Discipulus est prioris posterior dies
What Will the Future World be Like?!
Digitisation and robotisation of society in close connection with the rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) has become a significant feature of the progress of modern civilisation. These are revolutionary achievements that change the foundations of public order and us too. They force us to reconsider the current ideas about the role of the human in modern reality and require a thorough assessment of a philosophical nature.
The advancement of these objective processes is determined both by the entry of innovative technologies into our life and by far-sighted actions of the political elite of states. As well as by international cooperation and dominating globalisation trends.
Therefore, it is particularly important to realise the enormous potential of scientific and technological progress as well as to identify the likely risks and threats in order to develop a well-thought-out strategy to maximise the use of the achievements of human thought in the interests of society as a whole and prevent their malevolent applications....
What Will the Future World be Like?!
Digitisation and robotisation of society in close connection with the rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) has become a significant feature of the progress of modern civilisation. These are revolutionary achievements that change the foundations of public order and us too. They force us to reconsider the current ideas about the role of the human in modern reality and require a thorough assessment of a philosophical nature.
The advancement of these objective processes is determined both by the entry of innovative technologies into our life and by far-sighted actions of the political elite of states. As well as by international cooperation and dominating globalisation trends.
Therefore, it is particularly important to realise the enormous potential of scientific and technological progress as well as to identify the likely risks and threats in order to develop a well-thought-out strategy to maximise the use of the achievements of human thought in the interests of society as a whole and prevent their malevolent applications....
Life
2.0 This feature is coming soon.
We’re currently working on it!
Life 2.0 is a high-end documentary series that looks into how human lives are being transformed by incredible new technologies and what that means for us all in the future, that takes a deep and thought-provoking dive into a variety of topics - such as the future of human life extension, breakthroughs in interspecies communication, the rise of “cyborgism”, existing in virtual reality, and more.
https://www.xplorationstation.com/show/Life-2.0Making the world more safe and connected
· Published on December 17, 2018 Gina Bianchini
…A world that is safe and connected is one where you can be the very best version of yourself, surrounded by people who make you better. It’s a world driven by curiosity and organized by interests and passions. It’s a world where you have the freedom to follow an idea, and you don’t have to stop that exploration because you’re thinking about all the ways you’ll be criticized.
A safe and connected world offers context and builds trust. Context and trust mean that you can live in the moment, meet people who make you better, and explore your ideas with those who build on them, challenge them constructively, and who want you to succeed.
In practice, safe isn’t the opposite of open. A closed and connected world can be unsafe. Just look at the sinister power of cults. While they promise belonging, they do not offer the norms and conditions required for trust, growth, or experimentation. In contrast to these dark worlds, scientific breakthroughs, new music scenes, and technological innovations have all happened in safe and connected worlds–worlds where people found kindred, ambitious spirits and the freedom to pursue new ways to think and be. Sometimes these have been open, sometimes closed, but in all cases, they were safe for new ideas and discovery.
A safe and connected world will have more personality–and more personalities–because the resulting context and trust allows each of us to be more ourselves and less everyone else, or what we think everyone else wants from us. I believe a safe and connected world will look more like a loosely-organized world of podcasts, blogs, websites, and apps that can each stand on its own and allows us to jump from world to world, rather than reducing everything that’s colorful, interesting, and awesome to a singular generic box in a single blue and white feed.
Who will lead us here?
It will not be a single big monopolistic company that’s built on advertising and addiction. You can’t spend 15 years delivering a mantra of “open and connected” and shift to a new definition of “safe and connected” overnight.
The transition to a world that’s safe and connected will be led by new people and brands who:
Choose a business model not built on hidden algorithms but rather on people paying them directly for context, growth, learning, events, products, and meaningful relationships.
Recognize the inherent power of bringing people together in fresh and unique ways.
Measure themselves and their impact by the quality of the relationships they create between their followers and the people who care about the same things.
I believe 2019 is the year that creators–our new rockstars, educators, and promoters–rise up and lead us to this new safe and connected world where they are in charge.
In fact, it’s already happening.
Peter Diamandis, founder of innovation breakthrough XPRIZE, created Abundance Digitalto bring together exponential thinkers, leaders, and entrepreneurs in a new way outside the noise and clutter of one-size-fits-all platforms.
Jeff Krasno, founder of the global health and wellness festival Wanderlust, created Commune to grow a new movement of seekers prioritizing a world of higher consciousness, deeper connections, and more meaning in their daily lives.
Gretchen Rubin, bestselling author of The Happiness Project and The Four Tendencies, chose to launch her own app Better to bring together her fans and followers to connect and learn not just from her, but from each other.
Alain De Botton, the wildly successful author and founder of the School of Life, is using his YouTube following to funnel people into a thriving world where they talk about life’s big questions.
These are all examples of creators choosing to offer safe and connected worlds for their followers outside of social media. And because of how a network grows, I believe this trend will only accelerate from here.
What Peter, Jeff, Gretchen, and Alain all know is that once their followers make this shift, they no longer have to fight an algorithm when they want to reach their people, nor compete with every other account fighting for attention. For brands with something to say and a reason to bring people together, staking out a space that offers trust and context over ease alone is simply obvious.
It will then be up to each of us to make the choice with our time and money whether we want to live in a more safe and connected world organized by amazing creators and niche entrepreneurs, or continue to click away in a system that’s not only delivering bad news to us, but in many cases, creating it.
For this and many other reasons, I can’t wait for the shift to a world that’s safe and connected. It’s a more powerful mission that’s the right one to seize from here. To make it a reality, it will take each of us not only choosing to join these worlds but also getting behind those who want to create them. We can do this.
That leaves me with one question. What kind of world do you want to be a part of?
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/making-world-more-safe-connected-
Boston experimented with using generative AI for governing. It went surprisingly well
BY SANTIAGO GARCES AND STEPHEN GOLDSMITH
addresses important questions. If it’s not implemented in a dynamic and flexible way, however, it runs the risk of impeding the kinds of dramatic improvements in both government and community participation that generative AI stands to offer.
Current bureaucratic procedures, developed 150 years ago, need reform, and generative AI presents a unique opportunity to do just that. As two lifelong public servants, we believe that the risk of delaying reform is just as great as the risk of negative impacts.
Anxiety around generative AI, which has been spilling across sectors from screenwriting to university education, is understandable. Too often, though, the debate is framed only around how the tools will disrupt us, not how these they might reform systems that have been calcified for too long in regressive and inefficient patterns.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT and its competitors are not yet part of the government reform movement, but they should be. Most recent attempts to reinvent government have centered around elevating good people within bad systems, with the hope that this will chip away at the fossilized bad practices.
The level of transformative change now will depend on visionary political leaders willing to work through the tangle of outdated procedures, inequitable services, hierarchical practices, and siloed agency verticals that hold back advances in responsive government.
New AI tools offer the most hope ever for creating a broadly reformed, citizen-oriented governance. The reforms we propose do not demand reorganization of municipal departments; rather, they require examining the fundamental government operating systems and using generative AI to empower employees to look across agencies for solutions, analyze problems, calculate risk, and respond in record time.
What makes generative AI’s potential so great is its ability to fundamentally change the operations of government.
Bureaucracies rely on paper and routines. The red tape of bureaucracy has been strangling employees and constituents alike. Employees, denied the ability to quickly examine underlying problems or risks, resort to slow-moving approval processes despite knowing, through frontline experience, how systems could be optimized. And the big machine of bureaucracy, unable or unwilling to identify the cause of a prospective problem, resorts to reaction rather than preemption.
Finding patterns of any sort, in everything from crime to waste, fraud to abuse, occurs infrequently and often involves legions of inspectors. Regulators take months to painstakingly look through compliance forms, unable to process a request based on its own distinctive characteristics. Field workers equipped with AI could quickly access the information they need to make a judgment about the cause of a problem or offer a solution to help residents seeking assistance. These new technologies allow workers to quickly review massive amounts of data that are already in city government and find patterns, make predictions, and identify norms in response to well framed inquiries.
Together, we have overseen advancing technology innovation in five cities and worked with chief data officers from 20 other municipalities toward the same goals, and we see the possible advances of generative AI as having the most potential. For example, Boston asked OpenAI to “suggest interesting analyses” after we uploaded 311 data. In response, it suggested two things: time series analysis by case time, and a comparative analysis by neighborhood. This meant that city officials spent less time navigating the mechanics of computing an analysis, and had more time to dive into the patterns of discrepancy in service. The tools make graphs, maps, and other visualizations with a simple prompt. With lower barriers to analyze data, our city officials can formulate more hypotheses and challenge assumptions, resulting in better decisions.
Not all city officials have the engineering and web development experience needed to run these tests and code. But this experiment shows that other city employees, without any STEM background, could, with just a bit of training, utilize these generative AI tools to supplement their work.
To make this possible, more authority would need to be granted to frontline workers who too often have their hands tied with red tape. Therefore, we encourage government leaders to allow workers more discretion to solve problems, identify risks, and check data. This is not inconsistent with accountability; rather, supervisors can utilize these same generative AI tools, to identify patterns or outliers—say, where race is inappropriately playing a part in decision-making, or where program effectiveness drops off (and why). These new tools will more quickly provide an indication as to which interventions are making a difference, or precisely where a historic barrier is continuing to harm an already marginalized community.
Civic groups will be able to hold government accountable in new ways, too. This is where the linguistic power of large language models really shines: Public employees and community leaders alike can request that tools create visual process maps, build checklists based on a description of a project, or monitor progress compliance. Imagine if people who have a deep understanding of a city—its operations, neighborhoods, history, and hopes for the future—can work toward shared goals, equipped with the most powerful tools of the digital age. Gatekeepers of formerly mysterious processes will lose their stranglehold, and expediters versed in state and local ordinances, codes, and standards, will no longer be necessary to maneuver around things like zoning or permitting processes.
Numerous challenges would remain. Public workforces would still need better data analysis skills in order to verify whether a tool is following the right steps and producing correct information. City and state officials would need technology partners in the private sector to develop and refine the necessary tools, and these relationships raise challenging questions about privacy, security, and algorithmic bias.
However, unlike previous government reforms that merely made a dent in the issue of sprawling, outdated government processes, the use of generative AI will, if broadly, correctly, and fairly incorporated, produce the comprehensive changes necessary to bring residents back to the center of local decision-making—and restore trust in official conduct.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90983427/chatgpt-generative-ai-government-reform
Government and industry
experts convene to explore responsible AI in government.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OitVuTW4Vpc
Humans will not be able to control an ASI. Trying to control an ASI is like trying to control another human being who is more capable than you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kif9fE2mjYU&t=81s
by EG
Weyl · 2022
We call this richer,
pluralistic ecosystem “Decentralized Society” (DeSoc)—a co-determined
sociality, where Souls and communities come ... :
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4105763
06-11-20 THE SHAPE OF TOMORROW
6 experts on how capitalism will emerge after COVID-19
We have an unprecedented opportunity to rein in capitalism’s excesses and reshape our democracy. Here’s how experts from MIT, Harvard, and more would tackle the biggest problems.
BY TALIB VISRAM
For Fast Company’s Shape of Tomorrow series, we’re asking business leaders to share their inside perspective on how the COVID-19 era is transforming their industries. Here’s what’s been lost—and what could be gained—in the new world order.
Sarah Miller is the executive director of the American Economic Liberties Project, which advocates for antitrust regulation and corporate accountability. She’s the former deputy director of the Open Markets Institute, another prominent anti-monopoly group, and was a policy adviser at the U.S. Treasury during the Obama administration.
One of the biggest challenges—which we have seen exacerbated by the pandemic—is the question of Amazon: just the sheer amount of economic and political power that it has generated for Jeff Bezos. We also do a lot of work on Facebook and Google. These three [companies] are some of the most dangerous monopolies from a societal and democratic perspective. Our regulators—our government—have allowed them to monopolize advertising markets.
You’ve seen the sheer power of Amazon as an intermediary in the economy between businesses and consumers. You’ve seen them make decisions on who can sell and who can’t sell, on what’s essential and what’s not essential. You’ve seen them leverage their political power to abuse workers and prevent them from working safely. Most recently, you saw Amazon tell the House Judiciary Committee [which requested testimony from Bezos on Amazon’s anticompetitive business practices], essentially, to go to hell. That just shows the culture of disrespect for democracy that monopolists tend to carry along with them. And then you top it off with stories that Bezos might become a trillionaire in seven years. Is that really the kind of economic and political power that we want our economy to generate for a single person?
WHETHER WE LIKE IT OR NOT, THE ECONOMY IS GETTING RESTRUCTURED, AND OUR DEMOCRATIC INSTITUTIONS HAVE A ROLE TO PLAY.”
SARAH MILLER, AMERICAN ECONOMIC LIBERTIES PROJECT
At the same time, there’s more awareness across the board that [concentrating power in the private sector] is a problem, that this crisis is going to make it worse, and that government has a role to play. [There’s awareness] that we’re going to probably come out on the other side of this with a decimated small-business sector and more power in the largest corporations.
Whether we like it or not, the economy is getting restructured, and our democratic institutions have a role to play. There’s not any single-bullet solution to it: There’s no Dodd-Frank Act to deal with concentrated private power. It really is about a reorientation of priorities and relearning how to use and create new tools in government to address it. And that’s going to take a lot of research, a lot of investigations, and a confrontational approach to monopolies. This broadly shared ideology of “Uh, we shouldn’t punish success”—that huge, powerful companies bestow great benefits, or that we can keep them under control through various checks on their power—just isn’t a sustainable or safe path.
The first thing and most easy thing to do is pause mergers during the crisis. We saw legislation that would do that: Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren and David Cicilline sent a letter to the Fed asking for that to be a condition on access to any bailout money. [We also need to look] at trade agreements and see how they benefit the largest corporations and how that entrenches their power. We need to look into a lot of specific corporate actors, and revitalize the FTC and have commissioners in place who will use that authority. Same with the Department of Justice. Same with the Department of Defense.
We’d like Democrats to see this as both a humanitarian crisis and a moment when we are making decisions about who is going to have power in the economy and who is going to lose power.
Demond Drummer is the executive director and cofounder of New Consensus, an organization that promotes a vision of a robust public sector that actively shapes the economy and markets. The group is particularly focused on how the government and public institutions should make investments to create and support a sustainable economy in the form of a Green New Deal.
We had outlined a set of national projects [tied to the Green New Deal] to update this country’s energy system and the way it consumes energy and the way we grow food. But back in February, it was hard to make the case that we needed a jobs program in this country, because people said, “Unemployment is so low.” Well, people had shit jobs—and several jobs, in some cases. And they were gig workers. It was a terrible situation for most people.
Now we don’t have to make the case that we need robust public investments to create and stimulate great jobs, because it’s clear: 40 million people are unemployed, and increasing numbers of people who were employed are now underemployed. Now we can have that jobs conversation.
WE BUILT THE WHITE MIDDLE CLASS—WE CAN BUILD THE MIDDLE CLASS THAT INCLUDES BLACK PEOPLE AND BROWN PEOPLE.”
DEMOND DRUMMER, NEW CONSENSUS
What else happens? You lose your job, you lose your healthcare. Now there’s a stronger case for some form of universal healthcare. And the federal government picks up the tab, because that can unleash industry to do what it needs to do to advance.
Everything that I would call the Green New Deal package is very much on the table right now, and much more urgent, not only from an economic stimulus standpoint, but from a sustainability standpoint.
This is a beautiful moment to onshore [manufacturing] in a sustainable manner. I think that this a build-it-here, make-it-here, grow-it-here [moment]—and not in some weird, nationalist kind of frame, but in the sense that we need to be able to build the things we need, in case these types of things happen again. And they will. We’ve got to have a more resilient way of getting [manufacturing] done. And if that creates jobs, all the better.
We will be laying out a package of proposals from energy all the way to manufacturing and food that can advance this country to an era of strength and vitality. The tools are there. We built the white middle class—we can build the middle class that includes Black people and brown people.
I’m not optimistic that we’re going to see some natural kind of shift in political thinking and vision, because look what got us into this crisis. I do think we have urgency and a set of immediate data and lived experience that can be exploited to explain to folks and communicate what needs to be done and how we can do it. People may be open to alternative solutions.
David Autor, Ford Professor of Economics at MIT, is a leading labor economist who focuses on inequality and the opportunities facing people without high levels of education, especially in an economy that’s being rapidly altered by technology and automation.
There are two aspects of [the COVID-19 crisis]. One is in the short term: Who’s bearing the burden, and how can it possibly be reduced to some degree? The second is in the long run: What does this mean for the structure of earnings and employment and opportunity for those same groups of workers? Unfortunately, the longer-term prospects are also adverse.
In the long run, my concern is it’s going to change patterns of consumption. One [example] is in business travel, which drives a lot of the money in the hospitality industry because business travelers pay full freight on the airplane. They pay full fare at hotels on weeknights. They may expense-account meals. It’s hard to believe that there won’t be a big reduction in business travel over the long term because people have realized that it’s just not as necessary as they’d thought.
Similarly, people will be going less to offices, which means less cleaning services, less people going out for lunch, less location services, less Uber. That will also affect the demand for services. And, finally, I think that employers are learning, very rapidly, which workers they can do without. And there’s no reason to think that employers would unlearn that as soon as this is over.
[This crisis] will speed up the process of automation. In the long run, that has some benefits: We can raise productivity; technologies that we were only beginning to use before, now we will realize how well we can make them work. But it also means that even though the labor market is slack—with millions of people ready to go back to their jobs—many firms may say, “Actually, we’ve figured out how to do that one without people.” There’s also going to be a shift in the distribution of business activity from small- and medium-sized firms to larger firms, and those larger firms are less labor-intensive. That’s also going to exacerbate exactly the same phenomenon.
The government is the only actor that really has the capacity to act on the scale that’s needed. We just spent 10% of GDP on a bailout; why don’t we spend another 10% on investment? Let’s create a Marshall Plan for the U.S.: Rebuild American infrastructure, invest in schools, and remake ourselves. The U.S. has essentially unlimited borrowing capacity and interest rates are essentially zero. This is the moment to use that.
We have done something quite radical with the social safety net in the last couple months: We decided a bunch of people who weren’t part of the unemployment insurance system should get unemployment insurance benefits. We could do that more broadly: Make the unemployment insurance system more comprehensive. Let’s now formalize that. And then [use the crisis as] an opportunity for skills investment. There are many things that we’ve been doing extensively in the form of in-person education that can potentially be done less expensively and still efficiently. [Let’s] capitalize on that.
Rebecca Henderson, an economics professor at Harvard Business School, is the author of Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire, which explores how a democratically accountable government and a strong civil society can rein in capitalism’s excesses.
Before the pandemic, a lot of businesspeople would say, “I care about inequality and it’s important, but I have a business to run.” It was not so clear that [inequality is] an immediate business problem. Now, it’s much clearer. Businesses can’t just say, “Someone else will deal with this.”
Look at the states bidding against each other for vital medical equipment. Where is the federal task force [putting] the might of America to work? The political system is broken, and the idea that government should take a central role has been delegitimized. We can disagree about how big government should be, and what exactly the edges should be. But the idea that government is a good thing and is fundamental to the health of the society—that, we should not be disagreeing about.
What can businesses do to help? Businesses can stop demonizing the government. Business [leaders have] a role to play in moving our society: First, by doing what you can in your own business to address social and environmental problems, then by cooperating with other firms to address problems like environmental damage and inequality in your industry. But of course we’re not going to solve [an issue like] climate change without appropriate regulation and support for the transition. We’re not going to solve inequality without new labor market policies, without investments in education and health. Government is the answer—government in partnership with business.
I think the pandemic may hopefully have a silver lining. [Historically] major shifts in political systems tend to come at times of crisis. This crisis might be that kind of crisis. But it might be like 2008, where we papered over, and somehow chugged on.
Tom Steyer, a former 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, is the founder of NextGen America, an organization that’s dedicated to mobilizing voters under the age of 35, and co-chair of California’s economic recovery task force.
What does rebooting California look like? We don’t want to go back to January 2020. We want something better, more just, more equitable, more sustainable. And we want to make sure that we have the underresourced communities, the black and brown communities who’ve borne the brunt of the COVID pandemic and the economic freefall, in the front of our minds as we take action in the short run and make policy in the long run.
There’s going to be a big building program. Exactly how that takes place is unclear, but we know doing it in a sustainable fashion is the better way to invest. It creates more jobs in the short run and creates an infrastructure that will sustain us in the long run, in terms of preserving the natural world, but also in terms of having costs be much lower for Americans.
One of the things that’s true in the very near term, but also going forward, is that not having equal access to high-speed internet is a profound source of inequality. If you can’t receive [your education both] online and offline, you’re at a severe disadvantage. As telemedicine becomes more relevant, if you’re unable to access high-speed internet, you’re going to be at a disadvantage. With high unemployment, [we] want to retrain and rescale workers. [But] if you can’t participate online, that’s going to be a severe disadvantage.
Stephanie Kelton, professor of economics and public policy at Stony Brook University, is a leading proponent of Modern Monetary Theory, which posits that the U.S. government can and should spend and invest without having to balance a budget like a private business. She was the chief economist for the Democratic Minority Staff of the U.S. Senate Budget Committee, and was an economic adviser for Bernie Sanders during his 2016 presidential campaign.
People say, We just want to return to normal; we just want to get back to the way things were. Hang on: The way things were is why we’re where we are today.
Look at the inequality. Why are black and brown people bearing a disproportionate amount of pain, both physical and economic, in the coronavirus crisis? Why is it that 30 million people just lost their employer-sponsored health insurance, and [around 40] million lost jobs? Well, we tied healthcare to employment. And now you’ve got people who can’t afford housing and student debt.
THE ONLY WAY WE’RE GOING TO GET SUSTAINED COMMITMENT [TO FISCAL POLICY] IS IF EVERYBODY CAN BREATHE THROUGH IT, LIKE A LAMAZE CLASS FOR DEFICIT SPENDING.”
STEPHANIE KELTON, ECONOMIST
These are more than imperfections—they’re deeply rooted flaws in the design. The way that we have constructed our economy over the last almost 40 years has left us vulnerable in many respects. Recent events bring such things into sharper focus for people, but hopefully also, there’s that backdrop that says the way out of this is not through the Federal Reserve. [It’s] going to have to be through sustained commitment to fiscal policy.
And the only way we’re going to get sustained commitment [to fiscal policy] is if everybody can breathe through it, like a Lamaze class for deficit spending. So that we can take a deep breath, exhale, breathe through it, and let the deficit get as big as it needs to get to heal and repair and allow us to rebuild the type of economy that will, to the extent we can, deal with and eliminate those vulnerabilities.
Many of us thought that after the [2008] financial crisis [there was] an opportunity, but this one is bigger. So much is driven by the virus: We could possibly have three or four years with no vaccine. And so, as this thing possibly pops back up periodically and we’re dealing with hotspots and closures, we’ll have a situation where a lot of industries are going to be shadows of their former selves, and some won’t survive at all. Many of the jobs that have been lost will never come back. The economy is going to change, the way we work, how the consumer wants to spend—a lot of things are going to change.
The last thing I want to do is watch everything come apart, and then pick up the pieces and try to reassemble them exactly the way they were assembled before. You want to put it together differently: You want to build better, build smarter, build safer, build stronger, build more resilient.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90506269/6-experts-on-how-capitalism-will-emerge-after-covid-19?partner=feedburner&utm
12-30-20
Here are the top tech trends of 2021, according to 30+ top experts
During the year ahead, technology will help us emerge from the pandemic in ways big and small, obvious and surprising....: https://www.fastcompany.com/90588717/top-tech-trends-2021-
MARK IN THE
METAVERSE
Facebook’s CEO on why the social network
is becoming ‘a metaverse company’
Much
of the work we’ve been doing at Facebook Reality Labs connects deeply to the
Metaverse vision Mark has talked about. Today we’re standing up a Metaverse
product group under my organization to bring together the teams focused on
responsibly building this ambitious work. Here’s a condensed version of my
internal announcement today:
Why
does the Metaverse matter?
The
Metaverse is already here as a collection of digital worlds each with
its own physics to determine what’s possible within them. The defining quality
of the metaverse will be presence -- the feeling of really being there with
people -- and FRL has been focused on building products that deliver presence
across digital spaces for years. Today Portal and Oculus can teleport you
into a room with another person, regardless of physical distance, or to new
virtual worlds and experiences. But to achieve our full vision of the
Metaverse, we also need to build the connective tissue between these spaces --
so you can remove the limitations of physics and move between them with the
same ease as moving from one room in your home to the next.
To
focus our efforts and deliver on this vision, we are bringing together the
teams that have been driving some of this fundamental work under the new
Metaverse PG. I’m excited to welcome Vishal
Shah, who joins us from Instagram to lead this new product group; Vivek
Sharma, who joins us from FB Gaming, will lead the Horizon teams,
and Oculus OG Jason
Rubin, who also joins from FB Gaming, will lead the Content team as
he and Vivek continue their work with FB Gaming partners on expanding the size
and capabilities of Facebook’s gaming platforms.
There
is a lot of work to be done to bridge these worlds that will ultimately form
part of the Metaverse and I’m looking forward to what we can accomplish
together.
https://www.theverge.com/22588022/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-ceo-metaverse
The Code Breaker. Jennifer
Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race
by Walter
Isaacson
When
Jennifer Doudna was in sixth grade, she came home one day to find that her dad
had left a paperback titled The Double Helix on her bed. As
she sped through the pages, she became enthralled by the intense drama behind
the competition to discover the code of life. Even though her high school counselor
told her girls didn’t become scientists, she decided she would.
Driven by a passion to understand how nature works and to turn discoveries into
inventions, she would help to make what the book’s author, James Watson, told
her was the most important biological advance since his co-discovery of the
structure of DNA. She and her collaborators turned a curiosity of
nature into an invention that will transform the human race: an easy-to-use
tool that can edit DNA. Known as CRISPR, it opened a brave new world of medical
miracles and moral questions.
The development of CRISPR and the race to create vaccines for coronavirus will
hasten our transition to the next great innovation revolution. The past
half-century has been a digital age, based on the microchip, computer, and
internet. Now we are entering a life-science revolution. Children who study
digital coding will be joined by those who study genetic code.
Should we use our new evolution-hacking powers to make us less susceptible to
viruses? What a wonderful boon that would be! And what about preventing
depression? Hmmm…Should we allow parents, if they can afford it, to enhance the
height or muscles or IQ of their kids?
After helping to discover CRISPR, Doudna became a leader in wrestling with
these moral issues and, with her collaborator Emmanuelle Charpentier, won the
Nobel Prize in 2020.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54968118-the-code-breaker
The 10 most exciting world-changing ideas of 2020
12-28-20From new masks to four-day workweeks to cancelling rent to genetically engineered mosquitoes, here are the ideas that blew our minds this year.
BY MORGAN CLENDANIEL
Despite the deep tragedies of 2020, it was also a year of hope. Behind the daily toll of the pandemic was the knowledge that scientists were working at record speed to make a vaccine using a new breakthrough technology. Every day people made new advances in technological solutions to prevent the virus spreading (surely more innovation—both scientific and DIY—happened in the mask world than in any previous year) and in policy solutions to help people caught in the economic disaster brought on by COVID-19. And in a year that felt like it changed everything, people also began contemplating how we might rebuild differently, with new ideas about how to fix the climate crisis, how we work, and how we live.
To help catalog those advances, these are the ideas we featured on Fast Company’s Impact section this year that drew the most attention in 2020.
1: TREAT CLIMATE CHANGE AS SERIOUSLY AS WE TREATED COVID-19
2: MAKE BETTER MASKS
3: USE 3D PRINTING FOR GOOD
4: GIVE PEOPLE MONEY
5: USE DRONES TO PLANT TREES
6: ENGINEER AWAY MOSQUITOES
7: CANCEL RENT
8: REINVENT OUR CITIES
9: START A 4-DAY WORKWEEK
10: CHANGE HOW WE HIRE
https://www.fastcompany.com/90587028/the-10-most-exciting-world-changing-ideas-of-2020?
Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2020
Experts highlight advances with the potential to revolutionize industry, health care and society
November 10, 2020 Vanessa Branchi
https://www.scientificamerican.com/report/top-10-emerging-technologies
AI method generates 3D holograms in real-time
For virtual reality, 3D printing, and medical imaging.
Even though virtual reality headsets are popular for gaming, they haven’t yet become the go-to device for watching television, shopping, or using software tools for design and modelling.
One reason why is because VR can make users feel sick with nausea, imbalance, eye strain, and headaches. This happens because VR creates an illusion of 3D viewing — but the user is actually staring at a fixed-distance 2D display. The solution for better 3D visualization exists in a 60-year-old tech that’s being updated for the digital world — holograms.
A new method called tensor holography enables the creation of holograms for virtual reality, 3D printing, medical imaging, and more — and it can run on a smart-phone…:
https://www.kurzweilai.net/digest-breakthrough-ai-method-generates-3d-holograms-in-real-time
Civilization: knowledge, institutions, and humanity’s future
Insights from technological sociologist Samo Burja.
Burja outlines these steps: investigate the landscape, evaluate our odds, then try to plot the best course. He explains:
Our civilization is made-up of countless individuals and pieces of material technology — that come together to form institutions and inter-dependent systems of logistics, development, and production. These institutions + systems then store the knowledge required for their own renewal + growth.
We pin the hopes of our common human project on this renewal + growth of the whole civilization. Whether this project is going well is a challenging — but vital — question to answer. History shows us we’re not safe from institutional collapse. Advances in technology mitigate some aspects, but produce their own risks. Agile institutions that make use of both social + technical knowledge not only mitigate such risks — but promise unprecedented human flourishing.
There has never been an immortal society. No matter how technologically advanced our own society is — it’s unlikely to be an exception. For a good future that defies these odds, we must understand the hidden forces shaping society.…:
https://www.kurzweilai.net/digest-civilization-knowledge-institutions-and-humanitys-future
The Social Singularity: How decentralization will allow us to transcend politics, create global prosperity, and avoid the robot apocalypse
by Max Borders
In this decentralization manifesto, futurist Max Borders shows that humanity is already building systems that will “underthrow” great centers of power.
Exploring the promise of a decentralized world, Borders says we will:
- Reorganize to collaborate and compete with AI;
- Operate within networks of superior collective intelligence;
- Rediscover our humanity and embrace values for an age of connection.
With lively prose, Borders takes us on a tour of modern pagan festivals, cities of the future, and radically new ways to organize society. In so doing, he examines trends likely to revolutionize the ways we live and work.
Although the technological singularity fast approaches, Borders argues, a parallel process of human reorganization will allow us to reap enormous benefits. The paradox? Our billion little acts of subversion will help us lead richer, healthier lives—and avoid the robot apocalypse. …: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41031272-the-social-singularity
Jamie Susskind Future Politics: Living Together In A World Transformed By Tech
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38819346-future-politics
Published: 09 December 2019
A DNA-of-things storage architecture to create materials with embedded memory
Abstract
DNA storage offers substantial information density1,2,3,4,5,6,7 and exceptional half-life3. We devised a ‘DNA-of-things’ (DoT) storage architecture to produce materials with immutable memory. In a DoT framework, DNA molecules record the data, and these molecules are then encapsulated in nanometer silica beads8, which are fused into various materials that are used to print or cast objects in any shape. First, we applied DoT to three-dimensionally print a Stanford Bunny9 that contained a 45 kB digital DNA blueprint for its synthesis. We synthesized five generations of the bunny, each from the memory of the previous generation without additional DNA synthesis or degradation of information. To test the scalability of DoT, we stored a 1.4 MB video in DNA in plexiglass spectacle lenses and retrieved it by excising a tiny piece of the plexiglass and sequencing the embedded DNA. DoT could be applied to store electronic health records in medical implants, to hide data in everyday objects (steganography) and to manufacture objects containing their own blueprint. It may also facilitate the development of self-replicating machines…: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-019-0356-z
How We Chose the 100 Best Inventions of 2020
https://time.com/5911857/how-we-chose-best-inventions-2020/
10 Breakthrough Technologies
— summary —
This annual list — curated by the world’s top thinkers — features each year’s 10 most important innovations that will change tomorrow for the better.
These are the tech advances we believe will make a real difference in solving important problems. How do we pick? We avoid the one-off tricks, the over-hyped new gadgets. Instead we look for those breakthroughs that will truly change how we live and work.
list | 10 Breakthrough Technologies
year: 2020 — read
year: 2019 — read
year: 2018 — read
year: 2017 — read
year: 2016 — read
year: 2015 — read
year: 2014 — read
year: 2013 — read
year: 2012 — read
year: 2011 — read
year: 2010 — read
year: 2009 — read
year: 2008 — read
year: 2007 — read
year: 2006 — read
year: 2005 — read
year: 2004 — read
year: 2003 — read
year: 2001 — read
https://www.kurzweilai.net/digest-tracking-breakthroughs-progress
FTI’s 13th Annual Tech Trends Report: What we found interesting, insightful and surprising…: https://futuretodayinstitute.wetransfer.com/downloads/14f623f321798cdb7a4370c3b140f47920200225171335/6498cf
Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
By HARARI YUYAL NOAH
"Homo Deus will shock you. It will entertain you. Above all, it will make you think in ways you had not thought before." (Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking Fast, and Slow). Yuval Noah Harari, author of the bestselling Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, envisions a not-too-distant world in which we face a new set of challenges. Now, in Homo Deus, he examines our future with his trademark blend of science, history, philosophy and every discipline in between. Homo Deus explores the projects, dreams and nightmares that will shape the twenty-first century - from overcoming death to creating artificial life. It asks the fundamental questions: Where do we go from here? And how will we protect this fragile world from our own destructive powers? This is the next stage of evolution. This is Homo Deus. War is obsolete You are more likely to commit suicide than be killed in conflict Famine is disappearing You are at more risk of obesity than starvation Death is just a technical problem Equality is out - but immortality is in What does our future hold?
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31138556-homo-deus
2030: How Today's Biggest Trends Will Collide and Reshape the Future of Everything
by Mauro F. Guillén
Once upon a time, the world was neatly divided into prosperous and backward economies. Babies were plentiful, workers outnumbered retirees, and people aspiring towards the middle class yearned to own homes and cars. Companies didn't need to see any further than Europe and the United States to do well. Printed money was legal tender for all debts, public and private. We grew up learning how to "play the game," and we expected the rules to remain the same as we took our first job, started a family, saw our children grow up, and went into retirement with our finances secure.
That world—and those rules—are over.
By 2030, a new reality will take hold, and before you know it:
- There will be more grandparents than grandchildren
- The middle-class in Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa will outnumber the US and Europe combined
- The global economy will be driven by the non-Western consumer for the first time in modern history
- There will be more global wealth owned by women than men
- There will be more robots than workers
- There will be more computers than human brains
- There will be more currencies than countries
All these trends, currently underway, will converge in the year 2030 and change everything you know about culture, the economy, and the world.
According to Mauro F. Guillen, the only way to truly understand the global transformations underway—and their impacts—is to think laterally. That is, using “peripheral vision,” or approaching problems creatively and from unorthodox points of view. Rather than focusing on a single trend—climate-change or the rise of illiberal regimes, for example—Guillen encourages us to consider the dynamic inter-play between a range of forces that will converge on a single tipping point—2030—that will be, for better or worse, the point of no return.
2030 is both a remarkable guide to the coming changes and an exercise in the power of “lateral thinking,” thereby revolutionizing the way you think about cataclysmic change and its consequences.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49127551-2030
The New Map: Energy,
Climate, and the Clash of Nations
A Wall
Street Journal besteller and a USA Today Best Book of
2020!
Pulitzer Prize-winning author and global energy expert, Daniel Yergin offers a
revelatory new account of how energy revolutions, climate battles, and
geopolitics are mapping our future
The world is being shaken by the collision of energy, climate change, and the
clashing power of nations in a time of global crisis. Out of this tumult is
emerging a new map of energy and geopolitics. The "shale revolution"
in oil and gas has transformed the American economy, ending the "era of
shortage" but introducing a turbulent new era. Almost overnight, the
United States has become the world's number one energy powerhouse. Yet concern
about energy's role in climate change is challenging the global economy and way
of life, accelerating a second energy revolution in the search for a low-carbon
future. All of this has been made starker and more urgent by the coronavirus
pandemic and the economic dark age that it has wrought.
World politics is being upended, as a new cold war develops between the United
States and China, and the rivalry grows more dangerous with Russia, which is
pivoting east toward Beijing. Vladimir Putin and China's Xi Jinping are
converging both on energy and on challenging American leadership, as China
projects its power and influence in all directions. The South China Sea,
claimed by China and the world's most critical trade route, could become the
arena where the United States and China directly collide. The map of the Middle
East, which was laid down after World War I, is being challenged by jihadists,
revolutionary Iran, ethnic and religious clashes, and restive populations. But
the region has also been shocked by the two recent oil price collapses--and by
the very question of oil's future in the rest of this century.
A master storyteller and global energy expert, Daniel Yergin takes the reader
on an utterly riveting and timely journey across the world's new map. He
illuminates the great energy and geopolitical questions in an era of rising
political turbulence and points to the profound challenges that lie ahead.
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/51122895-the-new-map
«Il y a le feu à la Maison Europe», le manifeste des patriotes européens
Par Un collectif d'écrivains internationaux — 25 janvier 2019 à 14:24Trente écrivains internationaux, dont plusieurs Prix Nobel, ont répondu à l'appel de Bernard-Henri Lévy pour tirer la sonnette d'alarme, en exclusivité dans «Libération», sur la montée des dangers qui menacent l'Europe.
«Il y a le feu à la Maison Europe», le plaidoyer européen de trente écrivains internationaux
Tribune. L’Europe est en péril.
De partout montent les critiques, les outrages, les désertions.
En finir avec la construction européenne, retrouver l’«âme des nations», renouer avec une «identité perdue» qui n’existe, bien souvent, que dans l’imagination des démagogues, tel est le programme commun aux forces populistes qui déferlent sur le continent.
Attaquée de l’intérieur par des mauvais prophètes ivres de ressentiment et qui croient leur heure revenue, lâchée, à l’extérieur, outre-Manche et outre-Atlantique, par les deux grands alliés qui l’ont, au XXe siècle, deux fois sauvée du suicide, en proie aux manœuvres de moins en moins dissimulées du maître du Kremlin, l’Europe comme idée, volonté et représentation est en train de se défaire sous nos yeux.
Et c’est dans ce climat délétère que se dérouleront, en mai, des élections européennes qui, si rien ne change, si rien ne vient endiguer la vague qui enfle et qui pousse et qui monte et si ne se manifeste pas, très vite, sur tout le continent, un nouvel esprit de résistance, risquent d’être les plus calamiteuses que nous ayons connues : victoire des naufrageurs ; disgrâce de ceux qui croient encore à l’héritage d’Erasme, de Dante, de Goethe et de Comenius ; mépris de l’intelligence et de la culture ; explosions de xénophobie et d’antisémitisme ; un désastre.
Les signataires sont de ceux qui ne se résolvent pas à cette catastrophe annoncée.
