“Hybrid system where brain cells and chip-based MEMS “The use of on-chip microelectromechanical systems”establish a close physical interaction allowing the transfer of information in one or both directions”.

In July 2019 Elon Musk, best known as the CEO of the electric car company Tesla, presented details of an implantable wireless system that his company Neuralink is building. It is already being studied in monkeys, Musk revealed, and it is hoped that human trials will start before the end of 2020. To date, Neuralink has received $158m in funding, $100m of it from Musk.

The device’s safety will be studied along with how well the system allows brain control of a computer for typing and texting. While it can only read the aggregate activity of a population of neurons, of which it will take in about 1,000, there is enough data to make a system useful for patients – and less nuance in the signal actually makes it more stable and robust, says founder and CEO Tom Oxley.

“Elon Musk worries about the threat posed by artificial intelligence and claims BCIs may provide a way of keeping up with it”

With this awesome music technology you don’t listen with your ears but with your brain. At least, this is what it feels and sounds like. You can compare it to as if you were standing at a music festival or live show. Best of all, you don’t even realise that you are wearing headphones!

“At its core, the 8D effect tries to mimic the sensation of hearing a binaural recording, which places sounds in space relative to a human’s head (rather than normal stereo recordings, which can only direct sound to the left and right speaker channels)”.

This “new” 8D audio, for most people, is a new futuristic technology that allows you to recreate the feeling of listening to music played by speakers distributed around us. A sort of immersive and actually very suggestive experience. So, is this a real new technology called 8D? The answer is no, 8D audio does not exist for various reasons but, the effect created by the audio is a real thing.

Wearable technology seems like the logical step forward for the digital generation. Following the clear trend of blending the physical world with the virtual, fashion began weaving technologies into clothing in recent years in an attempt to capitalize on technology’s effervescent desire to be ever smaller. The lack of progression in the field of battery technology has put any such innovations at the mercy of frequent charging, leaving the user experience of wearables lamentable. A foreseeable alternative to the traditional battery is solar energy though this also requires much progression to a smaller, flexible version capable of providing long-lasting energy while indoors. A more promising answer for textiles is a supercapacitor which gains energy via static charge. Printed on thin, flexible material, the supercapacitor can power a wearable or charge a phone using energy created by standard movements. Perfecting such a device means it will no longer be necessary to carry charging cables around for phones or laptops.

The fashion industry is being eyed by environmental activists as a major contributor to the environmental crisis due to its significant production of carbon emissions, ocean plastic pollution, waste, and water pollution.

The damage has escalated rapidly with the rise of ‘fast fashion’ – a term which references a high rate of consumption for low quality clothing meant to last for only one season then discarded. 3D printing has evolved to the point of now being able to quickly print flexible materials which can then be turned into clothing. This process is significantly more environmentally friendly. Factories would no longer be needed to roll out large batches of clothing, reducing carbon emissions. Dyes used to color fabrics, a major source of water pollution, would no longer be a necessary step in the production process. Because the clothing would be printed made-to-fit, textile scraps would be nonexistent, working in tandem with an increase in longevity to reduce the amount of waste produced. Should 3D printing at home become a widespread adoption once made available, the gamut of fashion pollution will be an obsolete affair.

Marketing is now targeting a connected customer with fast-changing expectations, making agility, transparency, and trust necessary characteristics of a successful marketing team. Strategic partnerships are an exceptional way of achieving such goals with additional benefits of creative latitude, multichannel reach, and adherence to cultural norms (Galloway, 2019). Micro-influencer utilization has risen 300% in the past 4 years, outweighing mega-influencers 10 to 1 due to their superior command of supporter engagement (Influencer Marketing Hub, 2020). With the digital world blending with reality and the number of social media platforms expanding, shifting requires influencer marketing to increase its revenue.

CGI avatars, using automated technology, have gained traction in the influencer industry on social media due to their ability to bypass the challenges human influencers face (Robertson, 2018). One such challenge is the frequent violations of strict Federal Trade Commission disclosure requirements that one study found influencer posts to be fully compliant with 14% of the time (Influencer Marketing Hub, 2020). Many companies are implementing similar technologies for commercial applications that go beyond social media influencing, suggesting that digital humans will become increasingly more commonplace, and thus, more normalized 
(Katz, 2018).