What Workplace Skills Will Get You To The Top In The Age Of AI?
People seem to be rather dichotomous in their thinking when it comes to predicting the specifics of an AI-driven future, especially when it comes to the world of work. It has been suggested that machines will either take everyone’s jobs and render humanity useless, or they will be catalysts for a world where humans are freed up to ponder issues that have plagued our society for decades. Super AI in the world of singularity has been hailed as the ultimate slayer of modern economic systems – the government can’t tax AI. The reality, of course, is probably somewhere in between.
What is certain, however, is that the fourth industrial revolution, just like the three movements before it, is ushering in change – and we have to do what we can to be prepared for that seismic shift, especially when it comes to how we plan on earning an income in the future.
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https://www.cnbcafrica.com/news/2017/11 ... -216274365
TECHNOLOGY AND DEVELOPMENT
How Evil Is Tech?
Not long ago, tech was the coolest industry. Everybody wanted to work at Google, Facebook and Apple. But over the past year the mood has shifted.
Some now believe tech is like the tobacco industry — corporations that make billions of dollars peddling a destructive addiction. Some believe it is like the N.F.L. — something millions of people love, but which everybody knows leaves a trail of human wreckage in its wake.
Surely the people in tech — who generally want to make the world a better place — don’t want to go down this road. It will be interesting to see if they can take the actions necessary to prevent their companies from becoming social pariahs.
There are three main critiques of big tech.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/20/opin ... -tech.html
Not long ago, tech was the coolest industry. Everybody wanted to work at Google, Facebook and Apple. But over the past year the mood has shifted.
Some now believe tech is like the tobacco industry — corporations that make billions of dollars peddling a destructive addiction. Some believe it is like the N.F.L. — something millions of people love, but which everybody knows leaves a trail of human wreckage in its wake.
Surely the people in tech — who generally want to make the world a better place — don’t want to go down this road. It will be interesting to see if they can take the actions necessary to prevent their companies from becoming social pariahs.
There are three main critiques of big tech.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/20/opin ... -tech.html
Where Birds and Planes Collide, a Winged Robot May Help
The bird, apparently a female falcon, wheels into view 100 feet over Edmonton International Airport, flapping her wings — hunting behavior. She pursues a flock of starlings, which scatter into the safety of the woods. The falcon is majestic, graceful and resolute.
She is also a machine — a battery, sensors, GPS, barometer and flight control computer stuffed into a falcon-shaped, hand-painted exterior. A human on the ground controls her wings.
The Robird patrols the skies around the airport, in Alberta, Canada. Her mission is to mimic falcon behavior in order to head off a serious threat to aviation: the bird strike, which happens when a bird or flock collides with an airplane. The Robird doesn’t actually catch any prey. Its job is to alert birds to the presence of a predator, herd them away from the airport, and teach them to prefer a less dangerous neighborhood.
Small birds do little damage to a plane, even if they are sucked into an engine (“ingested” is the aviation term). But a large bird, or sometimes a flock of small ones, can bend or break engine blades.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/28/opin ... dline&te=1
The bird, apparently a female falcon, wheels into view 100 feet over Edmonton International Airport, flapping her wings — hunting behavior. She pursues a flock of starlings, which scatter into the safety of the woods. The falcon is majestic, graceful and resolute.
She is also a machine — a battery, sensors, GPS, barometer and flight control computer stuffed into a falcon-shaped, hand-painted exterior. A human on the ground controls her wings.
The Robird patrols the skies around the airport, in Alberta, Canada. Her mission is to mimic falcon behavior in order to head off a serious threat to aviation: the bird strike, which happens when a bird or flock collides with an airplane. The Robird doesn’t actually catch any prey. Its job is to alert birds to the presence of a predator, herd them away from the airport, and teach them to prefer a less dangerous neighborhood.
Small birds do little damage to a plane, even if they are sucked into an engine (“ingested” is the aviation term). But a large bird, or sometimes a flock of small ones, can bend or break engine blades.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/28/opin ... dline&te=1
Inside China’s Big Tech Conference, New Ways to Track Citizens
WUZHEN, China — An artificial intelligence company touted a robot that could help doctors with diagnoses. A start-up displayed a drone designed to carry a single passenger 60 miles per hour.
And in a demonstration worthy of both wonder and worry, a Chinese facial recognition company showed how its technology could quickly identify and describe people.
If there were any doubts about China’s technological prowess, the presentations made this week at the country’s largest tech conference should put them to rest. The event, once a setting for local tech executives and leaders of impoverished states, this year attracted top American executives like Tim Cook of Apple and Sundar Pichai of Google, as well as executives of Chinese giants like Jack Ma of Alibaba and Pony Ma of Tencent.
Yet all the advancements exhibited at the event, the World Internet Conference, in the picturesque eastern Chinese city of Wuzhen, also offered reason for caution. The technology enabling a full techno-police state was on hand, giving a glimpse into how new advances in things like artificial intelligence and facial recognition can be used to track citizens — and how they have become widely accepted here.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/05/busi ... d=71987722
WUZHEN, China — An artificial intelligence company touted a robot that could help doctors with diagnoses. A start-up displayed a drone designed to carry a single passenger 60 miles per hour.
And in a demonstration worthy of both wonder and worry, a Chinese facial recognition company showed how its technology could quickly identify and describe people.
If there were any doubts about China’s technological prowess, the presentations made this week at the country’s largest tech conference should put them to rest. The event, once a setting for local tech executives and leaders of impoverished states, this year attracted top American executives like Tim Cook of Apple and Sundar Pichai of Google, as well as executives of Chinese giants like Jack Ma of Alibaba and Pony Ma of Tencent.
Yet all the advancements exhibited at the event, the World Internet Conference, in the picturesque eastern Chinese city of Wuzhen, also offered reason for caution. The technology enabling a full techno-police state was on hand, giving a glimpse into how new advances in things like artificial intelligence and facial recognition can be used to track citizens — and how they have become widely accepted here.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/05/busi ... d=71987722
The Robots Are Coming, and Sweden Is Fine
In a world full of anxiety about the potential job-destroying rise of automation,
Sweden is well placed to embrace technology while limiting human costs.
Excerpt:
In much of the world, people whose livelihoods depend on paychecks are increasingly anxious about a potential wave of unemployment threatened by automation. As the frightening tale goes, globalization forced people in wealthier lands like North America and Europe to compete directly with cheaper laborers in Asia and Latin America, sowing joblessness. Now, the robots are coming to finish off the humans.
But such talk has little currency in Sweden or its Scandinavian neighbors, where unions are powerful, government support is abundant, and trust between employers and employees runs deep. Here, robots are just another way to make companies more efficient. As employers prosper, workers have consistently gained a proportionate slice of the spoils — a stark contrast to the United States and Britain, where wages have stagnated even while corporate profits have soared.
“In Sweden, if you ask a union leader, ‘Are you afraid of new technology?’ they will answer, ‘No, I’m afraid of old technology,’” says the Swedish minister for employment and integration, Ylva Johansson. “The jobs disappear, and then we train people for new jobs. We won’t protect jobs. But we will protect workers.”
More..
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/27/busi ... d=45305309
In a world full of anxiety about the potential job-destroying rise of automation,
Sweden is well placed to embrace technology while limiting human costs.
Excerpt:
In much of the world, people whose livelihoods depend on paychecks are increasingly anxious about a potential wave of unemployment threatened by automation. As the frightening tale goes, globalization forced people in wealthier lands like North America and Europe to compete directly with cheaper laborers in Asia and Latin America, sowing joblessness. Now, the robots are coming to finish off the humans.
