Future Beat: Electoral anticipation

We're only a few days away from the highly anticipated and incredibly contentious US Presidential election.

While we are indeed the Future Beat newsletter, most polls at this point show the race as being neck and neck, making it almost impossible to predict a winner.

Make no mistake, however, the winner of the election will set the pace for a lot of the topics we discus regularly. Both candidates, Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump, will have to pave their own paths when it comes to artificial intelligence, quantum computing and cryptocurrencies.

Much like our inability to predict a winner, we don't know what those respective paths will look like, but they will set the pace for the rest of the world, and ultimately, have an impact on all of us.

Cody Sigel Combs , Future Editor

The Big Story

Apple Intelligence arrives, but is it too late?

In brief | Amid much anticipation and promotion in recent months, Apple Intelligence, described as a game-changer for mobile users by the company, has finally arrived.

The artificial intelligence platform boasts advanced photo-editing capabilities, writing enhancement tools and a vastly improved Siri voice assistant among other features.

Yet as The National's Alvin Cabral points out, you'll have to join a waiting list beforeyou can actually use Apple's AI tools once you upgrade to iOS 18.1. That being said, Alvin only had to wait an hour.

Some are wondering, however, if Apple is too far behind other entrenched players in the AI space.

Why it matters | Despite those concerns, it's worth noting that Apple's iPhone has been in the pockets and hands of billions of people around the world for years.

For all the talk about artificial intelligence, there are still those who have only read about it, falling just short of using it for several reasons.

Apple's user-friendly way of including AI throughout its iOS will give them their first taste of the burgeoning technology on the minds of so many.

It may take some time for iPhone users to upgrade their iOS, but make no mistake, the final frontier is being approached, and those who never thought they'd use AI will soon find themselves using it.

Quoted | "The actual Apple Intelligence features are pretty good. The roll-out is a bit of a mess. I think really that reflects a collision between Apple‘s one big launch and the pressure to get this out. My theory was always that Apple has about a dozen iOS projects in progress at any given time, and if something wasn’t going to be ready for the Autumn launch cycle, they just pushed it back until the following year’s cycle. But they couldn’t do that with Apple Intelligence”

– Benedict Evans, technology analyst

Future in focus

Unanswered questions | Why haven't we encountered alien life? Is climate change to blame?

High-altitude platform | Abu Dhabi aerospace company to launch near-space flights from UAE to capture real-time data

Seeing double | 'Digital twins' of cancer patients created to test treatments

AI representation | Why Google expects more Arabic LLMs to emerge

Predicting the future: Signal or noise?

Speaking through a video link to Riyadh's Future Investment Initiative summit, often referred to as ”Davos in the desert“, technology entrepreneur, space tycoon and occasional provocateur Elon Musk told a packed auditorium that there was a 10 to 20 per cent chance that AI "goes bad".

This is noise: While his overall point was that artificial intelligence "most likely is going to be great", Mr Musk failed to explain how he came to that "10 to 20 per cent" statistic. This isn't an isolated incident either. His comments, along with similar statements from those in attendance like Masayoshi Son, chief executive of SoftBank, were made under the umbrella of the idea that balanced regulatory measures would be needed to make sure disruption from AI is kept to a minimum. Those points are well-taken, but to throw out an arbitrary statistic like Mr Musk did seems fanciful at a time when calm and measured thought is needed.

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