Ils sont de ces patriotes européens, plus nombreux qu’on ne le croit, mais trop souvent résignés et silencieux, qui savent que se joue là, trois quarts de siècle après la défaite des fascismes et trente ans après la chute du mur de Berlin, une nouvelle bataille pour la civilisation.
Et leur mémoire d’Européens, la foi en cette grande Idée dont ils ont hérité et dont ils ont la garde, la conviction qu’elle seule, cette Idée, a eu la force, hier, de hisser nos peuples au-dessus d’eux-mêmes et de leur passé guerrier et qu’elle seule aura la vertu, demain, de conjurer la venue de totalitarismes nouveaux et le retour, dans la foulée, de la misère propre aux âges sombres – tout cela leur interdit de baisser les bras.
De là, cette invitation au sursaut.
De là cet appel à mobilisation à la veille d’une élection qu’ils se refusent à abandonner aux fossoyeurs.
Et de là cette exhortation à reprendre le flambeau d’une Europe qui, malgré ses manquements, ses errements et, parfois, ses lâchetés reste une deuxième patrie pour tous les hommes libres du monde.
Notre génération a commis une erreur.
Semblables à ces Garibaldiens du XIX° siècle répétant, tel un mantra, leur «Italia farà da sé», nous avons cru que l’unité du continent se ferait d’elle-même, sans volonté ni effort.
Nous avons vécu dans l’illusion d’une Europe nécessaire, inscrite dans la nature des choses, et qui se ferait sans nous, même si nous ne faisions rien, car elle était dans le «sens de l’Histoire».
C’est avec ce providentialisme qu’il faut rompre.
C’est à cette Europe paresseuse, privée de ressort et de pensée, qu’il faut donner congé.
Nous n’avons plus le choix.
Il faut, quand grondent les populismes, vouloir l’Europe ou sombrer.
Il faut, tandis que menace, partout, le repli souverainiste, renouer avec le volontarisme politique ou consentir à ce que s’imposent, partout, le ressentiment, la haine et leur cortège de passions tristes.
Et il faut, dès aujourd’hui, dans l’urgence, sonner l’alarme contre les incendiaires des âmes qui, de Paris à Rome en passant par Dresde, Barcelone, Budapest, Vienne ou Varsovie jouent avec le feu de nos libertés.
Car tel est bien l’enjeu : derrière cette étrange défaite de l’Europe qui se profile, derrière cette nouvelle crise de la conscience européenne acharnée à déconstruire tout ce qui fit la grandeur, l’honneur et la prospérité de nos sociétés, la remise en cause – sans précédent depuis les années 30 – de la démocratie libérale et de ses valeurs.
Signataires : Vassilis Alexakis ; Svetlana Alexievitch ; Anne Applebaum ; Jens Christian Grøndahl ; David Grossman ; Ágnes Heller ; Elfriede Jelinek ; Ismaïl Kadaré ; György Konrád ; Milan Kundera ; Bernard-Henri Lévy ; António Lobo Antunes ; Claudio Magris ; Adam Michnik ; Ian McEwan ; Herta Müller ; Ludmila Oulitskaïa ; Orhan Pamuk ; Rob Riemen ; Salman Rushdie ; Fernando Savater ; Roberto Saviano ; Eugenio Scalfari ; Simon Schama ; Peter Schneider ; Abdulah Sidran ; Leïla Slimani ; Colm Tóibín ; Mario Vargas Llosa ; Adam Zagajewski.
The Road to Unfreedom by Timothy Snyder review – chilling and unignorable
This persuasive book looks at Putin’s favourite Russian political philosopher and the template he set for fake news
ven presidents who don’t believe in history need a historian to rely on. When asked, in 2014, by a delegation of students and history teachers for his chosen chronicler of Russia’s past, Vladimir Putincame up with a single name: Ivan Ilyin.
Ilyin is a figure who might have been easily lost to history were it not for the posthumous patronage of Russia’s leader. Putin first drew attention to him – Ilyin was a philosopher, not a historian, a Russian who died in exile in Switzerland in 1954 – when he organised the repatriation of Ilyin’s remains for reburial in Moscow in 2005. Ilyin’s personal papers, held in a library in Michigan, were also brought “home” at the president’s request. New editions of Ilyin’s dense books of political philosophy became popular in Kremlin circles – and all of Russia’s civil servants reportedly received a collection of his essays in 2014. And when Putin explained Russia’s need to combat the expansion of the European Union, and laid out the argument to invade Ukraine, it was Ilyin’s arguments on which the president relied.
Timothy Snyder begins his pattern-making deconstruction of recent Russian history – which by design, he argues, is indistinguishable from recent British and American history – with a comprehensive account of Putin’s reverence for the work of Ilyin. Like much of Snyder’s analysis in this unignorable book, the framing offers both a disturbing and persuasive insight.
Ilyin, an early critic of Bolshevism, had been expelled by the Soviets in 1922. In Germany, where he wrote favourably of the rise of Hitler and the example of Mussolini, he developed ideas for a Russian fascism, which could counter the effects of the 1917 revolution. As a thread through his nationalist rhetoric, he proposed a lost “Russian spirit”, which in its essence reflected a Christian God’s original creation before the fall and drew on a strongly masculine “pure” sexual energy (he had been psychoanalysed by Freud). A new Russian nation should be established, Ilyin argued, to defend and promote that ineffable spirit against all external threats – not only communism but also individualism. To achieve that end, Ilyin outlined a “simulacrum” of democracy in which the Russian people would speak “naturally” with one voice, dependent on a leader who was cast as “redeemer” for returning true Russian culture to its people. Elections would be “rituals” designed to endorse that power, periodically “uniting the nation in a gesture of subjugation”.
The more outrageous the official lie was, the more it allowed people to demonstrate their faith in the Kremlin
To establish that dystopian state, Snyder argues, Putin’s regime has deliberately pursued two of Ilyin’s central concepts. The first demanded the identification and destruction of the enemies of that Russian spirit to establish unity; alien influences – Muslim or Jewish, fundamentalist or cosmopolitan – were intent on “sodomising” Russian virtue (sexual imagery is never far away in the Kremlin’s lurid calls to arms). If those enemies did not exist they would have to be invented or exaggerated. After the terror attacks on Russian institutions – the Moscow theatre siege and the Beslan school massacre – Chechen separatism was used as a reason to bring first television and then regional governorships under state control. Those policies were led, Snyder documents, by Vladislav Surkov, the former postmodernist theatre director who was Boris Yeltsin’s deputy chief of staff and then Putin’s lead strategist. Surkov directs a policy, borrowed from Ilyin, which he calls “centralisation, personification, idealisation”. With Surkov’s management, “Putin was to offer masculinity as an argument against democracy”, Snyder suggests; he was to associate, specifically, for example, gay rights and equal marriage with an attack on the Russian spirit.
In this culture war, disinformation was critical. Russian TV and social media would create a climate in which news became entertainment, and nothing would quite seem factual. This surreal shift is well documented, but Snyder’s forensic examination of, for example, the news cycle that followed the shooting down of flight MH17 makes essential reading. On the first day official propaganda suggested that the Russian missile attack on the Malaysian plane had in fact been a bodged attempt by Ukrainian forces to assassinate Putin himself; by day two, Russian TV was promoting the idea that the CIA had sent a ghost plane filled with corpses overhead to provoke Russian forces.
The more outrageous the official lie was, the more it allowed people to demonstrate their faith in the Kremlin. Putin made, Snyder argues, his direct assault on “western” factuality a source of national pride. Snyder calls this policy “implausible deniability”; you hear it in the tone of the current “debate” around the Salisbury attack: Russian power is displayed in a relativist blizzard of alternative theories, delivered in a vaguely absurdist spirit, as if no truth on earth is really provable.
The second half of Snyder’s book explores how Russia has sought to export this policy to those who threaten it, primarily through a mass disinformation war, a 2.0 update of Sun Tzu’s “confusion to our enemy” principle, with the aim of dividing and polarising pluralist democracies – in particular the EU and the US – against themselves.
Wreckage of flight MH17: official propaganda suggested the attack on the Malaysian plane had been a bodged attempt to assassinate Putin. Photograph: Maxim Zmeyev/Reuters
Snyder is very astute at joining the dots in how Russian propagandists, human or digital, sought to spread fake news to undermine faith in the democratic process, at the same time giving overt support to European separatists and Russia TV regulars such as Marine Le Pen and Nigel Farage. He details how, for example, Russian “news” sources spread the idea that the Scottish independence vote had been “rigged” by “establishment forces” with the aim of undermining faith in democratic institutions in Britain before the EU referendum. We are still awaiting, of course, the full disentangling of Donald Trump’s complex relations with Putin’s government, and the many links between his campaign organisation and Russian operatives. As with Luke Harding’s book Collusion, however, there is more than enough here to keep Robert Mueller busy for a long while yet.
One unavoidable conclusion of this depressing tale lies in the acknowledgment that Putin’s strategy has been so successful in shaking faith in the sanctity of fact and expert knowledge. A measure of that assault comes when you examine your reaction to this meticulously researched and footnoted book as you read it. Timothy Snyder is professor of history at Yale. His book Bloodlands, about the fallout of second world war atrocities on the eastern front, won the prestigious Hannah Arendt prize and was described by the late, great Tony Judt as “the most important book to appear on this subject in decades”. And yet as he unfolds this contemporary sequel, you might well hear, as I did from time to time, those sneery voices now lodged in your head that whisper of “liberal elitism” and “fake news” and “MSM” and “tempting conspiracies”, and which refuse ever, quite, to be quieted. How did we get here? Snyder has a good idea.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/apr/15/the-road-to-unfreedom-russia-europe-america-timothy-snyder-review-tim-adams
James Kirchick The end of Europe — Dictators, demagogues and the coming Dark Age. :
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/capsule-review/2017-04-14/end-europe-dictators-demagogues-and-coming-dark-age
How Democracies Die by Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt
Donald Trump’s presidency has raised a question that many of us never thought we’d be asking: Is our democracy in danger? Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have spent more than twenty years studying the breakdown of democracies in Europe and Latin America, and they believe the answer is yes. Democracy no longer ends with a bang—in a revolution or military coup—but with a whimper: the slow, steady weakening of critical institutions, such as the judiciary and the press, and the gradual erosion of long-standing political norms. The good news is that there are several exit ramps on the road to authoritarianism. The bad news is that, by electing Trump, we have already passed the first one.
Drawing on decades of research and a wide range of historical and global examples, from 1930s Europe to contemporary Hungary, Turkey, and Venezuela, to the American South during Jim Crow, Levitsky and Ziblatt show how democracies die—and how ours can be saved.
https://www.fairobserver.com/world-leaders-news/how-democracies-die-steven-levitsky-daniel-ziblatt-book-review-politics-culture-news-31811/
Alvin Toffler, Author of ‘Future Shock
The best study of our times that I know. . . . Of all the books that I have read in the last 20 years, it is by far the one that has taught me the most."—Le Figaro
Future Shock is about the present. Future Shock is about what is happening today to people and groups who are overwhelmed by change. Change affects our products, communities, organizations—even our patterns of friendship and love.
Future Shock vividly describes the emerging global civilization: tomorrow’s family life, the rise of new businesses, subcultures, life-styles, and human relationships—all of them temporary.
Future Shock illuminates the world of tomorrow by exploding countless clichés about today.
Future Shock will intrigue, provoke, frighten, encourage, and, above all, change everyone who reads it.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/466537.Future_Shock
Next Geopolitics: The Future of World Affairs (Technology) Volume One
by Abishur Prakash
Next Geopolitics: The Future of World Affairs (Technology) is a groundbreaking book on how new technologies, such as robotics, artificial intelligence, embryo editing, space colonization and more will transform world affairs.
Written by a leading geopolitical futurist, each of the eight chapters revolve around provocative scenarios, like which country is responsible for a designer baby that is designed in the United Kingdom but born in India, and how will governments decide what is an act of war in the age of autonomous robots and artificial intelligence?
The book has been purposely written to be short and straight to the point, with the imagined reader being able to finish the book during a flight from New York to Tokyo, or London to Hong Kong. If you are looking for a rare look into the wave of disruption heading your way, and how countries will be jolted, pick up this book as it is redefining the word geopolitics and giving a new meaning to the future.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33225582-next-geopolitics
Go.AI (Geopolitics of Artificial Intelligence)
by Abishur Prakash
In July, 2018, one of the biggest developments since World War II took place: China revealed that it was developing artificial intelligence (AI) to create foreign policy.
Think about that for a second. In the future, if the world wants to understand what China will do on the world stage, it will have to understand how China’s AI thinks.
What China is doing is one part of a much bigger picture. All over the world, countries are deploying AI in powerful ways. In Russia, AI is detecting social unrest. In Japan, AI is helping police predict crime. In the United Arab Emirates, AI is deciding who can enter the country.
As countries deploy AI, it could change how the world operates. As AI enters the picture, the balance of power around the world could change. AI could lead to the next alliances or the next conflicts.
From the mind of Abishur Prakash, the world’s leading geopolitical futurist and author of Next Geopolitics: Volume One and Two, comes the first book to examine how AI could transform geopolitics. Building on more than 6 months of research, this book paints 12 groundbreaking scenarios of how AI could take geopolitics in a new direction. By looking at areas like ethics, trade and bias, this book goes where no other professor, pundit or publication has gone before.
This book will guide leaders, visionaries, investors and policy makers through a world of geopolitics that has no precedent, where for the first time, countries will compete and clash over a technology that everyone wants but nobody fully understands.
https://www.amazon.com/Geopolitics-Artificial-Intelligence-Abishur-Prakash-ebook/dp/B07SZ919JK
The Post-American World
by Fareed Zakaria
"This is not a book about the decline of America, but rather about the rise of everyone else." So begins Fareed Zakaria's important new work on the era we are now entering.
Following on the success of his best-selling The Future of Freedom, Zakaria describes with equal prescience a world in which the United States will no longer dominate the global economy, orchestrate geopolitics, or overwhelm cultures. He sees the "rise of the rest"—the growth of countries like China, India, Brazil, Russia, and many others—as the great story of our time, and one that will reshape the world.
The tallest buildings, biggest dams, largest-selling movies, and most advanced cell phones are all being built outside the United States. This economic growth is producing political confidence, national pride, and potentially international problems. How should the United States understand and thrive in this rapidly changing international climate? What does it mean to live in a truly global era? Zakaria answers these questions with his customary lucidity, insight, and imagination.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2120783.The_Post_American_World
Big other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization
By Shoshana Zuboff
Abstract
This article describes an emergent logic of accumulation in the networked sphere, ‘surveillance capitalism,’ and considers its implications for ‘information civilization.’ The institutionalizing practices and operational assumptions of Google Inc. are the primary lens for this analysis as they are rendered in two recent articles authored by Google Chief Economist Hal Varian. Varian asserts four uses that follow from computer-mediated transactions: ‘data extraction and analysis,’ ‘new contractual forms due to better monitoring,’ ‘personalization and customization,’ and ‘continuous experiments.’ An examination of the nature and consequences of these uses sheds light on the implicit logic of surveillance capitalism and the global architecture of computer mediation upon which it depends. This architecture produces a distributed and largely uncontested new expression of power that I christen: ‘Big Other.’ It is constituted by unexpected and often illegible mechanisms of extraction, commodification, and control that effectively exile persons from their own behavior while producing new markets of behavioral prediction and modification. Surveillance capitalism challenges democratic norms and departs in key ways from the centurieslong evolution of market capitalism. Journal of Information Technology (2015) 30, 75–89. doi:10.1057/jit.2015.5…:
https://cryptome.org/2015/07/big-other.pdf
Is This the End of the Liberal International Order?: The Munk Debates ...
https://www.amazon.com/...End-Liberal-International-Order/.../
Why we must not let Europe break apart
The European project is in big trouble – but it’s worth defending.
By Timothy Garton Ash Thu 9 May 2019 06.00
It’s time to sound the alarm. Seven decades after the end of the second world war on European soil, the Europe we have built since then is under attack. As the cathedral of Notre Dame burned, Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National was polling neck and neck with Emmanuel Macron’s movement for what he calls a “European renaissance”. In Spain, a far-right party called Vox, promoting the kind of reactionary nationalist ideas against which Spain’s post-Franco democracy was supposedly immunised, has won the favour of one in 10 voters in a national election. Nationalist populists rule Italy, where a great-grandson of Benito Mussolini is running for the European parliament on the list of the so-called Brothers of Italy. A rightwing populist party called The Finns, formerly the True Finns (to distinguish them from “false” Finns of different colour or religion), garnered almost as many votes as Finland’s Social Democrats in last month’s general election. In Britain, the European elections on 23 May can be seen as another referendum on Brexit, but the underlying struggle is the same as that of our fellow Europeans. Nigel Farage is a Le Pen in Wellington boots, a True Finn in a Barbour jacket.
Meanwhile, to mark the 30th anniversary of the velvet revolutions of 1989, Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party has denounced a charter of LGBT+ rights as an attack on children. In Germany, the Alternative für Deutschland successfully deploys a völkisch rhetoric we thought vanquished for good, although now it scapegoats Muslims instead of Jews. Remember Bertolt Brecht’s warning: “The womb is fertile still/ from which that crawled.” Viktor Orbán, the young revolutionary hero of 1989 turned bulldog-jowled neo-authoritarian, has effectively demolished liberal democracy in Hungary, using antisemitic attacks on the billionaire George Soros and generous subsidies from the EU. He has also enjoyed political protection from Manfred Weber, the Bavarian politician whom the European People’s party, Europe’s powerful centre-right grouping, suggests should be the next president of the European commission. Orbán has summed the situation up like this: “Thirty years ago, we thought Europe was our future. Today, we believe we are Europe’s future.”
Italy’s Matteo Salvini agrees, so much so that he is hosting an election rally of Europe’s rightwing populist parties, an international of nationalists, in Milan later this month. To be sure, the spectacle of a once-great country reducing itself to a global laughing stock, in a tragic farce called Brexit, has silenced all talk of Hungexit, Polexit or Italexit. But what Orbán and co intend is actually more dangerous. Farage merely wants to leave the EU; they propose to dismantle it from within, returning to an ill-defined but obviously much looser “Europe of nations”.
Wherever one looks, old and new rifts appear, between northern and southern Europe, catalysed by the Eurozone crisis, between west and east, reviving the old stereotypes of intra-European orientalism (civilised west, barbaric east), between Catalonia and the rest of Spain, between two halves of each European society, and even between France and Germany.
For anyone who takes a longer view, these mounting signs of European disintegration should not be a surprise. Isn’t this a pattern familiar from European history? In the 17th century, the horrendously destructive thirty years war was concluded by the peace of Westphalia. At the turn of the 18th to the 19th, the continent was torn apart by two decades of Napoleonic wars, then stitched together in another pattern by the Congress of Vienna. The first world war was followed by the Versailles peace. Each time, the new post-war European order lasts a while – sometimes shorter, sometimes longer – but gradually frays at the edges, with tectonic tensions building up under the surface, until it finally breaks apart in a new time of troubles. No European settlement, order, empire, commonwealth, res publica, Reich, concert, entente, axis, alliance, coalition or union lasts for ever.
Set against that historical measuring rod, our Europe has done pretty well: it is 74 years old this week, if we date its birth to the end of the second world war in Europe. It owes this longevity to the miraculously non-violent collapse in 1989-91 of a nuclear-armed Russian empire that had occupied half the continent. Only in former Yugoslavia, and more recently in Ukraine, have we witnessed what more normally follows the fall of empires: bloody strife. Otherwise, what happened after the end of the cold war was a peaceful enlargement and deepening of the existing, post-1945 west European order. Yet maybe now the muse of history is shouting, like some grim boatman from the shore, “come in Number 45, your time is up!”
