Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: transportation – Page 547

Bloomberg Businessweek alleges that Page has invested more than $100 million of his own personal funds into a flying car company since they started in 2010 and is currently funding another flying car startup.

You know how, when you’re stuck in traffic, you wish that you could pull a secret lever in your car that would make it shoot up in the air, fly you out of the congested street, and quickly whisk you to your meeting—where you are, of course, a corporate (and punctual) hero?

Well, it seems Google cofounder Larry Page may have been thinking the same thing. Bloomberg Businessweek claims that Page secretly owns a startup named Zee. Aero, a company that has been so evasive that employees were allegedly given cards with instructions on how to deflect reporters.

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As part of its new plan to build 2 to 3 million all-electric cars a year and unveil 30 new models by 2025, Volkswagen announced that they plan to debut one of these 30 new electric car models at the Paris Motor show next month.

VW CEO Hebert Diess confirmed the news in an interview with German magazine Wirtschafts Woche.

He said that the vehicle will achieve a range of 400 to 600 km (248 to 372 miles), but he could have been referring to the New European Driving Cycle (NEDC), which is much more forgiving than the EPA rating and doesn’t really reflect real-world range, but a range of ~300 miles sounds likely.

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Five hundred miles down the Atlantic Coast, the only road to Tybee Island, Ga., is disappearing beneath the sea several times a year, cutting the town off from the mainland.

And another 500 miles on, in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., increased tidal flooding is forcing the city to spend millions fixing battered roads and drains — and, at times, to send out giant vacuum trucks to suck saltwater off the streets.

Scientists’ warnings that the rise of the sea would eventually imperil the United States’ coastline are no longer theoretical.

By JUSTIN GILLIS SEPT. 3, 2016

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The odds that artificial intelligence will enslave or eliminate humankind within the next decade or so are thankfully slim. So concludes a major report from Stanford University on the social and economic implications of artificial intelligence.

At the same time, however, the report concludes that AI looks certain to upend huge aspects of everyday life, from employment and education to transportation and entertainment. More than 20 leaders in the fields of AI, computer science, and robotics coauthored the report. The analysis is significant because the public alarm over the impact of AI threatens to shape public policy and corporate decisions.

It predicts that automated trucks, flying vehicles, and personal robots will be commonplace by 2030, but cautions that remaining technical obstacles will limit such technologies to certain niches. It also warns that the social and ethical implications of advances in AI, such as the potential for unemployment in certain areas and likely erosions of privacy driven by new forms of surveillance and data mining, will need to be open to discussion and debate.

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