We hope the latest European Commission and Brexit dramas don’t have your head spinning. If they do, the upcoming days off will be very welcome. TechAways will also be taking a break. We’ll be back in two weeks with more interesting tech updates from the around the world. 

Cambre’s Tech Team

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Tech Team

The digital grapevine [Financial Times] 

Worried that the rare vintage wine you just bought at auction could be fake? (No? No one…?) Well if you are, blockchain is the solution for you! Chainvine is partnering with winemakers and merchants to put an IoT device and QR code on bottles – the codes are scanned at the vineyard and the data is added to Chainvine’s blockchain, which tracks them through the supply chain. The system also allows bottles to be marked as drunk, which prevents reuse of the bottle or labels. Bringing these tech solutions to the wine world could also make valuations more accurate. So next time you look for a fancy bottle of wine, you can now verify its grapevine.  

SpaceX, Starlink internet, & 42,000 satellites orbiting earth [The Verge] 

Just when you think Elon Musk couldn’t possibly take it to the next level once again, you then find out his SpaceX company has plans to launch 42,000 (yes you read that right – 42,000) satellites into orbit. This massive operation, with the incredibly cool name of Starlinkplans to give reliable and high-speed internet coverage to the planet as an internet-from-space initiative, which will begin offering services from mid-2020. However, to simply begin the coverage globally, the company has a long way to go, with six to eight launches needed, with 60 satellites per ride. However, knowing Elon Musk the next level is always out there and global internet coverage from space is just the beginning. 

AI helps young lawyers survive the rite of passage [Financial Times] 

We all remember Mike Ross having sleepless nights in Suits to revise clients’ contracts. Well this isn’t far from the reality. And recent events such as the implementation of GDPR or Brexit have resulted in additional headaches for junior lawyers. But it could soon be over as tech start-ups have tasked themselves with relieving young lawyers from thankless tasks. To speed up the repapering process, software uses AI to analyze thousands of pages of legal documents and contracts by extracting the data and picking out the clauses that need to be reviewed. It looks like intellectual professions aren’t immune to the replacement of labour. 

Your medical records traced back to you [WSJ] 

Your medical data is strictly confidential. Right…? Not for machines. A study showed facial-recognition software can identify over 80% of patients from their MRI scans, reconstituting their face from bone structure to skin and fat. AI has also been capable of identifying people from data generated through their smart watches. With the sophistication of machine-learning being correlated with the amount of data that digital devices generate, privacy shields for family medical history, illnesses and genetic data are increasingly tricky to maintain. Patient confidentiality, ethics, values – anyone? 

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In case you haven’t had enough… 

It is your own fault if you get hooked on technology [FT] 

A machine-learning system may have predicted the World Series winner [Engadget] 

Human Compatible — can we keep control over a superintelligence? [FT] 

The world’s first artificial womb for humans [BBC] 

Can you make AI fairer than a judge? [MIT Technology Review]