What a week! Gas Prices have shot up! By Wednesday night, over 6 energy firms in the UK had gone bust!! It doesn’t seem to be stopping. There’s also food shortages, Covid cases rising in some areas (thankfully – not an increase in deaths like we’ve seen before)… and now we’re hearing, non of this is going to end anytime soon!
What we can do is, a) remain positive (as possible) and b) know that, hopefully, this is temporary until the world sorts itself out.
From this week, here’s my Top Two Tech Stories…
- Scientists are working on technology that will erase all painful and scary memories from your brain!
This is something that it’s being explored, but Philipp Kellmeyer, a neurologist and head of the Neuroethics & A.I. Ethics Lab at the University of Freiburg, has several concerns. High among them is identity.
“Targeted elimination or inception of memories for purposes other than medical treatment obviously entails huge ethical problems,” Kellmeyer tells Inverse, “including the possibility for interfering with a person’s identity — or instrumentalizing individuals by using false memory inception to influence their behavior.”
While many of these painful memories do fade with time, particularly painful ones can leave a lasting mark in the form of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and make seemingly innocuous aspects of daily life difficult to manage.
While it seems far future, the technology may be nearer than we think. Computational neuroscientists are in the proof-of-concept stages of a new kind of PTSD treatment called decoded neurofeedback (DecNef) that collects and parses brain signals using machine learning to modify painful memories — all without the subject evening knowing it.
It could be the road to healing for countless PTSD sufferers. And let’s be honest- how awesome is that.
2. Less time on Tik Tok!
Douyin, China’s version of TikTok, will limit use of the platform for children to 40 minutes a day.
The rules will apply to users under 14, who have been authenticated using their real names, and who will be able to access it between 06:00 and 22:00.
Parent company Bytedance announced the app’s Youth Mode in a blog post,saying it is the first short-video company in the industry to have these limits.
It comes as China cracks down on teenagers’ use of technology.
According to Douyin’s user agreement there is no minimum age on the platform, but under 18s must obtain the consent of a legal guardian. On sister app TikTok the minimum age is 13.
New educational content – including science experiments, museum exhibitions and historical explainers – has been launched by Douyin as part of Youth Mode.
“Yes, we are more strict with teenagers. We will work harder to provide quality content so that young people can learn and see the world,” the post said.
And about time too if you ask me.
We really do need to reduce the time children spend in front of screens!
Well there you – erasing scary moments from your brain to reducing the time children spend on Tik Tok. Maybe, if the latter doesn’t work… we can revert to the former to remove anything stored in the brain that isn’t good?