Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: policy – Page 7

Strengthening Public Health Systems For Healthier And Longer Lives — Dr. Ashwin Vasan, Commissioner, NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

Dr. Ashwin Vasan, MD, PhD is the Commissioner of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (https://www.nyc.gov/site/doh/about/ab…).

Dr. Vasan is a primary care physician, epidemiologist and public health expert with nearly 20 years of experience working to improve physical and mental health, social welfare and public policy for marginalized populations here in New York City, nationally and globally. Since 2014 he has served on the faculty at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, and he continues to see patients as a primary care internist in the Division of General Medicine at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Irving Medical Center.

Dr. Vasan most recently served as the President and CEO of Fountain House, a national nonprofit fighting to improve health, increase opportunity, and end social and economic isolation for people most impacted by mental illness. During his tenure, he grew the organization from a New York-based community mental health organization to a national network across eight markets, and grew the budget by nearly $20 million annually. He helped navigate the organization through COVID-19 by driving new telehealth and digital mental health programs while its physical locations closed, as well as developing new community-based outreach and accompaniment programs. Further, Dr. Vasan led the creation of a national policy office in Washington, D.C., working to change national mental health policy on the issues of crisis response services and funding for and quality of community-based mental health services.

From 2016 to 2019, Dr. Vasan served as the founding Executive Director of the Health Access Equity Unit at the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, which focused on the intersection of clinical and social services for the care of people involved in the justice system and other vulnerable populations — a first-of-its-kind government program in the nation. Under his leadership the team launched the NYC Health Justice Network — an innovative partnership between community-based primary care providers, criminal legal system reentry organizations, the Health Department and the Fund for Public Health — to embed tech-enabled, peer community health workers to promote health and wellness of people reentering the community from incarceration, and their families. The program is currently under evaluation through the CDC Prevention Research Center grant to NYU and CUNY.

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Even if we can dodge a disaster in orbit by responsibly de-orbiting derelict satellites, many scientists are concerned that the number of objects circling our planet could still do harm: When they deorbit, they could deposit a significant flux of metals that could alter the chemical makeup of Earth’s atmosphere.

“Effects on astronomy are just the tip of the iceberg,” said Barentine, who says we may be fast approaching a turning point where tragedy becomes imminent, either in space due to a collision or on the ground from falling debris. “Space policy-making moves far too slowly to effectively deal with all of this.”

“Right now, there’s not a lot to look forward to that is positive,” he added. “If the New Space Age goes badly in the end, history will not look favorably on it.”

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Ancient Chinese society was dominated by feudalism. The economy was dominated by agriculture, and the development of science and technology was slow or even suppressed. The main achievements of this era were the four major inventions of China: papermaking, gunpowder, the compass, and printing. Why was this so? For an ancient civilization with a history of several thousand years, why was the development of science and technology so backward? The fundamental reason was the idea of imperial power. Ancient China was centered on the emperor, and everything on the Chinese land was owned by the emperor, including the farmers on that land. The emperor was afraid of a peasant revolution and was afraid that others would take the emperor’s place, and as a result successive emperors would use the policy of fools. Instead of allowing farmers to read books, the emperors just wanted the farmers to plant the land every day, like slaves, so that the farmers would have no ability to overthrow the rulers. This idea of imperial power had greatly suppressed the development of science and technology.

In 1949, Mao Zedong established the first democratic, self-improving, unified China in Chinese history: The People’s Republic of China, a stable country; a country without feudal ideas; and a country that serves the people. Only then did China begin to truly develop its own education, technology, and industry. It was aimed for ordinary people to have food to eat, houses to live in, and books to read, and it was also intended for them to be more involved in technology and democracy. However, Chinese politics had hindered the development of science and technology (superhuman science), such as the Great Leap Forward, which severely reduced China’s productivity and starved many people; the Cultural Revolution had destroyed China’s economic development, education, and technology, bringing China back to pre-liberation overnight. These events were relatively unfortunate. Political struggles have severely hindered the development of science and technology (superhuman science) in China.

In 1978, China began reform and opening up. This phase of reform and opening up was China’s greatest era. China has changed from a closed country to an open country. Deng Xiaoping formulated a basic national policy centered on economic construction, which has enabled China’s economy to develop rapidly. At this time, China attaches great importance to the development of education, science and technology, and the economy. At the same time, special attention is also paid to foreign exchanges, and advanced education and technology have been introduced from abroad. In education, a large number of international students are sent to study in developed countries such as the United States, which has cultivated a large number of scientific and technological talents for China; economically, a large number of foreign companies have been introduced to optimize state-owned enterprises and support for private enterprises, so China’s economy has developed rapidly.