But such talk has little currency in Sweden or its Scandinavian neighbors, where unions are powerful, government support is abundant, and trust between employers and employees runs deep. Here, robots are just another way to make companies more efficient. As employers prosper, workers have consistently gained a proportionate slice of the spoils — a stark contrast to the United States and Britain, where wages have stagnated even while corporate profits have soared.
“In Sweden, if you ask a union leader, ‘Are you afraid of new technology?’ they will answer, ‘No, I’m afraid of old technology,’” says the Swedish minister for employment and integration, Ylva Johansson. “The jobs disappear, and then we train people for new jobs. We won’t protect jobs. But we will protect workers.”
More..
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/27/busi ... d=45305309
The Looming Digital Meltdown
For computer security professionals, 2018 started with a bang. A new class of security vulnerability — a variety of flaws that affect almost all major microprocessor chips, and that could enable hackers to steal information from personal computers as well as cloud computing services — was announced on Wednesday. The news prompted a rush of fixes, ruining the holiday vacations of system administrators worldwide.
For an ordinary computer user, there is not much to panic about right now. Just keep your software updated so you receive the fixes. And consider installing an ad-blocker like uBlock Origin to protect against ads that carry malware that could exploit these vulnerabilities. That is about all you can do.
However, as a citizen of a world in which digital technology is increasingly integrated into all objects — not just phones but also cars, baby monitors and so on — it is past time to panic.
We have built the digital world too rapidly. It was constructed layer upon layer, and many of the early layers were never meant to guard so many valuable things: our personal correspondence, our finances, the very infrastructure of our lives. Design shortcuts and other techniques for optimization — in particular, sacrificing security for speed or memory space — may have made sense when computers played a relatively small role in our lives. But those early layers are now emerging as enormous liabilities. The vulnerabilities announced last week have been around for decades, perhaps lurking unnoticed by anyone or perhaps long exploited.
Almost all modern microprocessors employ tricks to squeeze more performance out of a computer program. A common trick involves having the microprocessor predict what the program is about to do and start doing it before it has been asked to do it — say, fetching data from memory. In a way, modern microprocessors act like attentive butlers, pouring that second glass of wine before you knew you were going to ask for it.
More..
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/06/opin ... d=45305309
For computer security professionals, 2018 started with a bang. A new class of security vulnerability — a variety of flaws that affect almost all major microprocessor chips, and that could enable hackers to steal information from personal computers as well as cloud computing services — was announced on Wednesday. The news prompted a rush of fixes, ruining the holiday vacations of system administrators worldwide.
For an ordinary computer user, there is not much to panic about right now. Just keep your software updated so you receive the fixes. And consider installing an ad-blocker like uBlock Origin to protect against ads that carry malware that could exploit these vulnerabilities. That is about all you can do.
However, as a citizen of a world in which digital technology is increasingly integrated into all objects — not just phones but also cars, baby monitors and so on — it is past time to panic.
We have built the digital world too rapidly. It was constructed layer upon layer, and many of the early layers were never meant to guard so many valuable things: our personal correspondence, our finances, the very infrastructure of our lives. Design shortcuts and other techniques for optimization — in particular, sacrificing security for speed or memory space — may have made sense when computers played a relatively small role in our lives. But those early layers are now emerging as enormous liabilities. The vulnerabilities announced last week have been around for decades, perhaps lurking unnoticed by anyone or perhaps long exploited.
Almost all modern microprocessors employ tricks to squeeze more performance out of a computer program. A common trick involves having the microprocessor predict what the program is about to do and start doing it before it has been asked to do it — say, fetching data from memory. In a way, modern microprocessors act like attentive butlers, pouring that second glass of wine before you knew you were going to ask for it.
More..
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/06/opin ... d=45305309
Is art-connoisseur yet another job threatened by technology?
For the time being, science and specialists work best in tandem
High-tech methods for authenticating art played a central role in the re-attribution of “Salvator Mundi” to Leonardo da Vinci, resulting in the painting’s record-breaking auction price of $450m. This shows how important science has become to art history and to the market. But art historians will not be replaced yet. The limitations of new techniques mean that the future belongs to a partnership between technology and connoisseur
More...
https://www.economist.com/blogs/prosper ... lydispatch
For the time being, science and specialists work best in tandem
High-tech methods for authenticating art played a central role in the re-attribution of “Salvator Mundi” to Leonardo da Vinci, resulting in the painting’s record-breaking auction price of $450m. This shows how important science has become to art history and to the market. But art historians will not be replaced yet. The limitations of new techniques mean that the future belongs to a partnership between technology and connoisseur
More...
https://www.economist.com/blogs/prosper ... lydispatch
While You Were Sleeping
Donald Trump poses a huge dilemma for commentators: to ignore his daily outrages is to normalize his behavior, but to constantly write about them is to stop learning. Like others, I struggle to get this balance right, which is why I pause today to point out some incredible technological changes happening while Trump has kept us focused on him — changes that will pose as big an adaptation challenge to American workers as transitioning from farms to factories once did.
More..
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/16/opin ... dline&te=1
Donald Trump poses a huge dilemma for commentators: to ignore his daily outrages is to normalize his behavior, but to constantly write about them is to stop learning. Like others, I struggle to get this balance right, which is why I pause today to point out some incredible technological changes happening while Trump has kept us focused on him — changes that will pose as big an adaptation challenge to American workers as transitioning from farms to factories once did.
More..
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/16/opin ... dline&te=1
Artificial Intelligence’s ‘Black Box’ Is Nothing to Fear
Extract:
Perhaps the real source of critics’ concerns isn’t that we can’t “see” A.I.’s reasoning but that as A.I. gets more powerful, the human mind becomes the limiting factor. It’s that in the future, we’ll need A.I. to understand A.I. In health care as well as in other fields, this means we will soon see the creation of a category of human professionals who don’t have to make the moment-to-moment decisions themselves but instead manage a team of A.I. workers — just like commercial airplane pilots who engage autopilots to land in poor weather conditions. Doctors will no longer “drive” the primary diagnosis; instead, they’ll ensure that the diagnosis is relevant and meaningful for a patient and oversee when and how to offer more clarification and more narrative explanation. The doctor’s office of the future will very likely include computer assistants, on both the doctor’s side and the patient’s side, as well as data inputs that come from far beyond the office walls.
When that happens, it will become clear that the so-called black box of artificial intelligence is more of a feature, not a bug — because it’s more possible to capture and explain what’s going on there than it is in the human mind. None of this dismisses or ignores the need for oversight of A.I. It’s just that instead of worrying about the black box, we should focus on the opportunity and therefore better address a future where A.I. not only augments human intelligence and intuition but also perhaps even sheds light on and redefines what it means to be human in the first place.
More..
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/25/opin ... dline&te=1
Extract:
Perhaps the real source of critics’ concerns isn’t that we can’t “see” A.I.’s reasoning but that as A.I. gets more powerful, the human mind becomes the limiting factor. It’s that in the future, we’ll need A.I. to understand A.I. In health care as well as in other fields, this means we will soon see the creation of a category of human professionals who don’t have to make the moment-to-moment decisions themselves but instead manage a team of A.I. workers — just like commercial airplane pilots who engage autopilots to land in poor weather conditions. Doctors will no longer “drive” the primary diagnosis; instead, they’ll ensure that the diagnosis is relevant and meaningful for a patient and oversee when and how to offer more clarification and more narrative explanation. The doctor’s office of the future will very likely include computer assistants, on both the doctor’s side and the patient’s side, as well as data inputs that come from far beyond the office walls.
When that happens, it will become clear that the so-called black box of artificial intelligence is more of a feature, not a bug — because it’s more possible to capture and explain what’s going on there than it is in the human mind. None of this dismisses or ignores the need for oversight of A.I. It’s just that instead of worrying about the black box, we should focus on the opportunity and therefore better address a future where A.I. not only augments human intelligence and intuition but also perhaps even sheds light on and redefines what it means to be human in the first place.