In one respect, however, this time is different. For centuries, Europe kept tearing itself apart, then putting itself together again, but all the while exploiting, colonising and bossing around other parts of the world. With the European civil war that raged on and off from 1914 to 1945, once described by Winston Churchill as a second thirty years war, Europe deposed itself from its global throne. In act five of Europe’s self-destruction, the US and the Soviet Union strode on to the stage like Fortinbras at the end of Hamlet. Yet, Europe was at least still the central stage of world politics throughout the cold war that followed. Europeans made history once again for a brief shining moment in 1989, but then Hegel’s Weltgeist, the “world spirit”, moved rapidly on from Berlin to Beijing.
Today, Europe struggles to remain a subject rather than becoming merely an object of world politics – with Beijing hungry to shape a Chinese century, a revanchist Russia, Donald Trump’s unilateralist US, and climate change threatening to overwhelm us all. Both Russia and China merrily divide and rule across our continent, using economic power to pick off weaker European states and disinformation to set nation against nation. In the 19th century, European powers engaged in what was called the scramble for Africa; in the 21st, outside powers engage in a scramble for Europe.
Of course, Europe means many different things. It is a continent with ill-defined borders, a shared culture and history, a contested set of values, a complex web of institutions and, not least, hundreds of millions of people, all with their own individual Europes. Nationalists like Le Pen and Orbán insist they just want a different kind of Europe. Tell me your Europe and I will tell you who you are. But the central institution of the post-1945 project of Europeans working closely together is the European Union, and its future is now in question.
None of this radicalisation and disintegration is inevitable, but to avert it, we have to understand how we got here, and why this Europe, with all its faults, is still worth defending.
It is 1942. In a tram rattling through Nazi-occupied Warsaw sits an emaciated, half-starved 10-year-old boy. His name is Bronek. He is wearing four sweaters, yet still he shivers despite the August heat. Everyone looks at him curiously. Everyone, he is sure, sees that he is a Jewish kid who has slipped out of the ghetto through a hole in the wall. Luckily, no one denounces him, and one Polish passenger warns him to watch out for a German sitting in the section marked “Nur für Deutsche”. And so Bronek survives, while his father is murdered in a Nazi extermination camp and his brother sent to Bergen-Belsen.
Sixty years on, I was walking with Bronek down one of the long corridors of the parliament of a now-independent Poland. Suddenly he stopped in his tracks, turned to me, stroked his beard and said with quiet passion: “You know, for me, Europe is something like a Platonic essence.”
In the life of Prof Bronisław Geremek, you have the essential story of how, and why, Europe came to be what it is today. Having escaped the horrors of the ghetto (“the world burned before my eyes”), along with his mother, he was brought up by a Polish Catholic stepfather, served as an altar boy and was taught by an inspiring priest in the Sodality of the Blessed Virgin Mary. So he had also, in his bones, Europe’s deep and defining Christian heritage. Then, at the age of 18, he joined the communist party, believing it would build a better world. Eighteen years later, stripped of his last illusions by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, he resigned from that same party in protest and returned to his professional life as a medieval historian. But politics somehow would not let him go.
I first encountered him during a historic occupation strike in the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk in August 1980, when the leader of the striking workers, Lech Wałęsa, asked Geremek to become an adviser to the protest movement that would soon be christened Solidarity. Over the subsequent decade I would visit him, whenever I got the chance, in his small apartment in Warsaw’s Old Town, which had been razed to the ground by the Nazis, then rebuilt stone upon stone by the Poles. As he puffed away at his professorial pipe, he shared with me his pellucid analysis of the decline of the Soviet empire, even as he and his comrades in Solidarity helped turn that decline into fall. For in 1989, he was the intellectual architect of the round table talks that were the key to Poland’s negotiated transition from communism to democracy, and Poland was the icebreaker for the rest of central Europe.
Ten years on, he was the foreign minister who signed the treaty by which Poland became a member of Nato. When I visited him in the foreign ministry, I spotted on his mantelpiece a bottle of a Czech vodka called Stalin’s Tears. “You must have it!” he exclaimed. “A Polish foreign minister cannot keep Stalin in his office!” And so that bottle of Stalin’s Tears stands on my mantelpiece in Oxford as I write. In memory of Bronek, I will never drink it.
Having been instrumental in steering his beloved country into the European Union, he subsequently became a member of the European parliament, that same parliament to which we are electing new representatives this month. Tragically, but in a way symbolically, he died in a car accident on the way to Brussels.
Geremek’s story is unique, but the basic form of his Europeanism is typical of three generations of Europe-builders who made our continent what it is today. When you look at how the argument for European integration was advanced in various countries, from the 1940s to the 1990s, each national story seems at first glance very different. But dig a bit deeper and you find the same underlying thought: “We have been in a bad place, we want to be in a better one, and that better place is called Europe.” Many and diverse were the nightmares from which these countries were trying to awake. For Germany, it was the shame and disgrace of the criminal regime that murdered Bronek’s father. For France, it was the humiliation of defeat and occupation; for Britain, relative political and economic decline; for Spain, a fascist dictatorship; for Poland, a communist one. Europe had no shortage of nightmares. But in all these countries, the shape of the pro-European argument was the same. It was an elongated, exuberant pencilled tick: a steep descent, a turn and then an upward line ascending to a better future. A future called Europe.
Personal memories of bad times were a driving force for three distinctive generations. Many of the founding fathers of what is now the European Union were what one might call 14ers, still vividly recalling the horrors of the first world war. (The 14ers included the British prime minister Harold Macmillan, who would talk with a breaking voice of the “lost generation” of his contemporaries). Then came the 39ers like Geremek, indelibly shaped by traumas of war, gulag, occupation and Holocaust. Finally, there was a third cohort, the 68ers, revolting against the war-scarred generation of their parents, yet many of them also having experience of dictatorship in southern and eastern Europe.
The trouble starts when you have arrived in the promised land. Now, for the first time, we have a generation of Europeans – let’s call them the 89ers – who have known nothing but a Europe of closely connected liberal democracies. Call it a European empire or commonwealth, if you will. To be sure, “Europe whole and free” remains an ideal, not a reality, for millions who live here, especially those who are poor, belong to a discriminated minority or seek refuge from across the Mediterranean. But we are closer to that ideal than ever before.
It would be a parody of middle-aged condescension to say “these young people don’t know how lucky they are!”. After all, younger voters are often more pro-European than older ones. But it would not be wrong to say that many 89ers who have grown up in this relatively whole and free continent do not see Europe as a great cause, the way 39ers and 68ers did. Why be passionate about something that already exists? Unless they have grown up in the former Yugoslavia or Ukraine, they are unlikely to have much direct personal experience of just how quickly things can all unravel, back to European barbarism. By contrast, many of them do know from bitter experience how life got worse after the financial crisis of 2008.
On the walls of Al-Andalus, a tapas bar in Oxford, depictions of flamenco dancers and bullfights embrace cliche without shame. Here, when I first met him in 2015, Julio – dark-haired, lean and intense – worked as a waiter. But serving tourists in a tapas bar in England was not what he expected to be doing with his life. He had just finished a master’s degree in European studies at Computense University in Madrid. It was the Eurozone crisis – which at its height made one in every two young Spaniards unemployed – that reduced him to this. Looking back, Julio describes his feelings when he had to make this move abroad: “Sadness, impotence, solitude.”
Across the continent there are many thousands of Julios. For them, the tick line has been inverted: it started by going steadily up, but then turned sharply downwards after 2008. Ten years ago, you and your country were in a better place. Now you are in a worse one, and that is because Europe has not delivered on its promises.
Here is the cunning of history: the seeds of triumph are sown in the moment of greatest disaster, in 1939, but the seeds of crisis are sown in the moment of triumph, in 1989. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that many of the problems haunting Europe today have their origins in the apparently triumphant transition after the fall of the Berlin Wall. A few far-sighted people warned at the time. The French political philosopher Pierre Hassner wrote in 1991 that, even as we celebrated the triumph of freedom, we should remember that “humankind does not live by liberty and universality alone, that the aspirations that led to nationalism and socialism, the yearning for community and identity, and the yearning for solidarity and equality, will reappear as they always do”. And so they have.
The events of 1989 opened the door to an unprecedented era of globalised, financialised capitalism. While this facilitated great material progress for a new middle class in Asia, in the west it generated levels of economic inequality not seen since the early 20th century. A divide also opened up between those with higher education and international experience, and those in the less fortunate other halves of European societies. The latter felt an inequality of attention and respect from the former. Barriers to freedom of movement between European countries were eliminated while little thought was given to what Europe would do if large numbers of people wanted to enter through the outer frontier of the Schengen zone. What followed was problems of large-scale emigration, for the poorer countries of eastern and southern Europe, and of immigration for the richer ones of northern Europe – be it the internal movement of more than 2 million east Europeans to Britain or the influx of more than 1 million refugees from outside the EU to Germany.
When the global financial crisis hit, it exposed all the inherent flaws of a halfway-house Eurozone. Hastened into life as a political response to German unification, the Eurozone that we have today, a common currency without a common treasury, hitching together such diverse economies as those of Greece and Germany, had been warned against in vain by numerous economists. Absent a decisive, far-sighted response from northern Europe, and especially from Germany, the impact on southern Europe was traumatic. Not only did the Eurozone crisis drive Julio to that dreary tapas bar and people in Greece to desperate hardship; it kick-started a new wave of radical and populist politics, on both left and right, and with mixtures of left and right that don’t easily fit into that old dichotomy.
Populists blame the sufferings of “the people” on remote, technocratic, liberal elites. Europe, or more accurately “Europe”, is particularly vulnerable to this attack. For most officials in Brussels are quite remote, quite technocratic and quite liberal. Although members of the European parliament are directly elected, that parliament can at times seem like a bubble within the Brussels bubble. Although their remuneration is peanuts compared to that of the bankers who nearly crashed the globalised capitalist system, EU leaders, parliamentarians and officials are very well paid. Watching them jump out of a chauffeur-driven BMW to deliver another smooth, visionary speech about the future of Europe, before jumping back into the BMW to be swept off to another nice lunch, it is not surprising that many less privileged Europeans say: “Well, they would praise Europe, wouldn’t they?”
Earlier this year, in a shabby office in Westminster, I was talking to someone who, like me, passionately wants a second referendum on Brexit, in which the majority votes to remain in the EU. What should be our campaign slogan? Among others, he suggested “Europe is great!” I winced. Why? Because this calls to mind the toe-curling British government national promotion campaign built around the motto “Britain is GREAT”. Countries that feel the need to proclaim in capital letters that they are great probably no longer are. But also because of all these problems that have accumulated across Europe during the 30 years of peace since 1989. Europe is great for us, the educated, privileged, mobile and gainfully employed, but do you really feel like saying “Europe is great!” with a straight face to the unemployed, unskilled worker in the post-industrial north of England, the southern European graduate who can’t find a job, or the Roma child or the refugee stuck in a camp?
We are only credible if we acknowledge that the European Union is now passing through an existential crisis, under attack from inside and out. It is paying the price both for past successes, which result in its achievements being taken for granted, and past mistakes, many of them having the shared characteristic of liberal over-reach.
The case for Europe today is very different from that of a half-century ago. In the 1970s, people in Britain, Spain or Poland looked at countries like France and West Germany, just coming to the end of the trente glorieuses – the three postwar decades of economic growth – in the then much smaller European Community, and said “we want what they’re having”. Today, the case starts with the defence of a Europe that already exists, but is now threatened with disintegration. If the construction were so strong that we could without hesitation say “Europe is great!”, it would not need our support so badly.
Since its inception, the European project has had a future-oriented, teleological rhetoric, all about what will come to pass one fine day, as we reach some ideal finalité européenne. These habits die hard. Driving through Hannover recently, I saw a Green party poster for the European elections that declared “Europe is not perfect – but it’s a damned good start”. Pause to think for a moment, and you realise how odd this is. After all, we don’t say “Britain is not perfect, but it’s a damned good start”. Nor do most 74-year-olds say “my life is not perfect, but it’s a good start”. The European Union today, like Germany or France or Britain, is a mature political entity, which does not need to derive its legitimacy from some utopian future. There is now a realistic, even conservative (with a small c) argument for maintaining what has already been built – which, of course, necessarily also means reforming it. If we merely preserved for the next 30 years today’s EU, at its current levels of freedom, prosperity, security and cooperation, that would already be an astonishing achievement.
In a long historical perspective, this is the best Europe we have ever had. I challenge you to point to a better one, for the majority of the continent’s countries and individual people. Most Europeans live in liberal democracies that are committed to resolving their differences by all-night meetings in Brussels, not unilateral action, let alone armed force. This European Union is not a country, and will not become one any time soon, but it is much more than just an international organisation. The former Italian prime minister Giuliano Amato describes it as an unidentified flying object. It may be short on mystique, on emotional appeal, but it is not lacking that entirely. The heart can lift to see European flags fluttering beside national ones, and certainly to the strains of the European anthem, Beethoven’s setting of the Ode to Joy.
For everyone who is a citizen of an EU member state, this is a continent where you can wake up on a Friday morning, decide to take a budget airline flight to the other end of the continent, meet someone you like, settle down to study, work and live there, all the time enjoying the rights of a European citizen in one and the same legal, economic and political community. All this you appreciate most, like health, when you are about to lose it. Small wonder that marchers at the huge pro-European demonstration in London on 23 March this year wore T-shirts proclaiming “I am a citizen of Europe”.
So here’s the deepest challenge of this moment: do we really need to lose it all in order to find it again? Born in the depths of European barbarism more than 70 years ago, tipped towards crisis by a hubris born of that liberal triumph 30 years ago, does this project of a better Europe really need to descend all the way down to barbarism again before people mobilise to bring it back up? As personal memories like those that inspired the European passion of Bronisław Geremek fade away, the question is whether collective memory, cultivated by historians, journalists, novelists, statespeople and film-makers, can enable us to learn the lessons of the past without going through it all again ourselves.
Julio thinks we can learn. That is why, having resumed his academic career in Spain, he is now standing in the European elections for a radical, transnational pro-European party called Volt. “The generation that I represent,” he wrote to me in a recent email, “has observed the beginning of the disintegration of the EU, because of the triumph of the Brexit referendum. Imagine exit referendums across the EU in the next 10 or 20 years; the EU could easily be dismantled … So nothing will stand if we don’t defend what we have achieved after so many generations of sacrifice.”
You don’t have to subscribe to the electric radicalism of Volt’s pan-European federalist programme to appreciate the force of Julio’s appeal. I myself think more gradualist recipes for EU reform are more realistic. There are multiple variants of pro-Europeanism on offer from different parties in this month’s European elections, most of them acknowledging the need for reform. In Britain, five parties (not including Labour) are unambiguously in favour of the country staying in the EU. What is clear is that for once, and at last, these European elections really are about the future of Europe. Across 28 countries, new parties and old ghosts compete for the hearts of voters, with close to 100 million of them still undecided how they will vote. What is called for now, in every corner of our continent, is the defence of our common European home, not with arms but through the ballot box. Your continent needs you.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/09/why-we-must-not-let-europe-break-
Robo-Apocalypse? Not in Your Lifetime
May 21, 2019 J. BRADFORD DELONG
Not a week goes by without some new report, book, or commentary sounding the alarm about technological unemployment and the "future of work." Yet in considering the threat posed by automation at most levels of the value chain, we should remember that robots cannot do what humans cannot tell them to do.
BERKELEY – Will the imminent “rise of the robots” threaten all future human employment? The most thoughtful discussion of that question can be found in MIT economist David H. Autor’s 2015 paper, “Why Are There Still so Many Jobs?”, which considers the problem in the context of Polanyi’s Paradox. Given that “we can know more than we can tell,” the twentieth-century philosopher Michael Polanyi observed, we shouldn’t assume that technology can replicate the function of human knowledge itself. Just because a computer can know everything there is to know about a car doesn’t mean it can drive it.
CARL BILDT calls on leaders to finalize a new strategic agenda, from which all policy and personnel matters must follow.
This distinction between tacit knowledge and information bears directly on the question of what humans will be doing to produce economic value in the future. Historically, the tasks that humans have performed have fallen into ten broad categories. The first, and most basic, is using one’s body to move physical objects, which is followed by using one’s eyes and fingers to create discrete material goods. The third category involves feeding materials into machine-driven production processes – that is, serving as a human robot – which is followed by actually guiding the operations of a machine (acting as a human microprocessor).
In the fifth and sixth categories, one is elevated from microprocessor to software, performing accounting-and-control tasks or facilitating communication and the exchange of information. In the seventh category, one actually writes the software, translating tasks into code (here, one encounters the old joke that every computer needs an additional “Do” command: “Do What I Mean”). In the eighth category, one provides a human connection, whereas in the ninth, one acts as cheerleader, manager, or arbiter for other humans. Finally, in the tenth category, one thinks critically about complex problems, and then devises novel inventions or solutions to them.
For the past 6,000 years, tasks in the first category have gradually been offloaded, first to draft animals and then to machines. For the past 300 years, tasks in the second category have also been offloaded to machines. In both cases, jobs in categories three through six – all of which augmented the increasing power of the machines – became far more prevalent, and wages grew enormously.
But we have since developed machines that are better than humans at performing tasks in categories three and four – where we behave like robots and microprocessors – which is why manufacturing as a share of total employment in advanced economies has been declining for two generations, even as the productivity of manufacturing has increased. This trend, combined with monetary policymakers’ excessive anti-inflationary zeal, is a major factor contributing to the recent rise of neofascism in the United States and other Western countries.
Worse, we have now reached the point where robots are also better than humans at performing the “software” tasks in categories five and six, particularly when it comes to managing the flow of information and, it must be said, misinformation. Nonetheless, over the next few generations, this process of technological development will work itself out, leaving humans with just four categories of things to do: thinking critically, overseeing other humans, providing a human connection, and translating human whims into a language the machines can understand.
The problem is that very few of us have the genius to produce genuine economic value with our own creativity. The wealthy can employ only so many personal assistants. And many cheerleaders, managers, and dispute-settlers are already unnecessary. That leaves category eight: as long as livelihoods are tied to remunerative employment, the prospect of preserving a middle-class society will depend on enormous demand for human connection.
Here, Polanyi’s Paradox gives us cause for hope. The task of providing “human connection” is not just inherently emotional and psychological; it also requires tacit knowledge of social and cultural circumstances that cannot be codified into concrete, routine commands for computers to follow. Moreover, each advance in technology creates new domains in which tacit knowledge matters, even when it comes to interacting with the new technologies themselves.
As Autor observes, though auto manufacturers “employ industrial robots to install windshields … aftermarket windshield replacement companies employ technicians, not robots.” It turns out that “removing a broken windshield, preparing the windshield frame to accept a replacement, and fitting a replacement into that frame demand more real-time adaptability than any contemporary robot can cost-effectively approach.” In other words, automation depends on fully controlled conditions, and humans will never achieve full control of the entire environment.
Some might counter that artificial-intelligence applications could develop a capacity to absorb “tacit knowledge.” Yet even if machine-learning algorithms could communicate back to us why they have made certain decisions, they will only ever work in restricted environmental domains. The wide range of specific conditions that they need in order to function properly renders them brittle and fragile, particularly when compared to the robust adaptability of human beings.
At any rate, if the “rise of the robots” represents a threat, it won’t be salient within the next two generations. For now, we should worry less about technological unemployment, and more about the role of technology in spreading disinformation. Without a properly functioning public sphere, why bother debating economics in the first place?
