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Category: policy

The World Economic Forum suggests we are on the cusp of a Fourth Industrial Revolution driven by ‘ubiquitous automation, big data and artificial intelligence’. The Institute for Public Policy Research, however, says that “despite the growing capability of robots and artificial intelligence (AI), we are not on the cusp of a ‘post-human’ economy.”

IPPR suggests that an estimated 60 percent of occupations have at least 30 percent of activities which could be automated with already-proven technologies. As tasks are automated, work is likely to be redefined, focusing on areas of human comparative advantage over machines.

The CIPD point out that “new technology has changed many more jobs than it has destroyed, and it does not destroy work. Overall, the biggest advanced industrialized economies have between them created over 50 million jobs, a rise of nearly 20 percent, over the past 20 years despite huge economic and technological disruptions.”

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The courts have played a central role in climate change policy, starting with a landmark Supreme Court case that led to the mandatory regulation of greenhouse gases in the United States. How do the courts address climate cases today? Who wins, who loses and what kinds of strategies make a difference in the courtroom?

Researchers at the George Washington University (GW) have published a study in Nature Climate Change that for the first time analyzes all U.S climate change lawsuits over a 26-year period.

“This first-of-a-kind study outlines the types of climate change lawsuits that are more likely to win or lose, and why,” said lead author Sabrina McCormick, Ph.D., MA, an Associate Professor of Environmental and Occupational Health at GW’s Milken Institute School of Public Health (Milken Institute SPH). “Efforts to affect U.S. should consider current trends in the courtroom.”

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A global plastic waste crisis is building, with major implications for health and the environment. Under its so-called “National Sword” policy, China has sharply reduced imports of foreign scrap materials. As a result, piles of plastic waste are building up in ports and recycling facilities across the United States.

In response, support is growing nationally and worldwide for banning or restricting single-use consumer plastics, such as straws and grocery bags. These efforts are also spurred by chilling findings about how micro-plastics travel through oceans and waterways and up the food chain.

I have studied global trade in hazardous wastes for many years and am currently completing a book on the global politics of waste. In my view, today’s unprecedented level of public concern is an opportunity to innovate. There is growing interest in improving in the United States. This means getting consumers to clean and sort recyclables, investing in better technologies for sorting and reusing waste plastics, and creating incentives for producers to buy and use recycled plastic.

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By pure coincidence, the article by Seth Baum was published just 5 days after a small asteroid exploded over early warning Tule station in Greenland.

This paper studies the risk of collision between asteroids and Earth. It focuses on uncertainty in the human consequences of asteroid collisions, with emphasis on the possibility of global catastrophe to human civilization. A detailed survey of the asteroid risk literature shows that while human consequences are recognized as a major point of uncertainty, the studies focus mainly on physical and environmental dimensions of the risk. Some potential human consequences are omitted entirely, such as the possibility of asteroid explosions inadvertently causing nuclear war. Other human consequences are modeled with varying degrees of detail. Direct medical effects are relatively well-characterized, while human consequences of global environmental effects are more uncertain. The latter are evaluated mainly in terms of a global catastrophe threshold, but such a threshold is deeply uncertain and may not even exist. To handle threshold uncertainty in asteroid policy, this paper adapts the concept of policy boundaries from literature on anthropogenic global environmental change (i.e., planetary boundaries). The paper proposes policy boundaries of 100 m asteroid diameter for global environmental effects and 1 m for inadvertent nuclear war. Other policy implications include a more aggressive asteroid risk mitigation policy and measures to avoid inadvertent nuclear war. The paper argues that for rare events like large asteroid collisions, the absence of robust data means that a wide range of possible human consequences should be considered. This implies humility for risk analysis and erring on the side of caution in policy.

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If you’ve been hacked in recent years, odds are you fell for that perfectly crafted phishing message in your email. Even the most mindful individuals can slip up, but Google’s employees have reportedly had a flawless security record for more than a year thanks to a recent policy requiring them to use physical security keys.

Krebs on Security reports that in early 2017, Google started requiring its 85,000 employees to use a security key device to handle two-factor authentication when logging into their various accounts. Rather than just having a single password, or receiving a secondary access code via text message (or an app such as Google Authenticator), the employees had to use a traditional password as well as plug in a device that only they possessed. The results were stellar. From the report:

A Google spokesperson said Security Keys now form the basis of all account access at Google.

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Silicon computer chips have been on a roll for half a century, getting ever more powerful. But the pace of innovation is slowing. Today the U.S. military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced dozens of new grants totaling $75 million in a program that aims to reinvigorate the chip industry with basic research into new designs and materials, such as carbon nanotubes. Over the next few years, the DARPA program, which supports both academic and industry scientists, will grow to $300 million per year up to a total of $1.5 billion over 5 years.

“It’s a critical time to do this,” says Erica Fuchs, a computer science policy expert at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore made the observation that would become his eponymous “law”: The number of transistors on chips was doubling every 2 years, a time frame later cut to every 18 months. But the gains from miniaturizing the chips are dwindling. Today, chip speeds are stuck in place, and each new generation of chips brings only a 30% improvement in energy efficiency, says Max Shulaker, an electrical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. Fabricators are approaching physical limits of silicon, says Gregory Wright, a wireless communications expert at Nokia Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey. Electrons are confined to patches of silicon just 100 atoms wide, he says, forcing complex designs that prevent electrons from leaking out and causing errors. “We’re running out of room,” he says.

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Vivli, which spun out of a policy think tank at Harvard University–affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, is part of a push to encourage drug developers to share trial data—even negative results, findings that show a treatment has no benefit. Companies seeking U.S. regulatory approval for a drug, as well as investigators funded by the National Institutes of Health, must post limited, summary results on ClinicalTrials.gov. But many researchers and policy analysts believe sharing detailed raw data on individual patients, stripped of identifying information, would be valuable. Researchers could confirm that a drug works, look for side effects, or explore new questions.

Vivli aims to ease sharing of anonymized clinical studies.

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I’m not that interested in this on the movie end, because i think most movies already suck, and couldnt really get any worse.

AUDREY HEPBURN DIED in 1993, but in 2013 she nevertheless starred in an advertisement for Galaxy, a type of chocolate bar. She was shown riding a bus along the Amalfi coast before catching the eye of a passing hunk in a convertible. In 2016 Peter Cushing, who died in 1994, reprised his role as the villainous Grand Moff Tarkin in the Star Wars film “Rogue One”. Such resurrections are not new, but they are still uncommon enough to count as news. Yet advances in special effects—and, increasingly, in artificial intelligence (AI)—are making it ever easier to manufacture convincing forgeries of human beings.

In recent months this has led to concern that propagandists will use the technology to generate videos in which political figures appear to say compromising things. A video created by BuzzFeed, a news website, in April shows Barack Obama apparently saying “We’re entering an era in which our enemies can make it look like anyone is saying anything at any point in time,” for example. In May a Belgian political party produced a fake video of Donald Trump saying implausible things about Belgium’s climate policy. In both cases the video looks slightly off, and the voice is provided by an impersonator. But the technology is improving fast, prompting a dozen AI researchers to place bets on whether a fake video will disrupt America’s midterm elections later this year. (Tim Hwang, a Harvard academic, is overseeing the wager.)

Whatever happens in the arena of fake news, the same techniques are sure to revolutionise fiction of a different kind, in the form of film and television. In future, actors need not be creatures of flesh and blood, but could, like so many other things in an increasingly digitised world, exist as nothing more than long strings of 1s and 0s. Such digital actors would sit quietly in digital storage systems until their services were needed—there would be no need for luxury trailers, chefs and make-up people.

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