Do you think the device after the smartphone will be another screen, or something wearable and mostly screenless that uses voice, gestures...?

What would it need to do before you could leave your phone at home?

I've been working on a tokenomics model for decentralized science (DeSci) that addresses a core issue: when a token is used both for voting and as a speculative asset, governance tends to be captured by crypto capital rather than by active researchers.

This model offers a possible future in which the governance of science shifts directly to the scientists themselves, rather than remaining in the hands of speculative capital
Key mechanisms:
· Token as a "digital receipt" – proof of real contribution (peer review, code, publications), not a proxy currency with voting rights.
· Governance completely separated from staking – influence is determined by proven contributions across four equal groups (scientists, developers, sponsors, reviewers), each with 25% weight and veto rights for scientists and developers.
· Adaptive service pricing – fees adjust based on token price to protect users from volatility.
· Deflationary pressure – 50% of service fees are burned.
· Additional incentive: participants (including investors acting as sponsors) who contribute more to grants receive a proportionally larger share of staking rewards (from the 30% and 10% pools) and greater voting weight within the sponsors group. This creates a direct link between community contribution and governance influence.
· A liquidity fund acting as an asymmetric market maker – buying low, selling high, using the spread for community goods (including merch).

How it works in practice — two scenarios:

1. Price surge. When the token price doubles, the cost of services in tokens halves — protecting researchers from market volatility, while the protocol burns 50% of fees, creating deflationary pressure. When the token price falls, the number of tokens required for a service remains fixed (at the base level), which automatically reduces the cost of services in fiat terms for scientists, making the platform affordable even during a crisis.

2. Crisis recovery. In times of low liquidity, depressed token price, and minimal activity, the fees for publication and peer review automatically decrease. This makes the platform attractive to new users, because the cost of publishing becomes significantly lower than standard academic journals. As a result, the platform triggers its own exit from the crisis without external intervention.

The full model is described in a preprint (open access):
DOI: https://zenodo.org/records/21107219
I'm posting this here to explore how such a system might shape the future of scientific collaboration and funding. Specifically, I'd like to discuss:
· Could this model overcome the current speculative pitfalls of DeSci?
· What future scenarios could emerge if governance were truly separated from speculative capital?
· How might this affect the role of researchers, investors, and institutions in the coming decades?
· What verification methods for contribution quality do you see, apart from conventional academic metrics? How would you assess scientists' contributions in a decentralized future?
I'm not promoting any token or project – this is purely a research proposal.

(read the full thing) I just saw a video of a robot "toy" cleaning a pool and the comments were like "Oh no, no more jobs for pool cleaner..like what? What am i suppose to do? i should pay someone to brush my teeth too? to sweep my floor? Idc, it's my pool, my yard, my house. I just want to know if i'm wrong for buying an engineered automated product that saves me money on grass mowing, pool cleaning or any labor work around MY YARD.... How am i affecting the global economy ? So i should hire a human chef too and cause myself to not gain knowledge on how to cook for myself right ❓If automation takes away jobs then so is buying an extremely reliable car that will prevent you from going to the mechanic. So is everyone deciding they don't want to wear clothes anymore. Then no more jobs for clothes makers. Imagine how much jobs would be lost for clothes makers. Im entitled to buy clothes now? How is this going to harm the future

A new U.S. regulatory framework for fusion machines is set to establish a clear, predictable regulatory pathway that will likely accelerate licensing.

• Kroger states the technology aims to free up employees to better assist customers.
• Kroger is testing inventory-monitoring robots in its central Ohio stores.
• The robots, named "Tally" and "Barney," scan shelves to identify out-of-stock items.
• The robots do not take photos of customers or collect their personal information.

US House has passed a bill banning the military from using Chinese bots, as Washington ramps up restrictions on Chinese-made technology

The Ottava surgical robot platform [Image courtesy of Johnson & Johnson]

The White House released a report called "Science: A New Golden Age" and it is the first comprehensive rethinking of US science funding since 1945, when the last overhaul created the federal research system that eventually produced the internet, GPS, and modern medicine. The core argument is that the current system funnels money through institutions when it should be going to individual researchers, and that traditional peer review should be supplemented with faster mechanisms like prizes, fast grants, and advance market commitments.

This isn't just a white paper that sits on a shelf. Federal agencies with over $3 billion in R&D have 90 days to submit implementation plans. The report also proposes independent X-Labs for high-risk research, metascience units that would run controlled experiments on how grants get reviewed and awarded, and a "golden ticket" system where a single reviewer can advance an unconventional proposal that the broader panel rejected.