J. Bradford DeLong is Professor of Economics at the University of California at Berkeley and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He was Deputy Assistant US Treasury Secretary during the Clinton Administration, where he was heavily involved in budget and trade negotiations. His role in designing the bailout of Mexico during the 1994 peso crisis placed him at the forefront of Latin America’s transformation into a region of open economies, and cemented his stature as a leading voice in economic-policy debates.
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/rise-of-robots-social-work-by-j-bradford-delong-2019-05?utm_
Rule of the Robots: How Artificial
Intelligence Will Transform Everything
by Martin Ford
The New York Times–bestselling
author of Rise of the Robots shows what happens as AI
takes over our lives
If you have a smartphone, you have AI in your pocket. AI is impossible to avoid
online. And it has already changed everything from how doctors diagnose disease
to how you interact with friends or read the news. But in Rule of the
Robots, Martin Ford argues that the true revolution is yet to come.
In this sequel to his prescient New York Times bestseller Rise
of the Robots, Ford presents us with a striking vision of the very near
future. He argues that AI is a uniquely powerful technology that is altering
every dimension of human life, often for the better. For example, advanced
science is being done by machines, solving devilish problems in molecular
biology that humans could not, and AI can help us fight climate change or the
next pandemic. It also has a capacity for profound harm. Deep
fakes—AI-generated audio or video of events that never happened—are poised to
cause havoc throughout society. AI empowers authoritarian regimes like China
with unprecedented mechanisms for social control. And AI can be deeply biased,
learning bigoted attitudes from us and perpetuating them.
In short, this is not a technology to simply embrace, or let others worry about.
The machines are coming, and they won’t stop, and each of us needs to know what
that means if we are to thrive in the twenty-first century. And Rule of
the Robots is the essential guide to all of it: both AI and the future
of our economy, our politics, our lives.
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/56817335-rule-of-the-robots
The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind
by Michio Kaku
The book discusses various possibilities of advanced technology that can alter the brain and mind. Looking into things such as telepathy, telekinesis, consciousness, artificial intelligence, and transhumanism, the book covers a wide range of topics. In it, Kaku proposes a "spacetime theory of consciousness". Similarly to Ray Kurzweil, he believes the advances in silicon computing will serve our needs as opposed to producing a generation of robot overlords.[4]
The Future of Humanity: Terraforming Mars, Interstellar Travel, Immortality, and Our Destiny Beyond Earth Hardcover
by Michio Kaku
We are entering a new Golden Age of space exploration. With irrepressible enthusiasm and a deep understanding of the cutting-edge research in space travel, World-renowned physicist and futurist Dr. Michio Kaku presents a compelling vision of how humanity may develop a sustainable civilization in outer space. He reveals the developments in robotics, nanotechnology, and biotechnology that may allow us to terraform and build habitable cities on Mars and beyond. He then journeys out of our solar system and discusses how new technologies such as nanoships, laser sails, and fusion rockets may actually make interstellar travel a possibility. We travel beyond our galaxy, and even beyond our universe, as Kaku investigates some of the hottest topics in science today, including warp drive, wormholes, hyperspace, parallel universes, and the multiverse. Ultimately, he shows us how humans may someday achieve a form of immortality and be able to leave our bodies entirely, laser porting to new havens in space. https://www.amazon.com/Future-Humanity-Terraforming-Interstellar-Immortality/dp/0385542763
"Cognizant "21 Jobs of the Future Report""
Introduction Concern about a “jobless future” has never been greater. Seemingly every day, an academic, researcher or technology leader suggests that in a world of automation and artificial intelligence (AI), workers will increasingly be a surplus to what businesses need – or as Stanford University’s Jerry Kaplan says in his best-selling book, it won’t be long before “humans need not apply.”1 The concerns are understandable. AI – long academic theory and Hollywood plotline – is becoming “real” at an astonishing pace and finding its way into more and more aspects of work, rest and play. AI is now being used to read X-rays and MRIs. It’s at the heart of stock trading. Chat with Siri or Alexa, and you’re using AI. Soon, AI will be found in every job, profession and industry around the world. When machines do everything, lots of people wonder what will we do? What work will be left for people? How will we make a living when machines are cheaper, faster and smarter than we are – machines that don’t take breaks or vacations, don’t get sick and don’t care about chatting with their colleagues about last night’s game? For many people, the future of work looks like a bleak place, full of temporary jobs (a “gig” economy), minimum wage labor and a ruling technocracy safely hidden away in their gated communities and their circular living machines. Although plausible, this vision of the future is not one we share. Our vision is quite different – and much more optimistic. Our vision is based on a different reading of the trends and the facts; a different interpretation of how change occurs and how humans evolve. Our view of the future of work is based on the following principles: • Work has always changed. Few if any people make a living nowadays as knockeruppers, telegraphists, switchboard operators, computers (the first computers were people), lamplighters, nursemaids, limners, town criers, travel agents, bank tellers, elevator operators or secretaries. Yet these were all jobs that employed thousands of people in the past. • Lots of current work is awful. Millions of people around the world do work they hate — work that is dull, dirty or dangerous. Rather than trying to keep people in these jobs, we should liberate them to do more fulfilling, more enjoyable, more lucrative work. We shouldn’t have a “pre-nostalgia” for the mortgage processor in the way that some people are nostalgic about miners and steelworkers (people who typically weren’t miners or steelworkers, it goes without saying). • Machines need man. Machines can do more, but there is always more to do. Can a machine (in its software or hardware form) create itself, market itself, sell itself? Deliver itself? Feed itself? Clean itself? Fix itself? Machines are tools, and tools need to be used. By people. To imagine otherwise is to fall into the realm of science-fiction extrapolation. • Don’t underestimate human imagination or ingenuity. Our greatest quality is our curiosity. We want to know what’s around the riverbend. How it works. What it means. EMOJI/FILTER/AVATAR DESIGNERS • BIG DATA AS A SERVICE FOR INDIVIDUALS • AI AUGMENTED SOCIAL CAREER COACH • PERSONAL DATA ACTUARY • PERSONAL DATA MONETIZER • P+M SPECIALISTS GIG NEGOTIATOR • REMOTE DIGITAL FINANCIAL FITNESS COACH • DRONE JOCKEY/ DRONE LOGISTICS MANAGER • EXPERIENCE DESIGNER/ENGINEER /VIRTUAL STORE ARCHITECT • 3D PRINTING ENGINEER • VIRTUAL PROJECT EXPERTS/ “SOMMELIERS” • IMMERSION OVER LAYERS • JOURNEY SCENARISTS UXWRIGHTS/CXWRIGHTS • SMART HOME TECH SUPPORT • GENETIC MIXOLOGIST • ORGAN CREATORS • HUMAN NURTURERS • NANO BOT ENGINEERS • GENETIC DOPING PATHOLOGIST • SMART CLOTHING SPECIALIST • FITNESS COMMITMENT COUNSELLOR • TALKER/WALKER • MICRO ENERGY SPECIALIST • AGRICULTURAL GENE SPECIALIST/DNA ENGINEER • ALGAE FARMERS • INSECT BREEDERS • METHANE CONVERSION SPECIALISTS • APPLIANCE ENERGY INCENTIVE REPRESENTATIVE • ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE FOR ROBOTS • AI ASSISTED HEALTHCARE TECHNICIANS • AUTONOMOUS FLEET ATTENDANTS • SPACE CONTROLLERS • AI TRAINER • EXPERIENCE CURATORS • DEMENTIA SPECIALISTS • ARTISAN CYBER MAKERS • AUTONOMOUS TRAVEL CASE LAW • GENE MODIFICATION CASE LAW • EQUALITY CASE LAW • GENETIC DOPING ARBITRATION • “SOMMELIERS” • IMMERSION OVER LAYERS • JOURNEY SCENARISTS • EMOJI/FILTER/AVATAR DESIGNERS • BIG DATA AS A SERVICE FOR INDIVIDUALS • AI AUGMENTED SOCIAL CAREER COACH • PERSONAL DATA ACTUARY • PERSONAL DATA MONETIZER • P+M SPECIALISTS GIG NEGOTIATOR • REMOTE DIGITAL FINANCIAL FITNESS COACH • DRONE JOCKEY/DRONE LOGISTICS MANAGER • EXPERIENCE DESIGNER/ENGINEER /VIRTUAL STORE ARCHITECT • 3D PRINTING ENGINEER • VIRTUAL PROJECT EXPERTS/ “SOMMELIERS” • IMMERSION OVER LAYERS • JOURNEY SCENARISTS UXWRIGHTS/CXWRIGHTS • SMART HOME TECH SUPPORT • GENETIC MIXOLOGIST • ORGAN CREATORS • HUMAN NURTURERS • NANO BOT ENGINEERS • |
21 Jobs of the Future: A Guide to Getting – and Staying – Employed for the Next 10 Years How we can make it better. In an age of intelligent machines, man will continue to want to explore – and make – what’s next. Doing so will be the source of new work ad infinitum. • Technology will upgrade all aspects of society. Many aspects of modern societies are still far from perfect. Is our healthcare system as good as it’s ever going to be? The way we bank? How we educate our kids? Insure our houses? Board an airplane? Of course not. Technology – which is still, in truth, peripheral to many aspects of our work and our lives – is set to become central to how we do everything and, in the process, make the services and experiences we want much, much better. And, in doing so, it will also impact how we occupy our time. • Technology solves – and creates – problems. The guilty little secret of the technology world is that every solution begets a problem. Fix A, and then B goes on the fritz. Develop C – which is a great new thing – and then realize you’ve also created D – which is a terrible new thing that needs fixing. Intelligent machines will address many problems in society (see above), but in doing so, they will also create lots of new problems that people will need to work on addressing. Work that they will monetize. The work ahead goes on forever. Wash, rinse, repeat. In the future, work will change but won’t go away. Many types of jobs will disappear. Many workers will struggle to adjust to the disappearance of the work they understand and find it hard to thrive with work they don’t understand. Wrenching transformations – which is what the future of work holds for us all – are never easy. But a world without work is a fantasy that is no closer to reality in 2017 than it was 501 years ago upon the publication of Thomas More’s Utopia…:
https://www.cognizant.com/whitepapers/21-jobs-of-the-future-a-guide-to-getting-and-staying-employed-over-the-next-10-years-codex3049.pdf
Futurism | Science and Technology News and Videos
Discover the latest science and technology news and videos on breakthroughs that are shaping the world of tomorrow with Futurism. https://futurism.com/
Top 10 Emerging Technologies Of 2019
World-changing technologies that are poised to rattle the status quo
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/top-10-emerging-technologies-of-2019/
The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity
by
Toby Ord
This well-written and compelling book is about the possible: what we, the human race, might achieve; and what might go wrong, seriously wrong, on the path to those achievements. These ideas seem particularly relevant today—and Ord’s arguments make me determined to do what I can to lower those risks. Speaking of doing what you can, check out Giving What We Can, an organization he founded.
If
all goes well, human history is just beginning. Our species could survive for
billions of years - enough time to end disease, poverty, and injustice, and to
flourish in ways unimaginable today. But this vast future is at risk. With the
advent of nuclear weapons, humanity entered a new age, where we face existential
catastrophes - those from which we could never come back. Since then, these
dangers have only multiplied, from climate change to engineered pathogens and
artificial intelligence. If we do not act fast to reach a place of safety, it
will soon be too late.
Drawing on over a decade of research, The Precipice explores
the cutting-edge science behind the risks we face. It puts them in the context
of the greater story of humanity: showing how ending these risks is among the
most pressing moral issues of our time. And it points the way forward, to the
actions and strategies that can safeguard humanity.
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/50485582-the-precipice
The Genesis Machine: Our Quest to Rewrite Life in the Age of Synthetic Biology
by Amy Webb , Andrew Hessel
The next frontier in technology is inside our own bodies.
Synthetic biology will revolutionize how we define family, how we identify disease and treat aging, where we make our homes, and how we nourish ourselves. This fast-growing field—which uses computers to modify or rewrite genetic code—has created revolutionary, groundbreaking solutions such as the mRNA COVID vaccines, IVF, and lab-grown hamburger that tastes like the real thing. It gives us options to deal with existential threats: climate change, food insecurity, and access to fuel.
But there are significant risks.
Who should decide how to engineer living organisms? Whether engineered organisms should be planted, farmed, and released into the wild? Should there be limits to human enhancements? What cyber-biological risks are looming? Could a future biological war, using engineered organisms, cause a mass extinction event?
Amy Webb and Andrew Hessel’s riveting examination of synthetic biology and the bioeconomy provide the background for thinking through the upcoming risks and moral dilemmas posed by redesigning life, as well as the vast opportunities waiting for us on the horizon.
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/58340994-the-genesis-machine
21 Lessons for the 21st Century
By Yuval Noah Harari ( יובל נח הררי)
In bringing his focus to the here and now, Harari will help us to grapple with a world that is increasingly hard to comprehend, encouraging us to focus our minds on the essential questions we should be asking ourselves today. Employing his trademark entertaining and lucid style, Harari will examine some of the world’s most urgent issues, including terrorism, fake news and immigration, as well as turning to more individual concerns, from resilience and humility to meditation.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38820046-21-lessons-for-the-21st-century
Xenobots 3.0: Living Robots That Can Reproduce…:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqkfBish_Ic&t=1722s
Kinematic self-replication in reconfigurable
organisms
PNAS December 7,
2021
Significance
Almost all organisms
replicate by growing and then shedding offspring. Some molecules also
replicate, but by moving rather than growing: They find and combine building
blocks into self-copies. Here we show that clusters of cells, if freed from a
developing organism, can similarly find and combine loose cells into clusters
that look and move like they do, and that this ability does not have to be specifically
evolved or introduced by genetic manipulation. Finally, we show that artificial
intelligence can design clusters that replicate better, and perform useful work
as they do so. This suggests that future technologies may, with little outside
guidance, become more useful as they spread, and that life harbors surprising
behaviors just below the surface, waiting to be uncovered.
Abstract
All living systems
perpetuate themselves via growth in or on the body, followed by splitting,
budding, or birth. We find that synthetic multicellular assemblies can also
replicate kinematically by moving and compressing dissociated cells in their
environment into functional self-copies. This form of perpetuation, previously
unseen in any organism, arises spontaneously over days rather than evolving
over millennia. We also show how artificial intelligence methods can design
assemblies that postpone loss of replicative ability and perform useful work as
a side effect of replication. This suggests other unique and useful phenotypes
can be rapidly reached from wild-type organisms without selection or genetic
engineering, thereby broadening our understanding of the conditions under which
replication arises, phenotypic plasticity, and how useful replicative machines
may be realized….:
https://www.pnas.org/content/118/49/e2112672118
A scalable pipeline for designing reconfigurable
organisms
January 28,
2020
Significance
Most technologies are
made from steel, concrete, chemicals, and plastics, which degrade over time and
can produce harmful ecological and health side effects. It would thus be useful
to build technologies using self-renewing and biocompatible materials, of which
the ideal candidates are living systems themselves. Thus, we here present a
method that designs completely biological machines from the ground up:
computers automatically design new machines in simulation, and the best designs
are then built by combining together different biological tissues. This
suggests others may use this approach to design a variety of living machines to
safely deliver drugs inside the human body, help with environmental
remediation, or further broaden our understanding of the diverse forms and
functions life may adopt.
Abstract
Living systems are
more robust, diverse, complex, and supportive of human life than any technology
yet created. However, our ability to create novel lifeforms is currently
limited to varying existing organisms or bioengineering organoids in vitro.
Here we show a scalable pipeline for creating functional novel lifeforms: AI
methods automatically design diverse candidate lifeforms in silico to perform
some desired function, and transferable designs are then created using a
cell-based construction toolkit to realize living systems with the predicted
behaviors. Although some steps in this pipeline still require manual
intervention, complete automation in future would pave the way to designing and
deploying unique, bespoke living systems for a wide range of functions…:
https://www.pnas.org/content/117/4/1853
What are the risks of
artificial intelligence?
There are a myriad of risks to do with AI that we deal with in our lives today.
Not every AI risk is as big and worrisome as killer robots or sentient AI. Some
of the biggest risks today include things like consumer privacy, biased
programming, danger to humans, and unclear legal regulation.
RESEARCHER MEREDITH
WHITTAKER SAYS AI’S BIGGEST RISK ISN’T ‘CONSCIOUSNESS’—IT’S THE CORPORATIONS
THAT CONTROL THEM
Risks of Artificial
Intelligence
- Automation-spurred job loss.
- Deepfakes.
- Privacy violations.
- Algorithmic bias caused by bad data.
- Socioeconomic inequality.
- Market volatility.
- Weapons automatization.
- Uncontrollable self-aware AI.
Being human in the age of artificial intelligence
by Max Tegmark PhD, 2017
This book revolves around author, physicist, and cosmologist Max Tegmark PhD. He sets-out to differentiate the myths of AI from reality in an approachable way. He manages to answer challenging questions about creating a prosperous world with AI — and how to protect AI from being hacked.
The book aims to help the layperson understand what will be most affected by AI in our day-to-day lives. A great primer into the world of AI.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/arena-attachments/1446178/cffa5ebc74cee2b1edf58fa9a5bbcb1c.pdf?1511265314
The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives
by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler
In their book Abundance, bestselling authors and futurists Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler tackled grand global challenges, such as poverty, hunger, and energy. Then, in Bold, they chronicled the use of exponential technologies that allowed the emergence of powerful new entrepreneurs. Now the bestselling authors are back with The Future Is Faster Than You Think, a blueprint for how our world will change in response to the next ten years of rapid technological disruption.
Technology is accelerating far more quickly than anyone could have imagined. During the next decade, we will experience more upheaval and create more wealth than we have in the past hundred years. In this gripping and insightful roadmap to our near future, Diamandis and Kotler investigate how wave after wave of exponentially accelerating technologies will impact both our daily lives and society as a whole. What happens as AI, robotics, virtual reality, digital biology, and sensors crash into 3D printing, blockchain, and global gigabit networks? How will these convergences transform today’s legacy industries? What will happen to the way we raise our kids, govern our nations, and care for our planet?
Diamandis, a space-entrepreneur-turned-innovation-pioneer, and Kotler, bestselling author and peak performance expert, probe the science of technological convergence and how it will reinvent every part of our lives—transportation, retail, advertising, education, health, entertainment, food, and finance—taking humanity into uncharted territories and reimagining the world as we know it.
As indispensable as it is gripping, The Future Is Faster Than You Think provides a prescient look at our impending future…:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/46404268-the-future-is-faster-than-you-think
Spiritualities, ethics, and implications of human enhancement and artificial intelligence
October 15, 2019
by Ray Kurzweil (Author), Tracy J. Trothen (Author), Christopher Hrynkow (Editor)
By taking a religiously and spiritually literature approach, this volume gets the heart of several emerging ethical issues crucial to both human identity and personhood beyond the human as technology advances in the areas of human enhancement and artificial intelligence (AI). Several significant questions are addressed by the contributors, such as: How far should we go in improving our biological selves? How long should we aspire to live? What are fair and just human enhancements? When will AIs become people? What does AI spirituality consist of? Can AIs do more than project humour and emotions? What are the religious undertones of these high technology quests for better AI and improved human existence? Established and emerging voices explore these questions, and more, in Spiritualities, ethics, and implications of human enhancement and artificial intelligence.
This volume will be of interest to university students and researchers absorbed by issues surrounding spiritualities, human enhancement, and artificial intelligence; while also providing points for reflection for the wider public as these topics become increasingly important to our common future.
https://www.amazon.com/Spiritualities-implications-enhancement-artificial-intelligence/dp/1622738233
A breakthrough processor invented for AI
topic: progress in computing December 1, 2019
Cerebras says its computer chip is the largest ever built: as big as a dinner plate — 100 times the size of a typical chip.
