgs, and it's going to be awesome. --Rob Tracinski
Editor, RealClearFuture Follow @RealClearFuture on Twitter. Send comments, recommendations, and submissions to rob@realclearfuture.com. | 
