🔵 FS 🟠 Des-fi

“Trying to anticipate the future is like driving on a winding road at night. You can see what’s in front of you, and things in the distance ultimately come into view as you move forward. But beyond that, you can’t know,” they say.

They worry this kind of thinking overlooks present-day problems and could even be used to justify harmful actions if they might benefit future generations.

To understand the best way to think about what comes next, Inverse contributor and tech journalist Becca Caddy spoke to philosopher and eschatologist Émile Torres about the future and the inspiration for their upcoming book, Human Extinction: A History of the Science and Ethics of Annihilation, which is due out in July.

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🟣 SC

Hosted on the virtual social platform ENGAGE, the “Eat, Sleep, VR Repeat” event featured everything from captivating visual effects to original animations, all of which were designed to immerse audiences in the mind of the veteran musician and record producer.

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🌀 DTech

Utah has become the first US state to require social media firms get parental consent for children to use their apps and verify users are at least 18. The move comes amidst heightened concern over the impact of social media on children's mental health. Ari Z Cohn, a free speech lawyer for TechFreedom, said the bill posed "significant free speech problems". "There are so many children who might be in abusive households," he told the BBC, "who might be LGBT, who could be cut-off from social media entirely."

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🟣 SC 🔴 HCI

Like self-sustaining fusion power and full self-driving cars, in the last decade virtual reality (VR) has joined the ranks of technology not quite living up to its promise. While VR headsets, games, and even workplace applications have grown in recent years, widespread adoption of this technology at the rate of something akin to smartphones is still a far cry away.

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🔵 FS 🔘 Arch

Kabakoo Academies, the reference training platform for African youth, is launching the “Building tomorrow in the Sahel” program, an interdisciplinary training course aimed at architects and other building trades such as masonry, plumbing, carpentry and painting.

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🔵 FS 🟡 Sci-fi

Science fiction writers have anticipated a variety of modern inventions, from cars to organ transplants. In particular, some decades-old works of dystopian fiction don’t read like fiction anymore. At times, writers were even able to influence the course of history.

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🔵 FS Des-fi

When Kyle Cornforth first walked into IDEO’s San Francisco offices in 2011, she felt she had entered a whole new world. At the time, Cornforth was a director at the Edible Schoolyard Project, a nonprofit that uses gardening and cooking in schools to teach and to provide nutritious food. She was there to meet with IDEO.org, a new social-impact spinoff of the design consulting firm, which was exploring how to reimagine school lunch, a mission that the Edible Schoolyard Project has been working toward since 2004.

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🔘 Arch 🔵 FS

The technology and policies are falling into place. But we’ll need a revolution in U.S. home retrofit business models and financing to scale up enough to meet the climate challenge.

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🟣 SC

WebXR is expanding the many ways in which we interact with the web, allowing developers to create engaging experiences that can be accessed on a wide range of devices—from a fully immersive experience on Meta Quest VR headsets to a traditional browser experience on smartphones and tablets.

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🔵 FS 🔘 Arch

A joint Anglo-Italian architectural project has produced a 'floating city' concept - a collective of orb-like houses that would supposedly house up to 50,000 people in the event global warming leads to mass flooding. The concept was hatched by an international team of architects and designers led by Italian firm Luca Curci Architects and UK-based Tim Fu Design, who came together to design a eco-friendly village that adapts to future climate demands.

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