Important breakthroughs happen faster each year. There’s little time to read everything that’s essential, interesting, helpful, or paradigm shifting…:
https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201911/30/WS5de16c25a310cf3e3557b0d6.html
Human + Machine re-Imagining work in the age of AI
by Paul Daugherty + H. James Wilson, 2018
Look around you. Artificial intelligence is no longer just a futuristic notion. It's here right now--in software that senses what we need, supply chains that "think" in real time, and robots that respond to changes in their environment. Twenty-first-century pioneer companies are already using AI to innovate and grow fast. The bottom line is this: Businesses that understand how to harness AI can surge ahead. Those that neglect it will fall behind. Which side are you on?
In Human + Machine, Accenture leaders Paul R. Daugherty and H. James (Jim) Wilson show that the essence of the AI paradigm shift is the transformation of all business processes within an organization--whether related to breakthrough innovation, everyday customer service, or personal productivity habits. As humans and smart machines collaborate ever more closely, work processes become more fluid and adaptive, enabling companies to change them on the fly--or to completely reimagine them. AI is changing all the rules of how companies operate.
Based on the authors' experience and research with 1,500 organizations, the book reveals how companies are using the new rules of AI to leap ahead on innovation and profitability, as well as what you can do to achieve similar results. It describes six entirely new types of hybrid human + machine roles that every company must develop, and it includes a "leader’s guide" with the five crucial principles required to become an AI-fueled business.
Human + Machine provides the missing and much-needed management playbook for success in our new age of AI.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36465763-human-machine
Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence And the end of the human era.
by James Barrat, 2013
In as little as a decade, artificial intelligence could match, then surpass human intelligence. Corporations & government agencies around the world are pouring billions into achieving AI’s Holy Grail—human-level intelligence. Once AI has attained it, scientists argue, it will have survival drives much like our own. We may be forced to compete with a rival more cunning, more powerful & more alien than we can imagine. Thru profiles of tech visionaries, industry watchdogs & groundbreaking AI systems, James Barrat's Our Final Invention explores the perils of the heedless pursuit of advanced AI. Until now, human intelligence has had no rival. Can we coexist with beings whose intelligence dwarfs our own? Will they allow us to?
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17286699-our-final-invention
SuperIntelligence paths, dangers, strategies
by Nick Bostrom PhD, 2014
The human brain has some capabilities that the brains of other animals lack. It is to these distinctive capabilities that our species owes its dominant position. Other animals have stronger muscles or sharper claws, but we have cleverer brains.
If machine brains one day come to surpass human brains in general intelligence, then this new superintelligence could become very powerful. As the fate of the gorillas now depends more on us humans than on the gorillas themselves, so the fate of our species then would come to depend on the actions of the machine superintelligence.
But we have one advantage: we get to make the first move. Will it be possible to construct a seed AI or otherwise to engineer initial conditions so as to make an intelligence explosion survivable? How could one achieve a controlled detonation?
To get closer to an answer to this question, we must make our way through a fascinating landscape of topics and considerations. Read the book and learn about oracles, genies, singletons; about boxing methods, tripwires, and mind crime; about humanity's cosmic endowment and differential technological development; indirect normativity, instrumental convergence, whole brain emulation and technology couplings; Malthusian economics and dystopian evolution; artificial intelligence, and biological
cognitive enhancement, and collective intelligence.
This profoundly ambitious and original book picks its way carefully through a vast tract of forbiddingly difficult intellectual terrain. Yet the writing is so lucid that it somehow makes it all seem easy. After an utterly engrossing journey that takes us to the frontiers of thinking about the human condition and the future of intelligent life, we find in Nick Bostrom's work nothing less than a reconceptualization of the essential task of our time.
https://www.pdfdrive.com/superintelligence-paths-dangers-strategies-e53173641.html
the Singularity Is Near When humans transcend biology.
by Ray Kurzweil
The book builds on the ideas introduced in Kurzweil's previous books, The Age of Intelligent Machines (1990) and The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999). This time, however, Kurzweil embraces the term the Singularity, which was popularized by Vernor Vinge in his 1993 essay "The Coming Technological Singularity" more than a decade earlier.[1]
Kurzweil describes his law of accelerating returns which predicts an exponential increase in technologies like computers, genetics, nanotechnology, robotics and artificial intelligence. Once the Singularity has been reached, Kurzweil says that machine intelligence will be infinitely more powerful than all human intelligence combined. Afterwards he predicts intelligence will radiate outward from the planet until it saturates the universe. The Singularity is also the point at which machines intelligence and humans would merge.
http://stargate.inf.elte.hu/~seci/fun/Kurzweil,%20Ray%20-%20Singularity%20Is%20Near,%20The%20%28hardback%20ed%29%20%5Bv1.3%5D.pdf
Machine Learning Yearning Technical strategy for AI engineers in the era of deep learning.
by Andrew Ng PhD, 2019
AI, machine learning, and deep learning are transforming numerous industries. But building a machine learning system requires that you make practical decisions:
Should you collect more training data?
Should you use end-to-end deep learning?
How do you deal with your training set not matching your test set?
and many more.
Historically, the only way to learn how to make these "strategy" decisions has been a multi-year apprenticeship in a graduate program or company. This is a book to help you quickly gain this skill, so that you can become better at building AI systems.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30741739-machine-learning-yearning
the Master Algorithm How the quest for the ultimate learning machine will re-make our world.
by Pedro Domingos, 2015
A thought-provoking and wide-ranging exploration of machine learning and the race to build computer intelligences as flexible as our own
In the world's top research labs and universities, the race is on to invent the ultimate learning algorithm: one capable of discovering any knowledge from data, and doing anything we want, before we even ask. In The Master Algorithm, Pedro Domingos lifts the veil to give us a peek inside the learning machines that power Google, Amazon, and your smartphone. He assembles a blueprint for the future universal learner--the Master Algorithm--and discusses what it will mean for business, science, and society. If data-ism is today's philosophy, this book is its bible.
https://www.amazon.com/Master-Algorithm-Ultimate-Learning-Machine-ebook/dp/B012271YB2
Rise of the Robots Technology and the threat of a jobless future.
by Martin Ford, 2015
What are the jobs of the future? How many will there be? And who will have them? We might imagine—and hope—that today's industrial revolution will unfold like the last: even as some jobs are eliminated, more will be created to deal with the new innovations of a new era. In Rise of the Robots, Silicon Valley entrepreneur Martin Ford argues that this is absolutely not the case. As technology continues to accelerate and machines begin taking care of themselves, fewer people will be necessary. Artificial intelligence is already well on its way to making “good jobs” obsolete: many paralegals, journalists, office workers, and even computer programmers are poised to be replaced by robots and smart software. As progress continues, blue and white collar jobs alike will evaporate, squeezing working- and middle-class families ever further. At the same time, households are under assault from exploding costs, especially from the two major industries—education and health care—that, so far, have not been transformed by information technology. The result could well be massive unemployment and inequality as well as the implosion of the consumer economy itself.
In Rise of the Robots, Ford details what machine intelligence and robotics can accomplish, and implores employers, scholars, and policy makers alike to face the implications. The past solutions to technological disruption, especially more training and education, aren't going to work, and we must decide, now, whether the future will see broad-based prosperity or catastrophic levels of inequality and economic insecurity. Rise of the Robots is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand what accelerating technology means for their own economic prospects—not to mention those of their children—as well as for society as a whole. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22928874-rise-of-the-robots
Blacklists and redlists: How China’s Social Credit System actually works
OCT 23, 2018
|BY CHRIS UDEMANS
When a young mother from Chengdu wanted to return home from a visit to Beijing in May 2016, the only option she has was to travel for 20 hours in a rickety train to complete the 1,800-kilometer journey.
The woman, who told reporters her surname was Wei, had been put on a government blacklist that prevented her from purchasing certain items and services that required identification verification—including tickets for air and high-speed rail travel.
Wei, who had divorced a year earlier, had become entangled in a legal dispute with her ex-husband who, unbeknownst to her, had filed a suit against her over visitation rights to their son.
Much has been written about China’s emerging tools for social control. But few topics have garnered as much attention as the country’s nascent Social Credit System, a framework to monitor and manipulate citizen behavior using a dichotomy of punishments and rewards.
The idea is simple: By keeping and aggregating records throughout the government’s various ministries and departments, Chinese officials can gain insight into how people behave and develop ways to control them.
The goal writes Rogier Creemers, a postdoctoral scholar specializing in the law and governance of China at Leiden University in The Netherlands, is “cybernetic” behavioral control, allowing individuals to be monitored and immediately confronted with the consequences of their actions. In so doing, authorities can enhance the county’s expanding surveillance apparatus.
Some draw comparisons to the British/US science fiction television series Black Mirror and its speculative vision of the future. Others see parallels with dystopian societies penned by 20th-century writers such as George Orwell. In nearly all cases, the labels of the Social Credit System have been misappropriated.
Despite its name, it isn’t a single system, and it’s not monolithic, as many reports claim. Not every one of the country’s 1.4 billion citizens is being rated on a three-digit scale. Instead, it’s a complex ecosystem containing numerous subsystems, each at various levels of development and affecting different people.
Blacklists—and “redlists”—form the backbone of the Social Credit System, not a much-debated “social credit score.” Blacklists punish negative behavior while redlists reward positive. According to the planning outline released by the State Council, China’s cabinet, in mid-2014, the system’s objective is to encourage individuals to be trustworthy under the law and dissuade against breaking trust to promote a “sincerity culture.”
Even so, an intricate web of social credit systems is coming to China—only perhaps not in the way, or at the speed, that’s generally expected. Many obstacles curb the implementation of a fully-fledged national system, including inadequate technology, insular mindsets among government ministries that jealously guard their data, and a growing awareness of the importance of privacy among China’s educated urban class.
Early experiments
The concept of a system of social credit first emerged in 1999 when officials aimed to strengthen trust in the country’s emerging market economy. However, the focus quickly shifted from building financial creditworthiness to encompass the moral actions of the country’s enterprises, officials, judiciary, and citizens.
More recently, in 2010, Suining County, in eastern China’s Jiangsu Province, began experimenting with a system to rate its citizens. Established to quantify individuals’ behavior, points could be deducted for breaking laws, but also for deviating from social norms and political positioning. Residents were initially awarded 1,000 points. Running a red light, driving while drunk, bribing a public official, or failing to support elderly family members resulted in a 50-point deduction.
The total would be then be used to assign an A to D rating. A-ratings were above 970 points, while those with less than 599 points were given D-ratings. Lower-rated citizens had a harder time accessing social welfare and government housing. More than half of an individual’s points related to social management.
Residents and the media lambasted the system, saying the government had no right to rate the country’s citizens, let alone use public services as a means of punishment and reward. To make matters worse, it was also compared to the “good citizen” identity cards that were issued by the Japanese to Chinese citizens as a form of social management during World War II. City officials eventually disbanded the A to D rating. State-run media outlet Global Times later referred to it as a “policy failure.”
Rising from the ashes of that disastrous experiment, new models for rating individuals have emerged around China. There are over now over 30 of these cities, despite there being no mention of assigning quantitative ratings in the 2014 planning outline. This highlights how the details of implementation are left to local governments, resulting in a scattered application.
In Rongcheng, Shandong Province, each of the city’s 740,000 adult residents start out with 1000 points, according to a report by Foreign Policy. Depending on their score, residents are then rated from A+++ to D, with rewards for high ratings ranging from deposit-free shared bike rental and heating subsidies in winter.
The city of Shanghai is also experimenting with social credit. Through its Honest Shanghai app residents can access their rating by entering their ID number and passing a facial recognition test. The data is drawn from 100 public sources.
Xiamen, a city in the eastern province of Fujian, has launched a similar system. Adults over 18 years old can use the Credit Xiamen official account on popular messaging app WeChat to check their scores. Those with high scores can skip the line for city ferries, and don’t need to pay a deposit to rent shared bikes or borrow a book from the library.
Jeremy Daum, a senior fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center who has translated many of the government’s social credit-related documents, said that systems rating individuals—like the ones in Rongcheng, Shanghai, and Xiamen—have little effect since very few people are aware of their existence.
The scores are meant to form part of an education system promoting trustworthiness, says Daum. “This is supposed to get people to focus on being good,” he says. If punishments do occur, they are because of violations of laws and regulations, not “bad social credit,” he said.
In the 1990s, China went through a period of radical reformation, adopting a market-based economy. As the number of commercial enterprises mushroomed, many pushed for growth at any cost, and a host of scandals hit China.
In an editorial from 2012, Jiangxi University of Finance and Economics professor Zhang Jinming drew attention to the emerging appearance of low-quality goods and products and their effects on the populace. “These substandard products could result in serious economic losses, and some may even be health hazards,” he wrote.
In 2008, for example, contaminated milk powder sickened nearly 300,000 Chinese children and killed six babies. Twenty-two companies, including Sanlu Group, which accounted for 20% of the market at the time, were found to have traces of melamine in their products. An investigation found that local farmers had deliberately added the chemical to increase the protein content of substandard milk.
In 2015, a mother and daughter were arrested for selling $88 million in faulty vaccines. The arrests were made public a year later when it was announced that the improperly-stored vaccines had made their way across 20 provinces, causing a public outcry and loss in consumer confidence.
A question of trust
Incidents like these are driving the thinking behind the Social Credit System, Samm Sacks, a US-based senior fellow in the Technology Policy Program at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), who has published extensively on the topic, told TechNode. The idea is that greater supervision and increased “trust” in society could limit episodes like these, and in turn, promote China’s economic development.
The most well-developed part of social credit relates to businesses and seeks to ensure compliance in the market. Has your company committed fraud? It may be put on a blacklist. Along with you and other representatives. Have you paid your taxes on time? The company may be placed on a redlist, making it easier to bypass bureaucratic hurdles.
Government entities then share industry-specific lists and other public data through memorandums of understanding. This creates a system of cross-departmental punishments and rewards. If one government department imposes sanctions on a company, another could do the same within the scope of their power.
If a company were added to a blacklist for serious food safety violations it could be completely banned from operating or be barred from government procurement. Companies on redlists face fewer roadblocks when interacting with government departments.
A critical feature of the system to link individuals to businesses, explains Martin Chorzempa, a research fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, based in Washington, DC. The idea is that while companies are supervised in their market activities, executives and legal representatives are also held responsible if something goes wrong.
But it’s not just business people that can be included on blacklists, as Wei, the young mother from Chengdu, found out.
One of the most notorious blacklists is the “List of Dishonest Persons Subject to Enforcement.” Reserved for those who have willfully neglected to fulfill court orders, lost a civil suit, failed to pay fines, or conducted fraudulent activity. Punishments include bans from air and high-speed rail travel, private school education, high-end hotels, and purchasing luxury goods on e-commerce platforms. Other sanctions include restrictions from benefiting from government subsidies, being awarded honorary titles, and taking on roles as a civil servant or upper-management at state-owned enterprises.
Jia Yueting, former CEO of embattled conglomerate LeEco, also landed on the blacklist in December 2017. Six months later he was banned from buying “luxury” goods and travel for a year—including air and high-speed rail tickets. He had failed to abide by a court order holding him responsible for his debt-ridden company’s dues. Jia fled to the US in late 2017 and defied an order to return to China. He has been back in the news recently after becoming embroiled in a battle with a new investor in Jia’s electric vehicle company Faraday Future.
Blacklist boom
It is uncertain whether the government is incorporating private sector data in social credit records. However, information does flow the other way. Companies like Alibaba and JD.com have integrated blacklist records into their platforms to prohibit defaulters from spending on luxury items.
Reports claiming that the social credit scoops up social media data, internet browsing history, and online transactions data conflate the government’s systems with commercial opt-in platforms like Ant Financial’s Sesame Credit.
Despite being authorized by the People’s Bank of China (PBoC), Sesame Credit is distinct from the government system. The platform, which is integrated into Alipay, rates users on a scale of 350 to 950. Those with higher scores gain access to rewards, including deposit free use of power bricks and shared bicycles, as well as reduced deposits when renting property. It functions like a traditional credit rating platform mixed with a loyalty program. The company was not willing to comment on social credit.
Experts believe that the collection of data by the government is currently limited to records held by its various departments and entities. It is information the government already has but hasn’t yet shared across departments, says Chorzempa.
Liang Fan, a doctoral student at the University of Michigan who studies social credit, explains that he is aware of 400 sources of information, although the total number of types of data that are compiled is unknown to him.
Nonetheless, private industry is picking up on signals from the government, some implicit and others explicit. Private credit systems have been developed off the back of the government’s broader plan. The PBoC was integral in the development of these systems. Although information might not be shared, the companies are benefiting from the troves of data they collect.
The lifeblood of social credit is data. And China has heaps of it. But there are still significant threats to the development of a far-reaching social credit system. Honest Shanghai app users have reported problems ranging from faulty facial recognition tech to the app just not accepting their registration.
“The user experience is terrible. I can’t verify my real name and it failed when I scanned my face,” said one of numerous similar reviews in the iOS App Store. Many of the reviewers posted one-star ratings.
But there exists a much more entrenched problem—individual government departments don’t like sharing their data, says Chorzempa. It holds significant commercial and political value for those who control it. This creates enormous difficulty when attempting to set up a platform for cross-departmental sharing. While there is a national plan to set up a centralized system for the coordination of data, there are currently no notable incentives for sharing. In addition, creating a broader system results in more labor for individual departments, with agencies essentially taking on more work for the benefit of others.
Other challenges are societal. Reports about the proliferation of the social credit system often ignore an important factor that could hinder its overreach: the agency of Chinese individuals. There is a growing awareness of how private data is used. This was evident in the Suining experiment and could have more wide-ranging effects for social credit. “It’s not the free-for-all that it may have been even in 2014 when the social credit plan was released,” said Sacks of CSIS. “There’s been a change in ways that could make aspects of that system illegitimate in the eyes of the public.”
Someone to watch over
Real-name verification is essential for social credit. Everyone in China is required to prove their identity when buying a SIM card, creating or verifying social media accounts, and setting up accounts for making online payments, in part, is dictated by the 2017 Cybersecurity Law.
Everyday activities are being linked to individual identities with more success, reducing anonymity, says Daum. He believes that’s what the government is doing with social credit. “They’re saying: ‘First, we need a system where people are afraid to not be trustworthy. Then we need a system where it’s impossible to not be trustworthy,’ because there’s too much information on you.”
For Wei, the blacklisted woman in Chengdu, it wasn’t the prospect of an arduous cross-country rail journey that bothered her. Instead, she was fearful that her future actions and freedom could be restricted by her past record. What if, for example, her employer wanted her to go on a business trip?
In the late 1800s, British social theorist Jeremy Bentham proposed the idea of a panopticon—an institution in which a single corrections officer could observe all inmates without them knowing whether they were being watched. In the Social Credit System framework that is emerging in China, the lack of anonymity, through both real-name verification and publicly-published blacklists, creates a system of fear even if no one is watching—much like Bentham’s notorious panopticon.
https://technode.com/2018/10/23/china-social-credit/
‘Create a New Society’: Russian Lawmakers Order Gene-Editing Tech
Russian lawmakers have ordered a study on assisted human reproduction, including a cutting-edge and controversial gene-editing technology that would create a “new type of society.”
New gene-editing tools such as CRISPR/Cas9 have made it possible to rearrange the genetic code much more precisely and at lower costs than before. A Chinese scientist caused outrage last year with a claim to have “gene-edited” babies, while a Russian biologist has this year declared plans to modify the genomes of human embryos and implant them in women.
