Communicating with Digital Dead; Me and My Robot Shadow; Volunteers Needed to Not Drive Car; Hidden Drone Pods; Robot Bats; Catholic 'Transgender' Teacher; Artists Sue Phoenix; and Sitting the Rails

Future

Huawei prepares for robot overlords and communication with the dead washingtonpost

...Kevin Ho, president of its handset product line, told the CES Asia conference in Shanghai that the company used science-fiction movies such as “The Matrix” to envision future trends and new business ideas.

He described a future where children use apps such as WeChat to interact with dead grandparents, thanks to the ability to download human consciousness into computers. Such technologies would require huge amounts of data storage, which could generate business for Huawei, he added.

End of Oil Rich; Targeting Target; Inspired Robots; The Civil Rights of the Trans...humanist; Splice Your DNA in Your Spare Time; Russia's Barrel Response; Baghdad Scuffle; and NATO's New 4k Troops on Russia's Border

This weekend we have some longer-form articles on the decline of oil, a push for trans-humanism civil rights, and the accessibility of editing your own DNA in your spare time.

Fuel

There will be pandemonium: The end of the old oil order has already begun (Opinion) salon

It is hard to overstate the significance of the Doha debacle. At the very least, it will perpetuate the low oil prices that have plagued the industry for the past two years, forcing smaller firms into bankruptcy and erasing hundreds of billions of dollars of investments in new production capacity. It may also have obliterated any future prospects for cooperation between OPEC and non-OPEC producers in regulating the market. Most of all, however, it demonstrated that the petroleum-fueled world we’ve known these last decades — with oil demand always thrusting ahead of supply, ensuring steady profits for all major producers — is no more. Replacing it is an anemic, possibly even declining, demand for oil that is likely to force suppliers to fight one another for ever-diminishing market shares.