Lifeboat Foundation

Surging productivity and the general rise in incomes it brings would be welcome, of course, but that isn’t sufficient. The same questions being raised about the advance of robotics in the workplace apply to machine learning. While new jobs would be created, many existing jobs — from doctors and financial advisers to translators and call-center operators — are susceptible to displacement or much-reduced roles. No economic law guarantees that productivity growth benefits everyone equally. Unless we thoughtfully manage the transition, some people, even a majority, are vulnerable to being left behind even as others reap billions.

Whether it’s for the better and for the many is up to human intelligence.

The east coast is currently flooded. Why don’t we have pipelines for pumping water around the country where it is needed? We do it for oil and gas, and you know if it leaks it would not be a toxic mess.

Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack last week suggested the government would look at changing the law to allow water to be taken from the environment and given to farmers struggling with the drought.

This is a bad idea for several reasons. First, the environment needs water in dry years as well as wet ones. Second, unilaterally intervening in the way water is distributed between users undermines the water market, which is now worth billions of dollars. And, third, in dry years the environment gets a smaller allocation too, so there simply isn’t enough water to make this worthwhile.

Continue reading “Giving environmental water to drought-stricken farmers sounds straightforward, but it’s a bad idea” »

Chinese vice-premier Liu He called on the world to work together to address complex ethical, legal and other questions raised by artificial intelligence as he kicked off a gathering in Shanghai bringing together the globe’s AI elites.

“As members of a global village, I hope countries can show inclusive understanding and respect to each other, deal with the double-sword technologies can bring, and together embrace AI,” said Liu, a highly influential official who has been China’s top trade negotiator in the US-China trade war and is also on the country’s technology development committee.

The star-studded World Artificial Intelligence Conference, which opened Monday morning, comes as China has emerged as one of the world’s top players in AI, which promises to revolutionise everything from health care to driving to policing.

Continue reading “Chinese vice-premier calls on global AI elites to tackle ethics questions” »

Amandeep Gill has a difficult job, though he won’t admit it himself. As chair of the United Nations’ Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW) meetings on lethal autonomous weapons, he has the task of shepherding 125 member states through discussions on the thorny technical and ethical issue of “killer robots” — military robots that could theoretically engage targets independently. It’s a subject that has attracted a glaring media spotlight and pressure from NGOs like Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, which is backed by Tesla’s Elon Musk and Alphabet’s Mustafa Suleyman, to ban such machines outright.

Gill has to corral national delegations — diplomats, lawyers, and military personnel — as well as academics, AI entrepreneurs, industry associations, humanitarian organizations, and NGOs in order for member states to try to reach a consensus on this critical security issue.

Continue reading “Inside the United Nations’ effort to regulate autonomous killer robots” »

The country isn’t a world leader in autonomous or electric vehicles, but it’s all in on putting cars in the sky.

The news: Japan announced today that it’s bringing together 21 companies and organizations, including big hitters like Uber, Boeing, Airbus, Cartivator, and Japan Airlines, to bring aerial vehicles to the skies within 10 years.

The challenge: The government said it will address one of the major things holding back flying cars: regulation. “The Japanese government will provide appropriate support to help realize the concept of flying cars, such as creation of acceptable rules,” the ministry said. If Japan is able to quickly establish a legal system in which flying cars can function, it could get a jump start over countries like the US, whose Federal Aviation Association has been notoriously slow-moving on things like drone regulation.

Continue reading “Japan teams up with Uber, Boeing, and Airbus to deploy flying cars within a decade” »

That’s what we are after, with AI. Understanding intelligence in machines, animals and humans, is one of the great scientific challenges of our times and building intelligent machines is one of the greatest technological challenges of our times. No single entity in industry, academia or public research has a monopoly on the good ideas that will achieve these goals. It’s going to take the combined effort of the entire research community to make progress in the science and technology of intelligence.

Facebook is taking an unusual recruitment model championed in law and medicine and applying it to artificial intelligence — and it’s working.

Cuprate superconductors have many unusual properties even in the “normal” (nonsuperconducting) regions of their phase diagram. In the so-called “strange metal” phase, these materials have resistivity that scales linearly with temperature, in contrast to the usual quadratic dependence of ordinary metals. Giraldo-Gallo et al. now find that at very high magnetic fields—up to 80 tesla—the resistivity of the thin films of a lanthanum-based cuprate scales linearly with magnetic field as well, again in contrast to the expected quadratic law. This dual linear dependence presents a challenge for theories of the normal state of the cuprates.

Science, this issue p. 479

The anomalous metallic state in the high-temperature superconducting cuprates is masked by superconductivity near a quantum critical point. Applying high magnetic fields to suppress superconductivity has enabled detailed studies of the normal state, yet the direct effect of strong magnetic fields on the metallic state is poorly understood. We report the high-field magnetoresistance of thin-film La_2–xSr_xCuO₄ cuprate in the vicinity of the critical doping, 0.161 ≤ p ≤ 0.190. We find that the metallic state exposed by suppressing superconductivity is characterized by magnetoresistance that is linear in magnetic fields up to 80 tesla. The magnitude of the linear-in-field resistivity mirrors the magnitude and doping evolution of the well-known linear-in-temperature resistivity that has been associated with quantum criticality in high-temperature superconductors.

Continue reading “Scale-invariant magnetoresistance in a cuprate superconductor” »

A BASIC income (BI) is defined as a modest, regular payment to every legal resident in the community, paid unconditionally as a right, regardless of income, employment or relationship status.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, the case for BI does not rest on the assumption that robots and artificial intelligence will cause mass unemployment or that it would be a more efficient way of relieving poverty than present welfare systems (although it would). The main arguments are ethical and relate to social justice, individual freedom and the need for basic security.

Pope Francis has declared the death penalty ‘inadmissible’ for Catholics.