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/09/02/create-a-new-society-russian-lawmakers-order-gene-editing-tech-a67109
Russian Military Seeks Upper Hand With ‘Genetic Passport’ for Soldiers, Top Scientist Says
June 7, 2019
Russian soldiers of the future will be assigned service in specific military branches based on their hereditary predispositions detailed in so-called “genetic passports,” the country’s chief scientist has said.
President Vladimir Putin decreed in March for all Russians to be assigned “genetic passports” by 2025 under the national chemical and biological security strategy. Scientists speculated at the time that these “genetic passports” could refer toeither a set of genetic markers used to identify individuals or a detailed list of individual health risks and traits.
Top Officials Express Concern Over Foreign Collection of Russian DNA
Alexander Sergeyev, the head of Russia’s Academy of Sciences, said the institution is in talks to develop a “soldier’s genetic passport” with the St. Petersburg-based Kirov Military Medical Academy.
“The idea is to understand on a genetic level who’s more predisposed to serve in the Navy or who may be better-suited to become a paratrooper or tankman,” he told the state-run TASS news agency.
The project will also help predict soldiers’ behavior and capabilities in stressful conditions, Sergeyev said in an interview published on Thursday.
The Kirov academy is researching stress resistance as part of the “genetic passport” project to ready for traditional warfare’s expansion into cyberspace, Sergeyev said on Friday.
“After all, the war of the future will largely be a war of intellects, of people who make decisions in conditions far different from those in the past,” he told the state-run RIA Novosti news agency.
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/06/07/russian-military-seeks-upper-hand-with-genetic-passport-for-soldiers-top-scientist-says-a65927
23 OCTOBER 2019
Hello quantum world! Google publishes landmark quantum supremacy claim
The company says that its quantum computer is the first to perform a calculation that would be practically impossible for a classical machine.
Elizabeth Gibney
Scientists at Google say that they have achieved quantum supremacy, a long-awaited milestone in quantum computing. The announcement, published in Nature on 23 October, follows a leak of an early version of the paper five weeks ago, which Google did not comment on at the time.
In a world first, a team led by John Martinis, an experimental physicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Google in Mountain View, California, says that its quantum computer carried out a specific calculation that is beyond the practical capabilities of regular, ‘classical’ machines1. The same calculation would take even the best classical supercomputer 10,000 years to complete, Google estimates.
Quantum supremacy has long been seen as a milestone because it proves that quantum computers can outperform classical computers, says Martinis. Although the advantage has now been proved only for a very specific case, it shows physicists that quantum mechanics works as expected when harnessed in a complex problem.
“It looks like Google has given us the first experimental evidence that quantum speed-up is achievable in a real-world system,” says Michelle Simmons, a quantum physicist at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.
Martinis likens the experiment to a 'Hello World' programme, which tests a new system by instructing it to display that phrase; it's not especially useful in itself, but it tells Google that the quantum hardware and software are working correctly, he says.
The feat was first reported in September by the Financial Times and other outlets, after an early version of the paper was leaked on the website of NASA, which collaborates with Google on quantum computing, before being quickly taken down. At that time, the company did not confirm that it had written the paper, nor would it comment on the stories.
Although the calculation Google chose — checking the outputs from a quantum random-number generator — has limited practical applications, “the scientific achievement is huge, assuming it stands, and I’m guessing it will”, says Scott Aaronson, a theoretical computer scientist at the University of Texas at Austin.
Researchers outside Google are already trying to improve on the classical algorithms used to tackle the problem, in hopes of bringing down the firm's 10,000-year estimate. IBM, a rival to Google in building the world’s best quantum computers, reported in a preprint on 21 October that the problem could be solved in just 2.5 days using a different classical technique2. That paper has not been peer reviewed. If IBM is correct, it would reduce Google’s feat to demonstrating a quantum ‘advantage’ — doing a calculation much faster than a classical computer, but not something that is beyond its reach. This would still be a significant landmark, says Simmons. “As far as I’m aware, that’s the first time that’s been demonstrated, so that’s definitely a big result.”
Quick solutions
Quantum computers work in a fundamentally different way from classical machines: a classical bit is either a 1 or a 0, but a quantum bit, or qubit, can exist in multiple states at once. When qubits are inextricably linked, physicists can, in theory, exploit the interference between their wave-like quantum states to perform calculations that might otherwise take millions of years.
Physicists think that quantum computers might one day run revolutionary algorithms that could, for example, search unwieldy databases or factor large numbers — including, importantly, those used in encryption. But those applications are still decades away. The more qubits are linked, the harder it is to maintain their fragile states while the device is operating. Google’s algorithm runs on a quantum chip composed of 54 qubits, each made of superconducting loops. But this is a tiny fraction of the one million qubits that could be needed for a general-purpose machine.
The task Google set for its quantum computer is “a bit of a weird one”, says Christopher Monroe, a physicist at the University of Maryland in College Park. Google physicists first crafted the problem in 2016, and it was designed to be extremely difficult for an ordinary computer to solve. The team challenged its computer, known as Sycamore, to describe the likelihood of different outcomes from a quantum version of a random-number generator. They do this by running a circuit that passes 53 qubits through a series of random operations. This generates a 53-digit string of 1s and 0s — with a total of 253 possible combinations (only 53 qubits were used because one of Sycamore’s 54 was broken). The process is so complex that the outcome is impossible to calculate from first principles, and is therefore effectively random. But owing to interference between qubits, some strings of numbers are more likely to occur than others. This is similar to rolling a loaded die — it still produces a random number, even though some outcomes are more likely than others.
Sycamore calculated the probability distribution by sampling the circuit — running it one million times and measuring the observed output strings. The method is similar to rolling the die to reveal its bias. In one sense, says Monroe, the machine is doing something scientists do every day: using an experiment to find the answer to a quantum problem that is impossible to calculate classically. The key difference, he says, is that Google’s computer is not single-purpose, but programmable, and could be applied to a quantum circuit with any settings.
Verifying the solution was a further challenge. To do that, the team compared the results with those from simulations of smaller and simpler versions of the circuits, which were done by classical computers — including the Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Extrapolating from these examples, the Google team estimates that simulating the full circuit would take 10,000 years even on a computer with one million processing units (equivalent to around 100,000 desktop computers). Sycamore took just 3 minutes and 20 seconds.
Google thinks their evidence for quantum supremacy is airtight. Even if external researchers cut the time it takes to do the classical simulation, quantum hardware is improving — meaning that for this problem, conventional computers are unlikely to ever catch up, says Hartmut Neven, who runs Google’s quantum-computing team.
Limited applications
Monroe says that Google’s achievement might benefit quantum computing by attracting more computer scientists and engineers to the field. But he also warns that the news could create the impression that quantum computers are closer to mainstream practical applications than they really are. “The story on the street is ‘they’ve finally beaten a regular computer: so here we go, two years and we’ll have one in our house’,” he says.
In reality, Monroe adds, scientists are yet to show that a programmable quantum computer can solve a useful task that cannot be done any other way, such as by calculating the electronic structure of a particular molecule — a fiendish problem that requires modelling multiple quantum interactions. Another important step, says Aaronson, is demonstrating quantum supremacy in an algorithm that uses a process known as error correction — a method to correct for noise-induced errors that would otherwise ruin a calculation. Physicists think this will be essential to getting quantum computers to function at scale.
Google is working towards both of these milestones, says Martinis, and will reveal the results of its experiments in the coming months.
Aaronson says that the experiment Google devised to demonstrate quantum supremacy might have practical applications: he has created a protocol to use such a calculation to prove to a user that the bits generated by a quantum random-number generator really are random. This could be useful, for example, in cryptography and some cryptocurrencies, whose security relies on random keys.
Google engineers had to carry out a raft of improvements to their hardware to run the algorithm, including building new electronics to control the quantum circuit and devising a new way to connect qubits, says Martinis. “This is really the basis of how we’re going to scale up in the future. We think this basic architecture is the way forward,” he says.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03213-z?utm_source=email+marketing+Mailigen&utm_campaign=
Are We Ready for Quantum Computers?
Hardware hasn’t caught up with theory, but we’re already lining up many previously intractable problems for when it does
By Rolando Somma on March 13, 2020
A recent paper by Google claiming that a quantum computer performed a specific calculation that would choke even the world’s fastest classical supercomputer has raised many more questions than it answered. Chief among them is this: When full-fledged quantum computers arrive, will we be ready?
Google achieved this milestone against the backdrop of a more sobering reality: Even the best gate-based quantum computers today can only muster around 50 qubits. A qubit, or quantum bit, is the basic piece of information in quantum computing, analogous to a bit in classical computing but so much more.
Gate-based quantum computers operate using logic gates but, in contrast with classical computers, they exploit inherent properties of quantum mechanics such as superposition, interference and entanglement. Current quantum computers are so noisy and error-prone that the information in its quantum state is lost within tens of microseconds through a mechanism called decoherence and through faulty gates.
Still, researchers are making demonstrable, if slow, progress toward more usable qubits. Perhaps in 10 years, or 20, we’ll reach the goal of reliable, large-scale, error-tolerant quantum computers that can solve a wide range of useful problems.
When that day comes, what should we do with them?
We’ve had decades to prepare. In the early 1980s, the American physicist Paul Benioff published a paper demonstrating that a quantum-mechanical model of a Turing machine—a computer—was theoretically possible. Around the same time, Richard Feynman argued that simulating quantum systems at any useful scale on classical computers would always be impossible because the problem would get far, far too big: the required memory and time would increase exponentially with the volume of the quantum system. On a quantum computer, the required resources would scale up far less radically.
Feynman really launched the field of quantum computing when he suggested that the best way to study quantum systems was to simulate them on quantum computers. Simulating quantum physics is the app for quantum computers. They’re not going to be helping you stream video on your smartphone. If large, fault-tolerant quantum computers can be built, they will enable us to probe the strange world of quantum mechanics to unprecedented depths. It follows different rules than the world we observe in our everyday lives and yet underpins everything.
On a big enough quantum computer, we could simulate quantum field theories to study the most fundamental nature of the universe. In chemistry and nanoscale research, where quantum effects dominate, we could investigate the basic properties of materials and design new ones to understand mechanisms such as unconventional superconductivity. We could simulate and understand new chemical reactions and new compounds, which could aid in drug discovery.
By diving deep into mathematics and information theory, we already have developed many theoretical tools to do these things, and the algorithms are farther along than the technology to build the actual machines. It all starts with a theoretical model of the quantum computer, which establishes how it will harness quantum mechanics to perform a useful computation. Researchers write quantum algorithms to perform a task or solve a problem using that model. These are basically a sequence of quantum gates together with a measurement of the quantum state that provides the desired classical information.
So, for instance, Grover’s algorithm shows a way to perform faster searches. Shor’s algorithm has proved that large quantum computers will one day be able to break computer security systems based on RSA, a method widely used to protect, for instance, e-mail and financial websites worldwide.
In my research, my colleagues and Ihave demonstrated very efficient algorithms to perform useful computations and study physical systems. We have also demonstrated one of the methods in one of the first small-scale quantum simulations ever done of a system of electrons, in a nuclear magnetic resonance quantum information processor. Others have also followed up on our work and recently simulated simple quantum field theories on the noisy intermediate scale quantum computers available today and in laboratory experiments.
SPEED no limits in the digital era
by Aleksander Poniewierski,
Everything around us is accelerating. Everyone is talking about new technologies, digital transformation and new business models. But does everyone understand what this is all about?
SPEED is an acronym for:
(S) Security, which is today the basis of new business,
(P) Partnership, without it, is impossible to earn quickly and sustainably in four industrial revolution,
(E) Emerging technologies, thanks to which we can create the business of the future,
(E) Economy, which means to change the current business model to bring true value to shareholders,
(D) Digital transformation, which means everything about the value of the company, the change of organizational culture and the generation of Millennials and Gen Z, which becomes our employees and customers.
"SPEED no limits in the digital era" is the first book to explain the changes that have taken place over the past 250 years in a simple way. Not only by giving examples of Uber, Airbnb but by giving a real recipe for how to do it.
This book which will explain to readers with technical backgrounds the economic aspects and business people the meanders of technology.
SPEED is backed up with insightful guest contributions from senior executives from Google, Cisco Systems, Apple, IBM, EY, the European Commission, NATO, Tribal Planet and Harvard.
And most importantly, it is written by a practitioner with over 20 years of experience working for the largest companies in the world.
How to get your business into the fast lane and leave your competitors behind ... you will know reading SPEED no limits in the digital era.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/47584090-speed-no-limits-in-the-digital-era
DeepMind says its new AI coding engine is as good as an average human programmer
AlphaCode is good, but not great — not yet
By James
Vincent Feb 2, 2022
DeepMind has created
an AI
system named AlphaCode that it says “writes computer programs
at a competitive level.” The Alphabet subsidiary tested its system against
coding challenges used in human competitions and found that its program
achieved an “estimated rank” placing it within the top 54 percent of human
coders. The result is a significant step forward for autonomous coding, says
DeepMind, though AlphaCode’s skills are not necessarily representative of the
sort of programming tasks faced by the average coder…:
https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/2/22914085/alphacode-ai-coding-
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
By Yuval Noah Harari
100,000 years ago, at least six human species inhabited the earth. Today there is just one. Us. Homo sapiens.
How did our species succeed in the battle for dominance? Why did our foraging ancestors come together to create cities and kingdoms? How did we come to believe in gods, nations and human rights; to trust money, books and laws; and to be enslaved by bureaucracy, timetables and consumerism? And what will our world be like in the millennia to come?
In Sapiens, Dr Yuval Noah Harari spans the whole of human history, from the very first humans to walk the earth to the radical – and sometimes devastating – breakthroughs of the Cognitive, Agricultural and Scientific Revolutions. Drawing on insights from biology, anthropology, paleontology and economics, he explores how the currents of history have shaped our human societies, the animals and plants around us, and even our personalities. Have we become happier as history has unfolded? Can we ever free our behaviour from the heritage of our ancestors? And what, if anything, can we do to influence the course of the centuries to come?
Bold, wide-ranging and provocative, Sapiens challenges everything we thought we knew about being human: our thoughts, our actions, our power ... and our future
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23692271-sapiens
Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
By Yuval Noah Harari
Yuval Noah Harari, author of the critically-acclaimed New York Times bestseller and international phenomenon Sapiens, returns with an equally original, compelling, and provocative book, turning his focus toward humanity’s future, and our quest to upgrade humans into gods.
Over the past century humankind has managed to do the impossible and rein in famine, plague, and war. This may seem hard to accept, but, as Harari explains in his trademark style—thorough, yet riveting—famine, plague and war have been transformed from incomprehensible and uncontrollable forces of nature into manageable challenges. For the first time ever, more people die from eating too much than from eating too little; more people die from old age than from infectious diseases; and more people commit suicide than are killed by soldiers, terrorists and criminals put together. The average American is a thousand times more likely to die from binging at McDonalds than from being blown up by Al Qaeda.
What then will replace famine, plague, and war at the top of the human agenda? As the self-made gods of planet earth, what destinies will we set ourselves, and which quests will we undertake? Homo Deus explores the projects, dreams and nightmares that will shape the twenty-first century—from overcoming death to creating artificial life. It asks the fundamental questions: Where do we go from here? And how will we protect this fragile world from our own destructive powers? This is the next stage of evolution. This is Homo Deus.
With the same insight and clarity that made Sapiens an international hit and a New York Times bestseller, Harari maps out our future.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31138556-homo-deus
08 Oct 2019
Many Experts Say We Shouldn’t Worry About Superintelligent AI. They’re Wrong
By Stuart Russell
This article is based on a chapter of the author’s newly released book, Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control.
AI research is making great strides toward its long-term goal of human-level or superhuman intelligent machines. If it succeeds in its current form, however, that could well be catastrophic for the human race. The reason is that the “standard model” of AI requires machines to pursue a fixed objective specified by humans. We are unable to specify the objective completely and correctly, nor can we anticipate or prevent the harms that machines pursuing an incorrect objective will create when operating on a global scale with superhuman capabilities. Already, we see examples such as social-media algorithms that learn to optimize click-through by manipulating human preferences, with disastrous consequences for democratic systems.
Nick Bostrom’s 2014 book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies presented a detailed case for taking the risk seriously. In what most would consider a classic example of British understatement, The Economist magazine’s review of Bostrom’s book ended with: “The implications of introducing a second intelligent species onto Earth are far-reaching enough to deserve hard thinking.”
Switching the machine off won’t work for the simple reason that a superintelligent entity will already have thought of that possibility and taken steps to prevent it.
Surely, with so much at stake, the great minds of today are already doing this hard thinking—engaging in serious debate, weighing up the risks and benefits, seeking solutions, ferreting out loopholes in solutions, and so on. Not yet, as far as I am aware. Instead, a great deal of effort has gone into various forms of denial.
Some well-known AI researchers have resorted to arguments that hardly merit refutation. Here are just a few of the dozens that I have read in articles or heard at conferences:
Electronic calculators are superhuman at arithmetic. Calculators didn’t take over the world; therefore, there is no reason to worry about superhuman AI.
Historically, there are zero examples of machines killing millions of humans, so, by induction, it cannot happen in the future.
No physical quantity in the universe can be infinite, and that includes intelligence, so concerns about superintelligence are overblown.
Perhaps the most common response among AI researchers is to say that “we can always just switch it off.” Alan Turing himself raised this possibility, although he did not put much faith in it:
If a machine can think, it might think more intelligently than we do, and then where should we be? Even if we could keep the machines in a subservient position, for instance by turning off the power at strategic moments, we should, as a species, feel greatly humbled.... This new danger...is certainly something which can give us anxiety.
Switching the machine off won’t work for the simple reason that a superintelligent entity will already have thought of that possibility and taken steps to prevent it. And it will do that not because it “wants to stay alive” but because it is pursuing whatever objective we gave it and knows that it will fail if it is switched off. We can no more “just switch it off” than we can beat AlphaGo (the world-champion Go-playing program) just by putting stones on the right squares.
Other forms of denial appeal to more sophisticated ideas, such as the notion that intelligence is multifaceted. For example, one person might have more spatial intelligence than another but less social intelligence, so we cannot line up all humans in strict order of intelligence. This is even more true of machines: Comparing the “intelligence” of AlphaGo with that of the Google search engine is quite meaningless.
Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired magazine and a remarkably perceptive technology commentator, takes this argument one step further. In “The Myth of a Superhuman AI,” he writes, “Intelligence is not a single dimension, so ‘smarter than humans’ is a meaningless concept.” In a single stroke, all concerns about superintelligence are wiped away.
Now, one obvious response is that a machine could exceed human capabilities in all relevant dimensions of intelligence. In that case, even by Kelly’s strict standards, the machine would be smarter than a human. But this rather strong assumption is not necessary to refute Kelly’s argument.
Consider the chimpanzee. Chimpanzees probably have better short-term memory than humans, even on human-oriented tasks such as recalling sequences of digits. Short-term memory is an important dimension of intelligence. By Kelly’s argument, then, humans are not smarter than chimpanzees; indeed, he would claim that “smarter than a chimpanzee” is a meaningless concept.
This is cold comfort to the chimpanzees and other species that survive only because we deign to allow it, and to all those species that we have already wiped out. It’s also cold comfort to humans who might be worried about being wiped out by machines.
The risks of superintelligence can also be dismissed by arguing that superintelligence cannot be achieved. These claims are not new, but it is surprising now to see AI researchers themselves claiming that such AI is impossible. For example, a major report from the AI100 organization, “Artificial Intelligence and Life in 2030 [PDF],” includes the following claim: “Unlike in the movies, there is no race of superhuman robots on the horizon or probably even possible.”
