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"With each interaction, Alexa is training to hear better, to interpret more precisely, to trigger actions that map to the user's commands more accurately, and to build a more complete model of their preferences, habits and desires. What is required to make this possible? Put simply: each small moment of convenience - be it answering a question, turning on a light, or playing a song - requires a vast planetary network, fueled by the extraction of non-renewable materials, labor, and data. The scale of resources required is many magnitudes greater than the energy and labor it would take a human to operate a household appliance or flick a switch. A full accounting for these costs is almost impossible, but it is increasingly important that we grasp the scale and scope if we are to understand and govern the technical infrastructures that thread through our lives. III The Salar, the world's largest flat surface, is located in southwest Bolivia at an altitude of 3,656 meters above sea level. It is a high plateau, covered by a few meters of salt crust which are exceptionally rich in lithium, containing 50% to 70% of the world's lithium reserves. 4 The Salar, alongside the neighboring Atacama regions in Chile and Argentina, are major sites for lithium extraction. This soft, silvery metal is currently used to power mobile connected devices, as a crucial material used for the production of lithium-Ion batteries. It is known as 'grey gold.' Smartphone batteries, for example, usually have less than eight grams of this material. 5 Each Tesla car needs approximately seven kilograms of lithium for its battery pack. 6 All these batteries have a limited lifespan, and once consumed they are thrown away as waste. Amazon reminds users that they cannot open up and repair their Echo, because this will void the warranty. The Amazon Echo is wall-powered, and also has a mobile battery base. This also has a limited lifespan and then must be thrown away as waste. According to the Ay

"We demonstrated the high-speed, non-deformation catching of a marshmallow. The marshmallow is a very soft object which is difficult to grasp without deforming its surface. For the catching, we developed a 1ms sensor fusion system with the high-speed active vision sensor and the high-speed, high-precision proximity sensor. Generally, a tactile feedback is used to grasp various kinds of soft objects without deforming. However, the robot hand tends to deform the object surface with only tactile feedback. By slowing the grasping speed, the deformation becomes smaller. However, grasping time becomes longer. The 1ms sensor fusion system enabled seamless, high-sensitive sensing from non-contact to contact state. The robot hand could control fingertip position dynamically and precisely based on the visual and the proximity feedback. By the proximity feedback, contact to the object was detected before deforming its surface, and grasping motion is stopped. The robot hand could catch the marshmallow even if the position and posture of it were different. http://www.k2.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/fusion/... SHOW MORE "

Some have taken a stab at putting the pandemic in historical context. At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Washington Post visualized the devastating plagues of history, with Covid-19 by comparison a tiny dot. (By today, tragically, it'd be a much bigger dot.) This vivid graphic ranks Covid-19 the ninth deadliest in history