If any cars are mobile phones with wheels, it’s electric cars. And just as the switch from landline phones to mobile phones was quick, and from computers to smartphones was even quicker, the shift from engines to motors, from internal combustion cars to electric cars, is starting to gain momentum and when it reaches scale, it will happen quickly.
How quickly? Pandemic aside, Tesla would be on track to sell half a million cars in 2020, all of them electric. By contrast, GM sold almost 3 million cars last year, almost none of them electric. But by 2025 or so, GM plans to sell a million electric cars, a year that the company plans to be its tipping point toward electrics.
Of course, to do that, you need amazing batteries, and an amazing capacity to produce batteries—both of which are at the heart of the company’s plans. A new GM battery factory, in partnership with LG Chem, will dwarf Tesla’s Gigafactory and power, pun intended, its drive, pun again intended, to that 2025 goal of a million electric cars.
In this March roundup, IEEE Spectrum's editor-in-chief Harry Goldstein and senior editor Stephen Cass talk about some of the highlights of Spectrum's recent coverage, including a plea for programmers to stop producing bloated programs, a new transistor that could help make how we handle electrical power smarter, and the potential return of optical discs as a high-density date storage medium.
The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) recently released the open-source ARES_OS, a key software component of their Autonomous Research System. ARES_OS allows relatively simple robots to perform experiments, and develop new experiments based on the results. The AFRL's Benji Maruyama talks with IEEE Spectrum associate editor Dina Genkina about how he hopes the system becomes not just an invaluable helper for grad students, but opens up research to many more people outside traditional labs and enables progress in tackling hard problems like climate change.
The semiconductor industry is in the midst of a major expansion driven by the seemingly insatiable demands of AI, the addition of more intelligence in transportation, and national security concerns, among many other things. What this expansion might mean for chip-making's carbon footprint? Can we make everything in our world smarter without worsening climate change? Lizzie Boakes is a lifecycle analyst at IMEC, the Belgium-based nanotech research organisation, and she speaks with senior editor Samuel K. Moore about her work on this problem.
We've all seen impressive demos of prototype brain implants being used by paralyzed patients to interface with computers, but none of those implants have entered general clinical use. Biomedical device company Synchron is close to actually coming to market with its stentrode technology, promising less spectacular results than some of its competitors, but making up for that with ease of use and implant longevity. Synchron's co-founder Tom Oxley talks with IEEE Spectrum senior editor Eliza Strickland about the new tech, and you can read more in our January issue article by Emily Waltz.
The EU Sustronics program aims to make creating, maintaining, and recycling electronics more sustainable. Liisa Hakola is a senior scientist and project manager at the VTT Technical Research Center in Finland. She talks with IEEE Spectrum senior editor Stephen Cass about VTT's role in the EU's program, helping manufacturers to develop flexible, printed—and even compostable—electronics.
Security researchers Bruce Schneier and Barath Raghavan believe it's time to stop trusting our data to the cloud, where it can be exposed by greed, accident, or crime. In the December issue of IEEE Spectrum, they proposed a plan for "data decoupling" that would protect our data without sacrificing ease of use, and in this episode Raghavan talks through the highlights of the plan with Spectrum editor Stephen Cass.
Co-CEO's of Silmach, Pierre-Francois Louvigne and Jean-Baptiste Carnet, talk about their new MEMS technology with IEEE Spectrum editor Glenn Zorpette. The tech has been used to create the first major upgrade to the movement of quartz watches in decades, a power efficient motor that is 50 percent smaller, allows fluid forward-and-back motion of the hand, and requires so little power a watch can run for over a decade before it needs a new battery. Louvigne talk about their new hybrid watch, which combine smartwatch electronics with analog faces, and partnerships with manufacturers such as Timex.
Alan Clark of SUSE talks with IEEE Spectrum editor Stephen Cass about the disruption in the enterprise Linux community caused by recent announcements by Red Hat over open source access to its codebase, and the formation of the Open Enterprise Linux Alliance (Open ELA) by SUSE, Oracle and CIQ in response.
Justine Bateman is an author and filmmaker. She also holds a degree in computer science from UCLA and is the AI advisor to SAG-AFTRA, the actors' union currently striking against movie and television studios. In this episode, Bateman talks with IEEE Spectrum senior editor Stephen Cass about actors' demands for control and compensation over digital avatars created in their likeness, and the destructive potential of generative AI in Hollywood.
Wendy H. Wong is a professor of political science at the University of British Columbia, and author of the just released book, We, The Data: Human Rights in the Digital Age. An excerpt from the book regarding the emerging prospect of digitally reanimating the departed is available on IEEE Spectrum's website. In this episode of Fixing The Future, Wong talks with senior editor Eliza Strickland about how the increasing datification of our lives could make this prospect possible—with or without our consent.
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