Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: law – Page 48

How IoT and AI are helping keep truck drivers safe

A truck fleet accident costs an average of $16,500 in damages and $57,500 in injury-related costs for a total of $74,000. “This does not include a broad range of ‘hidden’ costs, including reduced vehicle value (typically anywhere from $500 to $2,000), higher insurance premium, legal fees, driver turnover (the average driver replacement cost = $8,200), lost employee time, lost vehicle-use time, administrative burden, reduced employee morale and bad publicity,” said Yoav Banin, chief product officer at Nauto, which provides artificial intelligence driver and fleet performance solutions.

Emphasis on truck driving safety is well placed, considering other challenges that the trucking industry is facing.

Ranking first is a chronic shortage of truck drivers nationwide that could force fleet operators to hire less-experienced drivers who require operator and safety training. Driver compensation and truck parking ranked second and third, but immediately behind them in fourth and fifth position were driver truck fleet safety and insurance availability, which depends on safe driving records.

23 species declared extinct in the U.S.

“To slow the ongoing loss of animal and plant life in the United States, President Biden signed an executive order in January 2,021 stating his administration’s goal to conserve 30% of U.S. lands and water by 2030. This bold, science-based initiative – America the Beautiful – is the first ever nationwide conservation effort to address both climate change and biodiversity loss.” https://www.futuretimeline.net/images/robot-future-timeline.jpg

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) has declared 23 species extinct, due to a combination of development, invasive species, logging and pollution.

The agency is recommending that the species be removed from the Endangered Species Act (ESA), the primary law in the United States for protecting and recovering imperilled organisms and the ecosystems they depend on. For the animals proposed for delisting, the protections of the ESA came too late.

These extinctions highlight the importance of the ESA and efforts to conserve species before declines become irreversible. The circumstances of each also underscore how human activity can drive population decline and ultimately extinction, by contributing to habitat loss, overuse and the introduction of invasive species and diseases. The growing impacts of climate change are anticipated to further exacerbate these threats and their interactions.

‘Fat finger’ $24m charge exposes fragility in crypto market

DeversiFi’s faulty bill shows crypto, where “code is law”, is equally vulnerable to costly slip-ups that have no formal resolution mechanism.

“Right now, most of the users of DeFi are true believers in the technology and its potential, and so confidence may persist regardless of these events,” said Hilary Allen, professor of law at the American University Washington College of Law.

“But if DeFi is more broadly adopted by people less committed to the technology, confidence will become more vulnerable — and the potential for panics that can come with damaged confidence should give us pause,” she added.

News, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publication.

Could Autonomous Robots Be More Dangerous than Nukes?

Without a new legal framework, they could destabilize societal norms.

Autonomous weapon systems – commonly known as killer robots – may have killed human beings for the first time ever last year, according to a recent United Nations Security Council report on the Libyan civil war. History could well identify this as the starting point of the next major arms race, one that has the potential to be humanity’s final one.

Autonomous weapon systems are robots with lethal weapons that can operate independently, selecting and attacking targets without a human weighing in on those decisions. Militaries around the world are investing heavily in autonomous weapons research and development. The U.S. alone budgeted US$18 billion for autonomous weapons between 2016 and 2020.

Meanwhile, human rights and humanitarian organizations are racing to establish regulations and prohibitions on such weapons development. Without such checks, foreign policy experts warn that disruptive autonomous weapons technologies will dangerously destabilize current nuclear strategies, both because they could radically change perceptions of strategic dominance, increasing the risk of preemptive attacks, and because they could become combined with chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons themselves.

Can AI Be An Inventor?

The last few months have seen a spate of patent applications filed in different countries listing AI as an inventor. This has led, at last count, to the legal apparatus of four countries to weigh in on the question — with two (the United States and the UK) weighing in against the idea and two (Australia and South Africa) permitting AI as an inventor.

If you read some of the findings, they show that the judges have, appropriately in my opinion, based their decisions on their interpretations of the law as written. This makes sense. However — this question is likely the first of many around the area of AI and new creations. In this article, we highlight some of the tech fundamentals that apply here and raise additional questions that will come shortly thereafter — and why businesses will need answers.

Elon Musk fires shot at Jeff Bezos, ‘you can’t sue your way to orbit’

I agree with Elon.

Elon Musk repeated prior criticisms of fellow billionaire space mogul Jeff Bezos, as their respective companies continue to battle in federal court and in front of regulators.

“I think I’ve expressed my thoughts on that front — I think he should put more of his energy into getting to orbit, [rather] than lawsuits,” Musk said Tuesday at the CodeCon 2021 conference in Beverly Hills, California. “You cannot sue your way to the moon, no matter how good your lawyers are,” Musk added. Bezos’ Blue Origin is suing SpaceX, by way of NASA, in the U.S. Federal Court of Claims over a $2.9 billion astronaut lunar lander contract the agency awarded Musk’s company earlier this year.

