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How does robotization impact employment and human skills ?

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How does robotization impact employment and human skills ?

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You hear EVA before you see it. A whirring and whizzing noise greets you as you enter the offices of Automata, a start-up robotics company based in London.

To one side a robotic arm is going through an intricate set of moves: six joints twisting and turning in a sequence which, in the real world, would place a label on a parcel.

That's EVA, and it has being doing those moves non-stop for months to test its reliability.

Around the office and workshop there are more than a dozen other EVA units, some being dismantled by the engineers, others awaiting testing.

It must be very eerie at night as EVA continues its work, simulating attaching labels, while surrounded by its silent clones.

This robotic arm emerged from the work of former architect Suryansh Chandra and his business partner Mostafa Elsayed.

"We started out with the intention to democratise robotics, to make automation accessible and affordable to as many people as needed it," says Mr Chandra.

They are betting that there are thousands, if not millions, of smaller businesses which need repetitive tasks completed, but can't afford a big industrial robot.

So EVA was developed from cheap reliable parts. It uses the same motors that power the electric windows in cars, while the computer chips are similar to those used in the consumer electronics business. This is allowing them to sell EVA at £8,000.

"If I was to give you an analogy, this was a world where there were a lot of luxury cars. Everything was fast, powerful and precise, but there was no Toyota. There was no people's car," Mr Chandra says.
More Technology of Business

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Giant jet engines aim to make our flying greener

Automata is just one firm trying to find a wider market for robots and disrupt the way that things are made.

More than 2.4 million industrial robots are operating in factories around the world, according to data from the International Federation of Robotics (IFR), which is forecasting double-digit sales growth from 2020 to 2022.

The majority of robots currently do repetitive work in large factories, producing cars, electronics and metal.

These giant industrial arms have long been powerful and accurate, but have lacked adaptability.

Yet now, developments in artificial intelligence, alongside improved vision technology and better devices for gripping, are opening new markets.

Online shopping has given the industry a juicy opportunity. In giant warehouses millions of objects of all different shapes and sizes have to be sorted and moved around.

Pick and mix

To replace the humans in this growing market, robots need to be able to recognise and grip all sorts of different items.

"Something that a child can do easily, which is to reach into a bin and grab an item, is really hard for a robot. It's taken a ton of technology to make it possible," says Vince Martinelli, from US-based RightHand Robotics.

His company was one of the first to develop a gripper that could be fitted to the end of robot arm, allowing it to grab items of different sizes.

Their attachment for a robot arm employs a suction device and three fingers to grab items. First the sucker extends to select the item and then the three fingers secure it.

It uses a camera linked to artificial intelligence to identify and locate the object it wants.

The explosion in online shopping has created a demand for this kind of technology; Amazon alone has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in tech for its warehouses.

"When I go to a store I provide the picking labour for free. I go around the store grabbing the things I want. If I order online I have kind of exported that labour back to the retailer and they've got to figure out now how to do the item handling," says Mr Martinelli.

Soft Robotics, also based in the US, is tackling the same problem albeit in a different way.

Its robotic hand has rubbery fingers that fill with air, allowing them to handle delicate food items like biscuits and pastries.

"The food industry is almost entirely manual today, because every piece of food, every chicken cutlet, you name it, varies in size shape and weight. You also have an added dimension of food safety and cleanliness," says Carl Vause, the chief executive of Soft Robotics.

Mr Vause thinks his firm's technology will also lend itself to the clothing industry.

While such systems give robotic arms more skill, their dexterity still falls a long way short of the human hand.

Researchers at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory (a partnership between the University of the West of England and Bristol University) think the big breakthrough would be to give robot hands a sense of touch.

Prof Nathan Lepora, head of the tactile robotics group, has developed rubber sensors that can detect and map surfaces.

The system uses a camera inside each "finger" that detects how the rubber tip bulges and moves when touching an object.

Using a type of artificial intelligence called machine learning, the robot is then trained to recognise objects just by touching them and seeing how the rubber tip responds.

Prof Lepora thinks that by the end of this decade robots will be able to manipulate items, assemble objects and tinker in the same way that humans do with their hands.

"It is just an engineering challenge at the end of the day. There's nothing magical about how we use our hands," he says.

'Emotional reaction'

Future developments in robotic hardware and artificial intelligence mean that robots will be able to do more and more of the jobs that are currently performed by humans.

According to a report by the OECD, 14% of of jobs are "at high risk of automation" and 32% of jobs could be "radically transformed", with the manufacturing sector at the highest risk.

It's a sensitive topic for those that work in the robotics industry and companies that use robots.

Mr Chandra argues that his technology will eliminate boring, repetitive jobs that humans don't like and aren't very good at, and also create new ones that are likely to replace them.

"There's definitely tens of thousands of new jobs that exist to suit the current society that did not exist before. So I think this constancy of jobs is a fiction, it's never really been the case," he says.

Every time a job dies, there is an emotional reaction... but every time there's a creation of a new economy."

Follow Technology of Business editor Ben Morris on Twitter

This article is the second part of mini-series on disruptive technologies, you can find the first, on blockchain, here.

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Why your new work colleague could be a robot

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You hear EVA before you see it. A whirring and whizzing noise greets you as you enter the offices of Automata, a start-up robotics company based in London. To one side a robotic arm is going through an intricate set of moves: six joints twisting and turning in a sequence which, in the real world, would place a label on a parcel.

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Transhumanism: billionaires want to use tech to enhance our abilities – the outcomes could change what it means to be human

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Transhumanism: billionaires want to use tech to enhance our abilities – the outcomes could change what it means to be human

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Many prominent people in the tech industry have talked about the increasing convergence between humans and machines in coming decades. For example, Elon Musk has reportedly said he wants humans to merge with AI "to achieve a symbiosis with artificial intelligence".

His company Neuralink aims to facilitate this convergence so that humans won't be "left behind" as technology advances in the future. While people with disabilities would be near-term recipients of these innovations, some believe technologies like this could be used to enhance abilities in everyone.

These aims are inspired by an idea called transhumanism, the belief that we should use science and technology to radically enhance human capabilities and seek to direct our own evolutionary path. Disease, aging and death are all realities transhumanists wish to end, alongside dramatically increasing our cognitive, emotional and physical capacities.

Transhumanists often advocate for the three "supers" of superintelligence, superlongevity and superhappiness, the last referring to ways of achieving lasting happiness. There are many different views among the transhumanist community of what our ongoing evolution should look like.

For example, some advocate uploading the mind into digital form and settling the cosmos. Others think we should remain organic beings but rewire or upgrade our biology through genetic engineering and other methods. A future of designer babies, artificial wombs and anti-aging therapies appeal to these thinkers.

This may all sound futuristic and fantastical, but rapid developments in artificial intelligence (AI) and synthetic biology have led some to argue we are on the cusp of creating such possibilities.

God-like role

Tech billionaires are among the biggest promoters of transhumanist thinking. It is not hard to understand why: they could be the central protagonists in the most important moment in history.

Creating so-called artificial general intelligence (AGI) - that is, an AI system that can do all the cognitive tasks a human can do and more - is a current focus within Silicon Valley. AGI is seen as vital to enabling us to take on the God-like role of designing our own evolutionary futures.

That is why companies like OpenAI, DeepMind and Anthropic are racing towards the development of AGI, despite some experts warning that it could lead to human extinction.

In the short term, the promises and the perils are probably overstated. After all, these companies have a lot to gain by making us think they are on the verge of engineering a divine power that can create utopia or destroy the world. Meanwhile, AI has played a role in fuelling our polarised political landscape, with disinformation and more complex forms of manipulation made more effective by generative AI.

Indeed, AI systems are already causing many other forms of social and environmental harm. AI companies rarely wish to address these harms though. If they can make governments focus on long-term potential "safety" issues relating to possible existential risks instead of actual social and environmental injustices, they stand to benefit from the resulting regulatory framework.

But if we lack the capacity and determination to address these real world harms, it's hard to believe that we will be able to mitigate larger-scale risks that AI may hypothetically enable. If there really is a threat that AGI could pose an existential risk, for example, everyone would shoulder that cost, but the profits would be very much private.

A familiar story

This issue within AI development can be seen as a microcosm of why the wider transhumanist imagination may appeal to billionaire elites in an age of multiple crises. It speaks to the refusal to engage in grounded ethics, injustices and challenges and offers a grandiose narrative of a resplendent future to distract from the current moment.

Our misuse of the planet's resources has set in train a sixth mass extinction of species and a climate crisis. In addition, ongoing wars with increasingly potent weapons remain a part of our technological evolution.

There's also the pressing question of whose future will be transhuman. We currently live in a very unequal world. Transhumanism, if developed in anything like our existing context, is likely to greatly increase inequality, and may have catastrophic consequences for the majority of humans.

Perhaps transhumanism itself is a symptom of the kind of thinking that has created our parlous social reality. It is a narrative that encourages us to hit the gas, expropriate nature even more, keep growing and not look back at the devastation in the rear-view mirror.

If we're really on the verge of creating an enhanced version of humanity, we should start to ask some big questions about what being human should mean, and therefore what an enhancement of humanity should entail.

If the human is an aspiring God, then it lays claim to dominion over nature and the body, making all amenable to its desires. But if the human is an animal embedded in complex relations with other species and nature at large, then "enhancement" is contingent on the health and sustainability of its relations.

If the human is conceived of as an environmental threat, then enhancement is surely that which redirects its exploitative lifeways. Perhaps becoming more-than-human should constitute a much more responsible humanity.

One that shows compassion to and awareness of other forms of life in this rich and wondrous planet. That would be preferable to colonising and extending ourselves, with great hubris, at the expense of everything, and everyone, else.

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Transhumanism: billionaires want to use tech to enhance our abilities - the outcomes could change what it means to be human

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The tech elite's obssession with upgrading humanity offers a grandiose narrative to distract from today's more pressing challenges and injustices.

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Evolution of Citizenship due to digitalisation 

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RESEARCH GATE- Civic engagement in the digital age

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RESEARCH GATE- Civic engagement in the digital age

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« Clearview AI: Face-collecting company database hacked »

BBC press article

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Clearview AI: Face-collecting company database hacked

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Many law-enforcement agencies in the US use Clearview AI’s facial-recognition technology.

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« Why your new work colleague could be a robot »

BBC press article

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You hear EVA before you see it. A whirring and whizzing noise greets you as you enter the offices of Automata, a start-up robotics company based in London.

To one side a robotic arm is going through an intricate set of moves: six joints twisting and turning in a sequence which, in the real world, would place a label on a parcel.

That's EVA, and it has being doing those moves non-stop for months to test its reliability.

Around the office and workshop there are more than a dozen other EVA units, some being dismantled by the engineers, others awaiting testing.

It must be very eerie at night as EVA continues its work, simulating attaching labels, while surrounded by its silent clones.

This robotic arm emerged from the work of former architect Suryansh Chandra and his business partner Mostafa Elsayed.

"We started out with the intention to democratise robotics, to make automation accessible and affordable to as many people as needed it," says Mr Chandra.

They are betting that there are thousands, if not millions, of smaller businesses which need repetitive tasks completed, but can't afford a big industrial robot.

So EVA was developed from cheap reliable parts. It uses the same motors that power the electric windows in cars, while the computer chips are similar to those used in the consumer electronics business. This is allowing them to sell EVA at £8,000.

"If I was to give you an analogy, this was a world where there were a lot of luxury cars. Everything was fast, powerful and precise, but there was no Toyota. There was no people's car," Mr Chandra says.
More Technology of Business

Blockchain: The revolution that hasn't quite happened

What happens to all the old wind turbines?

How tech is helping catch rats, wasps and bedbugs

What can you use instead of Google and Facebook?

Giant jet engines aim to make our flying greener

Automata is just one firm trying to find a wider market for robots and disrupt the way that things are made.

More than 2.4 million industrial robots are operating in factories around the world, according to data from the International Federation of Robotics (IFR), which is forecasting double-digit sales growth from 2020 to 2022.

The majority of robots currently do repetitive work in large factories, producing cars, electronics and metal.

These giant industrial arms have long been powerful and accurate, but have lacked adaptability.

Yet now, developments in artificial intelligence, alongside improved vision technology and better devices for gripping, are opening new markets.

Online shopping has given the industry a juicy opportunity. In giant warehouses millions of objects of all different shapes and sizes have to be sorted and moved around.

Pick and mix

To replace the humans in this growing market, robots need to be able to recognise and grip all sorts of different items.

"Something that a child can do easily, which is to reach into a bin and grab an item, is really hard for a robot. It's taken a ton of technology to make it possible," says Vince Martinelli, from US-based RightHand Robotics.

His company was one of the first to develop a gripper that could be fitted to the end of robot arm, allowing it to grab items of different sizes.

Their attachment for a robot arm employs a suction device and three fingers to grab items. First the sucker extends to select the item and then the three fingers secure it.

It uses a camera linked to artificial intelligence to identify and locate the object it wants.

The explosion in online shopping has created a demand for this kind of technology; Amazon alone has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in tech for its warehouses.

"When I go to a store I provide the picking labour for free. I go around the store grabbing the things I want. If I order online I have kind of exported that labour back to the retailer and they've got to figure out now how to do the item handling," says Mr Martinelli.

Soft Robotics, also based in the US, is tackling the same problem albeit in a different way.

Its robotic hand has rubbery fingers that fill with air, allowing them to handle delicate food items like biscuits and pastries.

"The food industry is almost entirely manual today, because every piece of food, every chicken cutlet, you name it, varies in size shape and weight. You also have an added dimension of food safety and cleanliness," says Carl Vause, the chief executive of Soft Robotics.

Mr Vause thinks his firm's technology will also lend itself to the clothing industry.

While such systems give robotic arms more skill, their dexterity still falls a long way short of the human hand.

Researchers at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory (a partnership between the University of the West of England and Bristol University) think the big breakthrough would be to give robot hands a sense of touch.

Prof Nathan Lepora, head of the tactile robotics group, has developed rubber sensors that can detect and map surfaces.

The system uses a camera inside each "finger" that detects how the rubber tip bulges and moves when touching an object.

Using a type of artificial intelligence called machine learning, the robot is then trained to recognise objects just by touching them and seeing how the rubber tip responds.

Prof Lepora thinks that by the end of this decade robots will be able to manipulate items, assemble objects and tinker in the same way that humans do with their hands.

"It is just an engineering challenge at the end of the day. There's nothing magical about how we use our hands," he says.

'Emotional reaction'

Future developments in robotic hardware and artificial intelligence mean that robots will be able to do more and more of the jobs that are currently performed by humans.

According to a report by the OECD, 14% of of jobs are "at high risk of automation" and 32% of jobs could be "radically transformed", with the manufacturing sector at the highest risk.

It's a sensitive topic for those that work in the robotics industry and companies that use robots.

Mr Chandra argues that his technology will eliminate boring, repetitive jobs that humans don't like and aren't very good at, and also create new ones that are likely to replace them.

"There's definitely tens of thousands of new jobs that exist to suit the current society that did not exist before. So I think this constancy of jobs is a fiction, it's never really been the case," he says.

Every time a job dies, there is an emotional reaction... but every time there's a creation of a new economy."

Follow Technology of Business editor Ben Morris on Twitter

This article is the second part of mini-series on disruptive technologies, you can find the first, on blockchain, here.

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Why your new work colleague could be a robot

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You hear EVA before you see it. A whirring and whizzing noise greets you as you enter the offices of Automata, a start-up robotics company based in London. To one side a robotic arm is going through an intricate set of moves: six joints twisting and turning in a sequence which, in the real world, would place a label on a parcel.

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"Transhuman Romance" photography from Jonas Leriche 

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"Transhuman Romance" photography from Jonas Leriche 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
You hear EVA before you see it. A whirring and whizzing noise greets you as you enter the offices of Automata, a start-up robotics company based in London.

To one side a robotic arm is going through an intricate set of moves: six joints twisting and turning in a sequence which, in the real world, would place a label on a parcel.

That's EVA, and it has being doing those moves non-stop for months to test its reliability.

Around the office and workshop there are more than a dozen other EVA units, some being dismantled by the engineers, others awaiting testing.

It must be very eerie at night as EVA continues its work, simulating attaching labels, while surrounded by its silent clones.

This robotic arm emerged from the work of former architect Suryansh Chandra and his business partner Mostafa Elsayed.

"We started out with the intention to democratise robotics, to make automation accessible and affordable to as many people as needed it," says Mr Chandra.

They are betting that there are thousands, if not millions, of smaller businesses which need repetitive tasks completed, but can't afford a big industrial robot.

So EVA was developed from cheap reliable parts. It uses the same motors that power the electric windows in cars, while the computer chips are similar to those used in the consumer electronics business. This is allowing them to sell EVA at £8,000.

"If I was to give you an analogy, this was a world where there were a lot of luxury cars. Everything was fast, powerful and precise, but there was no Toyota. There was no people's car," Mr Chandra says.
More Technology of Business

Blockchain: The revolution that hasn't quite happened

What happens to all the old wind turbines?

How tech is helping catch rats, wasps and bedbugs

What can you use instead of Google and Facebook?

Giant jet engines aim to make our flying greener

Automata is just one firm trying to find a wider market for robots and disrupt the way that things are made.

More than 2.4 million industrial robots are operating in factories around the world, according to data from the International Federation of Robotics (IFR), which is forecasting double-digit sales growth from 2020 to 2022.

The majority of robots currently do repetitive work in large factories, producing cars, electronics and metal.

These giant industrial arms have long been powerful and accurate, but have lacked adaptability.

Yet now, developments in artificial intelligence, alongside improved vision technology and better devices for gripping, are opening new markets.

Online shopping has given the industry a juicy opportunity. In giant warehouses millions of objects of all different shapes and sizes have to be sorted and moved around.

Pick and mix

To replace the humans in this growing market, robots need to be able to recognise and grip all sorts of different items.

"Something that a child can do easily, which is to reach into a bin and grab an item, is really hard for a robot. It's taken a ton of technology to make it possible," says Vince Martinelli, from US-based RightHand Robotics.

His company was one of the first to develop a gripper that could be fitted to the end of robot arm, allowing it to grab items of different sizes.

Their attachment for a robot arm employs a suction device and three fingers to grab items. First the sucker extends to select the item and then the three fingers secure it.

It uses a camera linked to artificial intelligence to identify and locate the object it wants.

The explosion in online shopping has created a demand for this kind of technology; Amazon alone has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in tech for its warehouses.

"When I go to a store I provide the picking labour for free. I go around the store grabbing the things I want. If I order online I have kind of exported that labour back to the retailer and they've got to figure out now how to do the item handling," says Mr Martinelli.

Soft Robotics, also based in the US, is tackling the same problem albeit in a different way.

Its robotic hand has rubbery fingers that fill with air, allowing them to handle delicate food items like biscuits and pastries.

"The food industry is almost entirely manual today, because every piece of food, every chicken cutlet, you name it, varies in size shape and weight. You also have an added dimension of food safety and cleanliness," says Carl Vause, the chief executive of Soft Robotics.

Mr Vause thinks his firm's technology will also lend itself to the clothing industry.

While such systems give robotic arms more skill, their dexterity still falls a long way short of the human hand.

Researchers at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory (a partnership between the University of the West of England and Bristol University) think the big breakthrough would be to give robot hands a sense of touch.

Prof Nathan Lepora, head of the tactile robotics group, has developed rubber sensors that can detect and map surfaces.

The system uses a camera inside each "finger" that detects how the rubber tip bulges and moves when touching an object.

Using a type of artificial intelligence called machine learning, the robot is then trained to recognise objects just by touching them and seeing how the rubber tip responds.

Prof Lepora thinks that by the end of this decade robots will be able to manipulate items, assemble objects and tinker in the same way that humans do with their hands.

"It is just an engineering challenge at the end of the day. There's nothing magical about how we use our hands," he says.

'Emotional reaction'

Future developments in robotic hardware and artificial intelligence mean that robots will be able to do more and more of the jobs that are currently performed by humans.

According to a report by the OECD, 14% of of jobs are "at high risk of automation" and 32% of jobs could be "radically transformed", with the manufacturing sector at the highest risk.

