Impact Lab – Page 556 – A Laboratory of the Future Human Experience

AI, Machine Learning, Science & Technology News

Machine learning goes beyond theory to beat human poker champs

July 26, 2019

How to deal with a breakdown in theoretical support in machine learning? Researchers from Carnegie Mellon and Facebook describe winning many hands against the world’s top poker players by inventing smart search strategies to counter a lack of theoretical math used in most game-playing AI.

Among the many achievements of machine learning in recent years, some of the most striking are the victories of the machine against human players in games, such as Google’s DeepMind group’s conquest of Go in 2016. In such milestones, researchers are often guided by theoretical math that says there can be an optimal strategy to be found, given a good algorithm and enough compute.

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AI, Artificial Intelligence, Employment, Science & Technology News

The answer to the A.I. jobs apocalypse is all about geography

July 25, 2019

The spread of intelligence machines will worsen geographic inequality, unless we take proactive measures

Historically, the worst times for labor have been those characterized by both worker-replacing technological change and slow productivity growth. If A.I. technologies turn out to be as brilliant as some of us think, we can expect some workers to see their incomes vanish in the process — even as new jobs are created elsewhere in the economy. That is what has happened in recent years, and it is also what happened during the most tumultuous years of industrialization.

If current trends continue in the coming years, the divide between the automation winners and losers will become even wider. And there are good reasons to think that it will. Looking at the automatability of existing jobs, we have seen that most occupations that require a college degree remain hard to automate, while many unskilled jobs — like those of cashiers, food preparers, call center agents, and truck drivers — seem set to vanish, though how soon is highly uncertain. But there are also unskilled jobs that remain outside the realms of A.I. Many in-person service jobs that center on complex social interactions — like those of fitness trainers, hairstylists, concierges, and massage therapists — will remain safe from automation.

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Augmented Reality, Employment, Science & Technology News, Virtual Reality

Walmart is using VR to help decide who should get promotions

July 25, 2019

Walmart, the largest private employer in the U.S. with 1.5 million workers, is using virtual reality to help find candidates for management positions in all 4,600 stores, the Wall Street Journal reported. The VR headsets and the assessment program were designed by Strivr, a Menlo Park, Calif.-based company.

Walmart’s idea for a VR assessment was rooted in seeing how its workers might respond to challenging situations and how they prioritize different tasks—things that would be hard to identify in an interview. So far, 10,000 employees have undergone the VR test as part of an initiative to identify potential high performers and cut back the overall number of managers in each store. This is part of a larger plan to change how many higher paid managers are overseeing teams and to give its frontline workers more decision-making power in their jobs, according to an earlier report in the WSJ.

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Biotech, Energy, Engineering, Green Friendly, Science & Technology News

South Korean tech breakthrough could change biofuels forever

July 25, 2019

Researchers in South Korea have made a major breakthrough in using bacteria to sustainably and efficiently produce biofuels. The team of scientists from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) report that they have developed a new kind of engineered microorganisms that are capable of producing greater volumes of the fatty acids that make up biodiesel than ever before.

A team of researchers from KAIST released a study detailing their discovery last month in the scientific journal Nature Chemical Biology. The paper, titled “Engineering of an oleaginous bacterium for the production of fatty acids and fuels” details the development of these record-breaking microorganisms which could prove to be a key breakthrough in the effort to develop sustainable, bio-based energy sources to replace dirtier, finite fossil fuels.

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Great New Product, Housing, Science & Technology News, Solar Energy

Cooling/heating window film captures and releases solar energy

July 24, 2019

The MOST window film keeps rooms from heating up during the day, but warms them at night(Credit: Yen Strandqvist/Chalmers University of Technology )

A couple of years ago we heard about the MOlecular Solar Thermal (MOST) system, in which solar energy is stored in a liquid medium, then later released as heat. Now, the technology has been applied to a clear film that could be applied to the inside of windows in energy-efficient buildings.

Developed at Sweden’s Chalmers University, the MOST film incorporates a norbornadiene–quadricyclane molecule. This causes the transparent polymer film to take on an orangey-yellow color when not being directly exposed to sunlight.

Once the sun rises in the morning and its rays strike the material, however, much of the sunlight’s solar energy is absorbed by the molecule. More specifically, the molecule captures some of the incoming photons, causing it to isomerize – this means that it temporarily becomes another type of molecule, with exactly the same atoms but in a different arrangement.

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App, government, Law Enforcement, Legal Issues, privacy, Science & Technology News

Revealed: This is Palintir’s top-secret user manual for cops

July 24, 2019

Motherboard obtained a Palantir user manual through a public records request, and it gives unprecedented insight into how the company logs and tracks individuals.

Palantir is one of the most significant and secretive companies in big data analysis. The company acts as an information management service for Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, corporations like JP Morgan and Airbus, and dozens of other local, state, and federal agencies. It’s been described by scholars as a “secondary surveillance network,” since it extensively catalogs and maps interpersonal relationships between individuals, even those who aren’t suspected of a crime.

Palantir software is instrumental to the operations of ICE, which is planning one of the largest-ever targeted immigration enforcement raids this weekend on thousands of undocumented families. Activists argue raids of this scale would be impossible without software like Palantir. But few people outside the company and its customers know how its software works or what its specific capabilities and user interfaces are.

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Agriculture, Blockchain, Farming, Food, Science & Technology News

Blockchains’s impact on food and farming, explained

July 24, 2019

1. Is it possible to track where food comes from?

Several companies have launched services allowing shoppers to see a product’s journey from farm to fork, but they often depend on retailers agreeing to be transparent.

When you pop into a store to buy fresh fruit, vegetables or meat, it’s common for the packaging to reveal which country it is from. Some upmarket brands go further by offering stories about the farm and the conditions where the food was cultivated.

Tracking an item step-by-step through the manufacturing process can be hard — and, sometimes, even manufacturers and retailers themselves aren’t sure about a product’s journey.

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Analysis, Big Problems, Children, Science & Technology News

World’s population will continue to grow and will reach nearly 10 billion by 2050

July 23, 2019

There has been tremendous growth in the size of the world’s population in the last half century. Global population was around 3 billion in 1960. By 1987, in less than three decades, it had surpassed 5 billion and there were around 7.6 billion people in the world in 2018.

This growth varies greatly across regions. Since 1960, the largest relative growth has taken place in Sub-Saharan Africa where the population expanded from 227 million in 1960 to more than 1 billion in 2018—a nearly fivefold increase. The second largest growth over the period can be seen in Middle East and North Africa, where the population increased more than 4 times, from 105 million to 449 million.

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Automation, Employment, Report, Science & Technology News

The next big inequality crisis

July 24, 2019

Think polarization and inequality are bad now? Buckle up: big cities are poised to get bigger, richer and more powerful — at the expense of the rest of America, a new report by McKinsey Global Institute shows.

Why it matters: McKinsey’s analysis of 315 cities and more than 3,000 counties shows only the healthiest local economies will be able to successfully adapt to disruptions caused by the next wave of automation. Wide swaths of the country, especially already-distressed rural regions, are in danger of shedding more jobs.

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Employment, Human Behavior, Science & Technology News

This is why you probably have a work wife or work husband

July 23, 2019

Nothing forms a bond like working closely with someone. But why are certain work friendships especially significant?

The modern workday takes up a lot of your time. A typical workday runs from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., and the average commute hovers at about an hour a day total. That means that the majority of your time awake each day is spent at work—or getting there.

So it’s no surprise that you often form close relationships with colleagues, even to the point where you consider someone your “office spouse” or “work spouse.” According to a survey by Simply Hired, more than 50% of female employees and 44% of male employees said that they had a work spouse at some point in their careers. The topics they discussed with these coworkers ranged from other colleagues and work projects to problems at home, or sometimes even their sex lives.

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NASA, Science & Technology News, Space, Space Flight, SpaceX

Everyone’s going back to the moon. But why?

July 22, 2019

The Deep Space Gateway, seen here in an artist’s rendering, would be a spaceport in lunar orbit. Boeing

As the 50th anniversary of the first Apollo landing approaches, a host of countries are undertaking lunar missions. What’s behind the new space race?

At 2.51am on Monday 15 July, engineers at India’s national spaceport at Sriharikota will blast their Chandrayaan-2 probe into orbit around the Earth. It will be the most ambitious space mission the nation has attempted. For several days, the four-tonne spacecraft will be manoeuvred above our planet before a final injection burn of its engines will send it hurtling towards its destination: the moon.

Exactly 50 years after the astronauts of Apollo 11 made their historic voyage to the Sea of Tranquillity, Chandrayaan-2 will repeat that journey – though on a slightly different trajectory. After the robot craft enters lunar orbit, it will gently drop a lander, named Vikram, on to the moon’s surface near its south pole. A robot rover, Pragyan, will then be dispatched and, for the next two weeks, trundle across the local terrain, analysing the chemical composition of soil and rocks.

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Engineering, Environment, Green Friendly, New Discoveries, Science & Technology News

Hydrogel uses sunlight to harvest fresh water from the sea

July 22, 2019

The research team (led by Tan Swee Ching, at right) with samples of the hydrogel

In many arid coastal regions, a great quantity of valuable fresh water is lost into the atmosphere every day, as it evaporates from the surface of the ocean. This situation prompted scientists to create a new hydrogel that’s highly effective at capturing moisture from the sea air, and then releasing it as fresh water.

Developed by a team at the National University of Singapore, the zinc-based material is claimed to be over eight times more absorbent than existing drying agents such as silica gel and calcium chloride – it can absorb more than four times its dry weight in water. Additionally, unlike the case with traditional drying agents, no electricity is required to get that water back out of it, plus the gel can be reused over 1,000 times.

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