Lifeboat Foundation

“UNISPACE+50 will celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the first United Nations Conference on the Exploration and Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. It will also be an opportunity for the international community to gather and consider the future course of global space cooperation for the benefit of humankind.

From 20 to 21 June 2018 the international community will gather in Vienna for UNISPACE+50, a special segment of the 61 st session of the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS).”

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The rise of artificial intelligence threatens to eliminate jobs once considered impossible to automate. One series of papers by Oxford researchers ranks jobs by their estimated susceptibility to automation. Among those most rated likely to vanish – because they involve work that AI can increasingly accomplish less expensively – are real estate brokers, insurance claims adjusters and sports referees. Could anything good come of mass unemployment?

History tells us that when technology squeezes people out of jobs, they revolt. Industrialization in 19th-century England, for example, gave rise to Luddite activism. Unfortunately, history also suggests that protests of the marginalized don’t solve the underlying problem. The British Army suppressed the Luddites; the government passed laws to protect factory equipment and industrialization marched on. As Marx went on to theorize, in a capitalist society, the government is co-opted by the wealthy classes.

What happens, though, when that skilled upper class is itself put out of a job? That’s the question that mass AI-based unemployment would pose. What would happen when well-educated lawyers, journalists, bureaucrats, corporate managers and other creative-class knowledge workers can’t find work? Could the rise of AI lead to a white-collar rebellion?

Continue reading “Will AI job-stealing robots lead to a human revolution?” »

Artificial intelligence beats over 100 London lawyers in predicting case outcome:

In a contest that took place last month. It pitched over 100 lawyers from many of London’s ritziest firms against an artificial intelligence program called Case Cruncher Alpha.

Both the humans and the AI were given the basic facts of hundreds of PPI (payment protection insurance) mis-selling cases and asked to predict whether the Financial Ombudsman would allow a claim.

(Revised post)

Arab News, the official outlet of the Royal Saudis, proudly reported of Saudi Arabia being “the first country to grant a robot citizenship”. Below is a more sober account of this publicity stunt.

Continue reading “Saudi Arabia grants citizenship to robot Sophia” »

With artificial intelligence technology advancing rapidly, the world must consider how the law should apply to synthetic beings. Experts from the fields of AI, ethics, and government weigh in on the best path forward as we enter the age of self-aware robots.

Artificially intelligent (AI) robots and automated systems are already transforming society in a host of ways. Cars are creeping closer to Level 5 autonomy, factories are cutting costs by replacing human workers with robots, and AIs are even outperforming people in a number of traditionally white-collar professions.

Continue reading “The rights of synthetic lifeforms is the next great civil rights controversy” »

Have you heard of Dennis Hope? How about The Lunar Embassy of the Galactic Government—no? As space enthusiasts and investors, you really should be familiar with the infamous man who has spent nearly thirty years becoming Earth’s most successful interplanetary real estate agent. As (legitimate) terrestrial governments consider a return to the Moon and the establishment of permanent lunar settlements, however, Hope and his customers may soon face legal challenges from national space agencies and commercial ventures alike.

Read full details here: https://goo.gl/VoVoZz

The immigration population in the United States jumped to a record 43million people in 2016, according to a new report.

And when adding in the children of those individuals, the number jumps to over 60million people.

Continue reading “US immigration population hits all-time high in 2016” »

Military applications of gene-altering technology must also be considered (Op-Ed by Tomasz Pierscionek)

Recent developments in the field of biotechnology have shown that mutations can be edited out of the human genome. What are the future implications of this research and will it be used to the benefit or detriment of society?

Last month, UK scientists performed gene-editing experiments for the first time in order to gain a greater understanding of how embryos develop, and it is likely researchers in other countries will soon follow suit.

Continue reading “Where’d you get those genes? The answer may shock you” »

White-collar automation has become a common buzzword in debates about the growing power of computers, as software shows potential to take over some work of accountants and lawyers. Artificial-intelligence researchers at Google are trying to automate the tasks of highly paid workers more likely to wear a hoodie than a coat and tie—themselves.

In a project called AutoML, Google’s researchers have taught machine-learning software to build machine-learning software. In some instances, what it comes up with is more powerful and efficient than the best systems the researchers themselves can design. Google says the system recently scored a record 82 percent at categorizing images by their content. On the harder task of marking the location of multiple objects in an image, an important task for augmented reality and autonomous robots, the auto-generated system scored 43 percent. The best human-built system scored 39 percent.

Such results are significant because the expertise needed to build cutting-edge AI systems is in scarce—even at Google. “Today these are handcrafted by machine learning scientists and literally only a few thousands of scientists around the world can do this,” said Google CEO Sundar Pichai last week, briefly namechecking AutoML at a launch event for new smartphones and other gadgets. “We want to enable hundreds of thousands of developers to be able to do it.”

Continue reading “Google’s AutoML Project Teaches AI To Write Learning Software” »