It appears that through the ages and across different cultures, people have always changed their bodies and faces for a wide variety of reasons: sometimes to help them look more beautiful, and sometimes to enable them to show social position or display group identity.

Based on artificial intelligence (AD), face recognition systems are spreading quickly. Facebook, a social network, uses the technology to label people in uploaded photographs. Modern smartphones can be unlocked with it. Supermarkets watch for under-age drinkers.

Wearable Data

The classic nightmare of suddenly realizing you're naked in public could soon get a futuristic twist: it might involve the horror of losing not just your modesty but also your codes. Scientists recently created magnetic garments that they say can store data, automatically unlock doors or control a nearby smart-phone with gestures.

The concept of interactive ‘smart clothing’ has drawn attention in the past couple of years. For example, Google and Levi's created a touch-sensitive denim jacket that can operate a smart-phone. This and other smart garment are made with conductive thread and usually require an attached electonic device.

To eliminate the need for such attached gear, researchers at the University of Washington recently took advantage of what they say is previously untapped property of conductive thread: its ability to be magnetized. Using magnetic instead of electric properties of the thread ‘may seem like a small difference, but it's what makes this work interesting and exciting,’ says Chris Harrison, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, who was not part of the research. The new technique allowed the researchers to do something they say is unique among wearables: turn them into storage devices. The Washington team magnetized a patch of fabric embroidered with conductive thread, giving different parts of the cloth a north or south orientation that corresponded to binary 1's or 0's. This step allowed the researchers to store us to 33 million different combinations—such as pass codes for doors—on a shirt cuff.

The graments still stored data after washing, drying and ironing, but they could not escape time's eraser; after about a week, the thread's magnetic fields had weakened by around 30 percent. The researchers suggest that using custom made thread designed to hold stronger magnetic fields might work longer. But for now the clothes may be best suited for storing temporary codes, such as those found on hotel key cards or clothing tags in stores. Harrison says that it is Very unlikely you're ever going to achieve a comparable density to magnetic hard drives with data-storing fabric, however.

The Ethical Dilemma of Driverless Cars

In 2014, the first self-driven car was sold by the company Induct Technology. This change has given rise to the concern of the ethical dilemma of driverless cars. Imagine the following scenario: you’re cruising down the highway in a driverless car. Your car is surrounded by a truck in the front, a motorcycle on your right and a SUV on your left. Suddenly the heavy load from the truck falls down. Crash into the fallen load, the motorcycle or the SUV? In this scenario, the decision taken would solely be based on the pre-written computer program so any damage can be looked on as a decision made with predetermination.

To no one’s surprise, the public has consequently spoken out against this controversial engineering marvel. To combat this, companies have integrated systems into their vehicles that can give more control to human drivers in extreme situations. For example, in 2016, Tesla made a decision that the car’s automatic system will not stop the driver in turning the car in a direction that the driver desires in an emergency situation, even if it is the one that would cause greater damage. However, this decision was also highly criticized as it endangered the passengers and any surrounding civilians. The official statement given by Tesla stated that they didn’t want to second-guess drivers in emergency situations and by doing so they could effectively tackle any situation that presents the dilemma.

Tesla’s decision, in fact, directly conflicts with the whole idea behind driverless cars that robots make better drivers than humans. While situations in the dilemma may cause fatalities, it is nothing compared to the accidents that human drivers cause.

Therefore, the decision made by Tesla is a huge setback for the advancement of society as a whole. Even though a group of people see this dilemma as morally wrong, they should also consider the mass amounts of lives that automatic cars can and have saved. It is reasonable to believe that if manufacturers stick to their “safety-first” motto and keep on improving their models with better technologies and more realistic simulations, there might be a day where the threat to human life is essentially zero.