Dell has once again successfully managed to improve one of it’s best selling laptops, the XPS 13. Ahead of the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES), which is scheduled to be held in Vegas later this week, Dell has released a refreshed edition of its quite-successful Dell XPS 13. One of the much-touted feature of the recent XPS series has been the InfinityEdge display, allowing Dell to fit a 13-inch screen into an 11-inch frame (talk about size-zero).

The laptop is now thinner, lighter than its predecessor, and also comes in a brand new rose gold edition. At 1.22 kg, the new XPS 13 is one of the lightest 13-inches laptop in the market, placing it squarely in the market of the MacBook Air. The company also claims that the new XPS 13 looks just as good even after 3 years of use and, in addition to that, you can wipe off any kind of stains; which, if true, could give whiteboards a serious run for their money. In order to make the carbon-fibre more obvious, Dell also decided to go with a white textured palm rest which can get extremely dirty, in a matter of seconds; We are hoping their 7-day instawipe technology works as well as they advertise it.

This bezel-less laptop offers the same internal specifications as its older sibling – Intel’s 8th Gen Core i5-8250 U, going up to 3.4 GHz, and the Core i7-8550U clocked at 4 GHz. You get three flavours of RAM – 4 GB, 8 GB, and 16 GB.

In terms of storage, we get an ample amount of choices – from a 128 GB SSD to a 1 TB PCIe SSD (That’s a lot of high-speed data, folks!). Going further, Dell declares itself to have a battery life of 20 hours with the Full HD touch display. However, a 4K model with an UltraSharp HD InfinityEdge touch display, and a battery life of up to 11 hours is also up for grabs. Furthermore, the XPS 13 plays nice with Windows Hello as an added perk, packing voice, facial recognition, and an optional fingerprint reader in the power button.

Keeping in tune with latest trends, Dell has replaced the USB 3.0 ports to USB C-type, which means you have to lug your adapters around if you haven’t completely switched sides yet. Much to all photographers’ chagrin, the laptop’s SD card has given way to a microSD card reader, which is honestly a lot less useful.

Going into minute upgrades (read: possible marketing gimmicks), Dell maintains that the XPS 13 stays cooler, owing to its woven glass fibre structure, aiding them to dissipate heat faster, and hence facilitate better performance. The company also boasts that you can wipe off all kinds of stains from the laptop, as long as it’s not a stain of the scale suffered by the Galaxy Note 7.

Oh, what’s this? The webcam has changed places from the incredibly awkward lower left side to the less awkward mid-lower bezel, but you still have to make do with chin-shots when calling your loved ones over Skype. The new Dell XPS 13 is already available for purchase in the United States at a retail price of $999 (approximately Rs 63,369). A Linux-edition is available for $50 less.

At the World Government Summit 2017 Elon Musk declared that the global economy will eventually move towards adopting the “universal basic income”. He stressed that the struggle would then not be to earn a living but to find meaning in one’s life.

Universal Basic Income refers to a substantive amount of money given periodically to everybody regardless of their work status. Or simply put, free money for everyone, no strings attached.

Even though the concept of Universal Basic Income has been abuzz recently, the concept itself is quite old. The roots of the basic income can be found in early 16th century, where Thomas More (1516) suggested it as a better cure for crime than punishment.The debate on Universal Basic Income has attracted a wide variety of people, ranging from economists and political thinkers to feminists and philosophers. Amongst the diverse supporters of Universal Basic Income was also Martin Luther King Jr.,he believed that the government’s approach to solving poverty had been indirect and a more effective solution would be to grant each American a ‘guaranteed income’, which they can spend as per their needs, like education, housing, food etc.

However, the recent and strongest push towards realising a Universal Basic income has come from Silicon Valley, from tech entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. Some like Y Combinator’s Sam Altman and Ebay founder Pierre Omidyar have even funded their own Universal Basic Income programmes.

As we get closer to automation UBI becomes even more relevant. The number of robots in workplaces is increasing exponentially as their installation costs are reducing. The developing countries are at a greater risk, it is estimated that 69% of all jobs in India, 77% in China and 80% in Nepal are at risk of completely being replaced by robots.

In the coming decades, 57% of existing jobs around the world will be non-existent for humans.

Such mass unemployment in a relatively short period could spell doom for the global economy, as incomes fall and demand for goods decreases, along with rising crime and wide economic disparity. The dream of a techno-utopian society that silicon valley has presented us with might soon turn into a hellish nightmare.

This realisation has led the Silicon Valley to take this 16th-century seemingly improbable idea and turn it into algorithms to make it a reality.

Yet we must question the motives of the people behind this recent rush towards UBI, as Vice’s Nathan Schneider points out:

“A basic income designed by venture capitalists in Silicon Valley is more likely to reinforce their power than to strengthen the poor. But a basic income arrived at through the vision and the struggle of those who need it most would help ensure that it meets their needs first. If we’re looking for a way through the robot apocalypse, we can do better than turn to the people who are causing it.”

