Advances in Artificial Intelligence Could Lead to Mass Unemployment Warn Experts Speaking on Radio 4’s Today programme, Dr Stuart Armstrong from the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford said that there was a risk that computers could take over human jobs “at a faster rate than new jobs could be generated.” “We have some studies looking at to which jobs are the most vulnerable and there are quite a lot of them in logistics, administration, insurance underwriting,” said Dr Armstrong. “Ultimately, huge swathe of jobs are potentially vulnerable to improved artificial intelligence.” Dr Murray Shanahan, a professor of cognitive robotics at Imperial College London, agreed that improvements in artificial intelligence were creating “short term issues that we all need to be talking about.” "It's very difficult to predict," said Dr Shanahan. Both academics did however praise Google for creating an ethics board to look at the “how to deploy artificial intelligence safely and reduce the risks” after its £400 million purchase of London-based start-up DeepMind.
Aid in reverse: How poor countries develop rich countries | /The Rules The idea of international development aid lies at the heart of a tremendously successful PR campaign. The narrative we have been sold claims that aid has been effective at reducing global poverty. Here I will argue that there are three problems with this narrative. First, poverty is not disappearing, despite what we have been told to believe. False accounting The narrative that poverty rates are declining and that extreme poverty will soon be eradicated has a tremendous amount of institutional backing; it is supported by the world’s most powerful governments and promoted through the United Nations Millennium Campaign. It was 1996, at a summit in Rome, when governments first pledged to use aid to halve the number of the world’s poor by 2015. After the UN General Assembly adopted MDG-1, the goal was diluted two more times. All of this raises questions about why world governments would be so eager to instil false confidence in a misleading poverty-reduction narrative.
Blood minerals are electronics industry's dirty secret - tech - 13 June 2014 A crackdown in the US is forcing technology firms to come clean about the source of the minerals used in their smartphones and electronics SMARTPHONE makers would prefer not to talk about it. The tiny components that make your phone work could contain materials that are financing a number of bloody conflicts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Last week the US Securities and Exchange Commission's deadline passed for 1200 US-listed companies to report on whether any metal in their microchips comes from mines controlled by these militias. Most, including Vodafone, Ford and Google, blamed their subcontractors' inability to assess whether the smelters or refiners who had sold them their 3TG metals had obtained their ore from conflict-free mines certified legal by the DRC government. DRC has vast natural supplies of the minerals needed for semiconductors and circuit boards. Companies have been reluctant to vet their supply chains because of cost. New Scientist Not just a website!
Study indicates Robots could replace 80% of Jobs In a few decades, twenty or thirty years — or sooner – robots and their associated technology will be as ubiquitous as mobile phones are today, at least that is the prediction of Bill Gates; and we would be hard-pressed to find a roboticist, automation expert or economist who could present a strong case against this. The Robotics Revolution promises a host of benefits that are compelling (especially in health care) and imaginative, but it may also come at a significant price. The Pareto Principle of Prediction We find ourselves faced with an intractable paradox: On the one hand technology advances increase productivity and wellbeing, and on the other hand it often reinforces inequalities. In his study Elliot relies on advances in speech, reasoning capabilities and movement capabilities to illustrate how robots and technology can replace jobs. Elliot is not the first to claim that robotics and technology will have such a profound impact on employment or inequality. Thinking machines
Psychopaths in Power and the Imminent Collapse of Global Society (It's all your fault!) I can't really comment in any informed way on societies in the East, except to point to the Chinese slave workers who produce mountains of plastic crap for Western nations to use and then dump in the ground and oceans; the Middle East's role as a bombing target, 'terrorist' recruiting ground and civil war factory for Western warmongers, and South East Asia and Africa as a block of new 'nations' born out of the 'white man's burden' to civilize their people via brutal colonization and then grant them 'independence' in the form of never-ending debt to Western banks. In the West, on the other hand, where I live, I can say with confidence that our modern society, its political and social conventions, customs and morality, has passed its expiry date and is well and truly moribund. Leading the cast in this tragicomedy (heavy on the tragi) we find our psychopathic leaders and their media whores trying extra hard to convince us that everything is just fine. Consider that: Domestic drones. See?
Losing our religion: Your guide to a godless future - life - 30 April 2014 (Image: Sylvia Serrado/Plainpicture) The human mind is primed to believe in god, so why are so many people abandoning religion – and should we be worried about living in an atheist world? ON AN unseasonably warm Sunday morning in London, I do something I haven't done for more than 30 years: get up and go to church. This is like hundreds of congregations taking place across the city this morning, but with one notable exception: there is no god. Welcome to the Sunday Assembly, a "godless congregation" held every other week in Conway Hall, home of the world's oldest free-thought organisation. Robotic-Farming Grows With the Ladybird My following article below was originally published by SERIOUS WONDER: Robots are going to steal your job, but that’s okay, because they’ll be liberating us away from boring, strenuous and monotonous labor and give us far more time in doing what we truly want to do. Agriculture will not be an exception, and is in fact moving fast in becoming a model of what the entire workforce will eventually transform into. In today’s age, we’ll be witnessing the coupling of the agricultural revolution with the industrial revolution – robotic farming. From drones to autonomous tractors, robotic farming is here to stay and (dare I say it?) Serious Wonder was able to briefly speak with Professor Salah Sukkarieh, the lead researcher in project Ladybird, to which he stated: “Ladybird is a completely new approach to agriculture robotics. The Ladybird is an omnidirectional, self-driving vehicle with three goals in mind: collect data, analyze data, and harvest. Like this: Like Loading...
Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function The poor often behave in less capable ways, which can further perpetuate poverty. We hypothesize that poverty directly impedes cognitive function and present two studies that test this hypothesis. First, we experimentally induced thoughts about finances and found that this reduces cognitive performance among poor but not in well-off participants. Lacking money or time can lead one to make poorer decisions, possibly because poverty imposes a cognitive load that saps attention and reduces effort. 4 Robots That Teach Children Science and Math in Engaging Ways Image: Play-i images PLAY-i Play-i robots are designed to engage children by making the abstract concepts of programming more accessible. These ball-shaped bots—named Bo and Yana—have distinct educational roles. Bo is made up of four connected spheres that children program to glide along the floor on three wheels, avoiding obstacles and delivering small items in the process. Yana is a single sphere laden with sensors.
The Clearest Trend in the American Workforce It’s been a while since I posted data on US employment trends, so here’s a chart created with FRED’s snazzy new graphing interface. It shows the employment rate (in other words, 100 – the standard unemployment rate) in blue, the employment-to-population ratio (the % of working-age people with work) in green, and the labor force participation rate (the percent of working-age people who have work or are actively looking for it) in red. This graph clearly shows a very steady up-then-down trajectory in the red line — of the labor force participation rate. It’s affected very little by recessions (the gray bars in the graph), and instead appears to be responding to deeper forces. The most obvious of these forces are the demographics of the American labor force. So is retirement the main reason that the red line is going down these days? I’m more persuaded by the lower figure. Also, disability claims started spiking right around the year 2000, and have almost doubled since then: