Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: policy – Page 32

Possible Paths to Artificial General Intelligence

Yoshua Bengio (MILA), Irina Higgins (DeepMind), Nick Bostrom (FHI), Yi Zeng (Chinese Academy of Sciences), and moderator Joshua Tenenbaum (MIT) discuss possible paths to artificial general intelligence.

The Beneficial AGI 2019 Conference: https://futureoflife.org/beneficial-agi-2019/

After our Puerto Rico AI conference in 2015 and our Asilomar Beneficial AI conference in 2017, we returned to Puerto Rico at the start of 2019 to talk about Beneficial AGI. We couldn’t be more excited to see all of the groups, organizations, conferences and workshops that have cropped up in the last few years to ensure that AI today and in the near future will be safe and beneficial. And so we now wanted to look further ahead to artificial general intelligence (AGI), the classic goal of AI research, which promises tremendous transformation in society. Beyond mitigating risks, we want to explore how we can design AGI to help us create the best future for humanity.

We again brought together an amazing group of AI researchers from academia and industry, as well as thought leaders in economics, law, policy, ethics, and philosophy for five days dedicated to beneficial AI. We hosted a two-day technical workshop to look more deeply at how we can create beneficial AGI, and we followed that with a 2.5-day conference, in which people from a broader AI background considered the opportunities and challenges related to the future of AGI and steps we can take today to move toward an even better future.

Free Virtual Event!

Space is no longer a remote and special place – it is becoming a part of our life and economy.

In parallel with technological advances such as space travel, lunar exploration and next-generation spacecraft, the number of businesses that utilize space has grown. Space has become an indispensable part of our lives.

The Nikkei Virtual Global Forum “The Future of Space 2022” will explore the possibilities of space, from Earth’s orbit to the Moon, Mars and beyond, and the global benefits and impacts on the economy, business and society. We will also discuss such issues as international collaboration, sustainable space utilization and policy responses.

Self-driving cars roll around Austin

AUSTIN (KXAN) — Walking around Austin, you may see something surprising — self-driving cars rolling around the roads.

Earlier this year, autonomous vehicle technology company Argo AI launched its driverless operation in Austin. Argo AI public policy and government relations manager Sly Majid said these cars are key to the future of transport.

“Autonomous vehicle technology is incredible,” he said. “The vehicle is doing the dynamic driving tasks; the vehicle is the driver of the car.”

Dr Asha M George, DrPH — Building Defenses Against Bio-Terrorism And (Re)Emerging Infectious Disease

Dr. Asha M. George, DrPH (https://biodefensecommission.org/teams/asha-m-george-drph/) is Executive Director, Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense, which was established in 2014 to assess gaps in and provide recommendations to improve U.S. biodefense. The Panel determines where the United States is falling short of addressing biological attacks and emerging and reemerging infectious diseases.

Dr. George is a public health security professional whose research and programmatic emphasis has been practical, academic, and political. She served in the U.S. House of Representatives as a senior professional staffer and subcommittee staff director at the House Committee on Homeland Security in the 110th and 111th Congress. She has worked for a variety of organizations, including government contractors, foundations, and non-profits. As a contractor, she supported and worked with all Federal Departments, especially the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Health and Human Services.

Dr. George also served on active duty in the U.S. Army as a military intelligence officer and as a paratrooper and she is a decorated Desert Storm Veteran.

Dr. George holds a Bachelor of Arts in Natural Sciences from Johns Hopkins University, a Master of Science in Public Health from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (in Parasitology and Laboratory Practice), and a Doctorate in Public Health (with a focus on Public Health Policy and Security Preparedness) from the University of Hawaii at Manoa. She is also a graduate of the Harvard University National Preparedness Leadership Initiative.

SpaceX Chopsticks Lift Booster 7 with 33 Raptor Engines

SpaceX is lifting Booster 7 onto the orbital launch mount via the Chopsticks. All 33 Raptor engines are installed on the Super Heavy prototype. Booster 7 will be conducting static fire tests at the orbital launch pad in Starbase, Texas.

If you are interested in using footage captured by this stream, please review our content use policy: https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/content-use-policy/

How Scientists Revived Organs in Pigs an Hour After They Died

Yes, it does. Although OrganEx helps revitalize pigs’ organs, it’s far from a deceased animal being brought back to life. Rather, their organs were better protected from low oxygen levels, which occur during heart attacks or strokes.

“One could imagine that the OrganEx system (or components thereof) might be used to treat such people in an emergency,” said Porte.

The technology could also help preserve donor organs, but there’s a long way to go. To Dr. Brendan Parent, director of transplant ethics and policy research at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, OrganEx may force a rethink for the field. For example, is it possible that someone could have working peripheral organs but never regain consciousness? As medical technology develops, death becomes a process, not a moment.

Watchdog groups call review at US nuclear lab ‘sham’ process

The U.S. government is planning to review the environmental effects of operations at one of the nation’s prominent nuclear weapons laboratories, but its notice issued Friday leaves out federal goals to ramp up production of plutonium cores used in the nation’s nuclear arsenal.

The National Nuclear Security Administration said the review—being done to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act—will look at the potential environmental effects of alternatives for operations at Los Alamos National Laboratory for the next 15 years.

That work includes preventing the spread and use of nuclear weapons worldwide and other projects related to national security and global stability, the notice said.

China surpasses the US in scientific research volume and quality, study claims

China produced an average of 407,181 scientific publications annually, overtaking the US’s 293,434 journal articles, says research.

China has overcome the US to take the top spot globally for “high impact” studies and volume of scientific research, according to a report published by Japan’s National Institute of Science and Technology Policy (NISTP).

China currently publishes the most scholarly papers each year, followed by the US and Germany, reported The Guardian.

“China is one of the top countries in the world in terms of both the quantity and quality of scientific papers,” Shinichi Kuroki of the Japan Science and Technology Agency told Nikkei Asia.

New-and-Improved Content Moderation Tooling

To help developers protect their applications against possible misuse, we are introducing the faster and more accurate Moderation endpoint. This endpoint provides OpenAI API developers with free access to GPT-based classifiers that detect undesired content — an instance of using AI systems to assist with human supervision of these systems. We have also released both a technical paper describing our methodology and the dataset used for evaluation.

When given a text input, the Moderation endpoint assesses whether the content is sexual, hateful, violent, or promotes self-harm — content prohibited by our content policy. The endpoint has been trained to be quick, accurate, and to perform robustly across a range of applications. Importantly, this reduces the chances of products “saying” the wrong thing, even when deployed to users at-scale. As a consequence, AI can unlock benefits in sensitive settings, like education, where it could not otherwise be used with confidence.

/* */