News of the week selected by Impactscool – November 5th, 2018
5 November 2018 | Written by La redazione
The new "robot-couriers", an artificial intelligence system to speed up checks at the airport, the birthday of Bitcoin: discover the most important news on technology and the future, selected from the web by Impactscool.
Goodbye couriers: deliveries will be made by robots
How many times did you have to pick up a package at the post office because, at the time of delivery, you weren’t home? Starship, a British company that deals with robotics, has found a solution to this problem: online orders will be delivered at the right time thanks to the use of small “couriers” robots. The service will allow the user to choose the time of delivery in a few simple steps. Starship has long been working on systems of this type: thanks to a collaboration with Just Eat, in fact, it has already tested the service with food delivery in England and the United States. It will be the citizens of Milton Keynes, an English town not far from London, to test the delivery system managed by mini robots. For the first month, the service will be free, and then you will need to subscribe for a monthly fee of about € 9.
The era of missed deliveries and long queues at the mail office is officially over.
Controls at the borders will be easier thanks to artificial intelligence
The European Union is thinking about new forms of control at airports. The new checkpoints, however, will not be managed by the police but by an artificial intelligence capable of detecting possible passenger lies. The pilot project, called iBorderCtrl, will last 6 months and will be applied in the airports of Hungary, Latvia and Greece. The goal is to speed up the controls and stop suspicious people thanks to a sort of truth test: the AI, in fact, has the goal of understanding if the passengers lie through the analysis of their reactions to some simple questions. If this virtual border guard determines that the passenger is telling the truth, it will provide them with a code to allow them to cross the border.
The system, for now, still needs to be tested to improve reliability, currently estimated at 76%, but the EU’s final goal is to speed up border controls and to use meat and bone agents only for cases that are suspicious.
It’s been 10 years since the publication of the manifesto signed by Satoshi Nakamoto, a Japanese pseudonym of what is considered the creator of Bitcoin of whose identity, still today, is unknown. The document, entitled “Bitcoin: a peer-to-peer electronic money system”, was published on October 31, 2008 and is considered the “milestone” of the crypto values. In this decade the Bitcoins have grown in value and popularity, leading to the birth of other digital coins and the diffusion of the technology on which they are based, the blockchain.
The Bitcoin represent an epochal turning point in the financial world, capable of revolutionary the rules of the banking market and with impacts still difficult to measure on the world economy. The most famous cryptocurrency in the world, however, could also have consequences on the environment: a recent study published in the journal Nature Climate Change, in fact, bitcoins could cause an increase in global temperatures of more than 2 degrees by 2033 due to consumption energy connected to the creation of cryptocurrencies.