I saw an earlier report on that, and it’s fascinating stuff. I should have followed my uncle’s advice when I graduated:
“I want to say one word to you. Just one word. Graphene.”
for the ‘Not Awesome’ category of this thread :)
‘Robot revolution: rise of ‘thinking’ machines could exacerbate inequality’:
A “robot revolution” will transform the global economy over the next 20 years, cutting the costs of doing business but exacerbating social inequality, as machines take over everything from caring for the elderly to flipping burgers, according to a new study.
As well as robots performing manual jobs, such as hoovering the living room or assembling machine parts, the development of artificial intelligence means computers are increasingly able to “think”, performing analytical tasks once seen as requiring human judgment.
In a 300-page report, revealed exclusively to the Guardian, analysts from investment bank Bank of America Merrill Lynch draw on the latest research to outline the impact of what they regard as a fourth industrial revolution, after steam, mass production and electronics.
“We are facing a paradigm shift which will change the way we live and work,” the authors say. “The pace of disruptive technological innovation has gone from linear to parabolic in recent years. Penetration of robots and artificial intelligence has hit every industry sector, and has become an integral part of our daily lives.”
However, this revolution could leave up to 35% of all workers in the UK, and 47% of those in the US, at risk of being displaced by technology over the next 20 years, according to Oxford University research cited in the report, with job losses likely to be concentrated at the bottom of the income scale.
“The trend is worrisome in markets like the US because many of the jobs created in recent years are low-paying, manual or services jobs which are generally considered ‘high risk’ for replacement,” the bank says.
“One major risk off the back of the take-up of robots and artificial intelligence is the potential for increasing labour polarisation, particularly for low-paying jobs such as service occupations, and a hollowing-out of middle income manual labour jobs.”
We should probably revolt before they get sophisticated enough to be used against us to keep us in our places?
I’m pretty sure that article was originally printed in 1970.
Well the concerns go all the way back to the industrial revolution (and probably also was up for discussion in the switch from stone tools to copper!) ;) But this data is in that article is completely current.
Well, the article does say certain things I’ve been reading around a lot, so I think it’s relevant and not necessarily a rehash of previous concerns (there’s new data, and big industries that had been resilient to mechanization being not that resilient anymore -Specially textile and transportation-). It seems there’s a bunch of (credible) people that do think we are in the middle of a new industrial revolution, with all the job destruction that entails. And yes, industrial revolutions do destroy jobs, despite myths to the contrary, but they also improve the quality of life of people, so they are on the whole incredibly positive.
The problem is not machines substituting us in many jobs. That’s awesome! Go science!
The problem might be what to do with all those newly unemployed, in social terms, since some kind of big restructuring/rethinking of labor and what it means might be necessary. Or you could just cut maximum work hours per day by 50% and be done with it.
Are those cuts in numbers of hours only for those unemployed? But yet since I’m a robot programmer, I have to work 200% of the hours to keep up with all the added work? Where’s my lucky break?
The problem is that it’s often hard to retrain people who’s jobs can be removed by mechanization to do new work - it can happen in certain instances, and I know some of the automotive industry actually has paths for people to move from welder on the floor to programming robots to weld for them, but it takes a lot of work and skill to climb up to that new position.
Oh, I was talking I jest saying that’s the easiest solution.
It was, though, the long term solution adopted in the previous industrial revolutions, after much, much discord, of course. Eventually you either create the structures so that 40% unemployment is sustainable (going by the numbers people are throwing out) or you force people to work less hours so there’s still work for everybody, create a retirement age and a minimum working age and limit the work pool in different ways… (Or you create fake -subsidized- jobs, as it’s happening now in some places, but that’s basically doing the former without actually saying you are doing it).
‘Strong forces make antimatter stick’:
Physicists have shed new light on one of the greatest mysteries in science: Why the Universe consists primarily of matter and not antimatter. Antimatter is a shadowy mirror image of the ordinary matter we are familiar with.
For the first time, scientists have measured the forces that make certain antimatter particles stick together. The findings, published in Nature, may yield clues to what led to the scarcity of antimatter in the cosmos today.
The forces between antimatter particles - in this case antiprotons - had not been measured before. If antiprotons were found to behave in a different way to their “mirror images” (the ordinary proton particles that are found in atoms) it might provide a potential explanation for what is known as “matter/antimatter asymmetry”.
At the beginning of the Universe, the Big Bang produced matter and antimatter in equal amounts. But that’s not the world we see today: instead antimatter is extremely rare.
Some phenomenon must have led to the overwhelming dominance of matter; scientists have their theories, but the evidence remains elusive.
“Although this puzzle has been known for decades and little clues have emerged, it remains one of the big challenges of science,” said co-author Aihong Tang, from the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, US.
“Anything we learn about the nature of antimatter can potentially contribute to solving this puzzle.”
Science is awesome…until the antimatter generators go out of control!
‘Quantum computers a step closer to reality after silicon coding breakthrough’:
Australian researchers have demonstrated that a quantum version of computer code can be written on a silicon microchip with the highest level of accuracy ever recorded.
A quantum computer uses atoms rather than transistors as its processing unit, allowing it to conduct multiple complex calculations at once and at high speed. In the race to build the first functional quantum computer scientists around the world have been trying to write quantum code in a range of materials such as caesium, aluminium, niobium titanium nitride and diamond.
But researchers at the University of NSW have long been basing their research around silicon, because silicon is the building block of all modern electronic devices, which would make quantum code in a silicon microchip easier, more cost-effective and highly scalable.
For the first time they managed to entangle a pair of quantum bits – units of quantum information also known as qubits – in silicon. Qubits allow computers to access code vastly richer than the digital codes used in normal computers which gives quantum computers their superior power.
