Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Friday 27 February 2015

The European Union Times


Posted: 27 Feb 2015 12:53 AM PST


Artificial intelligence (AI) needs to develop human emotion if humanity is to avoid the potential existential threat posed by machines capable of consciousness, a leading scientist has warned.
Computers that are “human-like” will be capable of empathy and moral reasoning, therefore reducing the risk of AI turning against humanity, he said.
Murray Shanahan, professor of cognitive robotics at Imperial College London, cautioned against “capitalist forces” developing AI without any sense of morality, arguing it could lead to potentially “uncontrollable military technologies.”
Shanahan’s comments follow warnings from leading scientists and entrepreneurs, including Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, and Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk.
Gates admitted last month that he doesn’t “understand why some people are not concerned” by the threat of AI.
Speaking to the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge last week, Shanahan argued that AI development faces two options.
Either a potentially dangerous AI is developed – with no moral reasoning and based on ruthless optimization processes – or scientists develop AI based on human brains, borrowing from our psychology and even neurology.
“Right now my vote is for option two, in the hope that it will lead to a form of harmonious co-existence [with humanity],” Shanahan said.
AI based on the human brain would not be possible without first mapping the organ – a task the Human Connectome Project (HCP) is undertaking and aims to complete by late 2015.
However, once the map is complete, it could take years to analyze all the data gathered.
Experts disagree as to how long it will be before AI is successfully developed – or if it is even possible.
Estimates range from 15 years to 100 years from now, with Shanahan believing that by the year 2100, AI will be “increasingly likely but still not certain.”
Whether the technology is helpful or harmful to humans depends on which of Shanahan’s two options becomes the driving force behind its development.
There is a fear that current economic and political systems are leading to the development of option one – a machine with no moral reasoning.
“Capitalist forces will drive incentive to produce ruthless maximization processes. With this there is the temptation to develop risky things,” Shanahan said.
For Shanahan, risky things include AI which could rig elections, subvert markets, or become dangerous military technology.
“Within the military sphere governments will build these things just in case the others do it, so it’s a very difficult process to stop.”
Shanahan’s comments echo fears expressed by Gates and Musk last year, both of whom were influenced by Nick Bostrom’s book “Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies,” he said.
In his book ‘Superintelligence: Paths, dangers, strategies,’ Nick Bostrom, a professor of philosophy at Oxford University – argues that if machine brains surpass humans in intelligence, they could eventually replace us as the dominant species on earth.
“As the fate of the gorillas now depends more on us humans than on the gorillas themselves,” Bostrom writes, “so the fate of our species then would come to depend on the actions of the machine superintelligence.”
After reading Bostrom’s book, Musk warned that the threat posed by AI could be greater than nuclear weapons. He donated $10 million to the Future of Life Institute in January, a global research program aimed at keeping AI beneficial to humanity.
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Posted: 26 Feb 2015 09:28 AM PST
Iranian navy blowing up a ‘mock’ US aircraft carrier.
Iran has staged naval war games in an important sea channel, including an attack on a mock US warship. Missiles were also fired from the coast around the Strait of Hormuz, which sees a quarter of all sea-transported oil pass through it.
The drills were conducted by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, which were named Prophet 9.
The exercises saw dozens of gunboats making a beeline towards a built-to-scale American aircraft carrier, before bombarding it with cruise missiles and ballistic missiles. Iranian helicopters also joined in the action, firing two cruise missiles at the 202-meter aircraft carrier.
“American aircraft carriers are very big ammunition depots housing a lot of missiles, rockets, torpedoes and everything else,” Navy chief Admiral Ali Fadavi said on state television, as reported by AP. He added that a direct missile strike on a vessel such as the aircraft carrier could set off a large secondary explosion.
The Guard’s chief commander, General Mohammad Ali Jafari added that the aircraft carrier had been specially-built last April in order to be destroyed.
“The Americans, and the entire world, know that the American Navy is one of our targets, and it will take us 50 seconds to destroy every US warship,” Jafari added, the Jerusalem Post reported.
Iranian gunboats also carried out other exercises during the drills, such as laying sea mines and shooting down a drone. Reports also stated that Tehran fired surface-to-sea missiles, which can travel more than 5km and can avoid radar detection. Iran regularly carries out naval war games in the region, though this is the first time that a mock US aircraft carrier has been used.


