Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: government – Page 19

The two years flew past, and now the facility is ready to begin mass production later this year, with TSMC tapping Sony’s assistance to get the plant operational in Japan. The new Kumamoto fab plant has been dubbed “Nightless Castle” as there were workers there on 24-hour shifts, which is how the new TSMC plant was built in just two years, with plants regularly taking three or more years to get up and running.

Sony is an investor and a customer for TSMC’s new plant in Japan; with the new fab plant getting up and running so quickly in Japan, that wouldn’t necessarily be done in other countries. Why? TSMC had efficient government support, strict construction timetables, and a low-cost workforce that was flooding the site and then working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

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Guizhou is China’s most indebted province. Its government has relied on borrowing to make ends meet. During the lunar new year, the province has seen unprecedented large-scale fires. State-controlled propaganda blamed local New Year customs and arsons by the Japanese and the Americans. However, Guizhou’s financial data shows that people have had just enough.

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Colombia’s government on Friday announced an expedition to remove items of “incalculable value” from the wreck of the legendary San Jose galleon, which sank in 1708 while laden with gold, silver and emeralds estimated to be worth billions of dollars. The 316-year-old wreck, often called the “holy grail” of shipwrecks, has been controversial, because it is both an archaeological and economic treasure.

Culture Minister Juan David Correa told AFP that more than eight years after the discovery of the wreck off Colombia’s coast, an underwater robot would be sent to recover some of its bounty.

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Here’s my latest Opinion piece just out for Newsweek. Check it out! Lifeboat Foundation mentioned.

We need to remember that universal distress we all had when the world started to shut down in March 2020: when not enough ventilators and hospital beds could be found; when food shelves and supplies were scarce; when no COVID-19 vaccines existed. We need to remember because COVID is just one of many different existential risks that can appear out of nowhere, and halt our lives as we know it.

Naturally, I’m glad that the world has carried on with its head high after the pandemic, but I’m also worried that more people didn’t take to heart a longer-term philosophical view that human and earthly life is highly tentative. The best, most practical way to protect ourselves from more existential risks is to try to protect ourselves ahead of time.

That means creating vaccines for diseases even when no dire need is imminent. That means trying to continue to denuclearize the military regardless of social conflicts. That means granting astronomers billions of dollars to scan the skies for planet-killer asteroids. That means spending time to build safeguards into AI, and keeping it far from military munitions.

Continue reading “We Need a Far Better Plan for Dealing With Existential Threat” | >

Called it. already impacting. not even a week later.

I just used AI in two films that are going to be announced soon. That kept me out of makeup for hours. In post and on set, I was able to use this AI technology to avoid ever having to sit through hours of aging makeup.

How are you thinking about approaching the threat that AI poses to certain job categories at your studio and on your productions?

Everything right now is so up in the air. It’s so malleable. The technology’s moving so quickly. I feel like everybody in the industry is running a hundred miles an hour to try and catch up, to try and put in guardrails and to try and put in safety belts to keep livelihoods afloat. But me, just like every other studio in town, we’re all trying to figure it all out. I think we’re all trying to find the answers as we go, and it’s changing every day — and it’s not just our industry, but it’s every industry that AI will be affecting, from accountants to architects. If you look at it across the world, how it’s changing so quickly, I’m hoping that there’s a whole government approach to help everyone be able to sustain, is my hope.

Continue reading “Tyler Perry Puts 0M Studio Expansion on Hold After Seeing OpenAI’s Sora: “Jobs Are Going to Be Lost”” | >

Norway boasts the highest electric vehicle adoption rate in the world. Some 82% of new car sales were EVs in Norway in 2023, according to the Norwegian Road Federation (OFV). In comparison, 7.6% of new car sales were electric in the U.S. last year, according to Kelley Blue Book estimates. In the world’s largest auto market, China, 24% of new car sales were EVs in 2023, according to the China Passenger Car Association.

“Our goal is that all new cars by 2025 will be zero-emission vehicles,” said Ragnhild Syrstad, the state secretary of the Norwegian Ministry of Climate and Environment, “We think we’re going to reach that goal.”

The Norwegian government started incentivizing the purchase of EVs back in the 1990s with free parking, the use of bus lanes, no tolls and most importantly, no taxes on zero-emission vehicles. But it wasn’t until Tesla and other EV models became available about 10 years ago that sales started to take off, Syrstad said.

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The U.S. government is giving chip maker GlobalFoundries $1.5 billion in grants to build and expand facilities in New York and Vermont, the first major award in a program that aims to reinvigorate domestic chip production.

The award from the Commerce Department kicks off what is expected to be a series of cash injections into semiconductor manufacturing projects in Arizona, Texas, New York and Ohio in the coming weeks. Chip makers Intel, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, Samsung Electronics and Micron Technology have all submitted applications for the government to cover a portion of the billions of dollars it costs to build cutting-edge factories.

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