LUXEMBOURG (Reuters) — Luxembourg abolished fares for trains, trams and buses on Saturday in what the government said was a bid to tackle road congestion and pollution, as well as supporting low earners.
Masoumeh Ebtekar, President Hassan Rouhani’s deputy for women’s affairs and the highest-ranking woman in the government, was at least the seventh Iranian official to test positive.
Regeneron will work with the U.S. government to develop antibody treatments for the new coronavirus from China, disclosing Tuesday an expansion of a partnership that previously yielded an experimental drug cocktail for the Ebola virus.
The Tarrytown, New York-based biotech is one of roughly a dozen drugmakers now working on treatments for the coronavirus that emerged late last year in Wuhan, China. Most are smaller companies unlikely to possess sufficient funds to run large-scale tests, although Johnson & Johnson and Gilead have announced initial efforts in recent weeks.
The biotech hopes to replicate its past success in quickly advancing a treatment for Ebola. But, as that experience showed, proving a new antiviral isn’t easy.
Continue reading “Regeneron partners with US government to develop coronavirus treatment” »
According to this CTV News article, survivors and families of an MK Ultra brainwashing program run by Dr. Ewen Cameron at McGill University in Montreal in the 1950s and 1960s have banded together to bring the horrors of this program more fully into the public eye.
They are planning a class action lawsuit against the provincial and federal government, an initiative which lawyer Alan Stein feels optimistic about:
“I believe we can claim moral damages as a result of the experiments when Dr. Cameron used these people as guinea pigs.”—lawyer Alan Stein
But in recent years, Americans — Silicon Valley leaders included — have put too much faith in the private sector to ensure U.S. global leadership in new technology. Now we are in a technology competition with China that has profound ramifications for our economy and defense — a reality I have come to appreciate as chairman of two government panels on innovation and national security. The government needs to get back in the game in a serious way.
We can’t win the technology wars without the federal government’s help.
While robotics and automation create a plethora of opportunities for skilled labor, they substitute many jobs of unskilled labor. Philips’ automated shaver factory in the Netherlands employs one-tenth of the workforce of its factory in China that makes the same shavers. Such developments accentuate inequality and pose severe social pressure in developed countries, which would need to be addressed by government in the years to come.
Technology can complement humans but it can also eliminate their jobs.
Lilac Nachum
Continue reading “Asia’s economies must learn to accommodate rise of robots” »
Handicaps: weak private sector, Soviet-style bureaucracy. Helps: Great STEM education — and history.
More than Western governments and even more than China’s, the Russian government is trying to position itself as a facilitator of innovation in artificial intelligence, the technology that Vladimir Putin said will lead whoever masters it to global advantage. Russia seeks “to go our own way,” said Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, borrowing Lenin’s 1917 words about various anti-capitalist ideologies to describe his government’s 21st-century attempt to shake the world.
Those who doubt that this uniquely state-heavy approach can succeed would do well to remember that today’s internet and mobile telecommunications grew out of Pentagon-funded research, that the Soviet Union led the Space Race for a decade, and that U.S. astronauts currently ascend to orbit atop Russian rockets.
China is deploying robots and drones to remotely disinfect hospitals, deliver food and enforce quarantine restrictions as part of the effort to fight coronavirus.
Chinese state media has reported that drones and robots are being used by the government to cut the risk of person-to-person transmission of the disease.
There are 780 million people that are on some form of residential lockdown in China. Wuhan, the city where the viral outbreak began, has been sealed off from the outside world for weeks.
I am not naive — I’ve worked as an aerospace engineer for 35 years — I realize that PR can differ from reality. However, this indication gives me some hope:
“The draft recommendations emphasized human control of AI systems. “Human beings should exercise appropriate levels of judgment and remain responsible for the development, deployment, use, and outcomes of DoD AI systems,” it reads.”
This is far from a Ban on Killer Robots, however, given how many advances are being overturned in the US federal government (example: the US will now use landmines, after over 30 years of not employing them in war), this is somewhat encouraging.
Continue reading “Pentagon to Adopt Detailed Principles for Using AI” »
Superb piece.
“But, I say we should pursue science and technology because, like Prometheus, the fires of invention burn bright, and although we may not always know where it leads us, a world darkened by the fear of treading upon the unknown, is unimaginable.”
Continue reading “We cannot predict with any precision where technology will lead us” »