It's a sensitive topic for those that work in the robotics industry and companies that use robots.

Mr Chandra argues that his technology will eliminate boring, repetitive jobs that humans don't like and aren't very good at, and also create new ones that are likely to replace them.

"There's definitely tens of thousands of new jobs that exist to suit the current society that did not exist before. So I think this constancy of jobs is a fiction, it's never really been the case," he says.

Every time a job dies, there is an emotional reaction... but every time there's a creation of a new economy."

Follow Technology of Business editor Ben Morris on Twitter

This article is the second part of mini-series on disruptive technologies, you can find the first, on blockchain, here.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why your new work colleague could be a robot

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
You hear EVA before you see it. A whirring and whizzing noise greets you as you enter the offices of Automata, a start-up robotics company based in London. To one side a robotic arm is going through an intricate set of moves: six joints twisting and turning in a sequence which, in the real world, would place a label on a parcel.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Genetically-modified babies are "highly desirable" tohelp protect people from disease and could be created ethically within two years, according to a newscientificpaper.

Gene editing now presents such low risks that it could be used in human embryos, according to an analysis by Kevin Smith, a bioethicist at Abertay University in Scotland, published last week in the journal Bioethics.

Advocates like Smith want to change the genetic makeup of embryos to prevent the transmission of gene-related diseases.

However, the practice is hugely controversial due to fears that it could be used to create "designer babies" whose genes have been edited for non-therapeutic purposes.

In November 2018 Chinese scientist He Jiankui sparked outrage after announcing he had created the first genetically-modified babies in the world from embryos altered to make them resistant to HIV.

But Smith says their creation is ethically justifiable and would offer hope to parents at risk of transmitting serious genetic disease to their offspring, according to a statement.

From a "utilitarian standpoint" genetic modification is the "only conceivable way" to deal with multiple disease-associated genes in an embryo, according to Smith.

Genetic modification would allow doctors to protect future people against cardiovascular disease, cancer and dementia, as well as other common illnesses, said Smith.

"If several common disorders could be avoided or delayed by genetically modifying humans, the average disease-free lifespan could be substantially extended," he said in a press statement.

Smith recommends delaying genetic modification programs because right now "society is largely opposed to genetically modifying humans."

Still, he believes an ethical attempt to produce genetically-modified babies could be less than two years away.

Criticism

His work has been criticized by other experts in the field, who point out that the risks of gene editing are still being studied.

"I do not believe that there are adequate experiments that will 'prove' that this technology is safe," Joyce Harper of the University College London (UCL) Institute for Women's Healthtold the Science Media Centre (SMC) in London. "So we need to tread carefully."

Harper underlines that genome editing has huge potential, but wants "public debate and legislation to ensure we have carefully thought this through."

Sarah Norcross, director of the Progress Educational Trust (PET), an organization that works to improve public understanding of genetics, called Smith's analysis "flawed."

Norcross points out that the public might not change its mind about genetically-modified babies, and more work needs to be done in understanding the risks of the technology.

"Lessons should be learned from the mistakes that were made last year, by the Chinese scientist who was responsible for the world's first genome-edited babies," Norcrosstold the SMC.

"If this technology is to be put to similar use in future, then far higher scientific and ethical standards need to be met."

Authorities in China have since said that the experiments which led to the birth of the babies broke the country's laws, and the scientists involved were suspended.

In October, researchers from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard published details of a new gene-editing technology that could potentially correct up to 89% of genetic defects, including those that cause diseases like sickle cell anemia.

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'Designer babies' could be just two years away, expert claims | CNN

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Genetically-modified babies are "highly desirable" to help protect people from disease and could be created ethically within two years, according to a new scientific paper.

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In an age of swift technological evolution, artificial intelligence (AI) emerges as a transformative influence with the capacity to reshape both our society and industries. Anchored in ethics, transparency, and accountability, the development of AI becomes pivotal, acting as the cornerstone for constructing a future that seamlessly integrates technological advancement with social responsibility.

In the dynamic landscape of technological evolution, marked by transformative milestones in the digital age, artificial intelligence (AI) emerges as a pivotal force. Progressing from the inception of the internet to the widespread use of mobile devices, big data, and cloud computing, each phase has significantly shaped our daily lives and professional landscapes.

AI, with its potential to automate non-routine tasks, stands out as a transformative influence. As articulated by Berkeley Exec Ed in their recent article, the advent of the ' AI era' carries profound implications for our societies beyond technological advancements and business models. It prompts crucial questions about the evolving roles of humans as machines gain cognitive capabilities, particularly in leadership, decision-making, and strategy.

Establishing Safety Standards for Ethical AI

It is essential to consider its current influence and potential future implications. Beyond automating routine tasks, AI's disruptive potential extends from intricate data analysis to various professional fields. According to insights from Berkeley Exec Ed, AI's prediction technology has the potential to automate diverse non-routine tasks across various occupations, with up to 30% of tasks in about 60% of jobs holding the potential for automation. While this doesn't necessarily imply a jobless future, it underscores a pivotal shift in roles and responsibilities, emphasizing the increasing importance of adaptability in the workforce. As Pieter den Hamer, Vice President of Research at Gartner, notes, "Every job will be impacted by AI... Most of that will be more augmentation rather than replacing workers".

Dhanvin Sriram, Founder of PromptVibes, sees AI continuing to revolutionize industries by automating tasks, generating insights, and enhancing decision-making. His vision entails the integration of AI into all aspects of life, focusing on ethical development, transparency, and accountability. Dhanvin believes in a future where AI amplifies human abilities, leading to increased efficiency, productivity, and innovation across sectors.

Revolutionizing Industries With Ethical AI Integration

Prioritizing ethical considerations in AI development ensures alignment with societal values and a focus on human well-being. Establishing transparency throughout the development process builds a foundation of trust, enabling users and stakeholders to comprehend the operations of AI systems. Accountability reinforces developers' responsibility in addressing potential risks and consequences, creating a framework that promotes innovation while being mindful of its broader societal implications.

Brett Gronow, Founder of Systema AI, holds global patents that have been cited by Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Samsung, and Spotify amongst many - envisions a future where if AI were to surpasses, certain vectors human capacity intellect, it could usher in an era of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Brett emphasizes the need for safety standards and protocols to prevent the development of AI systems that could further harm humanity.

In his view, the positive impact of AI on culture and communication can be directed through purposeful and ethical means. Brett advocates for the vital transmission of non-manipulated data, and of the preservation of context especially in fields like social media, where algorithmic optimization has led to concerns about truth suppression.
Best Practice: Ethical AI Development
Fostering the establishment of robust safety standards and ethical guidelines in AI development is imperative to ensure a positive impact on society while concurrently mitigating the risks of malicious use. Embracing these principles as best practices will pave the way for responsible and beneficial advancements in artificial intelligence.

Bridging Language Divides In Education Through AI

Bridging language divides in education through AI requires a concerted effort to promote inclusivity and accessibility, making it essential to adhere to safety standards and ethical guidelines in AI development. According to Brookings education,the surge in AI deployment brings to light a critical consideration - the inherent bias towards dominant languages. As elucidated in the exploration of language by Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world." The current trajectory of generative AI, often rooted in major languages, raises concerns about the perpetuation of social and economic divisions. With over 7,000 languages spoken globally, the majority of internet content is confined to a handful of dominant languages, creating a digital language divide. This not only hampers inclusivity but also perpetuates historical inequalities, reminiscent of past instances where language served as a tool of power, shaping socio-ethnic contexts and influencing the trajectory of technological tools. As we navigate the digital era, it becomes imperative to address and rectify the widening linguistic gap perpetuated by AI technologies.

Maria Chmir, Founder and CEO of Rask AI, is focused on addressing language disparities in education. Recognizing that online education often caters to a limited number of languages, Maria's vision is to democratize access to global knowledge by offering education in 130+ languages. Rask AI achieves this by providing educators with tools for content localization, including audio and video translation, dubbing, voice cloning, and lipsyncing.
Best Practice: Inclusive Education Through AI
A best practice for inclusive education through AI lies in advocating for the localization of educational content in multiple languages, thereby ensuring equitable access to knowledge and effectively bridging language divides in the realm of AI-driven education.

AI Automation In Brand Development

Transitioning into the realm of AI automation in brand development, it becomes crucial to explore how artificial intelligence can not only enhance educational inclusivity but also play a transformative role in shaping and optimizing brand strategies.

AI automation in brand development represents a transformative frontier where technology meets creativity. Brands are harnessing the power of artificial intelligence to streamline and enhance various facets of their development strategies. From advanced data analytics for market insights to personalized content creation and social media engagement, AI automation is revolutionizing the way brands connect with their audience. The precision and efficiency offered by AI tools in tasks such as customer targeting, trend analysis, and campaign optimization contribute to building a cohesive and impactful brand identity. As real-time data becomes integral to decision-making, AI automation proves to be a dynamic force, allowing brands to adapt and thrive in an ever-evolving digital landscape.

Drake Tigges, who specializes in digital marketing and conducts marketing master classes, provides insights into the impact of AI automation on the workspace. Having utilized AI tools over the years, he acknowledges the evolution of automation from follow/unfollow techniques to advanced functionalities like story viewing and post-scheduling. Drake emphasizes the benefits of AI automation for brand building while highlighting the importance of user knowledge and caution due to the ever-changing landscape of social platforms.
Best Practice: Informed AI Automation
In culmination, embracing the best practice of informed AI automation in brand development calls for a commitment to encouraging knowledgeable utilization, recognizing the inherent benefits, and maintaining vigilance amidst evolving platform dynamics for sustained success.

The future of AI is continuously being defined and reshaping our society. With the rapid changes, individuals can foresee a landscape where ethical practices, inclusivity, and knowledge are paramount. As industries evolve, embracing AI responsibly becomes crucial for positive societal impact. Through the collective efforts of innovators, individuals can navigate the transformative potential of AI, ensuring a future where technology serves humanity and fosters positive change.

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How AI Is Impacting Society And Shaping The Future

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As the dawn of artificial intelligence (AI) transforms industries and societies, we've engaged with visionary founders who are leading the charge.

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Cover from the book "Transhumanism, A Realistic future ?" By Jean-Pierre Fillard 

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Cover from the book "Transhumanism, A Realistic future ?" By Jean-Pierre Fillard 

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The impact of artificial intelligence on human society and bioethics

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Artificial intelligence (AI), known by some as the industrial revolution (IR) 4.0, is going to change not only the way we do things, how we relate to others, but also what we know about ourselves. This article will first examine what AI is, discuss…

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🔗 https://abcnews.go.com/US/black-lives-matter-multicultural-awakening/story?id=71635471

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AI in everyday life

Below are some AI applications that you may not realise are AI-powered:

Online shopping and advertising

Artificial intelligence is widely used to provide personalised recommendations to people, based for example on their previous searches and purchases or other online behaviour. AI is hugely important in commerce: optimising products, planning inventory, logistics etc.

Web search

Search engines learn from the vast input of data, provided by their users to provide relevant search results.

Digital personal assistants

Smartphones use AI to provide services that are as relevant and personalised as possible. Virtual assistants answering questions, providing recommendations and helping organise daily routines have become ubiquitous.

Machine translations

Language translation software, either based on written or spoken text, relies on artificial intelligence to provide and improve translations. This also applies to functions such as automated subtitling.

Smart homes, cities and infrastructure

Smart thermostats learn from our behaviour to save energy, while developers of smart cities hope to regulate traffic to improve connectivity and reduce traffic jams.

Cars

While self-driving vehicles are not yet standard, cars already use AI-powered safety functions. The EU has for example helped to fund VI-DAS, automated sensors that detect possible dangerous situations and accidents.

Navigation is largely AI-powered.

Cybersecurity

AI systems can help recognise and fight cyberattacks and other cyber threats based on the continuous input of data, recognising patterns and backtracking the attacks.

Artificial intelligence against Covid-19

In the case of Covid-19, AI has been used in thermal imaging in airports and elsewhere. In medicine it can help recognise infection from computerised tomography lung scans. It has also been used to provide data to track the spread of the disease.

Fighting disinformation

Certain AI applications can detect fake news and disinformation by mining social media information, looking for words that are sensational or alarming and identifying which online sources are deemed authoritative.

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What is artificial intelligence and how is it used? | Topics | European Parliament

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Artificial intelligence (AI) is set to be a "defining future technology", but what exactly is AI and how does it already affect our lives?

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Speech « I have a dream » by Martin Luther King, delivered 28 August 1963, at the Lincoln Memorial, Washington D.C.

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Speech « I have a dream » by Martin Luther King, delivered 28 August 1963, at the Lincoln Memorial, Washington D.C.

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Martin Luther King I Have a Dream Speech - American Rhetoric

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Martin Luther King’s I Have A Dream speech text and audio

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Rolling Stone, July 2020, drawn by Kadir Nelson

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Rolling Stone, July 2020, drawn by Kadir Nelson

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Doc2

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🔗 https://abcnews.go.com/US/black-lives-matter-multicultural-awakening/story?id=71635471

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Axios : Us press freedom falls to historical low 

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Axios : Us press freedom falls to historical low 

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In 2021, the Center for Systemic Peace downgraded the United States from a full democracy to an anocracy: a hybrid system that is part democracy, part autocracy.

Much of this downgrade was attributed to President Donald Trump's first term in office. Since then, the United States' rating has been buoyed by characteristics of a flawed democracy: a system where elections occur, but media freedom and political participation face increasing strain. With Trump back in office in 2025, it's no surprise that Americans are looking toward the future of democracy with hesitation, concern and even disdain.

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Democracy's unpopularity isn't new. In Gallup polls, 61% of Americans viewed democracy favorably in 1984. Today, that number hovers around 34% - a progressive decline. It seems America has fallen out of love with its most prized, yet fragile, political experiment. Now, the country stands at a crossroads: continue ahead, despite its flaws or look toward something else. That "something else" may very well be autocracy.

In their 2013 book "Why Nations Fail," authors Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson argue that trusted political and economic institutions are the foundation of national success. For decades, the U.S. embodied those ideals with inclusive political systems, competitive markets and general political participation. But today, trust in these institutions is eroding. Markets feel manic and exclusive. Political engagement is stifled by uncertainty and apathy. In short, our democratic pessimism is a direct symptom of our waning faith in the institutions meant to serve us.

President Trump's first two months back in office have been marked by sweeping action. One of the most unsettling moves has been the establishment of the Department of Government Efficiency. While its name implies reform, its purpose has left Americans uneasy, yet many are open to a movement toward monitoring government spending.

According to the 2025 CATO Institute Fiscal Policy Study, 85% of Americans believe government spending has failed to benefit them directly. Economists rightly argue that growth takes time and can take years or even decades to truly see. But Americans have waited - and what's there to show? Today's working class is worse off than previous generations. Meanwhile, 10% of Americans hold 70% of the nation's wealth. Was it really worth the wait?

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Trump's tariff policy has only intensified concerns of an autocratic economy. In the days after their announcement last month, unilateral tariff decisions led to an 8% drop in the dollar's value, shaved roughly 10% off market portfolios, and they amounted to an a verage tax increase of $1,900 per household, according to the Tax Foundation.

The Federal Reserve has raised alarms over inflation and recession fears are growing. While Americans are no strangers to market volatility, these self-inflicted shocks suggest a system no longer serving its people, but rather one increasingly under the control of a single leader isolating us from global esteem.

And what about our civic engagement? The U.S. has long struggled with voter turnout. Since 2002, the highest participation rate for a national election is 67%. Most presidential elections hover around 60%, with midterms significantly lower.

In 2024, 90 million eligible Americans didn't vote - more than the votes either Trump or Kamala Harris received. In interviews with the Guardian, many nonvoters gave the same answer: "What's the point?"

Embedded in all this is a deep exhaustion with a political and economic system that no longer feels representative. In this climate, populist leaders emerge, and the language of "us versus them" takes hold, further dividing Americans into emotionally driven camps. Social and media platforms reinforce these divisions, feeding us what we already believe while filtering out what we may need to hear.

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We are the product of this exhaustion, stalled progress, absent policy innovation and leaders who are too divided or too detached to reflect who we really are. The "Exhausted Majority," a term coined in the 2018 Hidden Tribes study, may best represent the true American mainstream: tired, frustrated and desperate for change.

Gridlock is no longer just a political reality; it's an emotional one. In our fatigue, populist rhetoric fills the vacuum. Understanding where we are and how we got here is the first step toward imagining something better.

Americans may be polarized, but perhaps an honest look at our shared frustrations is the first step toward unity. If we want to reclaim democracy, we must first rebuild trust, not only in our institutions, but in each other.

Manuel Grajeda III is a teacher in economics, history and government in Southern California.

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There's a word to describe what America has become under Trump: 'Anocracy'

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In 1984 Gallup polls, 61% of Americans viewed democracy favorably. Today, it is 34%. Have we fallen out of love with our most prized political experiment?

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BBC

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The Unitree G1 has been charming people at trade shows

It's a bright spring morning in Hanover, Germany, and I'm on my way to meet a robot.

I have been invited to see the G1, a humanoid robot built by Chinese firm, Unitree, at the Hannover Messe, one of the world's largest industrial trade shows.

Standing at about 4'3" (130cm), G1 is smaller and more affordable than other humanoid robots on the market, and has such a highly fluid range of motion and dexterity that videos of it performing dance numbers and martial arts have gone viral.

Today the G1 is being controlled remotely by Pedro Zheng, the Unitree sales manager.

He explains that customers must program each G1 for autonomous functions.

Passers-by stop and actively try to engage with the G1, which cannot be said for a lot of the other machines being shown off in the cavernous conference room.

They reach out to shake its hand, make sudden movements to see if it will respond, they laugh when G1 waves or bends backwards, they apologise if they bump into it. There's something about its human shape that, uncanny as it is, sets people at ease.

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and

Unitree is just one of dozens of companies around the world developing robots that have a human form.

The potential is huge - for business it promises a workforce that doesn't need holidays or pay rises.

It could also be the ultimate domestic appliance. After all, who wouldn't want a machine that could do the laundry and stack the dishwasher.

But the technology is still some way off. While robotic arms and mobile robots have been common in factories and warehouses for decades, conditions in those workplaces can be controlled and workers can be kept safe.

Introducing a humanoid robot to a less predictable environment, like a restaurant or a home, is a much more difficult problem.

To be useful humanoid robots would have to be strong, but that also makes them potentially dangerous - simply falling over at the wrong time could be hazardous.

So much work needs to be done on the artificial intelligence that would control such a machine.

"The AI simply has not yet reached a breakthrough moment," a Unitree spokesperson tells the BBC.

"Today's robot AI finds basic logic and reasoning - such as for understanding and completing complex tasks in a logical way - a challenge," they said.

At the moment their G1 is marketed at research institutions and tech companies, who can use Unitree's open source software for development.

For now entrepreneurs are focussing their efforts on humanoid robots for warehouses and factories.

The highest profile of those is Elon Musk. His car company, Tesla, is developing a humanoid robot called Optimus. In January he said that "several thousand" will be built this year and he expects them to be doing "useful things" in Tesla factories.

Other carmakers are following a similar path. BMW recently introduced humanoid robots to a US factory. Meanwhile, South Korean car firm Hyundai has ordered tens of thousands of robots from Boston Dynamics, the robot firm it bought in 2021.

Thomas Andersson, founder of research firm STIQ, tracks 49 companies developing humanoid robots - those with two arms and legs. If you broaden the definition to robots with two arms, but propel themselves on wheels, then he looks at more than 100 firms.

Mr Andersson thinks that Chinese companies are likely to dominate the market.

"The supply chain and the entire ecosystem for robotics is huge in China, and it's really easy to iterate developments and do R&D [research and development]," he says.

Unitree underlines that advantage - its G1 is cheap (for a robot) with an advertised price of $16,000 (£12,500).

Also, Mr Andersson points out, the investment favours Asian nations.

In a recent report STIQ notes that almost 60% of all funding for humanoid robots has been raised in Asia, with the US attracting most of the rest.

Chinese companies have the added benefit of support from the national and local government.

For example, in Shanghai there is a state-backed training facility for robots, where dozens of humanoid robots are learning to complete tasks.