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Humanoids, robotic or virtual systems with body structures that resemble the human body, have a wide range of real-world applications. As their limbs and bodies mirror those of humans, they could be made to reproduce a wide range of human movements, such as walking, crouching, jumping, swimming and so on.

Computationally generating realistic motions for virtual humanoid characters could have interesting implications for the development of video games, animated films, (VR) experiences, and other media content. Yet the environments portrayed in video games and animations are often highly dynamic and complex, which can make planning motions for introduced in these environments more challenging.

Researchers at NVIDIA Research in Israel recently introduced PlaMo (Plan and Move), a to plan the movements of humanoids in complex, 3D, physically simulated worlds. Their approach, presented in a paper published on arXiv preprint server, consists of a scene-aware path and a robust control policy.

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Eexxeccellent.

Human brains outperform computers in many forms of processing and are far more energy efficient. What if we could harness their power in a new form of biological computing?

In this Frontiers Forum Deep Dive session on 21 June 2023, Professor Thomas Hartung, Dr Lena Smirnova and other renowned researchers, explored the future of organoid intelligence and the scientific, technological and ethical steps required for realizing its full potential.

The session brought together the authors of the Frontiers in Science lead article ‘Organoid intelligence (OI): the new frontier in biocomputing and intelligence-in-a-dish’ which presents a roadmap for the strategic development of organoid intelligence as a scientific discipline. It was attended by hundreds of representatives from science, policy, and business across the world.

Links:

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The largest animals do not have proportionally bigger brains — with humans bucking this trend — a new study published in Nature Ecology and Evolution has revealed.

Researchers at the University of Reading and Durham University collected an enormous dataset of brain and body sizes from around 1,500…

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Back in June, YouTube quietly made a subtle but significant policy change that, surprisingly, benefits users by allowing them to remove AI-made videos that simulate their appearance or voice from the platform under YouTube’s privacy request process.

First spotted by TechCrunch, the revised policy encourages affected parties to directly request the removal of AI-generated content on the grounds of privacy concerns and not for being, for example, misleading or fake. YouTube specifies that claims must be made by the affected individual or authorized representatives. Exceptions include parents or legal guardians acting on behalf of minors, legal representatives, and close family members filing on behalf of deceased individuals.

According to the new policy, if a privacy complaint is filed, YouTube will notify the uploader about the potential violation and provide an opportunity to remove or edit the private information within their video. YouTube may, at its own discretion, grant the uploader 48 hours to utilize the Trim or Blur tools available in YouTube Studio and remove parts of the footage from the video. If the uploader chooses to remove the video altogether, the complaint will be closed, but if the potential privacy violation remains within those 48 hours, the YouTube Team will review the complaint.

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What are good policy options for academic journals regarding the detection of AI generated content and publication decisions? As a group of associate editors of Dialectica note below, there are several issues involved, including the uncertain performance of AI detection tools and the risk that material checked by such tools is used for the further training of AIs. They’re interested in learning about what policies, if any, other journals have instituted in regard to these challenges and how they’re working, as well as other AI-related problems journals should have policies about. They write: As associate editors of a philosophy journal, we face the challenge of dealing with content that we suspect was generated by AI. Just like plagiarized content, AI generated content is submitted under false claim of authorship. Among the unique challenges posed by AI, the following two are pertinent for journal editors. First, there is the worry of feeding material to AI while attempting to minimize its impact. To the best of our knowledge, the only available method to check for AI generated content involves websites such as GPTZero. However, using such AI detectors differs from plagiarism software in running the risk of making copyrighted material available for the purposes of AI training, which eventually aids the development of a commercial product. We wonder whether using such software under these conditions is justifiable. Second, there is the worry of delegating decisions to an algorithm the workings of which are opaque. Unlike plagiarized texts, texts generated by AI routinely do not stand in an obvious relation of resemblance to an original. This renders it extremely difficult to verify whether an article or part of an article was AI generated; the basis for refusing to consider an article on such grounds is therefore shaky at best. We wonder whether it is problematic to refuse to publish an article solely because the likelihood of its being generated by AI passes a specific threshold (say, 90%) according to a specific website. We would be interested to learn about best practices adopted by other journals and about issues we may have neglected to consider. We especially appreciate the thoughts of fellow philosophers as well as members of other fields facing similar problems. — Aleks…

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However, the White House Office of Management and Budget said in a statement of policy on Tuesday: “The Administration strongly opposes Section 924, which would establish a Drone Corps as a basic branch of the Army. A Drone Corps would create an unwarranted degree of specialization and limit flexibility to employ evolving capabilities. Further, the Secretary of the Army already has the authority to create branches, as needed, and creating a branch through legislation would detract from the Army’s flexibility in addressing current and future requirements.” The statement included a list of concerns about various items in the House version of the NDAA that it finds objectionable.

Senior Army officers have also come out against the proposal.

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