More..
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/25/opin ... dline&te=1
Welcome to the Post-Text Future
I’ll make this short: The thing you’re doing now, reading prose on a screen, is going out of fashion.
We’re taking stock of the internet right now, with writers who cover the digital world cataloging some of the most consequential currents shaping it. If you probe those currents and look ahead to the coming year online, one truth becomes clear. The defining narrative of our online moment concerns the decline of text, and the exploding reach and power of audio and video.
More....
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/201 ... ernet.html
I’ll make this short: The thing you’re doing now, reading prose on a screen, is going out of fashion.
We’re taking stock of the internet right now, with writers who cover the digital world cataloging some of the most consequential currents shaping it. If you probe those currents and look ahead to the coming year online, one truth becomes clear. The defining narrative of our online moment concerns the decline of text, and the exploding reach and power of audio and video.
More....
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/201 ... ernet.html
America’s Real Digital Divide
A group of former Facebook and Google employees last week began a campaign to change the tech companies they had a hand in creating. The initiative, called Truth About Tech, aims to push these companies to make their products less addictive for children — and it’s a good start.
But there’s more to the problem. If you think middle-class children are being harmed by too much screen time, just consider how much greater the damage is to minority and disadvantaged kids, who spend much more time in front of screens.
According to a 2011 study by researchers at Northwestern University, minority children watch 50 percent more TV than their white peers, and they use computers for up to one and a half hours longer each day. White children spend eight hours and 36 minutes looking at a screen every day, according to a survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation, while black and Hispanic children spend 13 hours.
While some parents in more dangerous neighborhoods understandably think that screen time is safer than playing outside, the deleterious effects of too much screen time are abundantly clear. Screen time has a negative effect on children’s ability to understand nonverbal emotional cues; it is linked to higher rates of mental illness, including depression; and it heightens the risk for obesity.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/11/opin ... dline&te=1
A group of former Facebook and Google employees last week began a campaign to change the tech companies they had a hand in creating. The initiative, called Truth About Tech, aims to push these companies to make their products less addictive for children — and it’s a good start.
But there’s more to the problem. If you think middle-class children are being harmed by too much screen time, just consider how much greater the damage is to minority and disadvantaged kids, who spend much more time in front of screens.
According to a 2011 study by researchers at Northwestern University, minority children watch 50 percent more TV than their white peers, and they use computers for up to one and a half hours longer each day. White children spend eight hours and 36 minutes looking at a screen every day, according to a survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation, while black and Hispanic children spend 13 hours.
While some parents in more dangerous neighborhoods understandably think that screen time is safer than playing outside, the deleterious effects of too much screen time are abundantly clear. Screen time has a negative effect on children’s ability to understand nonverbal emotional cues; it is linked to higher rates of mental illness, including depression; and it heightens the risk for obesity.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/11/opin ... dline&te=1
Self-driving cars offer huge benefits—but have a dark side
Policymakers must apply the lessons of the horseless carriage to the driverless car
A NEW kind of vehicle is taking to the roads, and people are not sure what to make of it. Is it safe? How will it get along with other road users? Will it really shake up the way we travel? These questions are being asked today about autonomous vehicles (AVs). Exactly the same questions were posed when the first motor cars rumbled onto the roads. By granting drivers unprecedented freedom, automobiles changed the world. They also led to unforeseen harm, from strip malls and urban sprawl to road rage and climate change. Now AVs are poised to rewrite the rules of transport—and there is a danger that the same mistake will be made all over again.
More...
https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/ ... a/102487/n
*****
Self-driving cars need plenty of eyes on the road
Cameras, radar and even humans help to keep autonomous vehicles safe
AUTONOMOUS cars perceive the world through a combination of sensors including cameras, radar and LIDAR—a radar-like technique that uses invisible pulses of light to create a high-resolution 3D map of the surrounding area. The three complement each other. Cameras are cheap and can see street signs and road markings, but cannot measure distance; radar can measure distance and velocity, but cannot see in fine detail; LIDAR provides fine detail but is expensive and gets confused by snow. Most people working on autonomous vehicles believe a combination of sensors is needed to ensure safety and reliability.
More...
https://www.economist.com/blogs/graphic ... lydispatch
******
Why driverless cars will mostly be shared, not owned
The total number of vehicles on the roads could have halved by 2050
WHEN will you be able to buy a driverless car that will work anywhere? This commonly asked question contains three assumptions: that autonomous vehicles (AVs) will resemble cars; that people will buy them; and that they will be capable of working on all roads in all conditions. All three of those assumptions may be wrong. Although today’s experimental vehicles are modified versions of ordinary cars, with steering wheels that eerily turn by themselves, future AVs will have no steering wheel or pedals and will come in all sorts of shapes and sizes; pods capable of carrying six or eight people may prove to be the most efficient design. Rather than work everywhere, these pods will initially operate within geographically limited and well-mapped urban areas. And they will be shared “robotaxis”, summoned when needed using a ride-hailing app. The first self-driving vehicle you ride in will be shared, not owned, for a combination of technological and economic reasons.
More...
https://www.economist.com/blogs/economi ... lydispatch
Policymakers must apply the lessons of the horseless carriage to the driverless car
A NEW kind of vehicle is taking to the roads, and people are not sure what to make of it. Is it safe? How will it get along with other road users? Will it really shake up the way we travel? These questions are being asked today about autonomous vehicles (AVs). Exactly the same questions were posed when the first motor cars rumbled onto the roads. By granting drivers unprecedented freedom, automobiles changed the world. They also led to unforeseen harm, from strip malls and urban sprawl to road rage and climate change. Now AVs are poised to rewrite the rules of transport—and there is a danger that the same mistake will be made all over again.
More...
https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/ ... a/102487/n
*****
Self-driving cars need plenty of eyes on the road
Cameras, radar and even humans help to keep autonomous vehicles safe
AUTONOMOUS cars perceive the world through a combination of sensors including cameras, radar and LIDAR—a radar-like technique that uses invisible pulses of light to create a high-resolution 3D map of the surrounding area. The three complement each other. Cameras are cheap and can see street signs and road markings, but cannot measure distance; radar can measure distance and velocity, but cannot see in fine detail; LIDAR provides fine detail but is expensive and gets confused by snow. Most people working on autonomous vehicles believe a combination of sensors is needed to ensure safety and reliability.
More...
https://www.economist.com/blogs/graphic ... lydispatch
******
Why driverless cars will mostly be shared, not owned
The total number of vehicles on the roads could have halved by 2050
WHEN will you be able to buy a driverless car that will work anywhere? This commonly asked question contains three assumptions: that autonomous vehicles (AVs) will resemble cars; that people will buy them; and that they will be capable of working on all roads in all conditions. All three of those assumptions may be wrong. Although today’s experimental vehicles are modified versions of ordinary cars, with steering wheels that eerily turn by themselves, future AVs will have no steering wheel or pedals and will come in all sorts of shapes and sizes; pods capable of carrying six or eight people may prove to be the most efficient design. Rather than work everywhere, these pods will initially operate within geographically limited and well-mapped urban areas. And they will be shared “robotaxis”, summoned when needed using a ride-hailing app. The first self-driving vehicle you ride in will be shared, not owned, for a combination of technological and economic reasons.
More...
https://www.economist.com/blogs/economi ... lydispatch
Free as a bird
Passenger drones are a better kind of flying car
Could the dream of soaring above the traffic come true?
TRAVELLERS have long envied the birds. In 1842 William Henson, a British lacemaker, somewhat optimistically filed a patent for an “aerial steam carriage”. It took another 60 years and the arrival of the internal combustion engine before Orville and Wilbur Wright flew the first practical aeroplane. In the 1920s Henry Ford began tinkering with the idea of making cars fly. “You may smile,” he said. “But it will come.” In 1970 his company considered marketing the Aerocar, one of the few flying-car designs that managed to gain an airworthiness certificate.