To my knowledge, this is the first time that serious AI researchers have publicly espoused the view that human-level or superhuman AI is impossible—and this in the middle of a period of extremely rapid progress in AI research, when barrier after barrier is being breached. It’s as if a group of leading cancer biologists announced that they had been fooling us all along: They’ve always known that there will never be a cure for cancer.
What could have motivated such a volte-face? The report provides no arguments or evidence whatever. (Indeed, what evidence could there be that no physically possible arrangement of atoms outperforms the human brain?) I suspect that the main reason is tribalism—the instinct to circle the wagons against what are perceived to be “attacks” on AI. It seems odd, however, to perceive the claim that superintelligent AI is possible as an attack on AI, and even odder to defend AI by saying that AI will never succeed in its goals. We cannot insure against future catastrophe simply by betting against human ingenuity.
If superhuman AI is not strictly impossible, perhaps it’s too far off to worry about? This is the gist of Andrew Ng’s assertion that it’s like worrying about “overpopulation on the planet Mars.” Unfortunately, a long-term risk can still be cause for immediate concern. The right time to worry about a potentially serious problem for humanity depends not just on when the problem will occur but also on how long it will take to prepare and implement a solution.
For example, if we were to detect a large asteroid on course to collide with Earth in 2069, would we wait until 2068 to start working on a solution? Far from it! There would be a worldwide emergency project to develop the means to counter the threat, because we can’t say in advance how much time is needed.
Ng’s argument also appeals to one’s intuition that it’s extremely unlikely we’d even try to move billions of humans to Mars in the first place. The analogy is a false one, however. We are already devoting huge scientific and technical resources to creating ever more capable AI systems, with very little thought devoted to what happens if we succeed. A more apt analogy, then, would be a plan to move the human race to Mars with no consideration for what we might breathe, drink, or eat once we arrive. Some might call this plan unwise.
Another way to avoid the underlying issue is to assert that concerns about risk arise from ignorance. For example, here’s Oren Etzioni, CEO of the Allen Institute for AI, accusing Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking of Luddism because of their calls to recognize the threat AI could pose:
At the rise of every technology innovation, people have been scared. From the weavers throwing their shoes in the mechanical looms at the beginning of the industrial era to today’s fear of killer robots, our response has been driven by not knowing what impact the new technology will have on our sense of self and our livelihoods. And when we don’t know, our fearful minds fill in the details.
Even if we take this classic ad hominem argument at face value, it doesn’t hold water. Hawking was no stranger to scientific reasoning, and Musk has supervised and invested in many AI research projects. And it would be even less plausible to argue that Bill Gates, I.J. Good, Marvin Minsky, Alan Turing, and Norbert Wiener, all of whom raised concerns, are unqualified to discuss AI.
The accusation of Luddism is also completely misdirected. It is as if one were to accuse nuclear engineers of Luddism when they point out the need for control of the fission reaction. Another version of the accusation is to claim that mentioning risks means denying the potential benefits of AI. For example, here again is Oren Etzioni:
Doom-and-gloom predictions often fail to consider the potential benefits of AI in preventing medical errors, reducing car accidents, and more.
And here is Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, in a recent media-fueled exchange with Elon Musk:
If you’re arguing against AI, then you’re arguing against safer cars that aren’t going to have accidents. And you’re arguing against being able to better diagnose people when they’re sick.
The notion that anyone mentioning risks is “against AI” seems bizarre. (Are nuclear safety engineers “against electricity”?) But more importantly, the entire argument is precisely backwards, for two reasons. First, if there were no potential benefits, there would be no impetus for AI research and no danger of ever achieving human-level AI. We simply wouldn’t be having this discussion at all. Second, if the risks are not successfully mitigated, there will be no benefits.
The potential benefits of nuclear power have been greatly reduced because of the catastrophic events at Three Mile Island in 1979, Chernobyl in 1986, and Fukushima in 2011. Those disasters severely curtailed the growth of the nuclear industry. Italy abandoned nuclear power in 1990, and Belgium, Germany, Spain, and Switzerland have announced plans to do so. The net new capacity per year added from 1991 to 2010 was about a tenth of what it was in the years immediately before Chernobyl.
Strangely, in light of these events, the renowned cognitive scientist Steven Pinker has argued [PDF] that it is inappropriate to call attention to the risks of AI because the “culture of safety in advanced societies” will ensure that all serious risks from AI will be eliminated. Even if we disregard the fact that our advanced culture of safety has produced Chernobyl, Fukushima, and runaway global warming, Pinker’s argument entirely misses the point. The culture of safety—when it works—consists precisely of people pointing to possible failure modes and finding ways to prevent them. And with AI, the standard model is the failure mode.
Pinker also argues that problematic AI behaviors arise from putting in specific kinds of objectives; if these are left out, everything will be fine:
AI dystopias project a parochial alpha-male psychology onto the concept of intelligence. They assume that superhumanly intelligent robots would develop goals like deposing their masters or taking over the world.
Yann LeCun, a pioneer of deep learning and director of AI research at Facebook, often cites the same idea when downplaying the risk from AI:
There is no reason for AIs to have self-preservation instincts, jealousy, etc.... AIs will not have these destructive “emotions” unless we build these emotions into them.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter whether we build in “emotions” or “desires” such as self-preservation, resource acquisition, knowledge discovery, or, in the extreme case, taking over the world. The machine is going to have those emotions anyway, as subgoals of any objective we do build in—and regardless of its gender. As we saw with the “just switch it off” argument, for a machine, death isn’t bad per se. Death is to be avoided, nonetheless, because it’s hard to achieve objectives if you’re dead.
A common variant on the “avoid putting in objectives” idea is the notion that a sufficiently intelligent system will necessarily, as a consequence of its intelligence, develop the “right” goals on its own. The 18th-century philosopher David Hume refuted this idea in A Treatise of Human Nature. Nick Bostrom, in Superintelligence, presents Hume’s position as an orthogonality thesis:
Intelligence and final goals are orthogonal: more or less any level of intelligence could in principle be combined with more or less any final goal.
For example, a self-driving car can be given any particular address as its destination; making the car a better driver doesn’t mean that it will spontaneously start refusing to go to addresses that are divisible by 17.
By the same token, it is easy to imagine that a general-purpose intelligent system could be given more or less any objective to pursue—including maximizing the number of paper clips or the number of known digits of pi. This is just how reinforcement learning systems and other kinds of reward optimizers work: The algorithms are completely general and accept any reward signal. For engineers and computer scientists operating within the standard model, the orthogonality thesis is just a given.
The most explicit critique of Bostrom’s orthogonality thesis comes from the noted roboticist Rodney Brooks, who asserts that it’s impossible for a program to be “smart enough that it would be able to invent ways to subvert human society to achieve goals set for it by humans, without understanding the ways in which it was causing problems for those same humans.”
Those who argue the risk is negligible have failed to explain why superintelligent AI will necessarily remain under human control.
Unfortunately, it’s not only possible for a program to behave like this; it is, in fact, inevitable, given the way Brooks defines the issue. Brooks posits that the optimal plan for a machine to “achieve goals set for it by humans” is causing problems for humans. It follows that those problems reflect things of value to humans that were omitted from the goals set for it by humans. The optimal plan being carried out by the machine may well cause problems for humans, and the machine may well be aware of this. But, by definition, the machine will not recognize those problems as problematic. They are none of its concern.
In summary, the “skeptics”—those who argue that the risk from AI is negligible—have failed to explain why superintelligent AI systems will necessarily remain under human control; and they have not even tried to explain why superintelligent AI systems will never be developed.
Rather than continue the descent into tribal name-calling and repeated exhumation of discredited arguments, the AI community must own the risks and work to mitigate them. The risks, to the extent that we understand them, are neither minimal nor insuperable. The first step is to realize that the standard model—the AI system optimizing a fixed objective—must be replaced. It is simply bad engineering. We need to do a substantial amount of work to reshape and rebuild the foundations of AI.
This article appears in the October 2019 print issue as “It’s Not Too Soon to Be Wary of AI.”
About the Author
Stuart Russell, a computer scientist, founded and directs the Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence at the University of California, Berkeley.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/many-experts-say-we-shouldnt-worry-about-superintelligent-ai-theyre-wrong?
Mocking AI Panic
Nick Bostrom Says We Should Trust Our Future Robot Overlords
Interview: Max Tegmark on Superintelligent AI, Cosmic Apocalypse, and Life 3.0
DNA Nation: How the Internet of Genes is Changing your Life
"An
indispensable resource for understanding the complex world of over-the-counter
genetic testing ... the impressive book explores territory that is both easy to
understand and enlightening."---Kirkus
Review
"Highly important, life-changing and delightfully written...[Pistoi] is
pulling the rug out from under many of our preconceptions...with continuous wit
and humor. A book which indeed demands to be savored."--- Paul
Levinson, author of The Silk Code and The Plot to
Save Socrates
Millions of people have done it: with a few clicks and some spit, and at less
than the cost of a fancy dinner, you can buy a reading of your DNA online. With
this in hand, you can find out where you came from, trace relatives around the
world and find new friends on a genetic social network. You can learn about
your predisposition to disease, get a genetically tailored diet, understand the
sports to which you or your children might be more suited, and even find a
date. It’s the dawn of consumer genomics, where the progress of biology meets
the power of the Internet and big data.
But do these applications work? Can we really prevent diseases based on what we
read in our DNA? What do scientists say? And do we really understand the
implications? What happens if things go wrong and the data is misused or the
trust abused?
Sergio Pistoi, a journalist and a DNA scientist, investigated this brave new
world first-hand by interrogating his own genes, and has provided a practical,
informative and thought-provoking survival guide to home genetic testing. From
medicine to food, from social networking to genealogy and advertising, this
book will show you how the DNA revolution is beginning to have such a profound
impact on our daily lives and privacy and why it will influence the choices we
make.
If you are interested in how social media meets cutting-edge science, and what
it means for your life, or if you are considering buying a DNA test, then this
is the book for you.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48758450-dna-nation
The Age of AI: And Our Human Future
Henry Kissinger, Eric
Emerson Schmidt, Daniel Huttenlocher
Three of the world’s most accomplished and deep
thinkers come together to explore Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the way it
is transforming human society—and what this technology means for us all.
An AI learned to win chess by making moves human grand masters had never
conceived. Another AI discovered a new antibiotic by analyzing molecular
properties human scientists did not understand. Now, AI-powered jets are
defeating experienced human pilots in simulated dogfights. AI is coming online
in searching, streaming, medicine, education, and many other fields and, in so
doing, transforming how humans are experiencing reality.
In The Age of AI, three leading thinkers have come together to
consider how AI will change our relationships with knowledge, politics, and the
societies in which we live. The Age of AI is an essential
roadmap to our present and our future, an era unlike any that has come before.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56620811-the-age-of-ai-and-our-human-future
- 05-03-23
- THE FUTURE
OF WORK
The
Fourth Industrial Revolution is here. Here’s what it means for the way we work
New technologies are on track to trigger leaps in
productivity greater than we have ever seen before.
BY W. CHAN KIM AND RENÉE MAUBORGNE
People want to believe that the company they work
for not only creates innovative offerings that positively influence people’s
lives but, in so doing, does not destroy the lives of others. So, by social
good here, we mean the unique ability of nondisruptive creation to innovate new
markets without causing the social harm of shuttered companies, lost jobs, and
hurt communities that occurs when market creation comes with market
destruction.
The rising importance of breaking this trade-off
underscores one of the main reasons we believe that nondisruptive creation is
likely to only grow in importance in the future. And why responsible executives
cannot afford to ignore it. The other main reason lies in the Fourth Industrial
Revolution that is upon us.
UNDERSTANDING
THE FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
Although the Industrial Revolution is often thought
of as a single continuous event, it can be better understood as four sequential
revolutions or paradigm shifts. The first, which began in the late 18th
century, was propelled by mechanization and steam power. The second, in the
19th century, was fostered by mass production, electricity, and the assembly
line. The third, which took place in the 20th century, introduced computers,
automation, and information technologies.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution, which we are now
experiencing, encompasses the advent and convergence of exponential
technologies—from artificial intelligence and smart machines to robotics,
blockchain, and virtual reality—that are already affecting the way we live.
Whenever you query Siri, for example, to find a restaurant’s address, or ask
Alexa to call your mom, you are using AI, whether you are conscious of it or
not.
All these new technologies are on track to trigger
leaps in productivity greater than we have ever seen before. And with these
leaps in productivity will come increasingly lower costs and greater
efficiencies. Which is good. Higher productivity and lower costs should theoretically
translate into a leap in discretionary income or a rise in the purchasing power
of every dollar we earn. Which is double good. Only there is a hitch.
To purchase these lower-priced goods and services
and enjoy the promised higher standard of living that productivity has
historically delivered, it goes without saying that people must have jobs and
sound income. Without them, no matter how efficient, low-cost, and high-quality
goods and services become through technological advances, people won’t have the
means to purchase them. And if people can’t purchase them, the long-established
relationship between greater productivity and a rising standard of living
becomes illusory.
THE
DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD
Herein lies the double-edged sword of the Fourth
Industrial Revolution. Although smart machines and artificial intelligence are
predicted to bring unimaginable efficiencies, they will do so by increasingly
replacing a wide swath of existing human jobs. While historically jobs have
always been around for human beings through technological revolutions, we have
never had a technological revolution that has been capable of displacing so
many human beings and so much human brain power as the one we are transitioning
through now.
According to a report from Oxford Economics, a
global forecasting and quantitative analysis firm, smart machines are expected
to displace about 20 million manufacturing jobs across the world over the next
decade, including more than 1.5 million in the U.S. Other studies predict that
smart machines, robotics, artificial intelligence, blockchain technology, 3D
printing, and automation will put 20% to 40% of existing jobs at risk over the
next decades.
And a report from the Brookings Institution finds
that 25% of U.S. workers will face “high exposure” and risk being displaced
over the upcoming few decades. That translates to about 36 million jobs at risk
of elimination, with another 52 million—36%—facing “medium exposure” to
displacement. The bottom line in all these studies is that we can expect a high
level of dislocation and a great release of labor, especially in the transition
years as the economy adapts to the new reality.
Poor lower- and middle-class workers, you might
think. But high-end jobs are equally at stake as AI and smart machines reach
human levels of performance. You don’t have to look into the future to see
this. Consider the elite sector of Wall Street investing. Already major
investment companies are replacing employees with computerized stock-trading
algorithms that far outperform them. In the next decade, financial institutions
are expected to have replaced 10% of their human workforce, with some 35% of
those jobs in the domain of money management. And consider journalism, where
robots have begun writing reports on economic trends, and automation is even
now used to generate election and sports coverage and to produce digestible
articles from financial reports.
Look at dentistry. In 2017, a robot dentist in
China, without human intervention, successfully implanted 3D-printed teeth into
a woman’s mouth in less than an hour. Only four years earlier, a study at
Oxford University had identified dentists and orthodontists as having among the
safest jobs vis-à-vis smart robots. And wildlife- preservation researchers
responsible for tracking endangered species are on track to becoming endangered
themselves. They’re increasingly being replaced by drones that capture footage
which machine-learning systems then analyze to monitor the populations and
movement of endangered species.
Research papers report that AI is in some respects
even more accurate than trained radiologists in detecting lung cancer, the most
common cause of cancer death in the U.S., and in detecting breast cancer, the
most prevalent form of cancer in women. In the lung cancer study, published in
Nature Medicine, the deep learning algorithm performed with 94.4% accuracy in
spotting cancer that doctors already knew was present. The AI’s performance was
similar to doctors’ when supplemental information, in the form of tomography
scans, was available to the radiologists.
However, when the additional data was not available,
the AI ably outperformed doctors with 11% fewer false positives and 5% fewer
false negatives. In the breast cancer study, which utilized DeepMind (a company
owned by Google) and was published in Nature, the applied AI proved
better at detecting breast cancer than doctors; the AI system was able to
reduce false negative mammograms by 5.7% in the U.S., where readings tend to be
done by only one radiologist. DeepMind has also created a program that performs
as well as the best medical experts in spotting signs of more than 50 eye
diseases.
Machine-learning-automated decision-making systems
will become responsible for tasks such as writing contracts, approving loans, appraising
real estate, deciding whether a customer should be onboarded, and identifying
corruption and financial crime— currently all largely human tasks. Machines,
once thought of as a fixture of the industrial economy, are increasingly
overtaking potentially large portions of today’s economy, with serious
implications for much of the modern workforce. For the first time, humans must
grapple with the harsh realization that they no longer have a monopoly on
thinking: machines are encroaching on us in a fundamental and existential way.
Today, owing to technology developments, scores of
large companies have fewer employees than they did twenty years ago, even when
they’ve experienced rising sales. Procter & Gamble, for example, increased
its sales from $40 billion in 2000 to $67 billion in 2018, yet reduced its
workforce in the same period from 110,000 to 92,000. And although sales at
General Motors, once the auto king of the world, shrank from $166 billion in
1998 to $147 billion in 2018, a drop of roughly 12%, the number of its
employees plummeted from 608,000 to 173,000—a loss of 71%—during the same
period. It certainly seems that the productivity unleashed by technology is
reducing the need for labor across industries. And the Fourth Industrial
Revolution hasn’t even fully hit.
When companies can increasingly make more money with
fewer people, many people will feel increasingly irrelevant. But companies
can’t afford to employ inefficient workers if their aim is to remain
competitive. The choice they face is not between protecting employees and
adopting the new technologies. It is between modernizing and becoming
irrelevant. And few companies are going to choose irrelevance—nor should we
want them to. There’s reason.
Pushing or shaming companies to protect workers who
are no longer needed is pushing companies to be inefficient and globally
noncompetitive, and ultimately to shrink or go out of business, which would
result in an even greater loss of jobs and a huge loss of social good.
Essentially, we are entering a new era in which the
efficacy of technological advances is hitting a tipping point. These advances
will increasingly replace a wide range of human jobs with a new labor force
like Alexa, Siri, and Bixby, which doesn’t need to check social media, receive
a paycheck, take vacations, eat, or even rest.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90890678/the-fourth-industrial-revolution-is-here?utm
NEXUS: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI
Yuval Noah Harari
This non-fiction book looks through the long lens
of human history to consider how the flow of information has made, and unmade,
our world.
We
are living through the most profound information revolution in human history.
To understand it, we need to understand what has come before. We have
named our species Homo sapiens, the wise human – but if humans are
so wise, why are we doing so many self-destructive things? In particular, why
are we on the verge of committing ecological and technological suicide?
Humanity gains power by building large networks of cooperation, but the easiest
way to build and maintain these networks is by spreading fictions, fantasies,
and mass delusions. In the 21st century, AI may form the nexus for a new
network of delusions that could prevent future generations from even attempting
to expose its lies and fictions. However, history is not deterministic, and
neither is technology: by making informed choices, we can still prevent the
worst outcomes. Because if we can’t change the future, then why waste time
discussing it?
https://www.ynharari.com/book/nexus/ ; https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/204927599-nexus
AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future by Kai-Fu Lee
This inspired
collaboration between a pioneering technologist and a visionary writer of
science fiction offers bold and urgent insights.
The biggest tech trends of 2022, according to
experts
Rising applied sciences
Web3 and the blockchain
The subsequent leap in crypto
Into the metaverse
Sustainable tech
Fixing the web
Constructing on the creator economic system
The new healthcare
How we work—and commute
A greater tech business …:
https://19coders.com/the-biggest-tech-trends-of-2022-according-to-experts/
Chasing immortality | The Future is Now
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5GntKFGjtE
IMMORTALITY: How close is it?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d85q7s3Q1E4
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