Tech Digest daily recap: UK set for ‘drone superhighway’

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Image: BT

The UK will become home to the world’s largest automated drone superhighway over the next two years. The drones will be used on the 164-mile Skyway project connecting cities and towns, including Cambridge and Rugby. It is part of a £273 million financing package for the aerospace sector to be unveiled Monday by Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng. Other projects include drones delivering mail to the Isles of Scilly and medicines across Scotland. Mr Kwarteng will announce the news at the Farnborough International Airshow – the first to be held since 2019. He will say the funding will “help the sector seize the tremendous growth opportunities that exist as the world moves towards cleaner forms of flying”. BBC

Internet service providers have a moral obligation to help customers through the cost of living crisis, the regulator said. More and more families are struggling with their internet bills, which are often linked to inflation and have risen this year. Along with everything else. Ofcom’s network and communications group director, Lindsey Fussell, told Sky News they know people across the country struggling with their bills currently. “It is essential that broadband and mobile services are affordable,” she said. “Especially for those who are really struggling with their finances right now, any bill can be an issue. Sky News

Klarna, the buy now pay later app that was Europe’s most popular tech start-up for a while, is worth $40 billion (£34 billion). Or, er, maybe just $6 billion. Uber was worth $100 billion at its peak, but is now worth less than half. Hopin, the events app, may have been worth $7 billion last year, but right now it’s firing its staff, and as for Theranos, the $9 billion medical start-up that every venture capital fund in the world wanted a share of, exactly nothing. worth. The value of many of the most highly regarded, VC-backed companies is starting to crash at an alarming rate. Of course, it is very difficult to value a brand new company. No one would try to argue that it is ever an exact science. Yet these are hardly minor mistakes. Telegraph

The tech industry’s latest artificial intelligence constructs can be quite convincing if you ask them what it feels like to be a sentient computer, or maybe just a dinosaur or squirrel. But they’re not that good — and sometimes dangerously bad — at handling other seemingly simple tasks. Take GPT-3, for example, a Microsoft-run system that can generate paragraphs of human-like text based on what it’s learned from a huge database of digital books and online writings. But when Pomona College professor Gary Smith asked him a simple but nonsensical question about walking upstairs, GPT-3 muted it. “Yes, it’s safe to walk upstairs on your hands if you wash them first,” the AI ​​replied. AP News

One of the reasons to be excited about a WWDC is a taste of what’s coming to Apple Music. Unfortunately, with iOS 16, Apple hasn’t announced many new features for its music streaming service — unlike all the other years. That said, there are a few more features and tweaks that users will love when using Apple Music with iOS 16, especially now that the first public beta is out. Apple Music on iOS 16 allows users to sort playlists. Traditionally, all playlists in the Music app are sorted by the order in which the songs were added to the playlist: the first songs added at the top and the last songs added at the bottom. 9 to 5 Mac

July 18, 2022Chris Price

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