Lifeboat Foundation

Honesty is the best policy… most of the time. Social norms help humans understand when we need to tell the truth and when we shouldn’t, to spare someone’s feelings or avoid harm. But how do these norms apply to robots, which are increasingly working with humans? To understand whether humans can accept robots telling lies, scientists asked almost 500 participants to rate and justify different types of robot deception.

“I wanted to explore an understudied facet of robot ethics, to contribute to our understanding of mistrust towards emerging technologies and their developers,” said Andres Rosero, Ph.D. candidate at George Mason University and lead author of the study in Frontiers in Robotics and AI. “With the advent of generative AI, I felt it was important to begin examining possible cases in which anthropomorphic design and behavior sets could be utilized to manipulate users.”

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Prefatory Note: Our usual policy at The Threepenny Review is to assign one book to one author. But in this case two of our longtime writers—P. N. Furbank, an essayist, critic, and biographer who lives in London, and Louis B. Jones, a novelist and essayist who lives in the Sierra foothills—both wanted to review the same book. So we let them. We think the results are instructive: not oppositional, not mutually contradictory, but very different approaches to the same subject. We are also pleased that neither Jones nor Furbank trained as a professional philosopher. (After all, philosophical theories, if they bear on reality, should be meaningful to the rest of us.) So here they are—first Jones, then Furbank—commenting on Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, out in the fall of 2012 in both America and England from Oxford University Press.

My stranded trailer in the woods looks onto a clearing where wild sweet pea vies with starthistle, fescue with blue-eye grass and miner’s lettuce, all competing as they’ve done, possibly, since the Sierra first crumbled into soil and started inviting plants to colonize. It is a patch of ground, then, that existed through the geologic ages in the peculiar twilight oblivion of being unwitnessed—until the first Maidu people came along, probably climbing up from the creek below. Before the Maidu, the witnesses of the place were the animals. And now these days I’m here, to substantiate this little clearing’s existence. It’s almost a weary old joke in philosophy, but still a surefire, hard-to-retire joke—that I’m necessary to this clearing’s existence. My mind. The joke, however, is making a serious, small comeback in this century.

The three final algorithms, which have now been released, are ML-KEM, previously known as kyber; ML-DSA (formerly Dilithium); and SLH-DSA (SPHINCS+). NIST says it will release a draft standard for FALCON later this year. “These finalized standards include instructions for incorporating them into products and encryption systems,” says NIST mathematician Dustin Moody, who heads the PQC standardization project. “We encourage system administrators to start integrating them into their systems immediately.”

Duncan Jones, head of cybersecurity at the firm Quantinuum welcomes the development. “[It] represents a crucial first step towards protecting all our data against the threat of a future quantum computer that could decrypt traditionally secure communications,” he says. “On all fronts – from technology to global policy – advancements are causing experts to predict a faster timeline to reaching fault-tolerant quantum computers. The standardization of NIST’s algorithms is a critical milestone in that timeline.”

India has edged past the United Kingdom by delivering more cutting-edge critical technology research during the period between 2019 and 2023, data published by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute on Wednesday (August 28) showed.

The institute updated its critical technology tracker this week by focusing on high-impact research or 10 per cent of the most highly cited papers, as a “leading indicator of a country’s research performance, strategic intent, and potential future science and technology capability”

The tracker covers 64 critical technologies and crucial fields spanning defence, space, energy, the environment, artificial intelligence (AI), biotechnology, robotics, cyber, computing, advanced materials, and key quantum technology areas.

Sometimes leaving well-enough alone is the best policy. Ask Teja Santosh Dandibhotla.

Upset that a paper of his had been retracted from the Journal of Physics: Conference Series, Santosh, a computer scientist at the CVR College of Engineering in Hyderabad, India, contacted us to plead his case. (We of course do not make decisions about retractions, we reminded him.)

Santosh’s article, “Intelligent defaulter Prediction using Data Science Process,” had been pulled along with some 350 other papers in two conference proceedings because IOP Publishing had “uncovered evidence of systematic manipulation of the publication process and considerable citation manipulation.”

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Strengthening Public Health Systems For Healthier And Longer Lives — Dr. Ashwin Vasan, Commissioner, NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

Dr. Ashwin Vasan, MD, PhD is the Commissioner of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (https://www.nyc.gov/site/doh/about/ab…).

Continue reading “Dr. Ashwin Vasan — Commissioner — NYC Dept. of Health & Mental Hygiene — Strengthening Public Health” »