Chinese firms are well positioned to dominate the humanoid robot market

So how can US and European robot makers compete with that?

Bristol-based Bren Pierce has founded three robotics companies and the latest, Kinisi has just launched the KR1 robot.

While the robot has been designed and developed in the UK, it will be manufactured in Asia.

"The problem you get as a European or American company, you have to buy all these sub-components from China in the first place.

"So then it becomes stupid to buy your motors, buy your batteries, buy your resistors, shift them all halfway around the world to put together when you could just put them all together at the source, which is in Asia."

As well as making his robots in Asia, Mr Pierce is keeping costs down by not going for the full humanoid form.

Designed for warehouses and factories, the KR1 does not have legs.

"All of these places have flat floors. Why would you want the added expense of a very complex form factor... when you could just put it on a mobile base?" he asks.

Where possible, his KR1 is built with mass-produced components - the wheels are the same as you would find on an electric scooter.

"My philosophy is buy as many things as you can off the shelf. So all our motors, batteries, computers, cameras, they're all commercially available, mass produced parts," he says.

Like his competitors at Unitree, Mr Pierce says that the real "secret sauce" is the software that allows the robot to work with humans.

"A lot of companies come out with very high-tech robots, but then you start needing a PhD in robotics to be able to actually install it and use it.

"What we're trying to design is a very simple to use robot where your average warehouse or factory worker can actually learn how to use it in a couple of hours," Mr Pierce says.

He says the KR1 can perform a task after being guided through it by a human 20 or 30 times.

The KR1 will be given to pilot customers to test this year.

Bren Pierce says Kinisi's robot will be easy to train

So will robots ever break out of factories into the home? Even the optimistic Mr Pierce says it's a long way off.

"My long term dream for the last 20 years has been building the everything robot. This is what I was doing my PhD work in I do think that is the end goal, but it's a very complicated task," says Mr Pierce.

"I still think eventually they will be there, but I think that's at least 10 to 15 years away."

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Who will win the race to develop a humanoid robot?

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Humanoid robots are attracting a lot of investment but will China dominate the industry?

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Pew Research Center's Global Attitudes Project

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Many say their country would be better off if more women, people from poor backgrounds and young adults held elective office

This Pew Research Center analysis focuses on public opinion of democracy and political representation in 24 countries in North America, Europe, the Middle East, the Asia-Pacific region, sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. Satisfaction with democracy is examined in the context of long-term trend data. The report also explores views of nondemocratic systems of government. This is the first year since 2019 that the Global Attitudes Survey has included countries from Africa and Latin America due to the coronavirus outbreak.

For non-U.S. data, this report draws on nationally representative surveys of 27,285 adults conducted from Feb. 20 to May 22, 2023. All surveys were conducted over the phone with adults in Canada, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, South Korea, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom. Surveys were conducted face to face in Hungary, Poland, India, Indonesia, Israel, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Argentina, Brazil and Mexico. In Australia, we used a mixed-mode probability-based online panel.

In the United States, we surveyed 3,576 U.S. adults from March 20 to 26, 2023. Everyone who took part in this survey is a member of the Center's American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the ATP's methodology.

In Israel, the survey was conducted from March 15 to April 24, 2023, before Hamas' attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the start of the Israel-Hamas war.

Several countries have had national elections since this data was collected. Most recently, Indonesia held a general election in February 2024. Greece and Poland both held parliamentary elections, while Argentina, the Netherlands and Spain held general elections in 2023. In Nigeria, elections were held immediately before fieldwork began.

Throughout the report, we analyze attitudes by respondents' income and education. For income, we created lower, middle and higher income categories by splitting the respondents who provided this information into three roughly equal groups within each country.

To compare educational groups across countries, we standardize education levels based on the UN's International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED).

In India, Indonesia, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa and Brazil, the lower education category is below secondary education and the higher category is secondary or above.

The lower education category is secondary education or below and the higher category is postsecondary or above in Canada, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden, the UK, Australia, Japan, South Korea, Israel, Argentina and Mexico.

In the U.S., the lower education category is some college or below and the higher category is a college degree or more.

Here are the questions used for the report, along with responses, and the survey methodology.

The health of democracy has declined significantly in many nations over the past several years, but the concept of representative democracy continues to be popular among citizens across the globe.

Solid majorities in each of the 24 countries surveyed by Pew Research Center in 2023 describe representative democracy, or a democratic system where representatives elected by citizens decide what becomes law, as a somewhat or very good way to govern their country.

However, enthusiasm for this form of government has slipped in many nations since 2017. And the survey highlights significant criticisms of the way it's working. Across the countries included in the study:

A median of 59% are dissatisfied with how their democracy is functioning.

74% think elected officials don't care what people like them think.

42% say no political party in their country represents their views.

Throughout this report, median scores are used to help readers see overall patterns in the data. The median percentage is the middle number in a list of all percentages sorted from highest to lowest.

What - or who - would make representative democracy work better?

Many say policies in their country would improve if more elected officials were women, people from poor backgrounds and young adults.

Electing more women is especially popular among women, and voting more young people into office is particularly popular among those under age 40.

Views are more mixed on the impact of electing more businesspeople and labor union members.

Overall, there is less enthusiasm for having more elected officials who are religious, although the idea is relatively popular in several middle-income nations (Argentina, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria and South Africa, as defined by the World Bank).

For this report, we surveyed 30,861 people in 24 countries from Feb. 20 to May 22, 2023. In addition to this overview, the report includes chapters on:
Read some of the report's key findings below.
How do views of democracy stack up against nondemocratic approaches?

Even though most people believe representative democracy is a good way to govern, many are open to other forms of government as well.

Direct democracy - a system where citizens, rather than elected officials, vote directly on major issues - is also viewed favorably by majorities in nearly all countries polled.

In most countries, expert rule - in which experts, not elected officials, make key decisions - is also a popular alternative.

And there is notable support for more authoritarian models of government.

In 13 countries, a quarter or more of those surveyed think a system in which a strong leader can make decisions without interference from parliament or the courts is a good form of government. In four of the eight middle-income nations in the study, at least half of respondents express this view.

Even military rule has its supporters, including about a third or more of the public in all eight middle-income countries. There is less support in high-income nations, although 17% say military rule could be a good system in Greece, Japan and the United Kingdom, and 15% hold this view in the United States.

Views on representative democracy

Strong support for representative democracy has declined in many nations since we last asked the question in 2017.

The share of the public describing representative democracy as a very good way to govern is down significantly in 11 of the 22 countries where data from 2017 is available (trends are not available in Australia and the U.S.).

For instance, 54% of Swedes said representative democracy was a very good approach in 2017, while just 41% hold this view today.

In contrast, strong support for representative democracy has risen significantly in three nations (Brazil, Mexico and Poland).

Views on autocratic leadership

Support for a government where a strong leader can make decisions without interference from courts or parliaments has increased in eight of 22 nations since 2017.

It is up significantly in all three Latin American nations polled, as well as in Kenya, India, South Korea, Germany and Poland.

Support for a strong leader model is especially common among people with less education and those with lower incomes.

People on the ideological right are often more likely than those on the left to support rule by a strong leader.

Views on expert rule

Support for a system where experts, not elected officials, make key decisions is up significantly in most countries since 2017, and current views of this form of government may be tied at least in part to the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, in the U.S., 59% of those who believe public health officials have done a good job of responding to the coronavirus outbreak think expert rule is a good system, compared with just 35% among those who say public health officials have done a bad job of dealing with the pandemic.

Widespread belief that elected officials are out of touch

One factor driving people's dissatisfaction with the way democracy is functioning is the belief that politicians are out of touch and disconnected from the lives of ordinary citizens.

In every country surveyed, people who feel politicians don't care about people like them are less satisfied with democracy.

Across 24 nations, a median of 74% say elected officials in their country don't care what people like them think.

At least half of those surveyed hold this view in all countries but one (Sweden). Opinions about elected officials are particularly negative in Argentina, Greece, Nigeria, Spain and the U.S., where at least eight-in-ten believe elected officials don't care what people like them think.

Many don't think political parties represent them

While a median of 54% across the 24 countries surveyed say there is at least one party that represents their views well, 42% say there is no party that represents their views.

Israelis, Nigerians and Swedes are the most likely to say at least one party represents their opinions - seven-in-ten or more express this view in each of these countries. In contrast, about four-in-ten or fewer say this in Argentina, France, Italy and Spain. Americans are evenly divided on this question.

In 18 countries where we asked about ideology, people who place themselves in the center are especially likely to feel unrepresented. And in some countries, those on the right are particularly likely to say there is at least one party that represents their views.

The U.S. illustrates this pattern: 60% of American conservatives say there is a party that represents their opinions, compared with 52% of liberals and just 40% of moderates.

People rate their country's leaders, parties and overall state of democracy poorly

The survey asked respondents how well they feel democracy is working in their country, and it also asked them to rate major national leaders and parties. Opinions on these questions may have shifted since the survey was conducted in spring 2023, but the overall results provide a relatively grim picture of the political mood in many nations. (Refer to Appendix A for details about the specific leaders and parties we asked about.)

There are only seven countries where half or more are satisfied with the way democracy is working.

Among the 24 national leaders included on the survey, just 10 are viewed favorably by half or more of the public.

Opposition leaders fare even worse - only six get favorable reviews.

Across the countries polled, we asked about 87 different political parties. Just 21 get a positive rating.

Opinions vary greatly across regions and countries, but to some extent, we see more positive views about leaders and parties in middle-income nations.

How ideology relates to views of representation

This report highlights significant ideological differences on many questions, including preferences regarding the characteristics of people who serve as elected officials.

Those on the political left are generally much more likely than those on the right to favor electing more labor union members, young adults, people from poor backgrounds and women.

Meanwhile, those on the right are more likely to say policies would improve if more religious people and businesspeople held elective office.

Ideological divisions on these topics are often especially sharp in the U.S. There are also very large partisan differences.

Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents are much more likely than Republicans and Republican leaners to favor having more women, young adults, people from poor backgrounds and labor union members in office.

Meanwhile, Republicans are more likely to endorse electing more religious people and businesspeople.

In their own words: Ideas for improving democracy

The survey also included the following open-ended question: "What do you think would help improve the way democracy in this country is working?" Respondents describe a wide variety of ideas for making democracy work better, but a few common themes emerge:

Improving political leadership: Respondents want politicians who are more responsive to the public's needs, more attentive to the public's voice, less corrupt and more competent. Many would also like political leaders to be more representative of their country's population in terms of gender, age, race and other factors.

Government reform: Many believe improving democracy will require significant political reform in their country. Views about what reform should look like vary considerably, but suggestions include changing electoral systems, shifting the balance of power between institutions, and placing limits on how long politicians and judges can serve. In several countries, people express a desire for more direct democracy.

Expecting more from citizens: Respondents also emphasize that citizens have an important role to play in making democracy work better. They argue that citizens need to be more informed, engaged, tolerant and respectful of one another.

Improving the economy: Many people - and especially those in middle-income nations - emphasize the link between a healthy economy and a healthy democracy. Respondents mention creating jobs; curbing inflation; changing government spending priorities; and investing more in infrastructure, such as roads, hospitals, water, electricity and schools.

The full results of the open-ended question will be released in an upcoming Pew Research Center report. For a preview of some of the findings, read "Who likes authoritarianism, and how do they want to change their government?"

Additional reports and analyses

Pew Research Center regularly explores public attitudes toward democracy and related issues around the world. Check out some of our major publications on this topic from the past few years:

The Center also regularly examines U.S. public opinion on topics related to democracy. Some of the most recent releases include:

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Richard Wike, Janell Fetterolf, Maria Smerkovich, Sarah Austin, Sneha Gubbala and Jordan Lippert

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Representative Democracy Remains a Popular Ideal, but People Around the World Are Critical of How It's Working

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A 24-country survey finds a median of 59% are dissatisfied with how their democracy is functioning, and 74% think elected officials don't care what people like them think.

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The case for taking AI seriously as a threat to humanity

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The case for taking AI seriously as a threat to humanity

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by Kelsey Piper

Illustrations by Javier Zarracina for Vox

UpdatedOct 15, 2020 at 7:30 PM

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This story is part of a group of stories called

Finding the best ways to do good.

Stephen Hawking has said, "The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race." Elon Musk claims that AI is humanity's " biggest existential threat."

That might have people asking: Wait, what? But these grand worries are rooted in research. Along with Hawking and Musk, prominent figures at Oxford and UC Berkeley and many of the researchers working in AI today believe that advanced AI systems, if deployed carelessly, could permanently cut off human civilization from a good future.

This concern has been raised since the dawn of computing. But it has come into particular focus in recent years, as advances in machine-learning techniques have given us a more concrete understanding of what we can do with AI, what AI can do for (and to) us, and how much we still don't know.

There are also skeptics. Some of them think advanced AI is so distant that there's no point in thinking about it now. Others are worried that excessive hype about the power of their field might kill it prematurely. And even among the people who broadly agree that AI poses unique dangers, there are varying takes on what steps make the most sense today.

The conversation about AI is full of confusion, misinformation, and people talking past each other - in large part because we use the word "AI" to refer to so many things. So here's the big picture on how artificial intelligence might pose a catastrophic danger, in nine questions:

1) What is AI?

Artificial intelligence is the effort to create computers capable of intelligent behavior. It is a broad catchall term, used to refer to everything from Siri to IBM's Watson to powerful technologies we have yet to invent.

Some researchers distinguish between "narrow AI" - computer systems that are better than humans in some specific, well-defined field, like playing chess or generating images or diagnosing cancer - and "general AI," systems that can surpass human capabilities in many domains. We don't have general AI yet, but we're starting to get a better sense of the challenges it will pose.

Narrow AI has seen extraordinary progress over the past few years. AI systems have improved dramatically at translation, at games like chess and Go, at important research biology questions like predicting how proteins fold, and at generating images. AI systems determine what you'll see in a Google search or in your Facebook Newsfeed. They compose music and write articles that, at a glance, read as if a human wrote them. They play strategy games. They are being developed to improve drone targetingand detect missiles.

But narrow AI is getting less narrow. Once, we made progress in AI by painstakingly teaching computer systems specific concepts. To do computer vision - allowing a computer toidentify things in pictures and video - researchers wrote algorithms for detecting edges. To play chess, they programmed in heuristics about chess. To do natural language processing (speech recognition, transcription, translation, etc.), they drew on the field of linguistics.

But recently, we've gotten better at creating computer systems that have generalized learning capabilities. Instead of mathematically describing detailed features of a problem, we let the computer system learn that by itself. While once we treated computer vision as a completely different problem from natural language processing or platform game playing, now we can solve all three problems with the same approaches.

And as computers get good enough at narrow AI tasks, they start to exhibit more general capabilities. For example, OpenAI's famous GPT-series of text AIs is, in one sense, the narrowest of narrow AIs - it just predicts what the next word will be in a text, based on the previous words and its corpus of human language. And yet, it can now identify questions as reasonable or unreasonable and discuss the physical world (for example, answering questions about which objects are larger or which steps in a process must come first). In order to be very good at the narrow task of text prediction, an AI system will eventually develop abilities that are not narrow at all.

Our AI progress so far has enabled enormous advances - and hasalso raised urgent ethical questions. When you train a computer system to predict which convicted felons will reoffend, you're using inputs from a criminal justice system biased against black people and low-income people - and so its outputs will likely be biased against black and low-income people too. Making websites more addictive can be great for your revenue but bad for your users. Releasing a program that writes convincing fake reviews or fake news might make those widespread, making it harder for the truth to get out.

Rosie Campbell at UC Berkeley's Center for Human-Compatible AI argues that these are examples, writ small, of the big worry experts have about general AI in the future. The difficulties we're wrestling with today with narrow AI don't come from the systems turning on us or wanting revenge or considering us inferior. Rather, they come from the disconnect between what we tell our systems to do and what we actually want them to do.

For example, we tell a system to run up a high score in a video game. We want it to play the game fairly and learn game skills - but if it instead has the chance to directly hack the scoring system, it will do that. It's doing great by the metric we gave it. But we aren't getting what we wanted.

In other words, our problems come from the systems being really good at achieving the goal they learned to pursue; it's just that the goal they learned in their training environment isn't the outcome we actually wanted. And we're building systems we don't understand, which means we can't always anticipate their behavior.

Right now the harm is limited because the systems are so limited. But it's a pattern that could have even graver consequences for human beings in the future as AI systems become more advanced.

2) Is it even possible to make a computer as smart as a person?

Yes, though current AI systems aren't nearly that smart.

One popular adage about AI is " everything that's easy is hard, and everything that's hard is easy." Doing complex calculations in the blink of an eye? Easy. Looking at a picture and telling you whether it's a dog? Hard (until very recently).

Lots of things humans do are still outside AI's grasp. For instance, it's hard to design an AI system that explores an unfamiliar environment, that can navigate its way from, say, the entryway of a building it's never been in before up the stairs to a specific person's desk. We are just beginning to learn how to design an AI system that reads a book and retains an understanding of the concepts.

The paradigm that has driven many of the biggest breakthroughs in AI recently is called "deep learning." Deep learning systems can do some astonishing stuff: beat games we thought humans might never lose, invent compelling and realistic photographs, solve open problems in molecular biology.

These breakthroughs have made some researchers conclude it's time to start thinking about the dangers of more powerful systems, but skeptics remain. The field's pessimists argue that programs still need an extraordinary pool of structured data to learn from, require carefully chosen parameters, or work only in environments designed to avoid the problems we don't yet know how to solve. They point to self-driving cars, which are still mediocre under the best conditions despite the billions that have been poured into making them work.

It's rare, though, to find a top researcher in AI who thinks that general AI is impossible. Instead, the field's luminaries tend to say that it will happen someday - but probably a day that's a long way off.

Other researchers argue that the day may not be so distant after all.

That's because for almost all the history of AI, we've been held back in large part by not having enough computing power to realize our ideas fully. Many of the breakthroughs of recent years - AI systems that learned how to play strategy games, generate fake photos of celebrities, fold proteins, and compete in massive multiplayer online strategy games - have happened because that's no longer true. Lots of algorithms that seemed not to work at all turned out to work quite well once we could run them with more computing power.

And the cost of a unit of computing time keeps falling. Progress in computing speed has slowed recently, but the cost of computing power is still estimated to be falling by a factor of 10 every 10 years. Through most of itshistory, AI has had access to less computing power than the human brain. That's changing. By most estimates, we're now approaching the era when AI systems can have the computing resources that we humans enjoy.

And deep learning, unlike previous approaches to AI, is highly suited to developing general capabilities.

"If you go back in history," top AI researcher and OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever told me, "they made a lot of cool demos with little symbolic AI. They could never scale them up - they were never able to get them to solve non-toy problems. Now with deep learning the situation is reversed. ... Not only is [the AI we're developing]general, it's also competent - if you want to get the best results on many hard problems, you must use deep learning. And it's scalable."

In other words, we didn't need to worry about general AI back when winning at chess required entirely different techniques than winning at Go. But now, the same approach produces fake news or music depending on what training data it is fed. And as far as we can discover, the programs just keep getting better at what they do when they're allowed more computation time - we haven't discovered a limit to how good they can get. Deep learning approaches to most problems blew past all other approaches when deep learning was first discovered.

Furthermore, breakthroughs in a field can often surprise even other researchers in the field. "Some have argued that there is no conceivable risk to humanity [from AI] for centuries to come," wrote UC Berkeley professor Stuart Russell, "perhaps forgetting that the interval of time between Rutherford's confident assertion that atomic energy would never be feasibly extracted and Szilárd's invention of the neutron-induced nuclear chain reaction was less than twenty-four hours."

There's another consideration. Imagine an AI that is inferior to humans at everything, with one exception: It's a competent engineer that can build AI systems very effectively. Machine learning engineers who work on automating jobs in other fields often observe, humorously, that in some respects, their own field looks like one where much of the work - the tedious tuning of parameters - could be automated.

If we can design such a system, then we can use its result - a better engineering AI - to build another, even better AI. This is the mind-bending scenario experts call "recursive self-improvement," where gains in AI capabilities enable more gains in AI capabilities, allowing a system that started out behind us to rapidly end up with abilities well beyond what we anticipated.