Yet flying cars have never taken off. That is not because they are impossible to build, but because they are, fundamentally, a compromise, neither good on the road nor graceful in the sky. They are also inconvenient. Most designs require a runway to take off and land, and a pilot’s licence to operate. But that is changing. Developments in electric power, batteries and autonomous-flight systems have led to a boom in sales of small drone aircraft. Several entrepreneurs have had the idea of scaling up such machines to the point that people can fit inside them. The ultimate goal is a pilotless passenger drone that can either be parked outside your house like an ordinary car, or even summoned with a smartphone app, like a taxi.
More...
https://www.economist.com/news/science- ... rm=2018038
Passenger drones are a better kind of flying car
Could the dream of soaring above the traffic come true?
TRAVELLERS have long envied the birds. In 1842 William Henson, a British lacemaker, somewhat optimistically filed a patent for an “aerial steam carriage”. It took another 60 years and the arrival of the internal combustion engine before Orville and Wilbur Wright flew the first practical aeroplane. In the 1920s Henry Ford began tinkering with the idea of making cars fly. “You may smile,” he said. “But it will come.” In 1970 his company considered marketing the Aerocar, one of the few flying-car designs that managed to gain an airworthiness certificate.
Yet flying cars have never taken off. That is not because they are impossible to build, but because they are, fundamentally, a compromise, neither good on the road nor graceful in the sky. They are also inconvenient. Most designs require a runway to take off and land, and a pilot’s licence to operate. But that is changing. Developments in electric power, batteries and autonomous-flight systems have led to a boom in sales of small drone aircraft. Several entrepreneurs have had the idea of scaling up such machines to the point that people can fit inside them. The ultimate goal is a pilotless passenger drone that can either be parked outside your house like an ordinary car, or even summoned with a smartphone app, like a taxi.
More...
https://www.economist.com/news/science- ... rm=2018038
How to Make A.I. That’s Good for People
For a field that was not well known outside of academia a decade ago, artificial intelligence has grown dizzyingly fast. Tech companies from Silicon Valley to Beijing are betting everything on it, venture capitalists are pouring billions into research and development, and start-ups are being created on what seems like a daily basis. If our era is the next Industrial Revolution, as many claim, A.I. is surely one of its driving forces.
It is an especially exciting time for a researcher like me. When I was a graduate student in computer science in the early 2000s, computers were barely able to detect sharp edges in photographs, let alone recognize something as loosely defined as a human face. But thanks to the growth of big data, advances in algorithms like neural networks and an abundance of powerful computer hardware, something momentous has occurred: A.I. has gone from an academic niche to the leading differentiator in a wide range of industries, including manufacturing, health care, transportation and retail.
I worry, however, that enthusiasm for A.I. is preventing us from reckoning with its looming effects on society. Despite its name, there is nothing “artificial” about this technology — it is made by humans, intended to behave like humans and affects humans. So if we want it to play a positive role in tomorrow’s world, it must be guided by human concerns.
I call this approach “human-centered A.I.” It consists of three goals that can help responsibly guide the development of intelligent machines.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/07/opin ... dline&te=1
For a field that was not well known outside of academia a decade ago, artificial intelligence has grown dizzyingly fast. Tech companies from Silicon Valley to Beijing are betting everything on it, venture capitalists are pouring billions into research and development, and start-ups are being created on what seems like a daily basis. If our era is the next Industrial Revolution, as many claim, A.I. is surely one of its driving forces.
It is an especially exciting time for a researcher like me. When I was a graduate student in computer science in the early 2000s, computers were barely able to detect sharp edges in photographs, let alone recognize something as loosely defined as a human face. But thanks to the growth of big data, advances in algorithms like neural networks and an abundance of powerful computer hardware, something momentous has occurred: A.I. has gone from an academic niche to the leading differentiator in a wide range of industries, including manufacturing, health care, transportation and retail.
I worry, however, that enthusiasm for A.I. is preventing us from reckoning with its looming effects on society. Despite its name, there is nothing “artificial” about this technology — it is made by humans, intended to behave like humans and affects humans. So if we want it to play a positive role in tomorrow’s world, it must be guided by human concerns.
I call this approach “human-centered A.I.” It consists of three goals that can help responsibly guide the development of intelligent machines.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/07/opin ... dline&te=1
Google Researchers Are Learning How Machines Learn
SAN FRANCISCO — Machines are starting to learn tasks on their own. They are identifying faces, recognizing spoken words, reading medical scans and even carrying on their own conversations.
All this is done through so-called neural networks, which are complex computer algorithms that learn tasks by analyzing vast amounts of data. But these neural networks create a problem that scientists are trying to solve: It is not always easy to tell how the machines arrive at their conclusions.
On Tuesday, a team at Google took a small step toward addressing this issue with the unveiling of new research that offers the rough outlines of technology that shows how the machines are arriving at their decisions.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/06/tech ... dline&te=1
SAN FRANCISCO — Machines are starting to learn tasks on their own. They are identifying faces, recognizing spoken words, reading medical scans and even carrying on their own conversations.
All this is done through so-called neural networks, which are complex computer algorithms that learn tasks by analyzing vast amounts of data. But these neural networks create a problem that scientists are trying to solve: It is not always easy to tell how the machines arrive at their conclusions.
On Tuesday, a team at Google took a small step toward addressing this issue with the unveiling of new research that offers the rough outlines of technology that shows how the machines are arriving at their decisions.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/06/tech ... dline&te=1
University Health Network is continent’s top organ transplant program
System that enables doctors to preserve organs outside the body for hours helped UHN complete 639 adult organ transplants in 2017.
Excerpt:
The milestone is due, in part, to the Toronto XVIVO Perfusion System, which preserves organs outside of body so they can be used safely for transplant. Organs are recovered from donors who have died. The organs receive oxygen and nutrients that enable them to be preserved outside body for up to 20 hours. Dr. Shaf Keshavjee, surgeon-in-chief at the University Health Network, is the architect of XVIVO.
With XVIVO, doctors can take organs, Keshavjee said, that “we normally would turn down, and evaluate them and treat them and make them better so we can use … (them).” He says the system is “the single biggest contributor to increasing the numbers of organs we can use for saving more lives.”
While the technology was first used for lungs, it can be used for the liver and kidney, and research on using it for the heart has begun.
Keshavjee said doctors in the United States and Europe use XVIVO, too. He talks to doctors at conferences to explain how the system works.
Organs can’t be transplanted without organ donors, and organ donation in Ontario has grown quickly; since 2008, the number of deceased organ donors in Ontario increased by 98 per cent. In 2017, there were 347 deceased organ donors in Ontario, compared to 175 in 2008. In 2008, 16 per cent of Ontarians were registered to donate their organs. The number nearly doubled to 30 per cent in 2017.
“One person can save eight people’s lives and change eight people’s lives,” said Keshavjee, referring to the eight organs a person can donate.
More...
https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2018/0 ... ogram.html
System that enables doctors to preserve organs outside the body for hours helped UHN complete 639 adult organ transplants in 2017.
Excerpt:
The milestone is due, in part, to the Toronto XVIVO Perfusion System, which preserves organs outside of body so they can be used safely for transplant. Organs are recovered from donors who have died. The organs receive oxygen and nutrients that enable them to be preserved outside body for up to 20 hours. Dr. Shaf Keshavjee, surgeon-in-chief at the University Health Network, is the architect of XVIVO.
