The Future This Week: Uber, NASA, and Nanobots

In The Future This Week, Serious Wonder traverses to the red planet in search of this week’s headlines of the future, from a robotics competition orchestrated by NASA to a fleet of self-driving Uber vehicles making their way onto our roads. This week we’re given a glimpse of the future where nano-sized robots infiltrate our bloodstream to help us combat disease and our factories become entirely administered by intelligent machines.

Whether we’re exploring deep space or the deepest depths of our own circulatory system, we’re engaging with a future that seeks to transform our very way of living. It doesn’t matter whether our species lives on Earth, or on Mars, or elsewhere. We are, first and foremost, transforming our own biological substrate through science and technology. In doing so, we are preparing ourselves for a journey beyond anything we currently can fathom. Welcome to the future!

Acting on a promise made last year, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick has recently revealed that the company is preparing to add self-driving vehicles to its fleet in Pittsburgh, of which will begin this month. SOURCE

Thanks to researchers from McGill University, Université de Montréal, and Polytechnique Montréal, a new breakthrough has been made in cancer research with the creation of nanorobots that can travel down the bloodstream to help combat cancerous cells. SOURCE

Photo Credit: Science News Journal

What will only increase both the hope and fear for technological unemployment, the shoes and clothing company Adidas has announced that will be opening a new factory next year that will be entirely ran by robots. SOURCE

The U.S. space agency NASA has recently launched a $1 million competition that will challenge engineers to develop humanoid robots that will specifically help astronauts during their journey to Mars. SOURCE