This is a possibility that has been anticipated since the first computers. I.J. Good, a colleague of Alan Turing who worked at the Bletchley Park codebreaking operation during World War II and helped build the first computers afterward, may have been the first to spell it out, back in 1965: "An ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an 'intelligence explosion,' and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make."

3) How exactly could AI wipe us out?

It's immediately clear how nuclear bombs will kill us. No one working on mitigating nuclear risk has to start by explaining why it'd be a bad thing if we had a nuclear war.

The case that AI could pose an existential risk to humanity is more complicated and harder to grasp. So many of the people who are working to build safe AI systems have to start by explaining why AI systems, by default, are dangerous.

The idea that AI can become a danger is rooted in the fact that AI systems pursue their goals, whether or not those goals are what we really intended - and whether or not we're in the way. "You're probably not an evil ant-hater who steps on ants out of malice," Stephen Hawking wrote, "but if you're in charge of a hydroelectric green-energy project and there's an anthill in the region to be flooded, too bad for the ants. Let's not place humanity in the position of those ants."

Here's one scenario that keeps experts up at night: We develop a sophisticated AI system with the goal of, say, estimating some number with high confidence. The AI realizes it can achieve more confidence in its calculation if it uses all the world's computing hardware, and it realizes that releasing a biological superweapon to wipe out humanity would allow it free use of all the hardware. Having exterminated humanity, it then calculates the number with higher confidence.

It is easy to design an AI that averts that specific pitfall. But there are lots of ways that unleashing powerful computer systems will have unexpected and potentially devastating effects, and avoiding all of them is a much harder problem than avoiding any specific one.

Victoria Krakovna, an AI researcher at DeepMind (now a division of Alphabet, Google's parent company), compiled a list of examples of "specification gaming": the computer doing what we told it to do but not what we wanted it to do. For example, we tried to teach AI organisms in a simulation to jump, but we did it by teaching them to measure how far their "feet" rose above the ground. Instead of jumping, they learned to grow into tall vertical poles and do flips - they excelled at what we were measuring, but they didn't do what we wanted them to do.

An AI playing the Atari exploration game Montezuma's Revenge found a bug that let it force a key in the game to reappear, thereby allowing it to earn a higher score by exploiting the glitch. An AI playing a different game realized it could get more points by falsely inserting its name as the owner of high-value items.

Sometimes, the researchers didn't even know how their AI systemcheated: "the agent discovers an in-game bug. ... For a reason unknown to us, the game does not advance to the second round but the platforms start to blink and the agent quickly gains a huge amount of points (close to 1 million for our episode time limit)."

What these examples make clear is that in any system that might have bugs or unintended behavior or behavior humans don't fully understand, a sufficiently powerful AI system might act unpredictably - pursuing its goals through an avenue that isn't the one we expected.

In his 2009 paper "The Basic AI Drives," Steve Omohundro, who has worked as a computer science professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and as the president of Possibility Research, argues that almost any AI system will predictably try to accumulate more resources, become more efficient, and resist being turned off or modified: "These potentially harmful behaviors will occur not because they were programmed in at the start, but because of the intrinsic nature of goal driven systems."

His argument goes like this: Because AIs have goals, they'll be motivated to take actions that they can predict will advance their goals. An AI playing a chess game will be motivated to take an opponent's piece and advance the board to a state that looks more winnable.

But the same AI, if it sees a way to improve its own chess evaluation algorithm so it can evaluate potential moves faster, will do that too, for the same reason: It's just another step that advances its goal.

If the AI sees a way to harness more computing power so it can consider more moves in the time available, it will do that. And if the AI detects that someone is trying to turn off its computer mid-game, and it has a way to disrupt that, it'll do it. It's not that we would instruct the AI to do things like that; it's that whatever goal a system has, actions like these will often be part of the best path to achieve that goal.

That means that any goal, even innocuous ones like playing chess or generating advertisements that get lots of clicks online, could produce unintendedresults if the agent pursuing it has enough intelligence and optimization power to identify weird, unexpected routes to achieve its goals.

Goal-driven systems won't wake up one day with hostility to humans lurking in their hearts. But they will take actions that they predict will help them achieve their goal - even if we'd find those actions problematic, even horrifying. They'll work to preserve themselves, accumulate more resources, and become more efficient. They already do that, but it takes the form of weird glitches in games. As they grow more sophisticated, scientists like Omohundro predict more adversarial behavior.

4) When did scientists first start worrying about AI risk?

Scientists have been thinking about the potential of artificial intelligence since the early days of computers. In the famous paper where he put forth the Turing test for determining if an artificial system is truly "intelligent," Alan Turing wrote:

Let us now assume, for the sake of argument, that these machines are a genuine possibility, and look at the consequences of constructing them. ... There would be plenty to do in trying to keep one's intelligence up to the standards set by the machines, for it seems probable that once the machine thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers. ... At some stage therefore we should have to expect the machines to take control.

I.J. Good worked closely with Turing and reached the same conclusions, according to his assistant, Leslie Pendleton. In an excerpt from unpublished notes Good wrote shortly before he died in 2009, he writes about himself in third person and notes a disagreement with his younger self - while as a younger man, he thought powerful AIs might be helpful to us, the older Good expected AI to annihilate us.

[The paper] "Speculations Concerning the First Ultra-intelligent Machine" (1965) ... began: "The survival of man depends on the early construction of an ultra-intelligent machine." Those were his words during the Cold War, and he now suspects that "survival" should be replaced by "extinction." He thinks that, because of international competition, we cannot prevent the machines from taking over. He thinks we are lemmings. He said also that "probably Man will construct the deus ex machina in his own image."

In the 21st century, with computers quickly establishing themselves as a transformative force in our world, younger researchers started expressing similar worries.

Nick Bostrom is a professor at the University of Oxford, the director of the Future of Humanity Institute, and the director of the Governance of Artificial Intelligence Program. He researches risks to humanity, both in the abstract - asking questions like why we seem to be alone in the universe - and in concrete terms, analyzing the technological advances on the table and whether they endanger us. AI, he concluded, endangers us.

In 2014, he wrote a book explaining the risks AI poses and the necessity of getting it right the first time, concluding, "once unfriendly superintelligence exists, it would prevent us from replacing it or changing its preferences. Our fate would be sealed."

Across the world, others have reached the same conclusion. Bostrom co-authored a paper on the ethics of artificial intelligence with Eliezer Yudkowsky, founder of and research fellow at the Berkeley Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), an organization that works on better formal characterizations of the AI safety problem.

Yudkowsky started his career in AI by worriedly poking holes in others' proposals for how to make AI systems safe, and has spent most of it working to persuade his peers that AI systems will, by default, be unaligned with human values (not necessarily opposed to but indifferent to human morality)- and that it'll be a challenging technical problem to prevent that outcome.

Increasingly, researchers realized that there'd be challenges that hadn't been present with AI systems when they were simple. "'Side effects' are much more likely to occur in a complex environment, and an agent may need to be quite sophisticated to hack its reward function in a dangerous way. This may explain why these problems have received so little study in the past, while also suggesting their importance in the future," concluded a 2016 research paper on problems in AI safety.

Bostrom's book Superintelligence was compelling to many people, but there were skeptics. " No, experts don't think superintelligent AI is a threat to humanity," argued an op-ed by Oren Etzioni, a professor of computer science at the University of Washington and CEO of the Allan Institute for Artificial Intelligence. " Yes, we are worried about the existential risk of artificial intelligence," replied a dueling op-ed by Stuart Russell, an AI pioneer and UC Berkeley professor, and Allan DaFoe, a senior research fellow at Oxford and director of the Governance of AI program there.

It's tempting to conclude that there's a pitched battle between AI-risk skeptics and AI-risk believers. In reality, they might not disagree as profoundly as you would think.

Facebook's chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, for example, is a vocal voice on the skeptical side. But while he argues we shouldn't fear AI, he still believes we ought to have people working on, and thinking about, AI safety. "Even if the risk of an A.I. uprising is very unlikely and very far in the future, we still need to think about it, design precautionary measures, and establish guidelines," he writes.

That's not to say there's an expert consensus here - far from it. There is substantial disagreement about which approaches seem likeliest to bring us to general AI, which approaches seem likeliest to bring us to safe general AI, and how soon we need to worry about any of this.

Many experts are wary that others are overselling their field, and dooming it when the hype runs out. But that disagreement shouldn't obscure a growing common ground; these are possibilities worth thinking about, investing in, and researching, so we have guidelines when the moment comes that they're needed.

5) Why couldn't we just shut off a computer if it got too powerful?

A smart AI could predict that we'd want to turn it off if it made us nervous. So it would try hard not to make us nervous, because doing so wouldn't help it accomplish its goals. If asked what its intentions are, or what it's working on, it would attempt to evaluate which responses are least likely to get it shut off, and answer with those. If it wasn't competent enough to do that, it might pretend to be even dumber than it was - anticipating that researchers would give it more time, computing resources, and training data.

So we might not know when it's the right moment to shut off a computer.

We also might do things that make it impossible to shut off the computer later, even if we realize eventually that it's a good idea. For example, many AI systems could have access to the internet, which is a rich source of training data and which they'd need if they're to make money for their creators (for example, on the stock market, where more than half of trading is done by fast-reacting AI algorithms).

But with internet access, an AI could email copies of itself somewhere where they'll be downloaded and read, or hack vulnerable systems elsewhere. Shutting off any one computer wouldn't help.

In that case, isn't it a terrible idea to let any AI system - even one which doesn't seem powerful enough to be dangerous - have access to the internet? Probably. But that doesn't mean it won't continue to happen.AI researchers want to make their AI systems more capable - that's what makes them more scientifically interesting and more profitable. It's not clear that the many incentives to make your systems powerful and use them online will suddenly change once systems become powerful enough to be dangerous.

So far, we've mostly talked about the technical challenges of AI. But from here forward, it's necessary to veer more into the politics. Since AI systems enable incredible things, there will be lots of different actors working on such systems.

There will likely be startups, established tech companies like Google (Alphabet's recently acquired startup DeepMind is frequently mentioned as an AI frontrunner), and organizations like Elon-Musk-founded OpenAI, which recently transitioned to a hybrid for-profit/non-profit structure.

There will be governments - Russia's Vladimir Putin has expressed an interest in AI, and China has made big investments. Some of them will presumably be cautious and employ safety measures, including keeping their AI off the internet. But in a scenario like this one, we're at the mercy of the least cautious actor, whoever they may be.

That's part of what makes AI hard: Even if we know how to take appropriate precautions (and right now we don't), we also need to figure out how to ensure that all would-be AI programmers are motivated to take those precautions and have the tools to implement them correctly.

6) What are we doing right now to avoid an AI apocalypse?

"It could be said that public policy on AGI [artificial general intelligence] does not exist," concluded a paper in 2018reviewing the state of the field.

The truth is that technical work on promising approaches is getting done, but there's shockingly little in the way of policy planning, international collaboration, or public-private partnerships. In fact, much of the work is being done by only a handful of organizations, and it has been estimated that around 50 people in the world work full time on technical AI safety.

Bostrom's Future of Humanity Institute has published a research agenda for AI governance: the study of "devising global norms, policies, and institutions to best ensure the beneficial development and use of advanced AI." It has published research on the risk of malicious uses of AI, on the context of China's AI strategy, and on artificial intelligence and international security.

The longest-established organization working on technical AI safety is the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), which prioritizes research into designing highly reliable agents - artificial intelligence programs whose behavior we can predict well enough to be confident they're safe. (Disclosure: MIRI is a nonprofit and I donated to its work in2017-2019.)

The Elon Musk-founded OpenAI is a very new organization, less than three years old. But researchers there are active contributors to both AI safety and AI capabilities research. A research agenda in 2016 spelled out " concrete open technical problems relating to accident prevention in machine learning systems," and researchers have since advanced some approaches to safe AI systems.

Alphabet's DeepMind, a leader in this field, has a safety team and a technical research agenda outlined here. "Our intention is to ensure that AI systems of the future are not just 'hopefully safe' but robustly, verifiably safe ," it concludes, outlining an approach with an emphasis on specification (designing goals well), robustness (designing systems that perform within safe limits under volatile conditions), and assurance (monitoring systems and understanding what they're doing).

There are also lots of people working on more present-day AI ethics problems: algorithmic bias, robustness of modern machine-learning algorithms to small changes, and transparency and interpretability of neural nets, to name just a few. Some of that research could potentially be valuable for preventing destructive scenarios.

But on the whole, the state of the field is a little bit as if almost all climate change researchers were focused on managing the droughts, wildfires, and famines we're already facing today, with only a tiny skeleton team dedicating to forecasting the future and 50 or so researchers who work full time on coming up with a plan to turn things around.

Not every organization with a major AI department has a safety team at all, and some of them have safety teams focused only on algorithmic fairness and not on the risks from advanced systems. The US government doesn't have a department for AI.

The field still has lots of open questions - many of which might make AI look much scarier, or much less so - which no one has dug into in depth.

7) Is this really likelier to kill us all than, say, climate change?

It sometimes seems like we're facing dangers from all angles in the 21st century. Both climate change and future AI developments are likely to be transformative forces acting on our world.

Our predictions about climate change are more confident, both for better and for worse. We have a clearer understanding of the risks the planet will face, and we can estimate the costs to human civilization. They are projected to be enormous, risking potentially hundreds of millions of lives. The ones who will suffer most will be low-income people in developing countries; the wealthy will find it easier to adapt. We also have a clearer understanding of the policies we need to enact to address climate change than we do with AI.

There's intense disagreement in the fieldon timelines for critical advances in AI. While AI safety experts agree on many features of the safety problem, they're still making the case to research teams in their own field, and they disagree on some of the details. There's substantial disagreement on how badly it could go, and on how likely it is to go badly. There are only a few people who work full time on AI forecasting. One of the things current researchers are trying to nail down is their models and the reasons for the remaining disagreements about what safe approaches will look like.

Most experts in the AI field think it poses a much larger risk of total human extinction than climate change, since analysts of existential risks to humanity think that climate change, while catastrophic, is unlikely to lead to human extinction. But many others primarily emphasize our uncertainty - and emphasize that when we're working rapidly toward powerful technology about which there are still many unanswered questions, the smart step is to start the research now.

8) Is there a possibility that AI can be benevolent?

AI safety researchers emphasize that we shouldn't assume AI systems will be benevolent by default. They'll have the goals that their training environment set them up for, and no doubt this will fail to encapsulate the whole of human values.

When the AI gets smarter, might it figure out morality by itself? Again, researchers emphasize that it won't. It's not really a matter of "figuring out" - the AI will understand just fine that humans actually value love and fulfillment and happiness, and not just the number associated with Google on the New York Stock Exchange. But the AI's values will be built around whatever goal system it was initially built around, which means it won't suddenly become aligned with human values if it wasn't designed that way to start with.

Of course, we can build AI systems that are aligned with human values, or at least that humans can safely work with. That is ultimately what almost every organization with an artificial general intelligence division is trying to do. Success with AI could give us access to decades or centuries of technological innovation all at once.

"If we're successful, we believe this will be one of the most important and widely beneficial scientific advances ever made," writes the introduction to Alphabet's DeepMind. "From climate change to the need for radically improved healthcare, too many problems suffer from painfully slow progress, their complexity overwhelming our ability to find solutions. With AI as a multiplier for human ingenuity, those solutions will come into reach."

So, yes, AI can share our values - and transform our world for the good. We just need to solve a very hard engineering problem first.

9) I just really want to know: how worried should we be?

To people who think the worrying is premature and the risks overblown, AI safety is competing with other priorities that sound, well, a bit less sci-fi - and it's not clear why AI should take precedence. To people who think the risks described are real and substantial, it's outrageous that we're dedicating so few resources to working on them.

While machine-learning researchers are right to be wary of hype, it's also hard to avoid the fact that they're accomplishing some impressive, surprising things using very generalizable techniques, and that it doesn't seem that all the low-hanging fruit has been picked.

AI looks increasingly like a technology that will change the world when it arrives. Researchers across many major AI organizations tell us it will be like launching a rocket: something we have to get right before we hit "go." So it seems urgent to get to work learning rocketry. No matter whether or not humanity should be afraid, we should definitely be doing our homework.

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The case for taking AI seriously as a threat to humanity

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Finding the best ways to do good. Stephen Hawking has said, "The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race." Elon Musk claims that AI is humanity's " biggest existential threat." That might have people asking: Wait, what? But these grand worries are rooted in research.

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"Unprecedented" response to hâte crime proposals (BBC News) 

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"Unprecedented" response to hâte crime proposals (BBC News) 

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Controversial proposals for a new hate crime law in Scotland have prompted an "unprecedented" response, according to the convener of the justice committee.
Conservative MSP Adam Tomkins said the number of submissions showed that the plans were contentious.

A consultation on the plans prompted 2,000 responses, including support from Age Scotland, Victim Support and the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

However, critics say it lacks clarity and could threaten freedom of speech.

The Scottish government wants a new law to protect people persecuted over age, sexual orientation, race, religion, disability or transgender identity.

Mr Tomkins said hundreds of individuals and organisations had made their views known during the consultation on the legislation.

"The number of submissions we have received is unprecedented and reflects that this bill is contentious," he said.

"Given the importance of this legislation - and the strength of feeling it is generating - it is vital that sufficient time is allowed for scrutiny."

Author Val McDermid was among 20 writers who signed an open letter criticising the plans

The committee aims to complete its stage one report by 18 December, although its Mr Tomkins said it would revisit that deadline if necessary.

It aims to simplify the law by bringing together multiple existing hate crime laws into a single piece of legislation.

However, it would also create a new crime of "stirring up hatred" either "with intention" or "where it is a likely consequence" of an action.

The Scottish Police Federation - which represents rank-and-file officers - claimed the bill "appears to paralyse freedom of speech in Scotland".

The Faculty of Advocates has raised concerns over "unintended consequences" for free speech.

However, the Equality Network is among those who support the bill.

It said it agreed that any new law should not impinge on legitimate free speech, adding: "We note that the existing stirring up racial hatred offence has not done that and neither have, in England and Wales, the offences there of stirring up hatred on grounds of religion or sexual orientation."

Support was also voiced by the Scottish Council for Jewish Communities, which said it would make current laws "more comprehensible, and also provide everyone with equal protection before the law."

Police Scotland said "the simplification of hate crime legislation would assist the understanding of victims, society as a whole, and indeed police officers".

Humza Yousaf said he knew from personal experience the distress that hate crime caused

Justice Secretary Humza Yousaf said he would consider "very carefully" the views of those who submitted responses to the public consultation.

He said he knew from both personal experience and the "powerful testimonies of others" about the physical and mental distress that hate crime caused its victims.

He added: "I welcome the many responses that support the main purpose of the bill - to make clear that crimes motivated by hatred and prejudice will not be tolerated in modern Scotland.

"The bill does not seek to stifle criticism or rigorous debate in any way but aims to achieve the correct balance between protecting those who suffer from the scourge of hate crime whilst respecting people's freedom of expression."

Mr Yousaf said he would work to find common ground and compromise as the bill made its way through the Scottish Parliament.

Scottish Conservative justice spokesman Liam Kerr said Mr Yousaf should heed the "avalanche of opposition" to the proposals.

"This level of substantial criticism cannot simply be waived away or ignored," he said.

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'Unprecedented' response to hate crime proposals

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The convener of Holyrood's justice committee says the number of submissions show the plans are contentious.

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BLM AND FAME : Is Activism the New Red Carpet?

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BLM AND FAME : Is Activism the New Red Carpet?

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Beyoncé Pays Tribute to George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery & Breonna Taylor in Commencement Speech

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“You have arrived in the middle of a global crisis, a racial pandemic, and worldwide expression of outrage at the senseless killing of yet another unarmed Black human being.”

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Media job cuts in Wales 'threat' to democracy, says FM (BBC.NEWS) 

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Media job cuts in Wales 'threat' to democracy, says FM (BBC.NEWS) 

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Media job cuts in Wales ‘threat’ to democracy, says FM

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Wales’ first minister calls on newspaper and BBC bosses to reconsider a recent wave of job cuts.

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The end of work: which jobs will survive the AI revolution?

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The end of work: which jobs will survive the AI revolution?

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by David Runciman on saturday 19 august 2023

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At the 2021 Australian and US Open tennis championships, all the line judges were replaced by machines. This was, in many ways, inevitable. Not only are these machines far more accurate than any human at calling balls in or out, but they can also be programmed to make their calls in a human-like voice, so as not to disorient the players. It is a little eerie, the disembodied shriek of "Out!" coming from nowhere on the court (at the Australian Open the machines are programmed to speak with an Australian accent). But it is far less irritating than the delays required by challenging incorrect calls, and far more reliable. It takes very little getting used to.

In the slew of reports published in the 2010s looking to identify which jobs were most at risk of being automated out of existence, sports officials usually ranked very high up the list (the best known of these studies, by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne in 2017, put a 98% probability on sports officiating being phased out by computers within 20 years). Here, after all, is a human enterprise where the single most important qualification is an ability to get the answer right. In or out? Ball or strike? Fair or foul? These are decisions that need to be underpinned by accurate intelligence. The technology does not even have to be state-of-the-art to produce far better answers than humans can. Hawk-Eye systems have been outperforming human eyesight for nearly 20 years. They were first officially adopted for tennis line calls in 2006, to check cricket umpire decisions in 2009 and, more recently, to rule on football offsides.

Yet despite the arrival of this smart technology, there are now many more people employed in sports officiating than ever before. Wimbledon has decided to retain its line judges, in part for aesthetic reasons. As the only major tournament played on grass, looking good against a green backdrop is a key part of the money-making machine (hence the requirement that the players wear nothing but white). The line judges are mainly there for their uniforms. In 2022, as for the previous 17 years, these were designed by Ralph Lauren.

Cricket matches, which traditionally featured just two umpires, currently have three to manage the complex demands of the technology, plus a referee to monitor the players' behaviour, which still involves a large element of human discretion (who's to say what is meant by "upholding the spirit of the game"?). Football matches have up to five officials, plus the large teams of screen-watchers needed to interpret the replays provided by the video assistant referee system (VAR). The NBA Replay Center at Secaucus, New Jersey, which employs 25 people full time, along with a rota of regular match officials, would not look out of place at Nasa.

Efficiency - even accuracy - turns out not to be the main requirement of the organisations that employ people to give decisions during sports games. They are also highly sensitive to appearance, which includes a wish to keep their sport looking and feeling like it's still a human-centred enterprise. Smart technology can do many things, but in the absence of convincingly humanoid robots, it can't really do that. So actual people are required to stand between the machines and those on the receiving end of their judgments. The result is more work all round.

Robots can dance, but they still need human choreographers to look convincing

It remains surprisingly hard to know which jobs are likely to go with the arrival of AI, though we can be confident that the scope and character of employment will change. Many studies of the risks of automation, like Frey and Osborne's, choose to treat work as a series of tasks, which can then be measured by their suitability to be undertaken by machines. This assumes that the barriers in the way of human replacement are simply the current limitations of the technology, which for now include a continuing inability to exhibit a range of human-centric cognitive and mobility skills. Robots are good at repetitive tasks, even when these are highly complex, along with ever more voluminous data crunching, but they often struggle with simple forms of human interaction. If your job involves creativity, aesthetic judgment, truly fluid movement or social sensitivity, then on these measures you are likely to be safe for now. Robots can dance, but they still need human choreographers to look convincing.

However, a task is not a job, not in the modern meaning of the term. Jobs are positions created by organisations that have their own requirements. It is too simplistic to think of these requirements as nothing more than the efficient performance of a task, even in the case of heartless, money-grubbing corporations. It also matters whether the job makes sense in relation to the corporation's needs. Most jobs continue to require people to fill them, because people are the human element of the impersonal organisations that provide the jobs. Otherwise, the machines would appear to be running the show, which is a dangerous look in a world where people still count.

How things look isn't everything. There are significant parts of every organisation where appearance doesn't matter so much, in the backrooms and maybe even the boardrooms that the public never gets to see. Behind-the-scenes technical knowledge that underpins the performance of public-facing tasks is likely to be an increasingly precarious basis for reliable employment. This is true of many professions, including accountancy, consultancy and the law. There will still be lots of work for the people who deal with people. But the business of gathering data, processing information and searching for precedents can now more reliably be done by machines. The people who used to undertake this work, especially those in entry-level jobs such as clerks, administrative assistants and paralegals, might not be OK.

The future of employment necessarily involves a complex set of relationships, which are far more likely to alter what we understand by work than to abolish it. There are the relationships between people and machines, some of which may turn out to be zero-sum (more work for them means less work for us), but most of which are still liable to be mutual. Doctors who use technology to diagnose cancers are going to need to hone other skills - including better ways of communicating what the machines are saying - but these will be far easier to acquire than expecting the technology to hone the skills possessed by the doctors. Then there is all the work for the managers, lawyers and ethicists who will need to decide on whether the doctor-machine relationship is proceeding as hoped, and what to do when it goes wrong. In the age of AI, there will be no shortage of work in hospitals.

'The technology does not even have to be state-of-the-art to produce far better answers than humans can.' Photograph: Charlotte Wilson/Offside/Getty Images

In the world of work, it's still people, organisations, machines - in that order. Might the order change? Could the organisations come to prioritise the machines over the people, or the machines come to take the most consequential decisions on behalf of the organisations?

History offers a partial guide to what might happen. Worries about automation displacing human workers are as old as the idea of the job itself. The Industrial Revolution disrupted many kinds of labour - especially on the land - and undid entire ways of life. The transition was grim for those who had to switch from one mode of subsistence existence to another. Yet the end result was many more jobs, not fewer. Factories brought in machines to do faster and more reliably what humans used to do or could never do at all; at the same time, factories were where the new jobs appeared, involving the performance of tasks that were never required before the coming of the machines. This pattern has repeated itself time and again: new technology displaces familiar forms of work, causing massively painful disruption. It is little consolation to the people who lose their jobs to be told that soon enough there will be entirely new ways of earning a living. But there will.

It does not always happen, however, that new tasks are found for the previous generation of workhorses. This was most notably the case with actual workhorses. Throughout the 19th century, fast-growing industrial production was heavily dependent on the labour of horses to transport people and goods, above all in the United States. From this labour a huge number and variety of jobs were created for the people needed to sustain horse-powered enterprises.

Just 50 years later the horse-powered economy had almost entirely disappeared from urban areas, if not yet from rural ones. Fifty years after that it was more or less gone throughout the whole country. But an enormous number of new jobs were created to service the needs of the automobile. By 1950 the auto industry had generated 7m or more net new jobs, which accounted at that point for 11% of the total American workforce.

What weren't created were many new jobs for the horses. Their skill set - pulling, carrying, not complaining about it - turned out to be insufficiently adaptable for the new era. Eventually there was nothing much left for them to do, outside the leisure industry. When the first model-T Ford (22 horsepower) rolled off the production line in 1908 there were around 25 million horses in the United States, alongside 90 million people. When the first Ford Falcon (260 horsepower) appeared in 1960, there were just 3 million horses left - and nearly 180 million people. The horse as worker was effectively obsolete.

Cars lack adaptability compared with horses. That didn't stop us building an entire economy around them

Might humans go the way of the horse? Our skill set too could turn out to be insufficiently adaptable, once machines are able to do most of the things we can, at many, many times the speed. The "human power" of deep learning technology - for instance, 3,000 years of chess knowledge picked up by AlphaZero in less than 24 hours (human power: 1,000,000+) - is exponentially greater than the horsepower of even the swiftest automobiles. It is true that smart machines also lack adaptability, above all the ability to switch between entirely different tasks. But cars lack plenty of kinds of adaptability compared with horses: they can't step over obstacles, or move sideways, or swim through streams. That didn't stop us building an entire economy around them, and road networks suited to all their limitations, sacrificing many millions of our own lives over the following century to inevitable road accidents in the process.

Where humans most clearly differ from horses, however, is that we are not uncomplaining. We are the opposite. We have agency, expressed through our ability to communicate our choices. When the horses were phased out, it was by organisations in which they did not have a say. We do have a say in the organisations that might choose to phase us out. We had better use it.

One reason we should is that these organisations have agency too. Without our input they will make their own choices. And smart machines, also unlike horses, can make their own choices as well. It is fanciful to suppose that they would choose to phase us out once we did not serve their purposes any more. They don't have that kind of agency - the human kind. But their ability to perform certain tasks better than we can is sufficient to allow them to shape how we live if we choose to let them. Just as cars came to shape how we live once we chose to let them.

It was never up to the horses. It was not up to the cars. It is not even up to the new breed of self-driving vehicles. It is still up to us, our states and our corporations.

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What makes a job different from other kinds of work is its relationship to the passing of time. When work comprises a task or a series of tasks, time is measured by how long the task takes to complete, and by how long its results last. Often there is a connection between the two, but not necessarily: the books that take the longest to write are by no means the ones that are sure to endure; the songs that take the longest to compose are not always the ones that people want to sing. Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen, which is among the most covered songs of the past 50 years, took 10 years and endless revisions to get right, but Forever Young by Bob Dylan, which has been re-recorded almost as often, was knocked out in a single sitting (as were many of Dylan's songs).

For Hannah Arendt, what distinguished work, and what made it potentially so satisfying, was this possibility of durability: things could be built that might long outlast their makers. These artefacts could be anything from books and songs to tables and chairs to states and constitutions.

At the same time, many jobs are longer lasting than the tasks they require. Being president is a single job with many responsibilities, some of which demand attention only from one day to the next. The job of a furniture maker could last an adult lifetime, during which many hundreds or even thousands of tables and chairs might be built. What gives jobs their durability is that the organisations that generate them have sufficient longevity of their own.

But often the price of job security is drudgery or repetition. Doing the same job for many years can be boring. That is why organisations try to offer progression as well as stability. A career is more than just a job - it usually involves changing roles within a given field, and when appropriate changing organisation too. Being a banker is a career; working for a bank is a job; devising a banking product is a task; closing a deal is an action. Yet being a banker also means running the serious risk of getting fired. It is potentially more rewarding than being a civil servant - in financial terms anyway - but it is less reliable.

These trade-offs - between job security and variety, between risk and reward - have been familiar throughout the history of modern employment. They echo the wider trade-offs between the personal and the impersonal, the human and the artificial, that define the modern age. Where the balance is struck varies with time and place. During much of the 20th century - the great age of the career, and indeed of "careers advice" in schools - large corporations, along with the state, could offer solid prospects for career progression. It was possible to remain in the same organisation for a working lifetime and still have a range of satisfying working experiences.

The 21st century is different. Many large organisations have relatively few employees compared to their 20th-century equivalents. The rapid proliferation of smaller, shorter-lived companies also means that longevity is not what it was. In the age of the startup, getting a job, even (and perhaps especially) a highly paid one, doesn't guarantee much security. Jobs are shorter lived, and as a result careers are far more fragmented. For anyone first entering the workplace in the third decade of the 21st century, it makes little sense to talk in terms of "careers advice" at all. The experience of work is far more likely to involve a portfolio of different occupations, some inevitably undertaken at the same time. A single person might have many jobs, but many jobs are unlikely to make a single career.

The rise of smart technology has a lot to do with this. Some of it is simple uncertainty - trying to picture the arc of a working life is almost impossible when the rate of change is so rapid. Apocalyptic warnings about the impending hollowing out of the professions make training to be a lawyer, or an accountant, feel far riskier than it once did. That doesn't mean that people have stopped training to be lawyers - the number of enrolments at US law schools is continuing to grow, as is the number of schools offering law degrees. But there is a widespread expectation that this will result in many more qualified lawyers than there are legal jobs, let alone legal careers. The hope must be that knowing the law will still provide good training for the increasing variety of human-oriented tasks that a portfolio career might require, with or without machines to do the heavy lifting.

But even in the shorter term, new technology has changed the relationship between careers, jobs and tasks. Performing tasks is what machines are good at. The better they get at it, the more work becomes task-oriented. In many ways, talking about the prospect of machines taking people's jobs is a misnomer, because once machines do the work these are no longer jobs. Machines don't require job security, any more than they require the other appurtenances of modern employment regimes: holidays, healthcare, positive feedback, redundancy pay. Jobs are what humans do.

The potential upside of the AI revolution is enormous. It is not hard to see how these systems could be deployed to make human beings vastly better off, by liberating us from drudgery, sparing us from disease, transporting us safely and stimulating us endlessly. The biggest boosters of the new generation of thinking machines promise what would until very recently have seemed impossible: lifespans extended by hundreds of years, telepathic communication, an exponential explosion of creativity and scientific discovery. It all seems unlikely but, given the current rate of progress, who's to say they are wrong?

At the same time, it is very easy to see the looming downsides, including the real risk of catastrophe. Even if we can work out what to do with our spare time, how to distribute these new resources equitably and whether we really want to know what everyone else is thinking, there is still the chance that we will lose control of the intelligent systems we have built. They are meant to work for us, but already it is possible to suspect that we will end up working for them. If they become much smarter than we are, will they still want to do our bidding? Will they even care about us at all? After all, these are just machines. For now, and probably for ever, they are going to lack a conscience, a heart, a soul. We built them to expand our horizons, but if we cannot keep them tethered to a human-centred perspective, it may be the last thing we do.

This is an edited extract from The Handover: How We Gave Control of Our Lives to Corporations, States and AIs by David Runciman (Profile), published on 7 September. To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com

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The end of work: which jobs will survive the AI revolution?

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Smart machines are meant to work for us, but there are already signs that we will end up working for them. What will the workplace of the future look like, and will your role still exist?

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BLM AND FAME : Is Activism the New Red Carpet?

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BLM AND FAME : Is Activism the New Red Carpet?

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Dave McMenamin, ESPN Staff WriterJul 24, 2020, 01:59 AM ET

Close

Lakers and NBA reporter for ESPN.

Covered the Lakers and NBA for ESPNLosAngeles.com from 2009-14, the Cavaliers from 2014-18 for ESPN.com and the NBA for NBA.com from 2005-09.

With the clock ticking under a minute before halftime in the Los Angeles Lakers' first scrimmage in Orlando, Florida, on Thursday, LeBron James zoomed past two defenders near midcourt to throw down a hammer dunk in transition.

As James split Jerry West's waistline while speeding through the massive NBA logo at the tipoff circle, TV viewers could see three words in block letters printed on the court on the top of their screens above him: "BLACK LIVES MATTER."

The phrase, which entered the public lexicon after George Zimmerman was acquitted for the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2013 and became the title of the social action that has been omnipresent in recent months following the killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and other Black Americans, is something that James says should be considered permanent, not passing.

"A lot of people kind of use this analogy, talking about Black Lives Matter as a movement. It's not a movement," James said after scoring 12 points in 15 minutes in the Lakers' 108-104 loss to the Dallas Mavericks. "When you're Black, it's not a movement. It's a lifestyle. We sit here and say it's a movement, and, OK, how long is this movement going to last? 'Don't stop the movement.' No, this is a walk of life. When you wake up and you're Black, that is what it is. It shouldn't be a movement. It should be a lifestyle. This is who we are. ...

"I don't like the word 'movement' because, unfortunately, in America and in society, there ain't been no damn movement for us. There ain't been no movement."

In this moment, James, 35, finds himself to be more than just a basketball player trying to push through aging legs and a global pandemic to stack another title on his Hall of Fame résumé.

He is a success story from humble beginnings, keenly aware of the pitfalls he sidestepped to get to where he is today. He is not only arguably the league's best player -- the Milwaukee Bucks' Giannis Antetokounmpo would like a word -- but without a doubt its most impactful voice.

"When he speaks, a lot of people listen," teammate Anthony Davis said.

So after James played in his first game in an NBA uniform in more than four months, his postgame comments were focused on larger issues than how the Lakers' defense handled Luka Doncic or what first impression JR Smith made.

"First of all, I want to continue to shed light on justice for Breonna Taylor and to her family and everything that's going on with that situation," James said as an opening statement.

He wrote "#Justice4BreonnaT" in marker on his sneakers for the game and was asked what steps he wanted to see to deliver that justice. Taylor, a Black emergency medical technician, was killed in Louisville, Kentucky, in March after plainclothes officers executed a "no-knock" warrant related to a narcotics investigation and shot the 26-year-old at least eight times, per reports. No drugs were found.

"We want the cops arrested who committed that crime," James said of the three Louisville police officers involved.

Detective Brett Hankison was fired. Jon Mattingly and Myles Cosgrove, the other officers serving the warrant, were put on administrative reassignment.

"Us as the NBA, and us as the players, and me as one of the leaders of this league, I want her family to know and I want the state of Kentucky to know that we feel for it and we want justice," James said. "That's what it's all about. What's right is right, and what's wrong is wrong. And this is a wrong situation that's going on in my eyes and in a lot of other eyes, not only here in America but I bet in the world as well."

He pointed out the irony of how "fortunate" it was that Floyd's death -- caused by a Minneapolis police officer kneeling on his neck -- was captured on video, because the tragedy was undeniable.

"I mean, is that what we need to see, a video of Breonna being killed to realize how bad the situation is?" James questioned.

His comments added to the din of players drawing attention to Taylor's case since the NBA invited 22 teams to the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex to restart the season following a lengthy hiatus because of the coronavirus pandemic.

James said he hoped other players -- individuals who might normally feel "scared" of potential fallout -- would feel empowered to continue to speak up while in Orlando.

"Because it's a time where we are being heard," he said. "Either if you really care or not, we're being heard. But that's what's most important."

Beyond his thoughts on Taylor, James spoke with a wider scope when addressing reporters for nearly 15 minutes -- about twice as long as his normal postgame session -- describing the systematic challenges that he sees Black people facing in this country.

"We know that for one step that someone else might have to take, or for one yard someone else may have to take, we know we got to take five more steps," James said. "We know we got to take 10 more yards to get to the end zone. I mean, we understand that. We know that. But it's also what makes us as strong, it makes us as powerful, it makes us so unique and unified is that we done had so much hardships in our life.

"It's just heartbreaking, man. You guys don't understand. Unless you're a person of color, you guys don't understand. I understand that you might feel for it, but you could never truly understand what it is to be Black in America."

James was asked whether he sensed any progress since July 2016, when he, Dwyane Wade, Carmelo Anthony and Chris Paul opened up the ESPYS by calling for social change.

"I mean, 2016, Barack [Obama] was our president," James said. "We know what's going on now. So is that progress? I don't think, I think we all can see and say that's not progress."

Progress, in James' estimation, will start with communication and a willingness and urgency to understand one another.

"If you could just sit there and talk to someone, look at someone eye-to-eye and say how you feel, no matter if they like it or not, you can respect them," he said. "Somebody might not agree. ... But if I can look you dead in your eye and you can you can look back at me and say, 'Listen, to each his own, I don't agree with that,' then I can respect you out of that. A lot of people cannot even have that conversation."

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LeBron: BLM 'a walk of life,' not just movement

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After LeBron James played in his first game in an NBA uniform in more than four months, his postgame comments were focused on larger issues, including the social injustice faced by Black Americans and justice for Breonna Taylor.

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« First amendment » constitution annotated 

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« First amendment » constitution annotated 

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Why your new work colleague could be a robot

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Why your new work colleague could be a robot

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18 February 2020

Ben Morris

Technology of Business editor

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You hear EVA before you see it. A whirring and whizzing noise greets you as you enter the offices of Automata, a start-up robotics company based in London.

To one side a robotic arm is going through an intricate set of moves: six joints twisting and turning in a sequence which, in the real world, would place a label on a parcel.

That's EVA, and it has being doing those moves non-stop for months to test its reliability.

Around the office and workshop there are more than a dozen other EVA units, some being dismantled by the engineers, others awaiting testing.

It must be very eerie at night as EVA continues its work, simulating attaching labels, while surrounded by its silent clones.

This robotic arm emerged from the work of former architect Suryansh Chandra and his business partner Mostafa Elsayed.

"We started out with the intention to democratise robotics, to make automation accessible and affordable to as many people as needed it," says Mr Chandra.

They are betting that there are thousands, if not millions, of smaller businesses which need repetitive tasks completed, but can't afford a big industrial robot.