Blue Origin went on a public relations offensive in August after the Government Accountability Office shot down the company’s protest, with Bezos’ venture calling SpaceX’s Starship rocket an “immensely complex & high risk” way to deliver NASA astronauts to the moon. In April, NASA chose SpaceX and its Starship concept to provide the vehicle that’ll carry Artemis astronauts to the surface of the moon as soon as 2024.

Do we finally have control over ageing? | Prof David Sinclair

In case this hasn’t been posted here yet.

Ageing is inevitable, but what if everything we’ve come to believe about ageing is wrong and we’re able to choose our lifespans? What if ageing is a disease?

In this week’s #HealthyLongevity #webinar, Prof David Sinclair from Harvard Medical School shares a bold new theory for why we age. Prof Sinclair is also the author of “Lifespan, Why We Age – and Why We Don’t Have To” (https://lifespanbook.com/).

Register for upcoming webinar sessions at https://nus-sg.zoom.us/webinar/register/9516279955794/WN_JhWMZNz0QGOgNqxtSBYedw.

#NUSMedicine #webinarseries

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An Automated System for Crime Investigation Using Conventional and Machine Learning Approach

Circa 2019

Crime causes significant damage to the society and property. Different kinds of physical or direct methods are devised by the law and order department to spot out the criminals involved in the crime. This techniques will explore the evidences at crime site. For instance if it finds a fingerprint then the system will capture and send it to forensic department for fingerprint matching, which can be later used for identifying the suspects or criminals by investigations etc. Yet, it is a huge challenge for them to find the criminal due to less or no evidence and incorrect information, which can change the direction of investigation to the end. This paper proposes a data analysis approach to help the police department by giving them first-hand information about the suspects. It automates the manual process for finding criminal and future crime spot by using various techniques such as pattern matching, biometric and crime analytics. Based on the availability of information, the system is able to produce the expected accuracy.

UN urges moratorium on use of AI that imperils human rights

The U.N. human rights chief is calling for a moratorium on the use of artificial intelligence technology that poses a serious risk to human rights, including face-scanning systems that track people in public spaces.

Michelle Bachelet, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, also said Wednesday that countries should expressly ban AI applications which don’t comply with international human rights law.

Applications that should be prohibited include government “social scoring” systems that judge people based on their behavior and certain AI-based tools that categorize people into clusters such as by ethnicity or gender.

Civilian Space Development has kicked-off: the work starts now!

Civilian Space Development has kicked-off: the work begins now!

Newsletter 17.09.2021 by Bernard Foing & Adriano V. Autino

During the last months we have seen the first civilian passengers fly to space, onboard Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic vehicles. September 15th, four civilian astronauts, onboard a Space X Dragon capsule, passed the 500 km orbit, more than 100 km higher than the ISS.In 2016 we started to publicly talk about and promote Civilian Space Development, while the whole space community kept on talking only about space exploration. Earlier, in 2,008 we founded the Space Renaissance movement, and a couple of years later the Space Renaissance International, as a philosophical association targeted to complete the Kopernican Revolution, supporting the Civilization expansion into space. Nowadays the concept of civilian space flight is everywhere on the media, and many people in the space community talk about a space renaissance. Of course the Coronavirus pandemics accelerated the awareness of the urgency to expand humanity into outer space. And space tourism — the first stage of civilian space settlement — is now a reality, in its first steps.

Of course nobody could be more happy than ourselves, for the above development, and of course**2 we want to congratulate with Elon, Richard and Jeff, for such a great achievement!

So, may we consider that our mission has been completed? Let’s see.

Firstly, were those crews composed by regular travelers, like normal air-flight passengers? Not exactly. The Inspiration4 crew members received astronaut training, for many months, including lessons in orbital mechanics, operating in a microgravity, stress testing, emergency preparedness training, and mission simulations. They have studied over 90 different kinds of training guides and manuals and lessons to learn to fly Crew Dragon, and what to do under emergency situations. The legal aspects are not clear: did FAA quickly authorize Space X and Blue Origin to deal commercial space flights? Doubt is more than legitimate, considering the long procedure followed by Virgin Galactic to be authorized to transport paying passengers in space. Likely, these first “civilian” passengers — like the first orbital tourist Dennis Tito did in 2001 — accepted conditions similar to the military astronauts (i.e. zero rights and warrants).

Therefore, we cannot say that the first “civilians” has gone to space. Yes, they are not military, but (i) they needed a hard astronautic training and (ii) they don’t have the rights and warrants given by air-flight companies to their passengers. It means, basically, that the vehicles are still more suitable to transport astronauts means than civilian passengers.

A lot of work is still to be done, to allow civilians to travel, live and work in space. And the real implementation of such work depends mostly on the right political decisions, and from the support by public opinion. We still need to fight against the fake news, the opposers, the misconceptions, the so many apparently reasonable objections to human expansion into outer space.

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