At one point, a camera from state TV panned across a banner which read: “If the Americans are ready to be buried at the bottom of the waters of the Persian Gulf – so be it,” a quote from Iran’s first Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Reuters reported.
Tehran has repeatedly said its defense doctrine is based on deterrence and poses no threat against other countries. It views the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf as its backyard and says it has a legitimate claim in looking to expand its influence there.
Iran is keen to assert its influence within the Persian Gulf given the latter’s economic and political importance. Tehran has often said that it is prepared to block the Strait of Hormuz if it ever came under military attack.










Given around 25 percent of all the world’s oil, which is transported by sea, travels through the passage, any disruption could lead to a steep hike in oil prices and disrupt global financial markets.
Jafari said the drills send a “message of [Iran’s] might” to “extraterritorial powers,” a reference to the United States.
Meanwhile, Ali Larijani who attended the drills and is also the Iranian parliament’s speaker, said Iran would keep on spending to boost its defenses.
“With attention to the situation in the region, we have noticeably expanded the defense budget of the armed forces to ensure the stable security of the region,” Larijani told a news conference before the exercises, according to Fars News.
In December, Iran conducted six days of drills in the Strait of Hormuz in which it tested warships and submarines, while also testing a suicide drone able to hit aerial and ground targets, as well as ships.
The drone, which is known as Yasir, is equipped with state-of-art, light cameras for reconnaissance. It can fly for eight hours with a range of 200km and reach an altitude of 4,500 meters.
Brigadier General Abdolrahim Mousavi, Chief of the Joint Headquarters of the Army said the purpose of the drills in December was to convey a message of peace and friendship to neighboring states and underscore the defensive nature of Iran’s military doctrine.
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Posted: 26 Feb 2015 09:03 AM PST
New report says most supermarket chickens contaminated with lethal poisoning bug.
Public concerns are rising in UK as the latest results of food safety tests by the Food Standards Agency show that three-quarters of fresh chickens on sales in supermarkets and butchers are contaminated with potentially lethal food poisoning, campylobacter.
According to the agency, the worst contamination rates were found in Asda, where eight in 10 birds tested positive for the bug and nearly a third of fresh whole chickens were heavily contaminated.
FSA went on noting that across all retailers nearly one in five samples were highly contaminated. 7 per cent of packaging on chickens was also contaminated, meaning the bug could be spread to other food in shopping baskets.
The results are taken from samples collected between February and November 2014 in three quarterly sets of tests.
Although the campylobacter bug is killed by thorough cooking, around 280,000 people a year in the UK are made ill by it, and it is thought that around 100 die.
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Posted: 26 Feb 2015 08:48 AM PST