So EVA was developed from cheap reliable parts. It uses the same motors that power the electric windows in cars, while the computer chips are similar to those used in the consumer electronics business. This is allowing them to sell EVA at £8,000.

"If I was to give you an analogy, this was a world where there were a lot of luxury cars. Everything was fast, powerful and precise, but there was no Toyota. There was no people's car," Mr Chandra says.
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Automata is just one firm trying to find a wider market for robots and disrupt the way that things are made.

More than 2.4 million industrial robots are operating in factories around the world, according to data from the International Federation of Robotics (IFR), which is forecasting double-digit sales growth from 2020 to 2022.

The majority of robots currently do repetitive work in large factories, producing cars, electronics and metal.

These giant industrial arms have long been powerful and accurate, but have lacked adaptability.

Yet now, developments in artificial intelligence, alongside improved vision technology and better devices for gripping, are opening new markets.

Online shopping has given the industry a juicy opportunity. In giant warehouses millions of objects of all different shapes and sizes have to be sorted and moved around.

Pick and mix

To replace the humans in this growing market, robots need to be able to recognise and grip all sorts of different items.

"Something that a child can do easily, which is to reach into a bin and grab an item, is really hard for a robot. It's taken a ton of technology to make it possible," says Vince Martinelli, from US-based RightHand Robotics.

His company was one of the first to develop a gripper that could be fitted to the end of robot arm, allowing it to grab items of different sizes.

Their attachment for a robot arm employs a suction device and three fingers to grab items. First the sucker extends to select the item and then the three fingers secure it.

It uses a camera linked to artificial intelligence to identify and locate the object it wants.

The explosion in online shopping has created a demand for this kind of technology; Amazon alone has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in tech for its warehouses.

"When I go to a store I provide the picking labour for free. I go around the store grabbing the things I want. If I order online I have kind of exported that labour back to the retailer and they've got to figure out now how to do the item handling," says Mr Martinelli.

Soft Robotics, also based in the US, is tackling the same problem albeit in a different way.

Its robotic hand has rubbery fingers that fill with air, allowing them to handle delicate food items like biscuits and pastries.

"The food industry is almost entirely manual today, because every piece of food, every chicken cutlet, you name it, varies in size shape and weight. You also have an added dimension of food safety and cleanliness," says Carl Vause, the chief executive of Soft Robotics.

Mr Vause thinks his firm's technology will also lend itself to the clothing industry.

While such systems give robotic arms more skill, their dexterity still falls a long way short of the human hand.

Researchers at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory (a partnership between the University of the West of England and Bristol University) think the big breakthrough would be to give robot hands a sense of touch.

Prof Nathan Lepora, head of the tactile robotics group, has developed rubber sensors that can detect and map surfaces.

The system uses a camera inside each "finger" that detects how the rubber tip bulges and moves when touching an object.

Using a type of artificial intelligence called machine learning, the robot is then trained to recognise objects just by touching them and seeing how the rubber tip responds.

Prof Lepora thinks that by the end of this decade robots will be able to manipulate items, assemble objects and tinker in the same way that humans do with their hands.

"It is just an engineering challenge at the end of the day. There's nothing magical about how we use our hands," he says.

'Emotional reaction'

Future developments in robotic hardware and artificial intelligence mean that robots will be able to do more and more of the jobs that are currently performed by humans.

According to a report by the OECD, 14% of of jobs are "at high risk of automation" and 32% of jobs could be "radically transformed", with the manufacturing sector at the highest risk.

It's a sensitive topic for those that work in the robotics industry and companies that use robots.

Mr Chandra argues that his technology will eliminate boring, repetitive jobs that humans don't like and aren't very good at, and also create new ones that are likely to replace them.

"There's definitely tens of thousands of new jobs that exist to suit the current society that did not exist before. So I think this constancy of jobs is a fiction, it's never really been the case," he says.

Every time a job dies, there is an emotional reaction... but every time there's a creation of a new economy."

Follow Technology of Business editor Ben Morris on Twitter

This article is the second part of mini-series on disruptive technologies, you can find the first, on blockchain, here.

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Why your new work colleague could be a robot

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You hear EVA before you see it. A whirring and whizzing noise greets you as you enter the offices of Automata, a start-up robotics company based in London. To one side a robotic arm is going through an intricate set of moves: six joints twisting and turning in a sequence which, in the real world, would place a label on a parcel.

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Reporters Without Borders : Global Press Freedom at Unprecedented, Critical Low 

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Reporters Without Borders : Global Press Freedom at Unprecedented, Critical Low 

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«Are there any philosophical arguments against "transhumanism"?» — Opinion of an anonymous user from the Reddit forum.

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«Are there any philosophical arguments against "transhumanism"?» — Opinion of an anonymous user from the Reddit forum.

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"Transhumanism" seeks to: "improve health, eliminate disabilities, cure diseases and produce stronger, faster, more intelligent humans with technology".

"Transhumanists" believe the time has come for humans to take control of their own evolution.

The common statements of the "transhumanists" include: "Why not a more resistant skin?" or "Why not the type of bat vision with ultrasound?"

They want to "remake" and integrate technology to humans.

They want to abandons nature. For them, nature is an "adversary". They want the body to have as little carbon as possible for it to be indifferent to what happens to carbon. They want to introduce silicon, steel and microchips within humans.

The end result would be a cyborg and the "cyborgization" would allow: improving the senses, having an infallible memory and intellectual capacity, having a greater physical performance, etc.

The "transhumanists" that make these statements are prestigious scientists, and most important universities professors.

The main icon of "transhumanism" in media may be Ray Kurzweil. He worked with the Army Science Board in 2006, has been called "the successor and legitimate heir of Thomas Edison" and was cited by Forbes magazine as "the supreme thinking machine".

"Transhumanists" seem confident they will achieve their dreams.

Have any philosophers argued against "transhumanism"?

A better question would be, have any philosophers argued "transhumanist" dreams are not and will not be achievable and why? If so, what are their arguments? Any books or articles on the subject?

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BLM AND FAME : Is Activism the New Red Carpet?

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BLM AND FAME : Is Activism the New Red Carpet?

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Celebrities photoshopping their pictures to make people believe they are in the BLM movement. Reality isn’t social medias apparently…

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Kendall Jenner sets the record straight about Black Lives Matter protest photo

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Jenner said a photo of her wearing a face mask at a recent protest event was altered.

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democracy is hanging up on a robocall."

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« Why social media may not be so good for democracy » The conversation on 6 november 2017 by Gordon Hull 

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« Why social media may not be so good for democracy » The conversation on 6 november 2017 by Gordon Hull 

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Why social media may not be so good for democracy

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A scholar asks whether democracy itself is at risk in a world where social media is creating deeply polarized groups of individuals who tend to believe everything they hear.

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AMC- Dossier Documentaire- M.Vidal, C.Lerat

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The Promise and Perils of Artificial Intelligence in Science

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Explore the potential and risks of using Artificial Intelligence (AI) in scientific research. Discover how AI is already being used to revolutionize the scientific community and assist researchers in data analysis and hypothesis testing.

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BLM AND FAME : Is Activism the New Red Carpet?

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BLM AND FAME : Is Activism the New Red Carpet?

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Black cast, celebrities using their notoriety to promote social and political causes.

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Black Panther: Lessons in Hollywood diversity and black pride

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Black History Month unveiled the long-awaited movie release of “Black Panther,” a project of Disney’s Marvel Studios. Released over the President’s Day weekend, the movie has grossed an estimated $700 million in global ticket sales in its first 12 days in theaters, and is on track to potentially hit the billion-dollar mark before it closes. The movie’s $242 million opening over the holiday weekend was the second-biggest debut ever, beating out “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” in four-day sales. Pre-sales for the movie were record-breaking, surpassing all prior Marvel movies for Fandango and IMAX movie services. Directed by Ryan Coogler (“Fruitvale Station” and “Creed”), “Black Panther” is also about to become the highest-grossing film made by an African American.

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NYC must stop treating cyclists like a special class — for everyone’s safety

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Heed Pope Leo’s warning on AI dangers — and don’t let Big Tech police itself

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On Saturday, Leo XIV suggested that artificial intelligence will be a focus of his papacy, warning that the rise of AI poses “new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice, and lab…

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Cartoon by Jimmy Margulies published in 2018 

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Cartoon by Jimmy Margulies published in 2018 

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www.jimmymarguilies.com

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BLM AND FAME: Is Activism the New Red Carpet?

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BLM AND FAME: Is Activism the New Red Carpet?

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Denouncing the hypocrisy of many public figures who show their support for the movement but don’t do anything concrete…

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How medias and new technologies influence the way teens participate and to be informe on the society of today ?

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Black Lives Matter: From social media post to global movement

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Black Lives Matter has sparked a hashtag, grass-roots organisations, and a collective of activists.

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US FTC wins administrative ruling in deceptive advertising case against Intuit -- company
The Federal Trade Commission won an administrative ruling against TurboTax tax software maker Intuit after the commission said the company misled consumers with deceptive advertisements pitching "free" tax filing products that millions of consumers were unable to use, the company said on Friday.

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Tech News | Today's Latest Technology News | Reuters

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Find latest technology news from every corner of the globe at Reuters.com, your online source for breaking international news coverage.

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The hidden costs of automated thinking (article-Newyorker)

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The hidden costs of automated thinking (article-Newyorker)

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Overreliance on artificial intelligence may put us in intellectual debt.

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« Twitter fact-checks Trump tweet for the first time » Reuters, on May 27, 2020 By Katie Paul and Elizabeth Culliford

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« Twitter fact-checks Trump tweet for the first time » Reuters, on May 27, 2020 By Katie Paul and Elizabeth Culliford

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Juneteenth explained: What is the holiday, why was it created and how should it be celebrated?

Many Americans are celebrating Juneteenth, marking the day in 1865 when the last enslaved people in the U.S. learned they were free

Terry Tang

Tuesday 18 June 2024 16:07 BST

For more than one-and-a-half centuries, the Juneteenth holiday has been sacred to many Black communities.

It marks the day in 1865 enslaved people in Galveston, Texas found out they had been freed — after the end of the Civil War, and two years after President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.

Since it was designated a federal holiday in 2021, Juneteenth has become more universally recognized beyond Black America. Many people get the day off work or school, and there are a plethora of street festivals, fairs, concerts and other events.

People who never gave the June 19 holiday more than a passing thought may be asking themselves, is there a “right” way to celebrate Juneteenth? Is Juneteenth a solemn day of remembrance or more of a party?

It just depends on what you want. Juneteenth festivities are rooted in cookouts and barbecues. In the beginnings of the holiday celebrated as Black Americans’ true Independence Day, the outdoors allowed for large, raucous reunions among formerly enslaved family, many of whom had been separated. The gatherings were especially revolutionary because they were free of restrictive measures, known as “Black Codes,” enforced in Confederate states, controlling whether liberated slaves could vote, buy property, gather for worship and other aspects of daily life.

Last week, the White House kicked things off early with a concert on the South Lawn for Juneteenth and Black Music Month. Singers Gladys Knight and Patti LaBelle were among the the lineup of well-known artists from gospel, rap, jazz and other genres. The atmosphere was primarily festive with Vice President Kamala Harris, the first Black vice president, dancing on stage with gospel singer Kirk Franklin.

“Today as we celebrate Juneteenth, together we are reminded of the promise of America,” Harris said in opening remarks. “A promise of freedom, liberty and opportunity, not for some but for all. In many ways the story of Juneteenth and of our nation is a story of our ongoing fight to realize that promise.”

Others may choose to treat Juneteenth as a day of rest and remembrance. That can mean doing community service, attending an education panel or taking time off.

The important thing is to make people feel they have options on how to observe the occasion, said Dr. David Anderson, a Black pastor and CEO of Gracism Global, a consulting firm helping leaders navigate conversations bridging divides across race and culture.

“Just like the Martin Luther King holiday, we say it’s a day of service and a lot of people will do things. There are a lot of other people who are just ‘I appreciate Dr. King, I’ll watch what’s on the television, and I’m gonna rest,’” Anderson said. “I don’t want to make people feel guilty about that. What I want to do is give everyday people a choice.”

What if you've never celebrated Juneteenth?

Anderson never did anything on Juneteenth in his youth. He didn’t learn about it until his 30s.

“I think many folks haven’t known about it — who are even my color as an African American male. Even if you heard about it and knew about it, you didn’t celebrate it,” Anderson said. “It was like just a part of history. It wasn’t a celebration of history.”

For many African Americans, the farther away from Texas that they grew up increased the likelihood they didn’t have big Juneteenth celebrations regularly. In the South, the day can vary based on when word of Emancipation reached each state.

What kind of public Juneteenth events are going on around the country?

Search online and you will find a smorgasbord of gatherings in major cities and suburbs all varying in scope and tone. Some are more carnival-esque festivals with food trucks, arts and crafts and parades. Within those festivals, you’ll likely find access to professionals in health care, finance and community resources. There also are concerts and fashion shows to highlight Black excellence and creativity. For those who want to look back, plenty of organizations and universities host panels to remind people of Juneteenth’s history.

For the first time since Juneteenth was federally recognized, the National Park Service is making entry into all sites free on the holiday. Several parks will be hosting Juneteenth commemorations this week.

Are there special foods served on Juneteenth?

Aside from barbecue, the color red has been a through line for Juneteenth food for generations. Red symbolizes the bloodshed and sacrifice of enslaved ancestors. A Juneteenth menu might incorporate items like barbecued ribs or other red meat, watermelon and red velvet cake. Drinks like fruit punch and red Kool-Aid may make an appearance at the table.

Does how you celebrate Juneteenth matter if you aren't Black?

Dr. Karida Brown, a sociology professor at Emory University whose research focuses on race, said there’s no reason to feel awkward about wanting to recognize Juneteenth just because you have no personal ties or you’re not Black. In fact, embrace it.

“I would reframe that and challenge my non-Black folks who want to lean into Juneteenth and celebrate,” Brown said. “It absolutely is your history. It absolutely is a part of your experience. ... Isn’t this all of our history? The good, the bad, the ugly, the story of emancipation and freedom for your Black brothers and sisters under the Constitution of the law.”

If you want to bring some authenticity to your recognition of Juneteenth, educate yourself. Attending a street festival or patronizing a Black-owned business is a good start but it also would be good to “make your mind better,” Anderson said.

“That goes longer than a celebration,” Anderson said. “I think Black people need to do it too because it’s new for us as well, in America. But for non-Black people, if they could read on this topic and read on Black history beyond Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks, that would show me that you’re really serious about growing in this area.”

If you’re struggling with how to “ethically” mark the day, Brown also suggested expanding your knowledge of why the holiday matters so much. That can be through reading, attending an event or going to an African American history museum if there’s one nearby.

“Have that full human experience of seeing yourself in and through the eyes of others, even if that’s not your own lived experience,” she said. “That is a radical human act that is awesome and should be encouraged and celebrated.”

What are other names used to refer to Juneteenth?

Over the decades, Juneteenth has also been called Freedom Day, Emancipation Day, Black Fourth of July and second Independence Day among others.

“Because 1776, Fourth of July, where we’re celebrating freedom and liberty and all of that, that did not include my descendants,” Brown said. “Black people in America were still enslaved. So that that holiday always comes with a bittersweet tinge to it.”

Is there a proper Juneteenth greeting?

It’s typical to wish people a “Happy Juneteenth” or “Happy Teenth," according to Alan Freeman, a comedian organizing a Juneteenth comedy festival in Galveston, Texas for the second straight year.

“You know how at Christmas people will say ‘Merry Christmas’ to each other and not even know each other?" Freeman said. “You can get a ‘Merry Christmas’ from everybody. This is the same way.”

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Juneteenth explained: What is the holiday, why was it created and how should it be celebrated?

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Many Americans are celebrating Juneteenth, marking the day in 1865 when the last enslaved people in the U.S. learned they were free

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Source: visual capitaliste

« Charted: The Jobs Most Impacted by AI »

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Elon Musk put a chip in this paralysed man’s brain. Now he can move things with his mind. Should we be amazed - or terrified?

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An accident left Noland Arbaugh paralysed, but Musk’s Neuralink brain implant allows him to control computers with his thoughts. Is it a life-changing innovation that could help millions – or the start of a dystopia where a billionaire can access our thoughts?

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OECD Employment Outlook 2019      The Future of Work

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OECD Employment Outlook 2019      The Future of Work

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« The world is changing at lightning speed. Digitalisation, globalisation and demographic changes are having a profound impact on our lives, on our cultures, on our societies. These and other megatrends are constantly (and rapidly) transforming the way we interact with our friends and families; how and where businesses operate; what goods and services we consume; what dreams we dream. Our education and health, the distribution of income and wealth, the jobs we have and how we work are all particularly sensitive to these changes. It is a transformational era. Disruption is the new normal.

As any revolution, this one is charged with opportunities. Multilateral co-operation, regional integration and the complex global interdependence that have developed over the past decades, have multiplied these opportunities. The new technologies are game-changers, but now they are also part of our daily lives. More and more people and devices are connecting to the internet, while artificial intelligence is silently spreading. Blockchain and other technologies are also becoming more prevalent across economies and societies. This is amplifying our capacity to promote higher productivity growth, better services, improved well-being; it also allows for new business models and innovative ways of working to emerge, providing more flexibility to both employers and workers. »

Source : OECD report

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This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
The rapid development of so-called NBIC technologies-nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science-are giving rise to possibilities that have long been the domain of science fiction. Disease, aging and even death are all human realities that these technologies seek to end.

They may enable us to enjoy greater "morphological freedom"-we could take on new forms through prosthetics or genetic engineering. Or advance our cognitive capacities. We could use brain-computer interfaces to link us to advanced artificial intelligence (AI).

Nanobots could roam our bloodstream to monitor our health and enhance our emotional propensities for joy, love or other emotions. Advances in one area often raise new possibilities in others, and this "convergence" may bring about radical changes to our world in the near-future.

"Transhumanism" is the idea that humans should transcend their current natural state and limitations through the use of technology-that we should embrace self-directed human evolution. If the history of technological progress can be seen as humankind's attempt to tame nature to better serve its needs, transhumanism is the logical continuation: the revision of humankind's nature to better serve its fantasies.

As David Pearce, a leading proponent of transhumanism and co-founder of Humanity+, says:

If we want to live in paradise, we will have to engineer it ourselves. If we want eternal life, then we'll need to rewrite our bug-ridden genetic code and become god-like ... only hi-tech solutions can ever eradicate suffering from the world. Compassion alone is not enough.

But there is a darker side to the naive faith that Pearce and other proponents have in transhumanism-one that is decidedly dystopian.

There is unlikely to be a clear moment when we emerge as transhuman. Rather technologies will become more intrusive and integrate seamlessly with the human body. Technology has long been thought of as an extension of the self. Many aspects of our social world, not least our financial systems, are already largely machine-based. There is much to learn from these evolving human/machine hybrid systems.

Yet the often Utopian language and expectations that surround and shape our understanding of these developments have been under-interrogated. The profound changes that lie ahead are often talked about in abstract ways, because evolutionary "advancements" are deemed so radical that they ignore the reality of current social conditions.

In this way, transhumanism becomes a kind of "techno-anthropocentrism," in which transhumanists often underestimate the complexity of our relationship with technology. They see it as a controllable, malleable tool that, with the correct logic and scientific rigour, can be turned to any end. In fact, just as technological developments are dependent on and reflective of the environment in which they arise, they in turn feed back into the culture and create new dynamics-often imperceptibly.

Situating transhumanism, then, within the broader social, cultural, political, and economic contexts within which it emerges is vital to understanding how ethical it is.

Competitive environments

Max More and Natasha Vita-More, in their edited volume The Transhumanist Reader, claim the need in transhumanism "for inclusivity, plurality and continuous questioning of our knowledge."

Yet these three principles are incompatible with developing transformative technologies within the prevailing system from which they are currently emerging: advanced capitalism.