With XVIVO, doctors can take organs, Keshavjee said, that “we normally would turn down, and evaluate them and treat them and make them better so we can use … (them).” He says the system is “the single biggest contributor to increasing the numbers of organs we can use for saving more lives.”
While the technology was first used for lungs, it can be used for the liver and kidney, and research on using it for the heart has begun.
Keshavjee said doctors in the United States and Europe use XVIVO, too. He talks to doctors at conferences to explain how the system works.
Organs can’t be transplanted without organ donors, and organ donation in Ontario has grown quickly; since 2008, the number of deceased organ donors in Ontario increased by 98 per cent. In 2017, there were 347 deceased organ donors in Ontario, compared to 175 in 2008. In 2008, 16 per cent of Ontarians were registered to donate their organs. The number nearly doubled to 30 per cent in 2017.
“One person can save eight people’s lives and change eight people’s lives,” said Keshavjee, referring to the eight organs a person can donate.
More...
https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2018/0 ... ogram.html
Avoiding Collisions in Outer Space
A revolution is afoot in space. As the use of satellites transforms from a national and military-led enterprise to one dominated by businesses, governments worldwide are playing catch-up with the rules and regulations that apply. It’s now possible for a private enterprise with headquarters in the United States to launch Argentine satellites from New Zealand’s soil.
The gaps in international regulations and coordination became clear recently when a California-based start-up, Swarm Technologies, launched four tiny satellites called SpaceBees on an Indian rocket, over the objection of the Federal Communications Commission. Among other things, the F.C.C. is responsible for making sure satellites are trackable by the government’s Space Surveillance Network to minimize the chance of collisions. The SpaceBees were so small (about 4 inches by 4 inches by 1 inch) that the network could not regularly track them, though a private tracking service, LeoLabs, says it has been tracking them since the launch.
Several new space start-ups are planning enormous “mega-constellations” of hundreds or even thousands of satellites in low Earth orbit (about 100 miles to 1,250 miles in altitude) in the next decade, and these too will challenge the regulatory framework. Only about a thousand or so operational satellites are in that region now, so the mega-constellation trend portends an increase of more than tenfold in active satellites in low Earth orbit, all within a matter of years.
How much distance should separate these various constellations so that any collision in one doesn’t create havoc for those in higher or lower orbits? Currently, orbital slots in low Earth orbit are not assigned — you launch to wherever you like — but this laissez-faire attitude may soon need revisiting.
Collisions in space have already occurred and can create thousands of debris particles. This threat will only grow unless new protocols are introduced and enforced. Debris in orbit can cause a chain reaction of collisions, creating more and more debris and putting certain orbital bands off limits.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/opin ... dline&te=1
A revolution is afoot in space. As the use of satellites transforms from a national and military-led enterprise to one dominated by businesses, governments worldwide are playing catch-up with the rules and regulations that apply. It’s now possible for a private enterprise with headquarters in the United States to launch Argentine satellites from New Zealand’s soil.
The gaps in international regulations and coordination became clear recently when a California-based start-up, Swarm Technologies, launched four tiny satellites called SpaceBees on an Indian rocket, over the objection of the Federal Communications Commission. Among other things, the F.C.C. is responsible for making sure satellites are trackable by the government’s Space Surveillance Network to minimize the chance of collisions. The SpaceBees were so small (about 4 inches by 4 inches by 1 inch) that the network could not regularly track them, though a private tracking service, LeoLabs, says it has been tracking them since the launch.
Several new space start-ups are planning enormous “mega-constellations” of hundreds or even thousands of satellites in low Earth orbit (about 100 miles to 1,250 miles in altitude) in the next decade, and these too will challenge the regulatory framework. Only about a thousand or so operational satellites are in that region now, so the mega-constellation trend portends an increase of more than tenfold in active satellites in low Earth orbit, all within a matter of years.
How much distance should separate these various constellations so that any collision in one doesn’t create havoc for those in higher or lower orbits? Currently, orbital slots in low Earth orbit are not assigned — you launch to wherever you like — but this laissez-faire attitude may soon need revisiting.
Collisions in space have already occurred and can create thousands of debris particles. This threat will only grow unless new protocols are introduced and enforced. Debris in orbit can cause a chain reaction of collisions, creating more and more debris and putting certain orbital bands off limits.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/opin ... dline&te=1
AI-spy
The workplace of the future
As artificial intelligence pushes beyond the tech industry, work could become fairer—or more oppressive
ARTIFICIAL intelligence (AI) is barging its way into business. As our special report this week explains, firms of all types are harnessing AI to forecast demand, hire workers and deal with customers. In 2017 companies spent around $22bn on AI-related mergers and acquisitions, about 26 times more than in 2015. The McKinsey Global Institute, a think-tank within a consultancy, reckons that just applying AI to marketing, sales and supply chains could create economic value, including profits and efficiencies, of $2.7trn over the next 20 years. Google’s boss has gone so far as to declare that AI will do more for humanity than fire or electricity.
Such grandiose forecasts kindle anxiety as well as hope. Many fret that AI could destroy jobs faster than it creates them. Barriers to entry from owning and generating data could lead to a handful of dominant firms in every industry.
More...
https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/ ... m=20180328
The workplace of the future
As artificial intelligence pushes beyond the tech industry, work could become fairer—or more oppressive
ARTIFICIAL intelligence (AI) is barging its way into business. As our special report this week explains, firms of all types are harnessing AI to forecast demand, hire workers and deal with customers. In 2017 companies spent around $22bn on AI-related mergers and acquisitions, about 26 times more than in 2015. The McKinsey Global Institute, a think-tank within a consultancy, reckons that just applying AI to marketing, sales and supply chains could create economic value, including profits and efficiencies, of $2.7trn over the next 20 years. Google’s boss has gone so far as to declare that AI will do more for humanity than fire or electricity.
Such grandiose forecasts kindle anxiety as well as hope. Many fret that AI could destroy jobs faster than it creates them. Barriers to entry from owning and generating data could lead to a handful of dominant firms in every industry.
More...
https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/ ... m=20180328
How Do You Count Endangered Species? Look to the Stars
Excerpt:
The scientists developed a system of drones and special cameras that can record rare and endangered species on the ground, day or night. Computer-vision and machine-learning techniques that help researchers study the universe’s oldest and most distant galaxies can now be used to find animals in video footage.
Claire Burke, an astrophysicist at the university now leading the project, presented the team’s latest findings at the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science on Tuesday.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/05/scie ... dline&te=1
Excerpt:
The scientists developed a system of drones and special cameras that can record rare and endangered species on the ground, day or night. Computer-vision and machine-learning techniques that help researchers study the universe’s oldest and most distant galaxies can now be used to find animals in video footage.
Claire Burke, an astrophysicist at the university now leading the project, presented the team’s latest findings at the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science on Tuesday.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/05/scie ... dline&te=1
An enzyme that digests plastic could boost recycling
A MILLION plastic bottles are sold every minute. Many are not recycled and of those that are, only a small fraction become bottles again. That is, in part, because recycling polyethylene terephthalate (PET), the polymer used to make such bottles, back into material robust enough to hold, say, a fizzy drink, is hard. What would be helpful is a way to break down PET into the chemicals that made it in the first place. These could then be used to make new high-grade PET.
This week John McGeehan of the University of Portsmouth, in Britain, and his colleagues report details of a bacterial enzyme called “PETase” that can do just that. Furthermore, they have engineered a version of this enzyme that can digest plastic faster than the natural variety. Their work is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
More...
https://www.economist.com/news/science- ... m=20180417
A MILLION plastic bottles are sold every minute. Many are not recycled and of those that are, only a small fraction become bottles again. That is, in part, because recycling polyethylene terephthalate (PET), the polymer used to make such bottles, back into material robust enough to hold, say, a fizzy drink, is hard. What would be helpful is a way to break down PET into the chemicals that made it in the first place. These could then be used to make new high-grade PET.