West behind overthrow of Ukrainian government, former congressman says.
The overthrow of the legally elected government of Ukraine was “was not only supported by U.S. and EU governments — much of it was actually planned by them,” former congressman Dr. Ron Paul said.
In his weekly column posted Sunday, Dr. Paul blamed western interventionism for the death and destruction in Ukraine’s ongoing civil war.
“Looking back at the events that led to the overthrow it is clear that without foreign intervention Ukraine would not be in its current, seemingly hopeless situation,” he wrote. “By the end of 2013 [before the coup], Ukraine’s economy was in ruins. The government was desperate for an economic bailout and then-president Yanukovych first looked west to the U.S. and EU before deciding to accept an offer of help from Russia.”
That led to division within the country, but as Dr. Paul points out, if it wasn’t for western intervention, the problem may have solved itself eventually instead of escalating into a full-blown civil war.
“The protests at the end of 2013 grew more dramatic and violent and soon a steady stream of U.S. and EU politicians were openly participating, as protesters called for the overthrow of the Ukrainian government,” Dr. Paul added. “Senator John McCain made several visits to Kiev and even addressed the crowd to encourage them.”
“Imagine if a foreign leader like Putin or Assad came to Washington to encourage protesters to overthrow the Obama administration!”
The protests, which were funded by billionaire activist George Soros, ultimately led to the overthrow of the government and the installation of politicians handpicked by the U.S. State Department.
Soros, who actively influences the politics of Russia-linked countries through various front groups, admitted his involvement in Ukraine during an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria.
“First on Ukraine, one of the things that many people recognized about you was that you during the revolutions of 1989 funded a lot of dissident activities, civil society groups in eastern Europe and Poland, the Czech Republic. Are you doing similar things in Ukraine?” Zakaria asked Soros.
“Well, I set up a foundation in Ukraine before Ukraine became independent of Russia, and the foundation has been functioning ever since and played an important part in events now,” Soros responded.
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Posted: 26 Feb 2015 08:31 AM PST
The newly-spotted black hole questions the rate at which they grow.
Astronomers have discovered a black hole that is 12 billion times more massive than the sun.
The new finding, described in a study published in science weekly Nature on Wednesday, could challenge a generally accepted theory about how black holes are formed.
The supermassive black hole, estimated to have been formed only 875 million years after the big bang, is the largest black hole ever spotted for that period, when the universe was just six percent of its current age.
This questions the rate at which the black holes grow as they do so relatively slowly by vacuuming gas and other stars that get too close.
“Forming such a large black hole so quickly is hard to interpret with current theories,” said Dr. Fuyan Bian, from the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Australian National University, and author of the paper that appeared in the journal.
As they absorb mass, black holes create radiation pressure, which pushes away the mass, setting a limit for growth.
The fact that the newly-found black hole has so much mass questions the limit factor.
“How do you build such a big black hole in such a short time?” asks Xue-Bing Wu of China’s Peking University, the lead author of the study.
The team that spotted the black hole used telescopes in China, Hawaii, Arizona, and Chile.
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Posted: 26 Feb 2015 07:55 AM PST


It’s time to engage in extra-marital sex without fear of prosecution, South Korea’s constitutional court has ruled, effectively ending a 62-year ban. Condom stocks soared immediately after the ruling.
South Korea, until Thursday, was one of the few non-Muslim countries which struggled with the law on this matter. North Korea and Taiwan are among the others.
The Constitutional Court believes the law is an attack on personal freedoms. This means anyone tried since October 21, 2008, when the court had upheld the ban, could get a second shot at justice, while current charges can be thrown out.
The number of charged stands at 5,400 people in the period between November 2008 and January 2015, according to the prosecutor’s office.
The most that South Koreans had previously risked was two years in prison, but that figure probably sounds less impressive than the number caught in the act and prosecuted since 1985. That stands at 53,000. Prison sentences, though, turned out to be quite rare.
The lifting of the ban has begun to take effect on certain areas of life straight off. Condom manufacturer Unidus Corp. benefited from it greatly, as its stocks went up by a whopping 15 percent.
The law prohibiting adultery has been the topic of heated debate ever since its inception in 1952, owing in part to South Korea’s constantly changing social trends.
Now the tide appears to have turned the way of the people, with a big win for extra-marital sex. Seven judges out of nine ruled in favor. Six are needed to kill a piece of legislation.
“Even if adultery should be condemned as immoral, state power should not intervene in individuals’ private lives,” said presiding justice Park Han-chul.
“[The law] excessively restricts citizens’ basic rights, such as the right to determine sexual affairs,” the court also stated.
This was the fifth time the constitutional right of the state has been under review in the matter. What opened the case up again were 17 complaints since 2009 by individuals charged with adultery. Their cases were to be dropped pending the outcome of the court’s deliberations.
Adultery once led to harsher punishment only in the event of the accusation being filed during divorce proceedings. The case would be dropped in the event of the aggrieved spouse electing not to pursue it. With time, this increasingly coincided with financial payouts. Therefore, legal experts in South Korea no longer see the adultery ban as a truly useful tool.
And the view of the law’s overall inappropriateness extends today even to more conservative members of society.
“Adultery must be censured morally and socially, but such a law is inappropriate in a modern society,” Ko Seon-ju with the civic group Healthy Families told AFP.
“It used to be an effective legal tool to protect female rights, but equal rights legislation has improved… “Adultery is an issue that should be dealt with through dialogue between the partners, not by law,” she also said.
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Posted by Roberto Abraham Scaruffi at 11:25