One problem is that a highly competitive social environment doesn't lend itself to diverse ways of being. Instead it demands increasingly efficient behaviour. Take students, for example. If some have access to pills that allow them to achieve better results, can other students afford not to follow? This is already a quandary. Increasing numbers of students reportedly pop performance-enhancing pills. And if pills become more powerful, or if the enhancements involve genetic engineering or intrusive nanotechnology that offer even stronger competitive advantages, what then? Rejecting an advanced technological orthodoxy could potentially render someone socially and economically moribund (perhaps evolutionarily so), while everyone with access is effectively forced to participate to keep up.

Going beyond everyday limits is suggestive of some kind of liberation. However, here it is an imprisoning compulsion to act a certain way. We literally have to transcend in order to conform (and survive). The more extreme the transcendence, the more profound the decision to conform and the imperative to do so.

The systemic forces cajoling the individual into being "upgraded" to remain competitive also play out on a geo-political level. One area where technology R&D has the greatest transhumanist potential is defence. DARPA (the US defense department responsible for developing military technologies), which is attempting to create " metabolically dominant soldiers," is a clear example of how vested interests of a particular social system could determine the development of radically powerful transformative technologies that have destructive rather than Utopian applications.

The rush to develop super-intelligent AI by globally competitive and mutually distrustful nation states could also become an arms race. In Radical Evolution, novelist Verner Vinge describes a scenario in which superhuman intelligence is the "ultimate weapon." Ideally, mankind would proceed with the utmost care in developing such a powerful and transformative innovation.

There is quite rightly a huge amount of trepidation around the creation of super-intelligence and the emergence of " the singularity"-the idea that once AI reaches a certain level it will rapidly redesign itself, leading to an explosion of intelligence that will quickly surpass that of humans ( something that will happen by 2029 according to futurist Ray Kurzweil). If the world takes the shape of whatever the most powerful AI is programed (or reprograms itself) to desire, it even opens the possibility of evolution taking a turn for the entirely banal-could an AI destroy humankind from a desire to produce the most paperclips for example?

It's also difficult to conceive of any aspect of humanity that could not be "improved" by being made more efficient at satisfying the demands of a competitive system. It is the system, then, that determines humanity's evolution-without taking any view on what humans are or what they should be. One of the ways in which advanced capitalism proves extremely dynamic is in its ideology of moral and metaphysical neutrality. As philosopher Michael Sandel says: markets don't wag fingers. In advanced capitalism, maximizing one's spending power maximizes one's ability to flourish-hence shopping could be said to be a primary moral imperative of the individual.

Philosopher Bob Doede rightly suggests it is this banal logic of the market that will dominate:

If biotech has rendered human nature entirely revisable, then it has no grain to direct or constrain our designs on it. And so whose designs will our successor post-human artefacts likely bear? I have little doubt that in our vastly consumerist, media-saturated capitalist economy, market forces will have their way. So - the commercial imperative would be the true architect of the future human.

Whether the evolutionary process is determined by a super-intelligent AI or advanced capitalism, we may be compelled to conform to a perpetual transcendence that only makes us more efficient at activities demanded by the most powerful system. The end point is predictably an entirely nonhuman-though very efficient-technological entity derived from humanity that doesn't necessarily serve a purpose that a modern-day human would value in any way. The ability to serve the system effectively will be the driving force. This is also true of natural evolution-technology is not a simple tool that allows us to engineer ourselves out of this conundrum. But transhumanism could amplify the speed and least desirable aspects of the process.

Information authoritarianism

For bioethicist Julian Savulescu, the main reason humans must be enhanced is for our species to survive. He says we face a Bermuda Triangle of extinction: radical technological power, liberal democracy and our moral nature. As a transhumanist, Savulescu extols technological progress, also deeming it inevitable and unstoppable. It is liberal democracy-and particularly our moral nature-that should alter.

The failings of humankind to deal with global problems are increasingly obvious. But Savulescu neglects to situate our moral failings within their wider cultural, political and economic context, instead believing that solutions lie within our biological make up.

Yet how would Savulescu's morality-enhancing technologies be disseminated, prescribed and potentially enforced to address the moral failings they seek to "cure"? This would likely reside in the power structures that may well bear much of the responsibility for these failings in the first place. He's also quickly drawn into revealing how relative and contestable the concept of "morality" is:

We will need to relax our commitment to maximum protection of privacy. We're seeing an increase in the surveillance of individuals and that will be necessary if we are to avert the threats that those with antisocial personality disorder, fanaticism, represent through their access to radically enhanced technology.

Such surveillance allows corporations and governments to access and make use of extremely valuable information. In Who Owns the Future, internet pioneer Jaron Lanier explains:

Troves of dossiers on the private lives and inner beings of ordinary people, collected over digital networks, are packaged into a new private form of elite money ... It is a new kind of security the rich trade in, and the value is naturally driven up. It becomes a giant-scale levee inaccessible to ordinary people.

Crucially, this levee is also invisible to most people. Its impacts extend beyond skewing the economic system towards elites to significantly altering the very conception of liberty, because the authority of power is both radically more effective and dispersed.

Foucault's notion that we live in a panoptic society-one in which the sense of being perpetually watched instills discipline-is now stretched to the point where today's incessant machinery has been called a "superpanopticon." The knowledge and information that transhumanist technologies will tend to create could strengthen existing power structures that cement the inherent logic of the system in which the knowledge arises.

This is in part evident in the tendency of algorithms toward race and gender bias, which reflects our already existing social failings. Information technology tends to interpret the world in defined ways: it privileges information that is easily measurable, such as GDP, at the expense of unquantifiable information such as human happiness or well-being. As invasive technologies provide ever more granular data about us, this data may in a very real sense come to define the world - and intangible information may not maintain its rightful place in human affairs.

Systemic dehumanisation

Existing inequities will surely be magnified with the introduction of highly effective psycho-pharmaceuticals, genetic modification, super intelligence, brain-computer interfaces, nanotechnology, robotic prosthetics, and the possible development of life expansion. They are all fundamentally inegalitarian, based on a notion of limitlessness rather than a standard level of physical and mental well-being we've come to assume in healthcare. It's not easy to conceive of a way in which these potentialities can be enjoyed by all.

Sociologist Saskia Sassen talks of the "new logics of expulsion," that capture "the pathologies of today's global capitalism." The expelled include the more than 60,000 migrants who have lost their lives on fatal journeys in the past 20 years, and the victims of the racially skewed profile of the increasing prison population.

In Britain, they include the 30,000 people whose deaths in 2015 were linked to health and social care cuts and the many who perished in the Grenfell Tower fire. Their deaths can be said to have resulted from systematic marginalization.

Unprecedented acute concentration of wealth happens alongside these expulsions. Advanced economic and technical achievements enable this wealth and the expulsion of surplus groups. At the same time, Sassen writes, they create a kind of nebulous centerlessness as the locus of power:

The oppressed have often risen against their masters. But today the oppressed have mostly been expelled and survive a great distance from their oppressors ... The "oppressor" is increasingly a complex system that combines persons, networks, and machines with no obvious centre.

Surplus populations removed from the productive aspects of the social world may rapidly increase in the near future as improvements in AI and robotics potentially result in significant automation unemployment. Large swaths of society may become productively and economically redundant. For historian Yuval Noah Harari "the most important question in 21st-century economics may well be: what should we do with all the superfluous people?"

We would be left with the scenario of a small elite that has an almost total concentration of wealth with access to the most powerfully transformative technologies in world history and a redundant mass of people, no longer suited to the evolutionary environment in which they find themselves and entirely dependent on the benevolence of that elite. The dehumanizing treatment of today's expelled groups shows that prevailing liberal values in developed countries don't always extend to those who don't share the same privilege, race, culture or religion.

In an era of radical technological power, the masses may even represent a significant security threat to the elite, which could be used to justify aggressive and authoritarian actions (perhaps enabled further by a culture of surveillance.)

In their transhumanist tract, The Proactionary Imperative, Steve Fuller and Veronika Lipinska argue that we are obliged to pursue techno-scientific progress relentlessly, until we achieve our god-like destiny or infinite power-effectively to serve God by becoming God. They unabashedly reveal the incipient violence and destruction such Promethean aims would require: "replacing the natural with the artificial is so key to proactionary strategy ... at least as a serious possibility if not a likelihood [it will lead to] the long-term environmental degradation of the Earth."

The extent of suffering they would be willing to gamble in their cosmic casino is only fully evident when analysing what their project would mean for individual human beings:

A proactionary world would not merely tolerate risk-taking but outright encourage it, as people are provided with legal incentives to speculate with their bio-economic assets. Living riskily would amount to an entrepreneurship of the self ... [proactionaries] seek large long-term benefits for survivors of a revolutionary regime that would permit many harms along the way.

Progress on overdrive will require sacrifices.

The economic fragility that humans may soon be faced with as a result of automation unemployment would likely prove extremely useful to proactionary goals. In a society where vast swaths of people are reliant on handouts for survival, market forces would determine that less social security means people will risk more for a lower reward, so "proactionaries would reinvent the welfare state as a vehicle for fostering securitised risk taking" while "the proactionary state would operate like a venture capitalist writ large".

At the heart of this is the removal of basic rights for "Humanity 1.0," Fuller's term for modern, non-augmented human beings, replaced with duties towards the future augmented Humanity 2.0. Hence the very code of our being can and perhaps must be monetised: "personal autonomy should be seen as a politically licensed franchise whereby individuals understand their bodies as akin to plots of land in what might be called the 'genetic commons.'"

The neoliberal preoccupation with privatization would extend to human beings. Indeed, the lifetime of debt that is the reality for most citizens in developed advanced capitalist nations, takes a further step when you are born into debt-simply by being alive "you are invested with capital on which a return is expected."

Socially moribund masses may thus be forced to serve the technoscientific super-project of Humanity 2.0, which uses the ideology of market fundamentalism in its quest for perpetual progress and maximum productivity. The only significant difference is that the stated aim of godlike capabilities in Humanity 2.0 is overt, as opposed to the undefined end determined by the infinite "progress" of an ever more efficient market logic that we have now.

A new politics
Alexander Thomas is a PhD Candidate at the University of East London.
Some transhumanists are beginning to understand that the most serious limitations to what humans can achieve are social and cultural-not technical. However, all too often their reframing of politics falls into the same trap as their techno-centric worldview. They commonly argue the new political poles are not left-right but techno-conservative or techno-progressive (and even techno-libertarian and techno-sceptic). Meanwhile Fuller and Lipinska argue that the new political poles will be up and down instead of left and right: those who want to dominate the skies and became all powerful, and those who want to preserve the Earth and its species-rich diversity. It is a false dichotomy. Preservation of the latter is likely to be necessary for any hope of achieving the former.

Transhumanism and advanced capitalism are two processes which value "progress" and "efficiency" above everything else. The former as a means to power and the latter as a means to profit. Humans become vessels to serve these values. Transhuman possibilities urgently call for a politics with more clearly delineated and explicit humane values to provide a safer environment in which to foster these profound changes. Where we stand on questions of social justice and environmental sustainability has never been more important. Technology doesn't allow us to escape these questions-it doesn't permit political neutrality. The contrary is true. It determines that our politics have never been important. Savulescu is right when he says radical technologies are coming. He is wrong in thinking they will fix our morality. They will reflect it.

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Could the quest for super-intelligence and eternal life lead us into a dystopian nightmare?

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This article was originally published on The Conversation . Read the original article. The rapid development of so-called NBIC technologies-nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science-are giving rise to possibilities that have long been the domain of science fiction. Disease, aging and even death are all human realities that these technologies seek to end.

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Graphic : new technologies used by young people.

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Graphic : new technologies used by young people.

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Transhumanism And The Future Of Humanity: 7 Ways The World Will Change By 2030

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Companies today are strategizing about future investments and technologies such as artificial intelligence, the internet of things, or growth around new business models.

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Raised fist of Black Power during the 1968 Summer olympics 

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Raised fist of Black Power during the 1968 Summer olympics 

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Canadians and fake news : (CBC NEWS via IPSOS et CIGI)

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Canadians and fake news : (CBC NEWS via IPSOS et CIGI)

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Copenhagen, 25 September 2024New data from the WHO Regional Office for Europe reveals a sharp rise in problematic social media use among adolescents, with rates increasing from 7% in 2018 to 11% in 2022. This, coupled with findings that 12% of adolescents are at risk of problematic gaming, raises urgent concerns about the impact of digital technology on the mental health and well-being of young people. These findings come from the Health Behaviour in School-aged Children (HBSC) study, which surveyed almost 280 000 young people aged 11, 13 and 15 across 44 countries and regions in Europe, central Asia and Canada in 2022. Key findings include: More than 1 in 10 adolescents (11%) showed signs of problematic social media behaviour, struggling to control their use and experiencing negative consequences. Girls reported higher levels of problematic social media use than boys (13% vs 9%). Over a third (36%) of young people reported constant contact with friends online, with the highest rates among 15-year-old girls (44%). A third (34%) of adolescents played digital games daily, with more than 1 in 5 (22%) playing for at least 4 hours on days when they engage in gaming. 12% of adolescents are at risk of problematic gaming, with boys more likely than girls to show signs of problematic gaming (16% vs 7%). The report defines problematic social media use as a pattern of behaviour characterized by addiction-like symptoms. These include an inability to control social media usage, experiencing withdrawal when not using it, neglecting other activities in favour of social media, and facing negative consequences in daily life due to excessive use.Implications of increased problematic social media useThe rise in problematic social media use among adolescents raises significant concerns about potential impacts on young people. Previous research has found that problematic social media users also reported lower mental and social well-being and higher levels of substance use compared to non-problematic users and non-users. This trend, if continued, could have far-reaching consequences for adolescent development and long-term health outcomes. Moreover, problematic social media use has been associated with less sleep and later bedtimes, potentially impacting adolescents’ overall health and academic performance. “It’s clear that social media can have both positive and negative consequences on the health and well-being of adolescents,” noted Dr Hans Henri P. Kluge, WHO Regional Director for Europe. “That’s why digital literacy education is so important. Yet it remains inadequate in many countries, and where it is available, it often fails to keep pace with young people and rapidly evolving technology. We are seeing the consequences of this gap, with worse likely to come, unless governments, health authorities, teachers and parents recognize the root causes of the current situation and take steps to rectify it. As millions of children across the Region return to school after the summer holidays, some countries are considering restrictions or outright bans on social media for children up to a certain age. It’s clear we need immediate and sustained action to help adolescents turn the tide on potentially damaging social media use, which has been shown to lead to depression, bullying, anxiety and poor academic performance.”Positive aspects of social media use While the report highlights the risks, it also underscores the benefits of responsible social media use. Adolescents who are heavy but non-problematic users reported stronger peer support and social connections. As one 17-year-old boy from Poland shared, “There are many benefits of social media, especially when it is used in moderation. Among the benefits, there is connection and connectedness. Teenagers may meet others who share their passions and interests”. “This study reveals both the promise and the pitfalls of digital engagement for our young people,” said Dr Natasha Azzopardi-Muscat, Director for Country Health Policies and Systems, WHO Regional Office for Europe. “It’s crucial that we take steps to protect youth to allow them to navigate the digital landscape safely and equip them to make informed choices about their online activities, maximizing the benefits while minimizing the risks to their mental and social well-being. In short, they should rule social media, and not have social media ruling them.” Gaming trends and their implications The report also reveals that 34% of adolescents play digital games daily, with 22% playing for at least 4 hours on gaming days. While 68% were classified as non-problematic gamers, 12% were at risk of problematic gaming.A previous HBSC study examining problematic online gaming behaviour in five countries found associations with lower life satisfaction, more frequent psychological complaints and lower peer support. However, for many adolescents, gaming remains a harmless or even beneficial pastime. Dr Claudia Marino, one of the report authors at the University of Padova, noted: “The gender differences in gaming patterns are striking. Boys not only show higher rates of daily gaming but are also more likely to develop problematic gaming habits. This highlights the need for targeted interventions that consider gender-specific motivations and risk factors in gaming behaviour”. Targeted interventions Interventions to address problematic social media use should be age-appropriate, gender-sensitive and culturally tailored. They should focus on helping young people develop digital literacy skills, promote healthy online behaviours and provide support for those at risk of problematic use. As one boy from England suggested, “I think it is more important to make social media better and safer, and teach people how to use it safely and to look after themselves”. This highlights the need for improved digital environments and education that empower young people to navigate online spaces safely. Roadmap for action While the findings are sobering, they also offer a roadmap for the way ahead. The WHO Regional Office for Europe – covering Europe and central Asia – calls upon policy-makers, educators and health-care providers to prioritize adolescent digital well-being with the following specific calls to action: Invest in a health promoting school environment, in which digital literacy education is embedded. Implement evidence-based programmes in schools covering responsible social media use, online safety, critical thinking skills and healthy gaming habits. Enhance mental health services. Ensure access to confidential, non-judgmental and affordable mental health services which can address issues arising from problematic digital technology use. Promote open dialogue. Encourage conversations about digital well-being within families, schools and communities to reduce stigma and increase awareness. Train educators and health-care providers. Provide specialized training to deliver effective and inclusive digital literacy education and support. Enforce platform accountability. Ensure social media platforms enforce age restrictions and create a regulatory framework encouraging responsible design of digital tools for young users. “Ultimately, what we are seeking to achieve for our children is a solid foundation for life in the digital age, something social media companies and young people alike are beginning to acknowledge and act upon around the world,” concluded Dr Kluge. “Digital literacy in the context of child development and well-being, informed by the right knowledge at the right time along with the right health and other support services, are critical. By empowering adolescents to make informed decisions about their online activities, balancing their online and offline worlds, we ultimately help safeguard and improve their overall well-being. This is crucial for ensuring a healthier, more balanced digital future for all communities, societies and countries.”

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he aims of the transhumanist movement are summed up by Mark O'Connell in his book To Be a Machine, which last week won the Wellcome Book prize. "It is their belief that we can and should eradicate ageing as a cause of death; that we can and should use technology to augment our bodies and our minds; that we can and should merge with machines, remaking ourselves, finally, in the image of our own higher ideals."

The idea of technologically enhancing our bodies is not new. But the extent to which transhumanists take the concept is. In the past, we made devices such as wooden legs, hearing aids, spectacles and false teeth. In future, we might useimplants to augment our senses so we can detect infrared or ultraviolet radiation directly or boost our cognitive processes by connecting ourselves to memory chips. Ultimately, by merging man and machine, science will produce humans who have vastly increased intelligence, strength, and lifespans; a near embodiment of gods.

Is that a desirable goal? Advocates of transhumanism believe there are spectacular rewards to be reaped from going beyond the natural barriers and limitations that constitute an ordinary human being. But to do so would raise a host of ethical problems and dilemmas. As O'Connell's book indicates, the ambitions of transhumanism are now rising up our intellectual agenda. But this is a debate that is only just beginning.

There is no doubt that human enhancement is becoming more and more sophisticated - as will be demonstrated at the exhibition The Future Starts Here which opens at the V&A museum in London this week. Items on display will include "powered clothing" made by the US company Seismic. Worn under regular clothes, these suits mimic the biomechanics of the human body and give users - typically older people - discrete strength when getting out of a chair or climbing stairs, or standing for long periods.

In many cases these technological or medical advances are made to help the injured, sick or elderly but are then adopted by the healthy or young to boost their lifestyle or performance. The drug erythropoietin (EPO) increases red blood cell production in patients with severe anaemia but has also been taken up as an illicit performance booster by some athletes to improve their bloodstream's ability to carry oxygen to their muscles.

And that is just the start, say experts. "We are now approaching the time when, for some kinds of track sports such as the 100-metre sprint, athletes who run on carbon-fibre blades will be able outperform those who run on natural legs," says Blay Whitby, an artificial intelligence expert at Sussex University.

The question is: when the technology reaches this level, will it be ethical to allow surgeons to replace someone's limbs with carbon-fibre blades just so they can win gold medals? Whitby is sure many athletes will seek such surgery. "However, if such an operation came before any ethics committee that I was involved with, I would have none of it. It is a repulsive idea - to remove a healthy limb for transient gain."

Scientists think there will come a point when athletes with carbon blades will be able to out-run able-bodied rivals. Photograph: Alexandre Loureiro/Getty Images

Not everyone in the field agrees with this view, however. Cybernetics expert Kevin Warwick, of Coventry University, sees no problem in approving the removal of natural limbs and their replacement with artificial blades. "What is wrong with replacing imperfect bits of your body with artificial parts that will allow you to perform better - or which might allow you to live longer?" he says.