The pilot projects of Basic Income in India has shown promising results.Villages spent more on food and healthcare, children’s school performance improved in 68 percent of families, time spent in school nearly tripled, personal savings tripled, and new business startups doubled.

Whether it was to combat poverty or crime and now mass unemployment, the idea of Universal Basic Income has always found a voice in prominent leaders and the general population alike. But for the first time in human history, we’ve come this close to implementing an idea which might radically change our goals both at a societal and individual level. As Fox Piven suggested that an income guarantee will free us from the “tyranny of wage slavery” and allow the development of new talents and unbound expression of creativity. Sciences and Arts which till now did not offer strong financial rewards will be able to flourish. We may very well be at the beginning of a second renaissance.  

The real struggle then, the struggle to find meaning, not just individually but as a species will then begin.  

What used to seem like an insight into the far future has now been pulled into the present as Elon Musk’s new start up, Neuralink Corp, focuses on bringing human beings at par with artificial intelligence with the help of groundbreaking neural lace technology.  The dramatic progress of artificial intelligence has raised various concerns about the position of humans in the social hierarchy of a society driven by technology.

The threats with artificial intelligence brings with itself are being addressed with an attempt to make it a part of the core of humanity. The initial aim of Neuralink is to be used in the treatment of neurological disorders such as epilepsy and Parkinson’s disease. This shall pave the path for humans to be able to upload and download their thoughts in real time along with accessing digital information without a physical interface.

How can neural lace technology prevent the human race being rendered useless in the long run?

If everything goes as planned, a third digital layer between the cortex and the limbic system shall act as a digital interface between the human brain and certain devices. It shall facilitate communication between human beings and physical electronic devices solely based on the power of thought. As a result a symbiotic relationship will be formed between human beings and artificial intelligence encouraging higher cognitive function.

Thus, by applying the concept of become what you fear, a society in which artificial intelligence reigns and humans become house cats can be kept at bay with the help of these implantable electrodes intertwining humans and computers. Even though a neural lace which functions in the specified manner is far from being developed, this seem to be first step in the narrowing of the gap between the data processing capabilities of a human being and a computer.

At the beginning of the twenty first century, we find ourselves caught in the middle of a cumbersome, world-wide crisis. It is a profound, multidimensional crisis which encompasses almost every aspect of our life- our health and livelihood, our economy, technology and politics. World renowned physicist, Stephen Hawking, took it upon himself to convey the message that we face the very threat of the complete wipe out of the human race owing to single disaster.

In the run up to his BBC Reith Lectures being broadcast, Professor Stephen Hawking said that the major threats to humanity are currently of our own making. With his inimitable ability to convey himself, Hawking seems to have provided us with enough logical data which concedes us to believe that the end is near.

Major Threats to Humanity in Hawking’s Opinion:

Global Warming

While Donald Trump might be in oblivion driven denial about climate change, Hawking seems to have made sure that we don’t forget that Global Warming is a real threat by remarking about the prospects of Earth becoming much like its sister planet, Venus.  Our constant interference in the environmental setup has in turn interfered with the moderate conditions that let us inhabit the earth. However, with technological leaps governing the provision of a second home for humans, Hawking believes in whole of humanity surviving the mayhem Global Warming is yet to bring about.

Usage of Atoms for Peace

We have stockpiled over tens of thousands of nuclear weapons and brought upon ourselves the looming threat of an upcoming nuclear war. Yet, the arms race is still extant to “make the planet safer”. Nuclear weapons do not increase our security rather just increase the likelihood of global destruction.

Genetic Modification

Standing against machines offering complete efficiency without any monetary aspect to them except for the upfront investment, humans allowed themselves to take the risk of genetic modification. A concept straight out science fiction, we might be unfortunate enough to witness it becoming a reality, Hawking fears.

Artificial Intelligence

Even after discounting the threat of a nuclear war, we are left with another one of our creations threatening our way of living. Artificial Intelligence has crept into our daily lives at a rate that has left most innovators in a fix. Hawking joined Tesla’s Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, and Google executive Demis Hassabis in signing a letter that warned against a military artificial intelligence arms race. An imbalance has already come into existence with respect to the benefits AI brings with itself. The risk of working on AI doesn’t end with the unemployment of the working class but also encompasses the possibility of machines acquiring the intelligence to engineer themselves in a far more advanced manner than we can imagine.

Stephen Hawking expressed his concerns about the developments in the field of Artificial Intelligence with the help of a rather interesting analogy,

“You’re probably not an evil ant-hater who steps on ants out of malice, but if you’re in charge of a hydroelectric green energy project and there’s an anthill in the region to be flooded, too bad for the ants. Let’s not place humanity in the position of those ants.”

Is there a solution?

Hawking brilliant answer to this question was, “By that time we should have spread out into space, and to other stars, so a disaster on Earth would not mean the end of the human race. However, we will not establish self-sustaining colonies in space for at least the next hundred years, so we have to be very careful in this period.We are not going to stop making progress, or reverse it, so we have to recognise the dangers and control them.”

A technological and cultural shift of this depth was inevitable. What’s yet to be seen is whether the primitive instinct will take over us to stop us from guiding ourselves to our own end.