Experts in artificial intelligence say the world is unprepared for the enormous changes automation is bringing to the global economy. Some say artificial intelligence could help us create an almost perfect world. But they also warn it could lead to the collapse of democracy and civilisation within a generation. Al Jazeera’s Laurence Lee reports from London.
NASA is prepping for a trip to the nearby three-star Alpha Centauri system—in 2069.
That’s my kind of advanced planning.
The mission, first announced by New Scientist, would include a 44-year-long expedition to an exoplanet in search of signs of life. Assuming NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) can figure out how to travel at a tenth of the speed of light.
SpaceX’s first Falcon Heavy rocket, made up of two previously-flown Falcon 9 boosters and a beefed up central core stage, made the trip to launch pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida and was raised vertical Thursday for testing ahead of its first liftoff next month.
The fully-assembled 229-foot-tall (70-meter) rocket will be the most powerful in the world when it blasts off, and Thursday’s arrival atop pad 39A marks a major step toward readying the Falcon Heavy for flight.
SpaceX engineers are expected to conduct a fit check and complete other tests at pad 39A this week, followed by a hold-down firing of all 27 first stage engines some time after New Year’s Day. The company has not set a target date for the Falcon Heavy’s first liftoff, but officials say the launch is targeted in January, some time after the hold-down hotfire test.
In response to growing concerns about autonomous weapons, a coalition of AI researchers and advocacy organizations released a fictitious video on Monday that depicts a disturbing future in which lethal autonomous weapons have become cheap and ubiquitous.
The video was launched in Geneva, where AI researcher Stuart Russell presented it at an event at the United Nations Convention on Conventional Weapons hosted by the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots.
Russell, in an appearance at the end of the video, warns that the technology described in the film already exists and that the window to act is closing fast.
A new initiative, I4OC, is working towards making reliable, structured data of authors, reference lists, and citations accessible to the public. Their launch marks the availability of 14 million scholarly works, with more to come.
The Initiative of Open Citations (140C) announced today that science papers’ reference lists will now be accessible to anyone.
Scientists, who had previously cloned polo ponies, have achieved yet another breakthrough in their work that could lead to the creation of genetically engineered “super-horses” that are faster, stronger and better jumpers than regular horses within two years.
Scientists in Argentina reportedly managed to rewrite the genomes of cloned horses by using a powerful DNA editing technique called CRISPR. They also produced healthy embryos that are now expected to be implanted into a surrogate mother by 2019.
CRISPR, an acronym that stands for Clustered, Regularly Interspaced, Short Palindromic Repeats, is basically a technique in a bacteria’s immune system. When a virus invades a bacterial cell, the CRISPR system captures a piece of the virus’s DNA and slides it into a section of the bacteria’s own DNA, allowing it to detect and destroy the virus as well as similar viruses in future attacks.
SpaceX plans to replace of all their current rockets by the early 2020s with the BFR. Tooling for the main tanks has been ordered and a facility to build the vehicles is under construction; construction of the first BFR is scheduled to begin in the second quarter of 2018. SpaceX has the aspirational goal for initial Mars-bound cargo flights of BFR launching as early as 2022, followed by the first crewed BFR flight one synodic period later, in 2024. Serious development of the BFR began in 2017.
Testing of the BFR is expected to begin with short suborbital hops of the full-scale ship, likely to just a few hundred kilometers altitude and lateral distance.
China has unveiled three-year plans to increase the country’s economic competitiveness by developing “key technologies” in nine industrial sectors, from robotics to railways.
Other areas include smart cars, robotics, advanced shipbuilding and maritime equipment, modern agricultural machinery, advanced medical devices and drugs, new materials, smart manufacturing and machine tools.
The aim is “to make China a powerful manufacturing country” and upgrade the nation’s industrial power through “the internet, big data and artificial intelligence”, the commission said.
To achieve that goal, the agency has laid out specific targets to develop key technologies and guide research and the flow of funds in each sector.
[This article is drawn from Ch. 8: “Pedagogical Love: An Evolutionary Force” in Postformal Education: A Philosophy for Complex Futures.]
“There is nothing more important in this world than radical love” as Paolo Freire told Joe Kincheloe over dinner.
- Joe Kincheloe. Reading, Writing and Cognition. 2006.
And yet, we live in a world of high-stakes testing, league tables for primary schools as well as universities, funding cuts, teacher shortages, mass shootings in schools, and rising rates of depression and suicide among young people.
The most important value missing from education today is pedagogical love.
In “Pedagogical Love: An Evolutionary Force” (Ch. 8 of Postformal Education: A Philosophy for Complex Futures) I explain why love should be at centre-stage in education. I introduce contemporary educational approaches that support a caring pedagogy, and some experiences and examples from my own and others’ practice, ending with some personal reflections on the theme.
Why do we want to educate with and for love? We live in a cynical global world with a dominant culture that does not value care and empathy. We live under the blanket of a dominant worldview that promotes values that are clearly damaging to human and environmental wellbeing. In many ways our world, with its dominance of economic values over practically all other concerns, is a world of callous values. And recently we’ve embarked on a flight from truth.
In the search for truth, the only passion that must not be discarded is love. Truth [must] become the object of increasing love and care and devotion.
- Rudolf Steiner. Metamorphoses of the Soul, Vol. I. 1909.
What a contrast Steiner’s early 20th century statement is to the lack of a love for truth that abounds in fake news in our post-Truth world. Canadian holistic educator, John Miller points to the subjugation of words like love in contemporary educational literature in the following quote:
The word ‘love’ is rarely mentioned in educational circles. The word seems out of place in a world of outcomes, accountability, and standardised tests.
- John Miller. Education and the Soul. 2000.
British educational researcher, Maggie MacLure speaks about the obsession with quantitative language in education in the UK: “objectives, outcomes, standards, high-stakes testing, competition, performance and accountability.” She argues that the resistance to the complexity and diversity of qualitative research that is found in the evidence-based agendas of the audit culture is linked to “deep-seated fears and anxieties about language and desire to control it.” In this context it is not hard to imagine that words like love might create what MacLure calls ontological panic among the educational audit-police.
In spite of these challenges several educational theorists and practitioners emphasise the importance of love—and the role of the heart—in educational settings. If young people are to thrive in educational settings, new spaces need to be opened up for softer terms, such as love, nurture, respect, reverence, awe, wonder, wellbeing, vulnerability, care, tenderness, openness, trust.
Awe, wonder, reverence, and epiphany are drawn forth not by a quest for control, domination, or certainty, but by an appreciative and open-ended engagement with the questions.
- Tobin Hart. Teaching for Wisdom. 2001.
Arthur Zajonc has developed an educational and contemplative process that he calls an “epistemology of love.” Mexican holistic education philosopher, Ramon Gallegos Nava, refers to holistic education as a “pedagogy of universal love.” Other important contributions to bringing pedagogical love into education include Nel Noddings extensive writings on “an ethics of care”, Parker Palmer’s “heart of a teacher” and Tobin Hart’s deep empathy.”
The caring teacher strives first to establish and maintain caring relations, and these relations exhibit an integrity that provides a foundation for everything teacher and student do together.
- Nel Noddings. Caring in Education. 2005.
