Science & Technology News – Page 210

AI, Artificial Intelligence, government, Science & Technology News

Elon Musk says all advanced AI development should be regulated, including at Tesla

February 27, 2020

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is once again sounding a warning note regarding the development of artificial intelligence. The executive and founder tweeted on Monday evening that “all org[anizations] developing advance AI should be regulated, including Tesla.”

Musk was responding to a new MIT Technology Review profile of OpenAI, an organization founded in 2015 by Musk, along with Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, Wojciech Zaremba and John Schulman. At first, OpenAI was formed as a non-profit backed by $1 billion in funding from its pooled initial investors, with the aim of pursuing open research into advanced AI with a focus on ensuring it was pursued in the interest of benefiting society, rather than leaving its development in the hands of a small and narrowly-interested few (i.e., for-profit technology companies).

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Elon Musk, Science & Technology News, Space Flight, SpaceX

SpaceX will launch private citizens into orbit

February 27, 2020

SpaceX is planning to send up to four private citizens into space to take a trip around Earth sometime at the end of 2021 or in early 2022. The spaceflight company announced an agreement on Tuesday with Space Adventures, a space tourism business that has helped seven different private citizens take trips to (and from) the International Space Station aboard Russia’s Soyuz rocket and spacecraft.

Space Adventures said the price of the mission will not be disclosed, and the two companies were light on other details, like what kind of preparation the tourists will have to go through. The companies did say Tuesday that the tourists will fly in the human-rated version of SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft and that they will orbit Earth at two to three times the roughly 250-mile height of the ISS.

SpaceX has spent the last few years building and testing out this new version of Dragon as part of a contract with NASA to shuttle astronauts to and from the ISS, after years of using the spacecraft to shuttle cargo to the space station. The private spaceflight company recently completed the second major flight test of the Crew Dragon, as it’s called, which demonstrated the capsule’s ability to escape an exploding rocket.

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Employment, Hot Issues, Latest News, Science & Technology News

Kickstarter employees vote to unionize

February 26, 2020

It’s the latest bid by tech workers to gain more clout.

More tech company workers are unionizing in an attempt to improve their bargaining power. A group of 85 Kickstarter employees have voted to unionize, aligning themselves with a branch of the Office and Professional Employees International Union in New York. The staffers will use their collective bargaining power to push for equal pay, more inclusive hiring, greater transparency from management and more of a say in decisions.

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Employment, Green Friendly, New Viewpoints, Science & Technology News, Trending

The future of work looks like staying out of the office

February 26, 2020

Dozens of studies find remote workers happy and productive. Why not let them be?

It’s 2020: we finally live in the future! Or at least a future—one where broadband Internet connections and portable, reasonably high-powered computing tools are pervasive and widely accessible, even if they aren’t yet universal. Millions of workers, including all of us here at Ars, use those tools to do traditional “office jobs” from nontraditional home offices.

Tens of millions of jobs at all points of the income and skill spectrum are of course not suited to remote work. Doctors, dentists, and countless other healthcare workers of the world will always need to be hands-on with patients, just as teachers need to be in schools, construction workers need to be on building sites, scientists need to be in labs, wait staff need to be in restaurants, judges need to be in court, and hospitality employees need to be in hotels. All of that said, though, many more of the hundreds of different kinds of jobs Americans do can be done off-site than currently are.

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AI, Big Problems, government, Science & Technology News, security

EU introduces AI strategy to build ‘ecosystem of trust’

February 26, 2020

Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission

The European Commission today unveiled a sweeping set of proposals that it hopes will establish the region as a leader in artificial intelligence by focusing on trust and transparency.

The proposals would lead to changes in the way data is collected and shared in an effort to level the playing field between European companies and competitors from the U.S. and China. The EC wants to prevent potential abuses while also building confidence among citizens in order to reap the benefits promised by the technology.

In a series of announcements, EC leaders expressed optimism that AI could help tackle challenges such as climate change, mobility, and health care, along with a determination to keep private tech companies from influencing regulation and dominating the data needed to develop these algorithms.

“We want citizens to trust the new technology,” said Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission. “Technology is always neutral. It depends on what we make with it. And therefore we want the application of these new technologies to deserve the trust of our citizens. This is why we are promoting a responsible human-centric approach to artificial intelligence.”

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Automobiles, Driverless cars, Science & Technology News, Tesla

Hackers stuck a 2-inch strip of tape on a 35-mph speed sign and successfully tricked 2 Teslas into accelerating to 85 mph

February 25, 2020

McAfee researchers were able to trick a Tesla’s autonomous systems.

Researchers at McAfee were able to trick two Teslas into autonomously speeding up by 50 mph.

The researchers stuck a 2-inch strip of tape on a 35-mph speed sign, and the car’s system misread it as 85 mph and adjusted its speed accordingly.

The safety of Tesla’s autopilot features has come under close scrutiny, but CEO Elon Musk has predicted the company will have “feature-complete full self-driving” this year.

