AI will create 'useless class' of human, predicts bestselling historian. It is hard to miss the warnings. In the race to make computers more intelligent than us, humanity will summon a demon, bring forth the end of days, and code itself into oblivion. Instead of silicon assistants we’ll build silicon assassins. The doomsday story of an evil AI has been told a thousand times. But our fate at the hand of clever cloggs robots may in fact be worse - to summon a class of eternally useless human beings. At least that is the future predicted by Yuval Noah Harari, a lecturer at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, whose new book says more of us will be pushed out of employment by intelligent robots and on to the economic scrap heap.
Harari rose to prominence when his 2014 book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, became an international bestseller. When a book is a hit, the publisher wants more. And the nightmares. Harari calls it “the rise of the useless class” and ranks it as one of the most dire threats of the 21st century. Former Facebook VP says social media is destroying society with ‘dopamine-driven feedback loops’ A former Facebook executive is making waves after he spoke out about his “tremendous guilt” over growing the social network, which he feels has eroded “the core foundations of how people behave by and between each other.” Chamath Palihapitiya began working for Facebook in 2007 and left in 2011 as its vice president for user growth. When he started, he said, there was not much thought given to the long-term negative consequences of developing such a platform. “I think in the back, deep, deep recesses of our minds, we kind of knew something bad could happen,” said Palihapitiya, 41.
“But I think the way we defined it was not like this.” business technology the-switch false after3th true That changed as Facebook’s popularity exploded, he said. But the ability to connect and share information so quickly — as well as the instant gratification people give and receive over their posts — has resulted in some negative consequences, according to Palihapitiya. EU declares war on plastic waste | Environment. The EU is waging war against plastic waste as part of an urgent plan to clean up Europe’s act and ensure that every piece of packaging on the continent is reusable or recyclable by 2030. Following China’s decision to ban imports of foreign recyclable material, Brussels on Tuesday launched a plastics strategy designed to change minds in Europe, potentially tax damaging behaviour, and modernise plastics production and collection by investing €350m (£310m) in research. Speaking to the Guardian and four other European newspapers, the vice-president of the commission, Frans Timmermans, said Brussels’ priority was to clamp down on “single-use plastics that take five seconds to produce, you use it for five minutes and it takes 500 years to break down again”.
In the EU’s sights, Timmermans said, were throw-away items such as drinking straws, “lively coloured” bottles that do not degrade, coffee cups, lids and stirrers, cutlery and takeaway packaging. “Let’s study this,” Timmermans said. Why the war on plastic might actually be won. Public Shaming and Even Prison for Plastic Bag Use in Rwanda. The Designer of the iPhone Worries That His Grandkids Will Think He’s the Guy ‘That Destroyed Society’ Tony Fadell helped design the iPod, the iPhone and the iPod. Not that his work rests easily with him. “I worry what my grandkids are going to think,” he told Anderson Cooper at Monday’s Mindfulness in America Summit. Will it be “He’s the guy that destroyed society,” he wondered aloud, or will he be revered? The impact of the iPhone was not something he—or his team—could have imagined. They were worried about taking on Nokia and BlackBerry, two competitors the iPhone has basically buried.
But this success has come with “unintended consequences,” Fadell said, like the way social platforms so relentlessly hijack our minds. That’s what makes our current technological moment so different from earlier ones. And advertisers used to have no clue who their customer was. If tech companies really loved their customers like they say they do, then they’d give them the tools to set better boundaries with their products, he added. A kind of digital quantified self would be huge, he said. The Great Awakening. ROSE: The Relevance of Science Education - Department of Teacher Education and School Research.
ROSE is an international comparative research project meant to shed light on factors of importance to the learning of science and technology (S&T) – as perceived by the learners. Key international research institutions and individuals work jointly on the development of theoretical perspectives, research instruments, data collection and analysis. ROSE, The Relevance of Science Education, is an international comparative project meant to shed light on affective factors of importance to the learning of science and technology. Key international research institutions and individuals work jointly on the development of theoretical perspectives, research instruments, data collection and analysis.
The target population is students towards the end of secondary school (age 15). Sowing the seeds of ROSE. The lack of relevance of the S&T curriculum is probably one of the greatest barriers for good learning as well as for interest in the subject. Why aren't there more women engineers? The leaky pipeline The first thought is to take a look at what goes on in schools and universities. The American example is significant and has the advantage of being well studied. The WebCaspar database of the National Science Foundation provides accurate statistical data that are the subject of regular analysis. In the United States, women are well represented in the field of scientific studies: in 2005, 45% of graduates in mathematics and 52% of chemistry graduates were women.
But in 2007, they obtained only 22.4% of master’s degrees and 20.8% of doctoral degrees. Clemencia Cosentino, director of the Program for Evaluation and Equity Research (Urban Institute, Washington DC), has worked for years on this “severe under-representation.” College dropouts, low enrollment in master’s programs, and higher abandonment rates at the doctoral level: the U.S. The profession and how it is perceived But other factors contribute to the demotivation of girls.