Lifeboat Foundation

O’Rourke soon started his own board, TacoLand, which was freewheeling and largely about punk music. “This was the counterculture: Maximum Rock & Roll[magazine], buying records by catalog you couldn’t find at record stores,” he said.

When he was younger, he was arrested on drunk-driving charges and played in a punk band. Now 46, he still skateboards.

Interestingly I played in Punk Rock bands in New Orleans, and used CDC’s BO2k to show my friend KJ that Southwest Research’s network was not safe. I also used it in Austin to show my friend Jacob Grimes’ boss that his network was not safe. It was a handy tool for hackers and security researchers back in the day. Texans know all too much about it. This gave Beto major cool points in my book. Hacktivismo still continues today with people like Johnny Long, and I would hope me too. I loved the Ninja Strike Force back in the day.

Continue reading “Beto O’Rourke’s secret membership in America’s oldest hacking group” »

So how should companies begin to think about ethical data management? What measures can they put in place to ensure that they are using consumer, patient, HR, facilities, and other forms of data appropriately across the value chain—from collection to analytics to insights?

We began to explore these questions by speaking with about a dozen global business leaders and data ethics experts. Through these conversations, we learned about some common data management traps that leaders and organizations can fall into, despite their best intentions. These traps include thinking that data ethics does not apply to your organization, that legal and compliance have data ethics covered, and that data scientists have all the answers—to say nothing of chasing short-term ROI at all costs and looking only at the data rather than their sources.

In this article, we explore these traps and suggest some potential ways to avoid them, such as adopting new standards for data management, rethinking governance models, and collaborating across disciplines and organizations. This list of potential challenges and remedies is not exhaustive; our research base was relatively small, and leaders could face many other obstacles, beyond our discussion here, to the ethical use of data. But what’s clear from our research is that data ethics needs both more and sustained attention from all members of the C-suite, including the CEO.

It is scheduled to be completed by 2050.

Tokyo’s Metropolitan Government plans to build a high-tech, sustainable city on reclaimed land in its bay area — Tokyo Bay eSG. Announced in April 2021, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government is clearing the decks for action to make the city carbon-neutral and better able to withstand future climate and health crises.

Continue reading “Tokyo builds an eco-friendly high-end technology city on the bay” »

Were you unable to attend Transform 2022? Check out all of the summit sessions in our on-demand library now! Watch here.

Editorial Disclosure: The author of this article has a business relationship with James Phare, CEO and founder of Neural Alpha.

What does sustainability actually mean for organizations? Can it be measured, and if yes, how so? Often, these are obvious questions with less-than-obvious answers, even for sustainability and environmental, social and governance (ESG) professionals like James Phare.

Title: Strong AI: Why we should be concerned about something nobody knows how to build.
Synopsis: At the moment, nobody fully knows how to create an intelligent system that rivals or exceed human capabilities (Strong AI). The impact and possible dangers of Strong AI appear to concern mostly those futurists that are not working in day-to-day AI research. This in turn gives rise to the idea that Strong AI is merely a myth, a sci fi trope and nothing that is ever going to be implemented. The current state of the art in AI is already sufficient to lead to irrevocable changes in labor markets, economy, warfare and governance. The need to deal with these near term changes does not absolve us from considering the implications of being no longer the most intelligent beings on this planet.
Despite the difficulties of developing Strong AI, there is no obvious reason why the principles embedded in biological brains should be outside of the range of what our engineering can achieve in the near future. While it is unlikely that current narrow AI systems will neatly scale towards general modeling and problem solving, many of the significant open questions in developing Strong AI appear to be known and solvable.

Talk held at ‘Artificial Intelligence / Human Possibilities’ event as adjunct to the AGI17 conference in Melbourne 2017.

Continue reading “Joscha Bach — Strong AI: Why we should be concerned” »

Were you unable to attend Transform 2022? Check out all of the summit sessions in our on-demand library now! Watch here.

As the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry is undergoing a staggering growth in the creation of data, organizations need to place a strong focus on data governance best practices.

That is one of the findings of a new study of the AEC sector that reveals it has experienced a 31.2% compound growth rate in data storage since 2017. The amount of new data being captured or created is staggering, but getting full value from it depends on how the data is managed, stored, accessed and protected.

An international team of scientists, led by the University of Leeds, have assessed how robotics and autonomous systems might facilitate or impede the delivery of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Their findings identify key opportunities and key threats that need to be considered while developing, deploying and governing robotics and autonomous systems.

The key opportunities robotics and autonomous systems present are through autonomous task completion, supporting human activities, fostering innovation, enhancing remote access and improving monitoring. Emerging threats relate to reinforcing inequalities, exacerbating environmental change, diverting resources from tried-and-tested solutions, and reducing freedom and privacy through inadequate governance.

We’re live now, on Space Renaissance YouTube channel, with Wes Faires, giving a lecture on space law:

The Working Group on Space Resources under the United Nations Committee on Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (UN COPUOS), presents an opportunity for a legally binding instrument to develop under the auspices of the United Nations Committee on Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (UNOOSA), and do so in a manner favorable to space resource utilization for the private sector. The intended result of the Working Group, as stated its 5 years workplan, is to conclude discussions on the development of space resources followed with possible adoption by the United Nations General Assembly as a dedicated resolution or other action. This presentation draws a parallel to a similar scenario with regard to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), where a working group on Deep Sea-Bed resources, executed via specific legal channels within the United Nations, led to a legally binding instrument: The 1994 Agreement on Implementation, resulting in a modification of the international framework governing ocean floor minerals.
The avenue utilized for the execution of the 1994 Agreement on Implementation for UNCLOS provides a course for legally binding instrument to develop via the Working Group on Space Resources. Such an instrument could serve to interpret and elaborate on ambiguities within the Outer Space Treaty framework, while avoiding any parallels to the commercially harmful aspects of the top-down governance structure embedded within the International Seabed Authority.

Continue reading “Toward an Acceptable Framework for Off-Planet Resource Utilization, with Wes Faires” »

A Korean company hopes to build a floating city Oceanix Busan. Seasteading is seen as a means to address climate-change-induced sea-level rise, as well as a sociology experiment.

But libertarian ideas are not the sole reasoning behind seasteading and floating cities. A prototype floating community is planned on the water next to Busan, South Korea. For the company that is creating it, Oceanix, it is about addressing the coastal community climate challenge of rising sea levels. Rather than building dikes and sea walls to hold back the ocean, Oceanix is offering a city that floats. So instead of increased sunshine day flooding along the US eastern seaboard that inundates Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Charleston, Norfolk, Hampton Roads and other Chesapeake Bay communities quite regularly these days, there would be cities that ride the surface of the ocean rather than be flooded by it.

It’s not like people haven’t been living in floating accommodation for decades. Houseboat communities here in Toronto have been around for a number of years. I visited one of these homes a few years ago and was surprised to see the quality of accommodation and the lifestyle it supported. Today, there are people living permanently on cruise ships that travel the globe. And in The Netherlands, boats and retired ships moored along its many canals have been turned into permanent homes often featured in HGTV’s House Hunters International. But it is in low-lying coastal areas like Bangladesh, The Maldives, and many Pacific island nations where the floating city is seen as a climate change solution for encroaching seas.

Continue reading “Oceanix Busan in South Korea Could Be The World’s First Floating City” »