It turns out all it takes to fool a Tesla’s camera system is a little tape.

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Children, Food, Science & Technology News, women

Scientists have figured out how to grow breast milk in a lab

February 25, 2020

What if the formula you bought at the store was just bottled breast milk?

First came the prototypes of lab-grown burgers and lab-grown Wagyu beef (or, as the industry calls it, “cultured” meat.) Then came ice cream made with lab-grown dairy proteins. Now, a handful of startups are working on lab-grown breast milk.

Last week, a five-month-old startup called Biomilq announced that it had succeeded in growing two key components found in human milk—lactose and casein—from mammary cells in a bioreactor. They’re looking for a solution to a widespread problem: Breastfeeding is linked to healthy development in children, but the majority of mothers aren’t able to breastfeed for some, if not all, of the recommended six months. Formula, made with nonhuman proteins that can be harder for babies to digest, is an imperfect alternative.

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Aviation, Engineering, Science & Technology News, Wearables

A jetpack company just reached a major milestone in our quest to fly like Iron Man

February 25, 2020

Watch this man fly in a jet-powered suit

(CNN)We may be closer to seeing a real-life Iron Man suit than you think.

The team at Jetman Dubai built a jet-powered wingsuit and say they just reached a major milestone with it — a pilot took off from the ground and then transitioned into a high-altitude flight.

The achievement occurred last Friday, when Jetman pilot Vince Reffett took off from a standing start on the runway at Skydive Dubai in the United Arab Emirates and then flew up to nearly 6,000 feet in altitude. He demonstrated the ability to hover, stop, turn and maneuver.

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AI, Medical Breakthrough, Medicine, new technology, Science & Technology News

AI-formulated medicine to be tested on humans for the first time

February 25, 2020

It took less than a year to develop the drug, which is designed to treat OCD.

A drug designed entirely by artificial intelligence is about to enter clinical human trials for the first time. The drug, which is intended to treat obsessive-compulsive disorder, was discovered using AI systems from Oxford-based biotech company Exscientia. While it would usually take around four and a half years to get a drug to this stage of development, Exscientia says that by using the AI tools it’s taken less than 12 months.

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Analysis, Human Behavior, New Viewpoints, People Making a Difference, Science & Technology News

What would your ‘future self’ want to do?

February 24, 2020

Prepare Yourself, It’s Unlikely To Be Comfortable

An internationally acclaimed keynote speaker & bestselling author, grab a copy of Margie Warrell’s fifth book ‘You’ve Got This! The Life-Changing Power of Trusting Yourself’ (Wiley Publishing)

I attend a lot of conferences and regularly sit on panels. One of the more popular questions I’ve seen asked, and been asked, is “What advice would you give your younger self?”

It’s not a bad question. However, it has limited utility. After all, we can’t wind the clock back and change the decisions we’ve made, the actions we’ve taken, or (often more relevant) those we’ve failed to take. It’s why I believe a more useful question is to consider what advice our “future self”—us in the final chapter of life, with all those years of accumulated wisdom—would want to whisper in our ear if it had the chance.

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AI, Business, Employment, New Viewpoints, Science & Technology News

The Human and machine workforce leading digital transformation

February 24, 2020

When it comes to digital transformation, humans—believe it or not—play an integral role. In fact, companies that make strong use of the combined human/machine workforce have a far greater chance of success in digital transformation. Accenture calls these combined people/bot workspaces “future systems”—systems that seamlessly integrate humans and robots to create business goals that are limitless, agile, and “radically human.” I consider the companies that harness the power of humans and machines will be the ultimate winners of the future of work.

The good news: these systems are already happening. The bad news: only 8% of those surveyed by Accenture seem to be using them right now, despite the fact that revenue growth in future system companies is 50% higher than those in average or laggard adoptees.

If your company has not already implemented some type of combined human/machine workforce, it will be hard—in fact, nearly impossible—to catch up. That’s because the power of AI and machine learning amplifies the skills, insights, and capabilities of leading users to the nth degree.

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2020 Predictions, Architecture, Art, Science & Technology News, Trending

The visual trends that will define 2020

February 24, 2020

The creative industries help to define the look of an era. As much as architecture and literature have an enormous impact, the style and flavour of a decade is primarily decided by the creatives. While that’s a privilege, it is also a responsibility that means creatives must be the ones to constantly push themselves to try new things. After all, nothing’s worse than stagnation.

That’s especially true in the media and marketing world. Too often brands find themselves playing catch-up with the trends being created for younger audiences, instead of working with them collaboratively. That risks alienating savvy millennial and Generation Z consumers, who recognise when they’re being sold to.

In order for marketers and creatives to stay abreast of visual trends,The Drum, in conversation with Adobe Stock and Dentsu in their latest webinar, will draw from Adobe’s 2020 Creative Trends report and explore some of the most important visual trends and sub trends for the year.

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