ROBOTICS: How to Design a Robot You Can Swallow

Emily Waltz | IEEE Spectrum

“Vanderbilt engineers want to speed up the development of capsule robots. So they have created an open-source modular platform that people with limited experience can use to build their own prototypes.”

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: How Google Aims To Dominate Artificial Intelligence

Dave Gershgorn | Popular Science

“For a machine to understand speech, it needs to first learn what words and phrases sound like. That means audio files, and a lot of them. These files are processed by the algorithm, which create a huge graph of which sounds correlate to which sounds, words, and phrases. When an audio clip is presented to the computer, it analyzes the clip by pushing the audio waveform through the graph, in an attempt to find a path that best explains the audio.”

FUTURE OF LAW: Here are 3 legal cases from the future

Kashmir Hill | Fusion

“Traditionally a driver was at fault because they had the control of the car, but with driverless cars, car company engineers program what the car does, so the control rests with the manufacturer. So there’s a really interesting question about whether or not the manufacturer is to blame.”

CULTURE: Artificial intelligence: ‘Homo sapiens will be split into a handful of gods and the rest of us’

Charles Arthur | The Guardian

“So the rise of the machines may generate huge economic benefits; but unless it is carefully managed, those gains may be captured by shareholders and highly educated knowledge workers, exacerbating inequality and leaving some groups out in the cold.”

BLOCKCHAIN: Say the Big, Bad ‘B’ Word: Bitcoin and the Internet of Money

Jeremy Allaire | Re/code

“Most people don’t want a new currency, they are quite happy with their dollars, euro, pound, yuan and yen….but, pretty uniformly, people want the benefits of bitcoin and the blockchain — near-instant transfers, globally available on any Internet-connected device, highly secure and nearly free value transfers.”

PRIVACY: Beware of ads that use inaudible sound to link your phone, TV, tablet, and PC

Dan Goodin | Ars Technica

“Cross-device tracking raises important privacy concerns…people use as many as five connected devices throughout a given day—a phone, computer, tablet, wearable health device, and an RFID-enabled access fob. Until now, there hasn’t been an easy way to track activity on one and tie it to another.”

LEARNING is the Global Grand Challenge

for the Month of November

“Access to skills and information for all people at all stages of their lives for personal fulfillment and benefit to society.”

from Singularity University’s 2015 Impact Report

Check out our Future of Learning series running all month on Singularity Hub!

EDUCATION: The Department of Education’s Plan to Go Open—Open Educational Resources, That Is

Lindsey Tepe | Slate

“Students today can’t learn about the inner workings of objects they interact with daily, like their iPhones, by just opening them up—they’re too complex. Teaching engineering through historical inventions allows students to break down and understand the basic concepts, while integrating STEM learning with history.”

Image Credit: Shutterstock