Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: business – Page 248

This marks the seventh year that the particle accelerator has been in operation.

At 12:17 p.m. on Friday, March 30, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN was switched on once again, making 2018 the seventh year that the world’s largest particle accelerator has been in operation. It is also excitingly the fourth year running now that the LHC will have achieved 13 TeV collision energy.

Over the past four months, much maintenance has been conducted on the LHC, but with the work now completed the ATLAS experiment has begun a glorious new year as the Large Hadron Collider is now back in the business of circulating proton beams, as ATLAS report.

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NVIDIA Corporation NVDA continues to gain traction in Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology with the help of several partnerships. Most recently, the graphic chip maker partnered with Adobe Systems Incorporated ADBE as part of which its graphics processing units (GPUs) will power up the latter’s AI toolkit, Sensei.

The partnership is anticipated to improve Adobe’s services for Creative and Experience Cloud customers and developers. That means, it will improve the performance as well as speed of Adobe’s Sensei.

The companies believe the collaboration will help them in targeting a new audience of developers, data scientists and partners for Sensei, thereby providing scope of business opportunities to both.

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The march of AI into the workplace calls for trade-offs between privacy and performance. A fairer, more productive workforce is a prize worth having, but not if it shackles and dehumanises employees. Striking a balance will require thought, a willingness for both employers and employees to adapt, and a strong dose of humanity.

ARTIFICIAL intelligence (AI) is barging its way into business. As our special report this week explains, firms of all types are harnessing AI to forecast demand, hire workers and deal with customers. In 2017 companies spent around $22bn on AI-related mergers and acquisitions, about 26 times more than in 2015. The McKinsey Global Institute, a think-tank within a consultancy, reckons that just applying AI to marketing, sales and supply chains could create economic value, including profits and efficiencies, of $2.7trn over the next 20 years. Google’s boss has gone so far as to declare that AI will do more for humanity than fire or electricity.

Such grandiose forecasts kindle anxiety as well as hope. Many fret that AI could destroy jobs faster than it creates them. Barriers to entry from owning and generating data could lead to a handful of dominant firms in every industry.

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Many asteroids are rich in minerals, metals and water, making them potential life support systems for humans venturing deep into the solar system.

“Asteroids contain all the materials necessary to enable human activity,” says Peter Stibrany, chief business developer and strategist of California-based Deep Space Industries (DSI). “Just those near Earth could sustain more than 10bn people.”

Moreover, their relatively small mass means their gravitational field is weak, so in this respect, at least, they are much easier than larger bodies such as the moon to land on and leave, he argues.

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The U.S. Air Force is considering Orbital ATK’s Next Generation Launcher under its Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle program. What does this new launch vehicle look like? How tall will it be? What will it capable of? To find the answers to these questions, SpaceFlight Insider spoke with one of the officials responsible for the new booster’s development.

SpaceFlight Insider spoke to Orbital ATK’s Mark Pieczynski, the Dulles, Virginia-based company’s vice-president of Business Development for Orbital ATK’s Flight Systems Group.

SFI: Thanks for taking the time to talk to us about NGL’s inclusion in the USAF’s Evolved Expendable Vehicle program. Can you provide our readers with a bit of background about you company’s latest offering.

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Space has suddenly become big in New Zealand, but Rocket Lab is just one example of what is starting to look like exponential growth in commercial activity. Business consultant and self-confessed space junkie Kevin Jenkins looks into how things are shaping up.

One space narrative is about disappointment. The 1950s and 1960s were about possibilities, and landing on the Moon seemed to prove that the science fiction of the 20th century really was just history written before it happened. But the promise of space seemed to peter out. The Apollo moon programme came to look more like a peak or end-point, rather than the trial run for Mars some in the space programme had hoped it would be.

After Apollo, “space” seemed to shift back to being more of a popular culture theme. For example, the famous song, album and movie Space is the Place is by one of my favourite jazz weirdos, Sun Ra, who was adamant he came from Saturn. Space became a dominant meme in pop and rock music too, as well as a mainstay in novels and films.

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Perfect vision is great. But like any advantage it comes with limitations. Those with ease don’t develop the same unique senses and strengths as someone who must overcome obstacles, people like Lana Awad, a neurotech engineer at CTRL-labs in New York, who diagnosed her own degenerative eye disease with a high school science textbook as a teen in Syria and went on to teach at Harvard University.

Though they see themselves as clear leaders, visionaries with all the obvious advantages—like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, for example—can be blind in their way, lacking the context needed to guide if they don’t recognize their counterintuitive limitations. This is problematic for humanity because we’re all relying on them to create the tools that increasingly rule every aspect of our lives. The internet is just the start.

Tools that will meld mind and machine are already a reality. Neurotech is a huge business with applications being developed for gaming, the military, medicine, social media, and much more to come. Neurotech Report projected in 2016 that the $7.6 billion market could reach $12 billion by 2020. Wired magazine called 2017, “a coming-out year for the brain machine interface (BMI).”

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