This week John McGeehan of the University of Portsmouth, in Britain, and his colleagues report details of a bacterial enzyme called “PETase” that can do just that. Furthermore, they have engineered a version of this enzyme that can digest plastic faster than the natural variety. Their work is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
More...
https://www.economist.com/news/science- ... m=20180417
IKEA furniture and the limits of AI
Humans have had a good run. But with the most recent breakthrough in robotics, it is clear that their time as masters of planet Earth has come to an end
COMPUTERS have already proved better than people at playing chess and diagnosing diseases. But now a group of artificial-intelligence researchers in Singapore have managed to teach industrial robots to assemble an IKEA chair—for the first time uniting the worlds of Allen keys and Alan Turing. Now that machines have mastered one of the most baffling ways of spending a Saturday afternoon, can it be long before AIs rise up and enslave human beings in the silicon mines?
The research also holds a serious message. It highlights a deep truth about the limitations of automation. Machines excel at the sorts of abstract, cognitive tasks that, to people, signify intelligence—complex board games, say, or differential calculus. But they struggle with physical jobs, such as navigating a cluttered room, which are so simple that they hardly seem to count as intelligence at all. The IKEAbots are a case in point. It took a pair of them, pre-programmed by humans, more than 20 minutes to assemble a chair that a person could knock together in a fraction of the time (see article).
More...
https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/ ... m=20180419
Humans have had a good run. But with the most recent breakthrough in robotics, it is clear that their time as masters of planet Earth has come to an end
COMPUTERS have already proved better than people at playing chess and diagnosing diseases. But now a group of artificial-intelligence researchers in Singapore have managed to teach industrial robots to assemble an IKEA chair—for the first time uniting the worlds of Allen keys and Alan Turing. Now that machines have mastered one of the most baffling ways of spending a Saturday afternoon, can it be long before AIs rise up and enslave human beings in the silicon mines?
The research also holds a serious message. It highlights a deep truth about the limitations of automation. Machines excel at the sorts of abstract, cognitive tasks that, to people, signify intelligence—complex board games, say, or differential calculus. But they struggle with physical jobs, such as navigating a cluttered room, which are so simple that they hardly seem to count as intelligence at all. The IKEAbots are a case in point. It took a pair of them, pre-programmed by humans, more than 20 minutes to assemble a chair that a person could knock together in a fraction of the time (see article).
More...
https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/ ... m=20180419
‘Whole Again’: A Vet Maimed by an I.E.D. Receives a Transplanted Penis
BALTIMORE — In a 14-hour operation, a young military veteran whose genitals were blown off by a bomb received an extraordinary transplant: a penis, scrotum and portion of the abdominal wall, taken from a deceased organ donor.
The surgery, performed last month at Johns Hopkins Hospital, was the most complex and extensive penis transplant to date, and the first performed on a combat veteran maimed by a blast.
Two other successful penis transplants have been performed — in South Africa in 2014 and at the Massachusetts General Hospital in 2016 — but they involved only the organ itself, not the scrotum or surrounding flesh. This latest operation transplanted a single piece of tissue that measured 10 inches by 11 inches and weighed four or five pounds.
This is an evolving branch of medicine spurred in large part by the wounds of war — particularly the blast injuries from improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.s. The medical teams in Baltimore and Boston have spent years preparing for the surgery, practicing on cadavers and refining their techniques.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/23/heal ... dline&te=1
BALTIMORE — In a 14-hour operation, a young military veteran whose genitals were blown off by a bomb received an extraordinary transplant: a penis, scrotum and portion of the abdominal wall, taken from a deceased organ donor.
The surgery, performed last month at Johns Hopkins Hospital, was the most complex and extensive penis transplant to date, and the first performed on a combat veteran maimed by a blast.
Two other successful penis transplants have been performed — in South Africa in 2014 and at the Massachusetts General Hospital in 2016 — but they involved only the organ itself, not the scrotum or surrounding flesh. This latest operation transplanted a single piece of tissue that measured 10 inches by 11 inches and weighed four or five pounds.
This is an evolving branch of medicine spurred in large part by the wounds of war — particularly the blast injuries from improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.s. The medical teams in Baltimore and Boston have spent years preparing for the surgery, practicing on cadavers and refining their techniques.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/23/heal ... dline&te=1
Would You Grow Your Baby In An Artificial Womb?
Imagine, for a minute, that you haven't been born yet (a bit of a stretch, I know, but stay with me).
You don't know whether you're going to come out male or female, and you can choose to enter one of two worlds. First you're offered Society A, in which one biological sex carries and births babies, taking on the risks of becoming ill or dying in childbirth. Or you can opt for Society B, where all embryos grow safely in artificial wombs. What would you do?
That's the question Anna Smajdor, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Oslo, wants us to ask ourselves. She's calling for more research into something called ectogenesis, an umbrella term for technology that allows babies to be grown artificially outside the womb.
'Being pregnant and giving birth are still significantly risky for women's health and, in other contexts, similar levels of risk are treated as very serious problems,' Smajdor tells me. 'A woman is more likely to die in pregnancy or childbirth than from measles, if she catches it. And yet we have big public health campaigns against measles.'
At the moment, it is not possible to grow a baby outside the womb for the full 40 weeks of pregnancy. But Dr Carlo Bulletti, a fertility specialist with more than 40 years' experience researching reproductive medicine, believes it could be in a decade's time.
'If there was adequate financial support, I think 10 years would be reasonable,' he says. 'The benefits of ectogenesis from a scientific point of view are enormous.'
More...
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/health/family ... ailsignout
Imagine, for a minute, that you haven't been born yet (a bit of a stretch, I know, but stay with me).
You don't know whether you're going to come out male or female, and you can choose to enter one of two worlds. First you're offered Society A, in which one biological sex carries and births babies, taking on the risks of becoming ill or dying in childbirth. Or you can opt for Society B, where all embryos grow safely in artificial wombs. What would you do?
That's the question Anna Smajdor, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Oslo, wants us to ask ourselves. She's calling for more research into something called ectogenesis, an umbrella term for technology that allows babies to be grown artificially outside the womb.
'Being pregnant and giving birth are still significantly risky for women's health and, in other contexts, similar levels of risk are treated as very serious problems,' Smajdor tells me. 'A woman is more likely to die in pregnancy or childbirth than from measles, if she catches it. And yet we have big public health campaigns against measles.'
At the moment, it is not possible to grow a baby outside the womb for the full 40 weeks of pregnancy. But Dr Carlo Bulletti, a fertility specialist with more than 40 years' experience researching reproductive medicine, believes it could be in a decade's time.
'If there was adequate financial support, I think 10 years would be reasonable,' he says. 'The benefits of ectogenesis from a scientific point of view are enormous.'
More...
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/health/family ... ailsignout
The next frontier: when thoughts control machines | The Economist
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91qx0LM ... m=20180518
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91qx0LM ... m=20180518
Shoemakers bring bespoke footwear to the high street
Using laser scanners and 3D printers
AMONG the boutiques in the canal district of Amsterdam is a shoe shop, called W-21, that has a selection of stylish footwear in the window. A select group of customers were recently invited there to have their feet scanned by a laser, and then to spend 30 seconds walking on a modified treadmill in a special pair of shoes stuffed with accelerometers, pressure gauges, thermometers and hygrometers. All this generated a wealth of data, which was displayed on a large screen along with a model of how the walker’s feet were moving.
From these data an algorithm determined the ideal soles for the customer’s shoes. Upstairs, a couple of 3D printers began humming away to make those soles. In about two hours they were ready to be fitted to a new pair of shoes, uniquely tailored to each person’s feet.