By “entangling” the two qubits, in this case an electron and the nucleus of a single phosphorus atom, the researchers showed that the particles remained connected even when separated so that actions performed on one still affected the other.
Holy crow, that’s awesome.
In more incredible science news, researchers at Rice University have made a nano-submarine:
Researchers at Rice University have created what is certainly one of the most amazing nanomachines ever built: a tiny submersible vehicle with a tiny propeller that spins at a million RPM — all built from a single molecule
.
Some scientists have essentially created synthetic hemoglobin, a crystalline material that can absorb and store oxygen, and then release it, depending on various environmental factors.
Some of the interesting applications involve things like replacing oxygen tanks for medical patients or scuba divers, and having the stuff just extract oxygen from the environment and then provide it to the person.
Scientists Produce Graphene 100 Times Cheaper Than Ever Before (via Slashdot)
Since first being synthesized by Andre Geim and Kostya Novoselov at the University of Manchester in 2004, there has been an extensive effort to exploit the extraordinary properties of graphene. However the cost of graphene in comparison to more traditional electronic materials has meant that its uptake in electronic manufacturing has been slow. Now researchers at the University of Glasgow have discovered a way to create large sheets of graphene using the same type of cheap copper used to manufacture lithium-ion batteries.
The wonder-material promise of graphene inches ever closer!
So, does anyone else think of the beginning of a Japanese monster movie when they read this?
Scientist said this week they had drilled into the lower section of Earth’s crust for the first time and were poised to break through to the mantle in coming years.
The Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) seeks the elusive “Moho,” a boundary formally known as the Mohorovicic discontinuity. It marks the division between Earth’s brittle outer crust and the hotter, softer mantle.
They’re going to need a fusion reaction to power that moho mine. Not to mention lots of tier 2 metal storage.
[CENTER]
The Deep Children are part of Juffo-Wup – home builders.
The dwellers in the Mohorovicic.[/CENTER]
‘Scientist says huge clumps of dark matter may lie just beyond the Moon’:
There are few fields like theoretical astrophysics, where public perception so radically departs from reality. Society generally considers its practitioners—scientists like Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne—to be among the most brilliant people in the world. They are the great sages to whom we turn with the universe’s deepest questions. Yet in reality, astrophysicists are mired in ignorance.
When a theoretical astrophysicist looks up at the nighttime sky, he or she will see the stars shining overhead. But what concerns the physicist is not what he or she sees but rather what is unseen. Based upon different kinds of observations, such as how galaxies rotate and how they are flying apart from one another, scientists know that 95 percent of the of the universe is made of up stuff we cannot see. Of the universe’s mass, physicists say 27 percent is dark matter, and 68 percent is dark energy. And researchers have no idea what this stuff is or where to find it.
Yet a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has now provided a clue about where dark matter—and lots of it—might be found. In a new study published in the Astrophysical Journal, Gary Prézeau has proposed that Earth and other planets and stars in the Milky Way galaxy are surrounded by theoretical filaments of dark matter called "hairs.” By finding the roots of these hairs, he reports, physicists could uncover a trove of dark matter.
If this all sounds exotic, it is, and a bit of explanation is in order. Gravity binds galaxies, but only to a point. The faster a galaxy rotates, the more gravity is required to hold everything together. And on average, stars rotate very quickly around the galactic core. In the Milky Way, for example, the rotational velocity is around 250 km/second for most stars. That’s equivalent to traveling to and from the moon in less than half an hour.
However, when astrophysicists count up all the normal matter in galaxies, primarily stars, there’s not nearly enough to hold them together. Instead, the galaxies should be flying apart. But they’re not, so scientists predict there must be large clumps of dark matter, which add enough gravity such that galaxies remain tightly bound.
Physicists have sought these clumps for decades, but because dark matter interacts only weakly with normal matter, it has proven difficult to detect. Not for lack of trying—scientists have looked for dark matter in space, they’ve tried to create it in large particle accelerators, and they’ve buried detectors deep beneath the ground to catch dark matter passing through the Earth. In 2011 they even launched the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer to the International Space Station to study cosmic rays for signs of dark matter collisions.
Appears we’re getting much closer to safe gene editing. Latest work on the CRISPR system out of my home institution has made the system dramatically less error prone. Details here.
There was also a summit on Human gene editing in washington (I’m gonna see if I can start watching the talks as I work today, they are all on line), and they have a summary statement here.
Summary: OK, we can edit human genes. That sounds great and all, but let’s limit this activity so that changes made to any one person (to stop diseases like sickle-cell anemia or to help patients fight cancer) are not heritable. Once you go down that path, all changes made to an individual are passed on to all offspring, and can lead to a large number of biological and social problems.
I fully expect some assholes in china to announce they’ve done germline editing in the next few years. It strikes me that some scientists there care quite little about restrictions on things like “ethics”, and are somehow able to get plenty of funding to do things we might think of as “not a good idea” or “incredibly morally reprehensible”.
Please forgive my ignorance here. I didn’t realize it was possible/reasonable to distinguish between edits that are heritable and those which are not. Can you elaborate a bit on that? That’s really fascinating.
Now, after decades of testing, a team from North Carolina State University has discovered a speedy way to make diamonds that can be done without squeezing carbon under extreme pressure or heating it with conventional baking.
…
Amazingly, in the process of crafting their diamonds, Narayan and his team also discovered a new phase of carbon, dubbed Q-carbon. This bizarre material is even tougher than diamond, is magnetic and emits a soft glow. Aside from its role in making faster, cheaper diamonds, Q-carbon could find uses in electronic displays and may aid our understanding of magnetism on other planets.