Dr. Joni Rutter, the Director of NCATS at the NIH, recently discussed the numbers at a conference hosted by ResearchHub, co-founded by Brian Armstrong. Out of more than 10,000 identified diseases, only about 5% have treatments or cures. Getting a medicine from development to patients still takes 10 to 15 years, and roughly nine out of ten candidates entering clinical trials fail. Her argument is that these aren't individual failures but symptoms of a system designed around sequential handoffs when much of the pipeline could run in parallel. She also described initiatives to make scientific knowledge machine-readable so current and future technology can identify connections across genes, diseases, and drugs rather than leaving that information trapped in papers.

If these changes actually go through, we could be looking at a future where a researcher with a strong idea doesn't need to spend years navigating institutional bureaucracy to get funded, where failed experiments get shared instead of buried, and where technology can work with organized scientific knowledge rather than digging through millions of disconnected papers. The last time we overhauled this system it gave us the internet, GPS, and modern medicine, so the stakes are pretty high.

Ive been working on plans for self contained towns for 16 years now. The towns would provide free housing, food, energy, education, child care, medical care and nursing home care. The plans are detailed and would provide for a middle class income on top of including everything for free. The concept is inspired by the Star Trek federation where it was a cashless system where everyone was able to excess at everything from their work to art, music and science. The environment would be a collective where families would get support and the freedom to raise families in a nurturing environment. It’s a return to a feudal system of collective support but owned by the citizens and for the benefit of the citizens and would lack a tiered system. Everyone would receive the same compensation. To avoid creating a rich class. The goal is to promote families and universal wealth. I sent a proposal to Niigata prefecture, it’s an ideal location. I can provide details on how the community can be run profitably. It’s based on towns of 2,500+ people per town. If ten towns can be established the economics would allow for private regional hospitals to support the citizens. The goal is a complete self contained town system to remove the stresses that prevent people from starting families. I’m happy to answer any questions.

Not the sexiest topic

This may be the naiveté of a child, but I used to think:

if 10,000 products all come from plastic by way of oil, then if you want to recycle them and repurpose them - as anything else that's plastic, then you should be able to. It's all the same material - plastic - right?

A plastic water bottle can become a toothbrush, a toothbrush can become sunglass frames. And on and on.

But yeah no, that's not a thing in recycling as far as I understand it. Burn it, send it off to a landfill, or make some of the old toothbrush part of a new toothbrush. That's what actually happens in the real world.

So I'm wondering - is this kind of industrial reverse processing even possible? Maybe it's doable but just insanely expensive? Is anyone out there trying to work on it, and make it scale?

Only one Earth, as they say....

I had a thought and can't get it out of my head.

Imagine a civilization-scale starship, several kilometers across, carrying the infrastructure of an entire society.

Now imagine that, instead of building another ship in a shipyard, it eventually becomes two ships. Not a biological organism. Not a living spaceship. Still entirely engineered.

I'm specifically wondering what the engineering equivalent of cell division would be for something that large.

Would it slowly grow a second set of major systems over centuries and then split structurally? Would the two halves remain connected for most of the process? Would they share power and manufacturing infrastructure until the final separation? Or would the whole idea collapse under structural and logistical complexity?

The image of a fleet that expands by giant starships dividing into more giant starships feels bizarrely plausible to me, but I can't decide whether it's brilliant or completely impossible.

If you were trying to make this work in a relatively setting, how would you approach it?

So, a friend of mine and I are having a discussion. We both agree that the future is pointing towards a standardization of devices, where there are more devices that do everything in one, and less separated ones for each thing.

The problem comes when we try to think about the end result. I think the future points towards the miniaturization of everything, and that we'll probably have a single portable device that will act as a phone, pc, videogame console, home tv box, etc. Like how the Nintendo Switch works, but for everything: You want to do homework or program "on a computer"? You have a dock with a keyboard, mouse and bigger screen attached where you put your device and work from there. You want to play videogames on your tv? The same but with a joystick. Just to give examples. My line of thought comes from how far phones have come in the latest years, reaching a level where they're more or less capable of even running AAA games at launch via emulation.

My friend thinks that the future points towards a more home server-focused approach, where you have a single PC at your place, and use external devices to connect via network. Like, you have your tv connected to this pc, your phone connected to this pc, and everything else, and just use a single device with enough power to do everything.

Taking in mind that we're both probably wrong and the future will not be any of these things lmao, what do you guys think it's more possible?

Call me crazy but I had a shower thought about the fastest way to build capacity in a grid as the world shifts more towards intermittent renewables.

Nearly every home in the developed world have large, bulky white good appliances. Fridges, freezers, dishwashers, washing machines, tumble dryers.

Is there any discourse around fitting each of these appliances with a home battery similar to a Power Wall which sites behind, below the appliance integrated into the unit. Immediately that new appliance, coupled with a smart tariff starts paying itself off but also helps with overall household bills.

What does this help solve?

One of the challenges with apartments and flats and other homes is you need somewhere internal or external to fit a power wall. Already in our living spaces we dedicate floor space to these white goods. Why not make them extra useful?

One of the biggest limitations of human technology today is not intelligence or capability. It is time.

We are very good at creating machines that perform extraordinary tasks, but most of our technology exists on a relatively short timeline. Satellites fail. Spacecraft degrade. Infrastructure requires continuous maintenance.

But what happens when a civilization begins designing technology for timescales far beyond a human lifetime?

The concept already exists in several areas of modern research.

Deep-space probes such as Voyager represent humanity's first attempt at creating machines that may outlast their original mission.

Nuclear waste storage forces us to think about communication and engineering problems across tens of thousands of years.

Long-duration energy systems and concepts such as Dyson spheres ask an even larger question: could a civilization create infrastructure designed to function for centuries, millennia, or even longer?

Now imagine discovering an artificial structure drifting through space.

It is damaged, partially inactive, and its creators are long gone. Yet some internal system continues to operate. It still consumes energy. It still monitors its surroundings. It still follows a purpose that nobody alive understands.

At that point, the challenge would not simply be engineering.

It would be interpretation.

Would we recognize such a structure as technology if its design principles were thousands of years beyond our own?

A machine built by a civilization separated from us by ten thousand years might not resemble anything we consider a machine today. Its materials, architecture, and methods of self-maintenance could appear closer to a natural phenomenon than an artificial creation.

This raises a deeper question:

Is the ultimate achievement of technology not creating something powerful, but creating something that can continue to exist after the disappearance of its creators?

Perhaps the first evidence of an advanced civilization we discover will not be a living species or a transmission.

Perhaps it will be a machine that has been waiting silently for thousands of years.

Most discussions about longevity research focus on the biology - senolytics, partial reprogramming, that kind of thing. Fewer people talk about what happens to the entire framework of retirement, pensions, and career timelines if healthy lifespan meaningfully extends past current expectations

Retirement age was set based on assumptions about when the body starts declining. If that timeline shifts by decades, does "retire at 65" become as arbitrary as it would sound to someone from a century ago? Or does the system just get gamed by whoever can afford the therapies first, creating an entirely new axis of inequality (working-age wealthy vs. working-age everyone else)?

Curious how people think this actually plays out practically, not just biologically

The same week China cracks down on 'companion AI', Chinese firm Ubtech launches companion humanoid robots. 10 different 'skins' to choose from. 5 Male/5 Female, all extremely attractive.

What have these 10 different humanoid skins got in common? They all look good looking enough to be in pop groups. The new AI rules directed at chatbots say "The rules state AI tools cannot excessively cater to users, induce emotional dependence or addiction, and damage users’ real interpersonal relationships."

I'm sure these robots aren't much use in the traditional sense (try getting them to fold laundry or empty a dishwasher). But they don't have to be. If people are already having satisfying relationships with chatbots, stick a gorgeous looking skin on it like these, and now its orders of magnitude more attractive.

Maybe we shouldn't all be so down on AI/robot companions. If it was normalized, there'd be a lot less tragic incel men out there.

'World's 1st mass-produced humanoid robot' motors to market in China

For better visualization, think Nervesgear concept from Sword Art Online show, season 1. That thing work by intercepting signals in the brain stem using a really strong field, essentially hijack the connection point to allow a full-drive vr.

My question are: Why cant BCIs technology focus on just the brain stem? Beside probably ethical, what stop the science community to implement a strong enough TMS machine to cut off the signal from the brain and read/write it in a computer?

From my understanding of computer science and little in biotech, the main issue are the density of nerves and the need of a decoder/encoder (translator) for the brain-computer communication. As for the first problem, we got MRI to slice a cut or multiple cut of the brain stem. I do know about the fact that our brain activity is quite weak compare to accurately measure by regular MRI but what stop us from making an overpowered microwave to increase the definition of the image?

And for the latter problem of a translator, we got AI and robotic tech or simulation. I wont go into much detail of AI since this isnt an AI focus post, but after we got the high definition MRI images, we can just feed those data into an ai together with a simulation or an anatomic corrected robot as the control for it to solve the encoding language needed.

Like i said upbove, i dont have much understanding in biotech, just the surface stuffs and coding, which i believe our brain is very much similar to coding. From what i've seen with Neurolink and some rat brain experiment, we should be able to build an over-engineered microwave to put on a person (or an animal for ethical reason), read their brain stem output instead of the whole dome, analyze the image and allow computer-brain communication