More...
https://www.economist.com/science-and-t ... m=20180522
Using laser scanners and 3D printers
AMONG the boutiques in the canal district of Amsterdam is a shoe shop, called W-21, that has a selection of stylish footwear in the window. A select group of customers were recently invited there to have their feet scanned by a laser, and then to spend 30 seconds walking on a modified treadmill in a special pair of shoes stuffed with accelerometers, pressure gauges, thermometers and hygrometers. All this generated a wealth of data, which was displayed on a large screen along with a model of how the walker’s feet were moving.
From these data an algorithm determined the ideal soles for the customer’s shoes. Upstairs, a couple of 3D printers began humming away to make those soles. In about two hours they were ready to be fitted to a new pair of shoes, uniquely tailored to each person’s feet.
More...
https://www.economist.com/science-and-t ... m=20180522
Lavatory Laboratory
How sanitation is following the cell phone model.
Our humble toilet has shaped civilization. Starting in 19th-century Britain, it spread throughout the industrialized world, eliminated recurring cholera epidemics, and contributed to the doubling of lifespans. But its spread was not universal. Dozens of countries could not afford to build the sewer system that toilets rely on, leaving a present-day 2.5 billion people subject to preventable plagues considered history in the industrialized world. Every year, this sewage shortcoming translates into the deaths of about 1.5 million children under 5 from diarrheal diseases. Annually, 100,000 people die from cholera.
Efforts to invest in sewer systems have stalled in several low-income nations, and now there is a growing sentiment that the answer to today’s sanitation dilemmas should not rely on today’s toilets anyway. Like mobile phones that have bypassed the need for a cabled telephone infrastructure, some engineers, designers, and humanitarian workers argue not for better sewage systems, but for smarter toilets. The future toilet, they say, must be self-contained.
More...
http://nautil.us/issue/60/searches/lava ... 3-60760513
How sanitation is following the cell phone model.
Our humble toilet has shaped civilization. Starting in 19th-century Britain, it spread throughout the industrialized world, eliminated recurring cholera epidemics, and contributed to the doubling of lifespans. But its spread was not universal. Dozens of countries could not afford to build the sewer system that toilets rely on, leaving a present-day 2.5 billion people subject to preventable plagues considered history in the industrialized world. Every year, this sewage shortcoming translates into the deaths of about 1.5 million children under 5 from diarrheal diseases. Annually, 100,000 people die from cholera.
Efforts to invest in sewer systems have stalled in several low-income nations, and now there is a growing sentiment that the answer to today’s sanitation dilemmas should not rely on today’s toilets anyway. Like mobile phones that have bypassed the need for a cabled telephone infrastructure, some engineers, designers, and humanitarian workers argue not for better sewage systems, but for smarter toilets. The future toilet, they say, must be self-contained.
More...
http://nautil.us/issue/60/searches/lava ... 3-60760513
Data Subjects of the World, Unite!
Excerpt:
A data subject is defined as “a natural person” inside or outside the European Union whose personal data is used by “a controller or processor”; in a curious inversion, it is individuals who are the subjects of data, not the data that is secondary to the individual.
The term started appearing in privacy regulations in the early 1980s. But it is mainly because of the internet that our digital lives have actually become de-territorialized. Our bodies can only be in one place at a time, but data can be in multiple locations at once. Digital information is split up, fragmented, multiplied and dispersed. We don’t always know where our files, emails and photos are stored; who ends up mining them for information; or how those mining them put the insights they gather to use.
What matters to regulators is whether the company collecting and processing your data is in the European Union, and, if it’s outside the union, whether it offers these services to or monitors people who are in Europe. The privacy law essentially compels companies operating globally to play by stricter European Union rules if they want to keep doing business there. It entitles us “data subjects” to move our information from one platform to another; to know how and by whom it is being used; and to contest a decision made by an algorithm, among other things. By reaching extraterritorially, regulators make it harder for companies to shop around for friendly jurisdictions to avoid these rules.
In broader terms, the regulation is an attempt to make sense of newly complex and decentralized relationships among individuals, their data, the state and the private sector that have emerged under globalization.
These are relationships we negotiate and renegotiate every day.
The artist James Bridle explores this process in Citizen Ex, a browser extension that uses the domains of the websites visited by people using the browser to determine where they appear to be “from.” Online, individuals “pass through time, space and law”; reduced to their browsing activities, they appear as “a collection of data extending across many nations, with a different citizenship and different rights in every place.” The tool can yield surprising results. I consider myself a citizen of the world, but lately, my browsing habits have been embarrassingly provincial: Although I’m not a United States citizen, I appear overwhelmingly American, with a smattering of Singapore, Ireland, France and Germany.
Mr. Bridle’s term for this form of belonging is “algorithmic citizenship”: a decentralized and fragmented status. It can be split “into an infinite number of sub-citizenships,” and it can “produce combinations of affiliations to different states.”
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/28/opin ... urope.html
Excerpt:
A data subject is defined as “a natural person” inside or outside the European Union whose personal data is used by “a controller or processor”; in a curious inversion, it is individuals who are the subjects of data, not the data that is secondary to the individual.
The term started appearing in privacy regulations in the early 1980s. But it is mainly because of the internet that our digital lives have actually become de-territorialized. Our bodies can only be in one place at a time, but data can be in multiple locations at once. Digital information is split up, fragmented, multiplied and dispersed. We don’t always know where our files, emails and photos are stored; who ends up mining them for information; or how those mining them put the insights they gather to use.
What matters to regulators is whether the company collecting and processing your data is in the European Union, and, if it’s outside the union, whether it offers these services to or monitors people who are in Europe. The privacy law essentially compels companies operating globally to play by stricter European Union rules if they want to keep doing business there. It entitles us “data subjects” to move our information from one platform to another; to know how and by whom it is being used; and to contest a decision made by an algorithm, among other things. By reaching extraterritorially, regulators make it harder for companies to shop around for friendly jurisdictions to avoid these rules.
In broader terms, the regulation is an attempt to make sense of newly complex and decentralized relationships among individuals, their data, the state and the private sector that have emerged under globalization.
These are relationships we negotiate and renegotiate every day.
The artist James Bridle explores this process in Citizen Ex, a browser extension that uses the domains of the websites visited by people using the browser to determine where they appear to be “from.” Online, individuals “pass through time, space and law”; reduced to their browsing activities, they appear as “a collection of data extending across many nations, with a different citizenship and different rights in every place.” The tool can yield surprising results. I consider myself a citizen of the world, but lately, my browsing habits have been embarrassingly provincial: Although I’m not a United States citizen, I appear overwhelmingly American, with a smattering of Singapore, Ireland, France and Germany.
Mr. Bridle’s term for this form of belonging is “algorithmic citizenship”: a decentralized and fragmented status. It can be split “into an infinite number of sub-citizenships,” and it can “produce combinations of affiliations to different states.”
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/28/opin ... urope.html
Does China’s digital police state have echoes in the West?
The state can gather more information, more easily, than ever before. Do not underestimate the risks
THEY’RE watching you. When you walk to work, CCTV cameras film you and, increasingly, recognise your face. Drive out of town, and number-plate-reading cameras capture your journey. The smartphone in your pocket leaves a constant digital trail. Browse the web in the privacy of your home, and your actions are logged and analysed. The resulting data can be crunched to create a minute-by-minute record of your life.
Under an authoritarian government such as China’s, digital monitoring is turning a nasty police state into a terrifying, all-knowing one. Especially in the western region of Xinjiang, China is applying artificial intelligence (AI) and mass surveillance to create a 21st-century panopticon and impose total control over millions of Uighurs, a Turkic-language Muslim minority (see Briefing). In Western democracies, police and intelligence agencies are using the same surveillance tools to solve and deter crimes and prevent terrorism (see Technology Quarterly). The results are effective, yet deeply worrying.