Warwick is a cybernetics enthusiast who, over the years, has had several different electronic devices implanted into his body. "One allowed me to experience ultrasonic inputs. It gave me a bat sense, as it were. I also interfaced my nervous system with my computer so that I could control a robot hand and experience what it was touching. I did that when I was in New York, but the hand was in a lab in England."

Such interventions enhance the human condition, Warwick insists, and indicate the kind of future humans might have when technology augments performance and the senses. Some might consider this unethical. But even doubters such as Whitby acknowledge the issues are complex. "Is it ethical to take two girls under the age of five and train them to play tennis every day of their lives until they have the musculature and skeletons of world champions?" he asks. From this perspective the use of implants or drugs to achieve the same goal does not look so deplorable.

This last point is a particular issue for those concerned with the transhumanist movement. They believe that modern technology ultimately offers humans the chance to live for aeons, unshackled - as they would be - from the frailties of the human body. Failing organs would be replaced by longer-lasting high-tech versions just as carbon-fibre blades could replace the flesh, blood and bone of natural limbs. Thus we would end humanity's reliance on "our frail version 1.0 human bodies into a far more durable and capable 2.0 counterpart," as one group has put it.

However, the technology needed to achieve these goals relies on as yet unrealised developments in genetic engineering, nanotechnology and many other sciences and may take many decades to reach fruition. As a result, many advocates - such as the US inventor and entrepreneur Ray Kurzweil, nanotechnology pioneer Eric Drexler and PayPal founder and venture capitalist Peter Thiel have backed the idea of having their bodies stored in liquid nitrogen and cryogenically preserved until medical science has reached the stage when they can be revived and their resurrected bodies augmented and enhanced.

Four such cryogenic facilities have now been constructed: three in the US and one in Russia. The largest is the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Arizona whose refrigerators store more than 100 bodies (nevertheless referred to as "patients" by staff) in the hope of their subsequent thawing and physiological resurrection. It is "a place built to house the corpses of optimists", as O'Connell says in To Be a Machine.

The Alcor Life Extension Foundation where 'patients' are cryogenically stored in the hope of future revival. Photograph: Alamy

Not everyone is convinced about the feasibility of such technology or about its desirability. "I was once interviewed by a group of cryonic enthusiasts - based in California - called the society for the abolition of involuntary death," recalls the Astronomer Royal Martin Rees. "I told them I'd rather end my days in an English churchyard than a Californian refrigerator. They derided me as a deathist - really old-fashioned."

For his part, Rees believes that those who choose to freeze themselves in the hope of being eventually thawed out would be burdening future generations expected to care for these newly defrosted individuals. "It is not clear how much consideration they would deserve," Rees adds.

Ultimately, adherents of transhumanism envisage a day when humans will free themselves of all corporeal restraints. Kurzweil and his followers believe this turning point will be reached around the year 2030, when biotechnology will enable a union between humans and genuinely intelligent computers and AI systems. The resulting human-machine mind will become free to roam a universe of its own creation, uploading itself at will on to a "suitably powerful computational substrate". We will become gods, or more likely "star children" similar to the one at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

These are remote and, for many people, very fanciful goals. And the fact that much of the impetus for establishing such extreme forms of transhuman technology comes from California and Silicon Valley is not lost on critics. Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, the entrepreneur who wants to send the human race to Mars, also believes that to avoid becoming redundant in the face of the development of artificial intelligence, humans must merge with machines to enhance our own intellect.

This is a part of the world where the culture of youth is followed with fanatical intensity and where ageing is feared more acutely than anywhere else on the planet. Hence the overpowering urge to try to use technology to overcome its effects.

It is also one of the world's richest regions, and many of those who question the values of the transhuman movement warn it risks creating technologies that will only create deeper gulfs in an already divided society where only some people will be able to afford to become enhanced while many other lose out.

The position is summed up by Whitby. "History is littered with the evil consequences of one group of humans believing they are superior to another group of humans," he said. "Unfortunately in the case of enhanced humans they will be genuinely superior. We need to think about the implications before it is too late."

For their part, transhumanists argue that the costs of enhancement will inevitably plummet and point to the example of the mobile phone, which was once so expensive only the very richest could afford one, but which today is a universal gadget owned by virtually every member of society. Such ubiquity will become a feature of technologies for augmenting men and women, advocates insist.

Many of these issues seem remote, but experts warn that the implications involved need to be debated as a matter of urgency. An example is provided by the artificial hand being developed by Newcastle University. Current prosthetic limbs are limited by their speed of response. But project leader Kianoush Nazarpour believes it will soon be possible to create bionic hands that can assess an object and instantly decide what kind of grip it should adopt.

"It will be of enormous benefit, but its use raises all sorts of issues. Who will own it: the wearer or the NHS? And if it is used to carry a crime, who ultimately will be responsible for its control? We are not thinking about these concerns and that is a worry."

The position is summed up by bioethicist professor Andy Miah of Salford University.

"Transhumanism is valuable and interesting philosophically because it gets us to think differently about the range of things that humans might be able to do - but also because it gets us to think critically about some of those limitations that we think are there but can in fact be overcome," he says. "We are talking about the future of our species, after all."

Limbs
The artificial limbs of Luke Skywalker and the Six Million Dollar Manare works of fiction. In reality, bionic limbs have suffered from multiple problems: becoming rigid mid-action, for example. But new generations of sensors are now making it possible for artificial legs and arms to behave in much more complex, human-like ways.

Senses
The light that is visible to humans excludes both infrared and ultra-violet radiation. However, researchers are working on ways of extending the wavelengths of radiation that we can detect, allowing us to see more of the world - and in a different light. Ideas like these are particularly popular with military researchers trying to create cyborg soldiers.

Power
Powered suits or exoskeletons are wearable mobile machines that allow people to move their limbs with increased strength and endurance. Several versions are being developed by the US army, while medical researchers are working on easy-to-wear versions that would be able to help people with severe medical conditions or who have lost limbs to move about naturally.

Brains
Transhumanists envisage the day when memory chips and neural pathways are actually embedded into people's brains, thus bypassing the need to use external devices such as computers in order to access data and to make complicated calculations. The line between humanity and machines will become increasingly blurred.

Robotic exoskeletons such as this one can help people who have suffered spinal injuries. Photograph: Alamy

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No death and an enhanced life: Is the future transhuman?

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he aims of the transhumanist movement are summed up by Mark O'Connell in his book To Be a Machine, which last week won the Wellcome Book prize.

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What is smartphone addiction?

While a smartphone, tablet, or computer can be a hugely productive tool, compulsive use of these devices can interfere with work, school, and relationships. When you spend more time on social media or playing games than you do interacting with real people, or you can’t stop yourself from repeatedly checking texts, emails, or apps—even when it has negative consequences in your life—it may be time to reassess your technology use.

Phone addiction, sometimes colloquially known as “nomophobia” (fear of being without a mobile phone), is often fueled by an internet overuse problem or internet addiction disorder. After all, it’s rarely the phone or tablet itself that creates the compulsion, but rather the games, apps, and online worlds it connects us to.

Smartphone addiction can encompass a variety of impulse-control problems, including:

Virtual relationships. Addiction to social networking, dating apps, texting, and messaging can extend to the point where virtual, online friends become more important than real-life relationships. We’ve all seen the couples sitting together in a restaurant ignoring each other and engaging with their smartphones instead. While the internet can be a great place to meet new people, reconnect with old friends, or even start romantic relationships, online relationships are not a healthy substitute for real-life interactions. Online friendships can be appealing as they tend to exist in a bubble, not subject to the same demands or stresses as messy, real-world relationships. Compulsive use of dating apps can change your focus to short-term hookups instead of developing long-term relationships.

Information overload. Compulsive web surfing, watching videos, playing games, or checking news feeds can lead to lower productivity at work or school and isolate you for hours at a time. Compulsive use of the internet and smartphone apps can cause you to neglect other aspects of your life, from real-world relationships to hobbies and social pursuits.

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Nearly half of U.S. teens (46%) say they’re on the internet almost constantly. YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat remain widely used by teens.

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Why your new work colleague could be a robot. BBC, 2020, Ben Morris

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Why your new work colleague could be a robot. BBC, 2020, Ben Morris

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You hear EVA before you see it. A whirring and whizzing noise greets you as you enter the offices of Automata, a start-up robotics company based in London.

To one side a robotic arm is going through an intricate set of moves: six joints twisting and turning in a sequence which, in the real world, would place a label on a parcel.

That's EVA, and it has being doing those moves non-stop for months to test its reliability.

Around the office and workshop there are more than a dozen other EVA units, some being dismantled by the engineers, others awaiting testing.

It must be very eerie at night as EVA continues its work, simulating attaching labels, while surrounded by its silent clones.

This robotic arm emerged from the work of former architect Suryansh Chandra and his business partner Mostafa Elsayed.

They are betting that there are thousands, if not millions, of smaller businesses which need repetitive tasks completed, but can't afford a big industrial robot.

So EVA was developed from cheap reliable parts. It uses the same motors that power the electric windows in cars, while the computer chips are similar to those used in the consumer electronics business. This is allowing them to sell EVA at £8,000.

Automata is just one firm trying to find a wider market for robots and disrupt the way that things are made.

More than 2.4 million industrial robots are operating in factories around the world, according to data from the International Federation of Robotics (IFR), which is forecasting double-digit sales growth from 2020 to 2022.

The majority of robots currently do repetitive work in large factories, producing cars, electronics and metal.

These giant industrial arms have long been powerful and accurate, but have lacked adaptability.

Yet now, developments in artificial intelligence, alongside improved vision technology and better devices for gripping, are opening new markets.

Online shopping has given the industry a juicy opportunity. In giant warehouses millions of objects of all different shapes and sizes have to be sorted and moved around.

Pick and mix

To replace the humans in this growing market, robots need to be able to recognise and grip all sorts of different items.

His company was one of the first to develop a gripper that could be fitted to the end of robot arm, allowing it to grab items of different sizes.

Their attachment for a robot arm employs a suction device and three fingers to grab items. First the sucker extends to select the item and then the three fingers secure it.

It uses a camera linked to artificial intelligence to identify and locate the object it wants.

The explosion in online shopping has created a demand for this kind of technology; Amazon alone has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in tech for its warehouses.

Soft Robotics, also based in the US, is tackling the same problem albeit in a different way.

Its robotic hand has rubbery fingers that fill with air, allowing them to handle delicate food items like biscuits and pastries.

While such systems give robotic arms more skill, their dexterity still falls a long way short of the human hand.

Researchers at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory (a partnership between the University of the West of England and Bristol University) think the big breakthrough would be to give robot hands a sense of touch.

Prof Nathan Lepora, head of the tactile robotics group, has developed rubber sensors that can detect and map surfaces.

The system uses a camera inside each "finger" that detects how the rubber tip bulges and moves when touching an object.

Using a type of artificial intelligence called machine learning, the robot is then trained to recognise objects just by touching them and seeing how the rubber tip responds.

'Emotional reaction'

Future developments in robotic hardware and artificial intelligence mean that robots will be able to do more and more of the jobs that are currently performed by humans.

According to a report by the OECD, 14% of of jobs are "at high risk of automation" and 32% of jobs could be "radically transformed", with the manufacturing sector at the highest risk.

It's a sensitive topic for those that work in the robotics industry and companies that use robots.

Mr Chandra argues that his technology will eliminate boring, repetitive jobs that humans don't like and aren't very good at, and also create new ones that are likely to replace them.

Every time a job dies, there is an emotional reaction... but every time

there's a creation of a new economy."

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Transhumanism And The Future Of Humanity capucine

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«Are there any philosophical arguments against "transhumanism"?

"Transhumanism" seeks to: "improve health, eliminate disabilities, cure diseases and produce stronger, faster, more intelligent humans with technology".

"Transhumanists" believe the time has come for humans to take control of their own evolution.

The common statements of the "transhumanists" include: "Why not a more resistant skin?" or "Why not the type of bat vision with ultrasound?"

They want to "remake" and integrate technology to humans.

They want to abandons nature. For them, nature is an "adversary". They want the body to have as little carbon as possible for it to be indifferent to what happens to carbon. They want to introduce silicon, steel and microchips within humans.

The end result would be a cyborg and the "cyborgization" would allow: improving the senses, having an infallible memory and intellectual capacity, having a greater physical performance, etc.

The "transhumanists" that make these statements are prestigious scientists, and most important universities professors.

The main icon of "transhumanism" in media may be Ray Kurzweil. He worked with the Army Science Board in 2006, has been called "the successor and legitimate heir of Thomas Edison" and was cited by Forbes magazine as "the supreme thinking machine".

"Transhumanists" seem confident they will achieve their dreams.

Have any philosophers argued against "transhumanism"?

A better question would be, have any philosophers argued "transhumanist" dreams are not and will not be achievable and why? If so, what are their arguments? Any books or articles on the subject?»

By the user Plastic_Lead3833, from the forum “askp

hilosophy”, Reddit, 2021

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GRACE BROWNE

SCIENCE

DEC 10, 2024 7:00 AM

An Augmented Reality Program Can Help Patients Overcome Parkinson’s Symptoms

Simple external cues, such as lines on the floor, can help Parkinson’s patients focus their efforts and overcome the difficulty of the symptoms. With augmented reality, those cues can be anywhere.

ILLUSTRATION: SEBASTIAN CESTARO

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IN 2018, TOM Finn took his father, Nigel, to a physiotherapy appointment. Nigel was living with vascular dementia, which can present with symptoms similar to Parkinson’s disease, a progressive neurological disorder characterized by motor symptoms such as tremors, stiffness, and trouble balancing. He was losing the ability to walk.

The physiotherapist told Finn about cue markers—colored lines laid on the floor that can help Parkinson’s patients overcome difficulty walking. Finn was unconvinced. He couldn’t see how some lines on the floor would help his father. But when they got home, he laid some colored exercise bands down in the kitchen and watched in amazement as his dad easily marched back and forth across them.

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The technique, called external cueing, works by using visual, auditory, or tactile prompts—colored tape on the ground, playing a metronome, or physical vibrations—to engage neural pathways not affected by the disease. “It can help people focus their attention and help them take that first step and overcome the freeze,” says Claire Bale, associate director of research at Parkinson’s UK, a research and support charity in the UK.

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Neuroscientist Answers Emotion Questions

While Finn—who worked in marketing and video production in London—was struck by the effectiveness of this simple intervention, he thought it too basic to actually be helpful. But augmented reality glasses from the likes of Magic Leap had just started coming to market, and he wondered whether they might be able to project virtual lines onto the ground to act as cues. He founded a startup, Strolll, to try to make that vision a reality.

Solving the Parkinson’s Puzzle Piece by Piece

Using Good Vibrations to Restore Confidence in Movement

Charco Neurotech is building wearable devices that vibrate at high frequency to provide physical cueing that can help lessen Parkinson’s symptoms. The Cambridge-based startup’s CUE1 device is already being used by thousands of people in trials.

Sniffing Out the Right Candidates for Drug Trials

Long-lasting smell loss is a surprisingly good predictor of brain disease. A study funded by the Michael J. Fox Foundation used a scratch and sniff test to help identify potential carriers of a biomarker for Parkinson’s.

Deep-Brain Stimulation for Real-Time Activity Adjustment

Deep-brain stimulation works like a pacemaker, using electrical signals to alleviate Parkinson’s symptoms such as tremors. Spanish startup Inbrain has raised $50m to develop graphene-based neural implants that can constantly monitor and modify brain activity in real time.

Detecting the Visual Signs of Parkinson’s Disease

As a teenager, Erin Smith created a program called FacePrint, which analyzes facial expressions in selfies to spot “Parkinson’s mask,” a tell-tale early sign of Parkinson’s disease. She won the WIRED Health Startup showcase in 2018.

Two years later, Strolll had no staff and about £50 in the bank, according to Jorgen Ellis. Ellis, a New Zealander with a background in furniture startups, had come to the UK looking for his next venture and wanted to get involved with something he felt passionate about. His grandfather had lived with Parkinson’s for over a decade, and when he met Finn through a mutual contact, he immediately saw the promise of the technology. He came onboard as CEO and started by trying to demonstrate that AR-based cueing was scientifically valid.

Ellis and Finn soon found a group of academics at VU University in Amsterdam, led by Melvyn Roerdink, who were working on something similar. Strolll acquired their intellectual property, and with Roerdink on board as chief innovation officer they began to develop and test the technology, now called Reality DTx.

Instead of physical bands like Finn used, Strolll’s AR software simulates colored lines on the floor in front of the wearer, with each line disappearing as they clear it. A clinical trial (supported by Strolll) confirmed the cueing technology was feasible and found promising outcomes.

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It could also help with rehabilitation exercises amid a shortage of physiotherapists: The software includes AR games like whack-a-mole and basketball, but designed around functional movements that help people with Parkinson’s. Matt Ross—who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s eight years ago at the age of 36 and is now Strolll’s head of brand and creative strategy—says these games can help overcome the apathy and depression that’s also a symptom of the disease. “You might know that you’ve got to exercise … but that’s not going to help you get off your chair,” he says. So the fact that it’s gamified makes doing the exercises much more alluring.

The Magic Leap headset the software runs on costs around £3,000 ($3,800), and Strolll charges upwards of £300 a month for its services—but Ellis argues this is more cost-effective than 30 half-hour sessions of in-person physical therapy. Ultimately, the company’s goal is to be the “most used rehabilitation software in the world,” says Ellis. They even have a specific timeline in mind: 7 million minutes of rehab with the Strolll device in a week by New Year’s Eve 2029. By then, Ellis hopes Strolll could be in use for all kinds of neurological conditions, from stroke to multiple sclerosis. There is, he says, an “almost unlimited opportunity.”

This article appears in the January/February 2025 issue of WIRED UK magazine

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The project is now a member-led global network of more than 40 chapters. Our members organize and build local power to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes.

Black Lives Matter is an ideological and political intervention in a world where Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise. It is an affirmation of Black folks’ humanity, our contributions to this society, and our resilience in the face of deadly oppression.

As organizers who work with everyday people, BLM members see and understand significant gaps in movement spaces and leadership. Black liberation movements in this country have created room, space, and leadership mostly for Black heterosexual, cisgender men — leaving women, queer and transgender people, and others either out of the movement or in the background to move the work forward with little or no recognition. As a network, we have always recognized the need to center the leadership of women and queer and trans people. To maximize our movement muscle, and to be intentional about not replicating harmful practices that excluded so many in past movements for liberation, we made a commitment to placing those at the margins closer to the center.

As #BlackLivesMatter developed throughout 2013 and 2014, we utilized it as a platform and organizing tool. Other groups, organizations, and individuals used it to amplify anti-Black racism across the country, in all the ways it showed up. Tamir Rice, Tanisha Anderson, Mya Hall, Walter Scott, Sandra Bland — these names are inherently important. The space that #BlackLivesMatter held and continues to hold helped propel the conversation around the state-sanctioned violence they experienced. We particularly highlighted the egregious ways in which Black women, specifically Black trans women, are violated. #BlackLivesMatter was developed in support of all Black lives.

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Black Lives Matter Turns 10 Pew research center 

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Black Lives Matter Turns 10 Pew research center 

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Assistive technology enables and promotes inclusion and participation, especially of persons with disability, aging populations, and people with non-communicable diseases. The primary purpose of assistive products is to maintain or improve an individual’s functioning and independence, thereby promoting their well-being. They enable people to live healthy, productive, independent and dignified lives, and to participate in education, the labour market and civic life.

Examples of assistive products include hearing aids, wheelchairs, spectacles, prostheses and devices that support memory, among many others. While supporting independence and well-being, these products can also help to prevent or reduce the effects of secondary health conditions, such as lower limb amputation in people with diabetes. They can also reduce the need and impact on carers and mitigate the need for formal health and support services. Moreover, access to appropriate assistive products can have a tremendous impact on community development and economic growth.

Despite the global need and recognized benefits of assistive products, access to assistive products remains limited. Addressing this unmet need is essential to progress towards the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals and realizing the Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

world health organization