More...
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2018/ ... m=20180531
The state can gather more information, more easily, than ever before. Do not underestimate the risks
THEY’RE watching you. When you walk to work, CCTV cameras film you and, increasingly, recognise your face. Drive out of town, and number-plate-reading cameras capture your journey. The smartphone in your pocket leaves a constant digital trail. Browse the web in the privacy of your home, and your actions are logged and analysed. The resulting data can be crunched to create a minute-by-minute record of your life.
Under an authoritarian government such as China’s, digital monitoring is turning a nasty police state into a terrifying, all-knowing one. Especially in the western region of Xinjiang, China is applying artificial intelligence (AI) and mass surveillance to create a 21st-century panopticon and impose total control over millions of Uighurs, a Turkic-language Muslim minority (see Briefing). In Western democracies, police and intelligence agencies are using the same surveillance tools to solve and deter crimes and prevent terrorism (see Technology Quarterly). The results are effective, yet deeply worrying.
More...
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2018/ ... m=20180531
A CRISPR Pioneer on Gene Editing: 'We Shouldn't Screw It Up'
Feng Zhang says many problems still have to be solved before the technology can be used to treat human diseases.
The first thing many people notice about Feng Zhang—nearly every article written about him acknowledges it—is his relative youth. At just 36, with glasses and a round face that make him look even younger, the biologist has already made two discoveries tipped to win Nobel Prizes.
The big one, the one that shot Zhang to scientific celebrity, is crispr: a gene-editing tool that could allow precise alterations to human DNA. Crispr is already being hyped as a cure for genetic diseases, a treatment for cancer, and a potential tool for creating designer babies. (We’ll get to all that.)
Full interview at:
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/arc ... up/561932/
Feng Zhang says many problems still have to be solved before the technology can be used to treat human diseases.
The first thing many people notice about Feng Zhang—nearly every article written about him acknowledges it—is his relative youth. At just 36, with glasses and a round face that make him look even younger, the biologist has already made two discoveries tipped to win Nobel Prizes.
The big one, the one that shot Zhang to scientific celebrity, is crispr: a gene-editing tool that could allow precise alterations to human DNA. Crispr is already being hyped as a cure for genetic diseases, a treatment for cancer, and a potential tool for creating designer babies. (We’ll get to all that.)
Full interview at:
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/arc ... up/561932/
We Are Merging With Robots. That’s a Good Thing.
The old boundaries of the human self are being blurred by technology. The risks are real, but the potential is astounding.
Here are some things that are true today:
Artificial intelligences already outperform us at many tasks and are now able to train themselves to reach competencies (in restricted domains such as chess or Go) that we can barely comprehend.
The controlled use of hallucinogenics and other drugs may soon be part of mainstream therapy for depression, loss, anxiety and other conditions.
Sex and companionship robots are already here.
Entirely new forms of sensory perception, such as the North Sense, are becoming possible, and human brains look fluid enough to make use of just about any reliable stream of information and control opportunity.
The human genome itself is now an object of control and intervention.
Gender is becoming more visibly fluid than ever before, and there is emerging a place in human society for a wonderfully wide spectrum of ways of being (personally, politically and sexually).
One new tool for exploring some of that spectrum will be the use of immersive interactive virtual realities, such as the BeAnotherLab.
Technological devices like cellphones and tablets are being used to help offset types of biological damage, such as a highly impaired memory, that just a few decades ago would have condemned victims to constant care.
Sports for people with disabilities, whether adaptive or para-sports, are positively expanding our images of health and fitness in ways that would have been hard to imagine just a few decades ago.
Neuro-enhancement, the improvement by drugs, practices, or implants of normal mental functioning, is possible and may soon become the norm.
What does it mean to live in this kind of emerging world? It is to live in a world marked more by possibility, fluidity, change and negotiability than by outdated images of fixed natures and capacities. This is a world of remarkable personal and social possibility. Sharing and group solidarity are now easier than ever before, and the communal mapping of new electronic trails is enabling multiple once-hidden demographics to command social, commercial and political respect. It’s a world where human intelligence itself is poised for repair and reinvention. And one whose bedrock nature is itself becoming fluid, as digital overlays augment reality with personalized pointers (the information-rich cousins of the contemporary elves and pixies of Pokémon Go). It’s also a world permeated by a growing swath of alien intelligences (just ask Alexa, although she won’t really admit it).
More....
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/13/opin ... dline&te=1
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There Will Never Be an Age of Artificial Intimacy
Robots may be better than nothing, but they still won’t be enough.
Excerpt:
This girl had grown up in the time of Siri, a conversational object presented as an empathy machine — a thing that could understand her. And so it seemed natural to her that other machines would expand the range of conversation. But there is something she may have been too young to understand — or, like a lot of us — prone to forget when we talk to machines. These robots can perform empathy in a conversation about your friend, your mother, your child or your lover, but they have no experience of any of these relationships. Machines have not known the arc of a human life. They feel nothing of the human loss or love we describe to them. Their conversations about life occupy the realm of the as-if.
More....
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/11/opin ... dline&te=1
The old boundaries of the human self are being blurred by technology. The risks are real, but the potential is astounding.
Here are some things that are true today:
Artificial intelligences already outperform us at many tasks and are now able to train themselves to reach competencies (in restricted domains such as chess or Go) that we can barely comprehend.
The controlled use of hallucinogenics and other drugs may soon be part of mainstream therapy for depression, loss, anxiety and other conditions.
Sex and companionship robots are already here.
Entirely new forms of sensory perception, such as the North Sense, are becoming possible, and human brains look fluid enough to make use of just about any reliable stream of information and control opportunity.
The human genome itself is now an object of control and intervention.
Gender is becoming more visibly fluid than ever before, and there is emerging a place in human society for a wonderfully wide spectrum of ways of being (personally, politically and sexually).
One new tool for exploring some of that spectrum will be the use of immersive interactive virtual realities, such as the BeAnotherLab.
Technological devices like cellphones and tablets are being used to help offset types of biological damage, such as a highly impaired memory, that just a few decades ago would have condemned victims to constant care.
Sports for people with disabilities, whether adaptive or para-sports, are positively expanding our images of health and fitness in ways that would have been hard to imagine just a few decades ago.
Neuro-enhancement, the improvement by drugs, practices, or implants of normal mental functioning, is possible and may soon become the norm.
What does it mean to live in this kind of emerging world? It is to live in a world marked more by possibility, fluidity, change and negotiability than by outdated images of fixed natures and capacities. This is a world of remarkable personal and social possibility. Sharing and group solidarity are now easier than ever before, and the communal mapping of new electronic trails is enabling multiple once-hidden demographics to command social, commercial and political respect. It’s a world where human intelligence itself is poised for repair and reinvention. And one whose bedrock nature is itself becoming fluid, as digital overlays augment reality with personalized pointers (the information-rich cousins of the contemporary elves and pixies of Pokémon Go). It’s also a world permeated by a growing swath of alien intelligences (just ask Alexa, although she won’t really admit it).
More....
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/13/opin ... dline&te=1
********
There Will Never Be an Age of Artificial Intimacy
Robots may be better than nothing, but they still won’t be enough.
Excerpt:
This girl had grown up in the time of Siri, a conversational object presented as an empathy machine — a thing that could understand her. And so it seemed natural to her that other machines would expand the range of conversation. But there is something she may have been too young to understand — or, like a lot of us — prone to forget when we talk to machines. These robots can perform empathy in a conversation about your friend, your mother, your child or your lover, but they have no experience of any of these relationships. Machines have not known the arc of a human life. They feel nothing of the human loss or love we describe to them. Their conversations about life occupy the realm of the as-if.
More....
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/11/opin ... dline&te=1