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In the late 1970s, a team of karate-loving physicists decided to perform an experiment inspired by their collective passion for martial arts. The group was made up of physicist Michael Feld, a brown belt who liked to illustrate the physics of karate via live demonstrations to his classes at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Ronald McNair, future astronaut and fifth-degree black belt; and undergraduate Stephen Wilk. “The picture of a karate expert breaking stout slabs of wood and concrete with his bare hand is a familiar one,” begins a 1979 paper by Feld, McNair, and Wilk. The trio wanted to know: How can a bare hand demolish a solid...... Read Full article on HadNews

A top research institute created with the lofty goals of investigating the ‘big-picture questions’ and assessing what the future holds for humanity..will now not play a part in that future. The Future of Humanity Institute was founded in 2005 by Professor Nick Bostrom and a select set of researchers from Oxford University. The Institute published numerous academic research papers on subjects like AI safety, existential and catastrophic risk, AI governance, digital minds, biological risk, human enhancement, moral uncertainty, effective altruism, grand futures, long-term, and ethical theory. While the official website used to be filled w...... Read Full article on HadNews

Today, almost a quarter of Australians are digitally excluded. This means they miss out on the social, educational and economic benefits online connectivity provides. In the face of this ongoing “digital divide”, countries are now talking about a future of inclusive artificial intelligence (AI). However, if we don’t learn from current problems with digital exclusion, it will likely spill over into people’s future experiences with AI. That’s the conclusion from our new research published in the journal AI and Ethics. What is the digital divide? The digital divide is a well-documented social schism. People on the wrong side of it face difficu...... Read Full article on HadNews

There is a growing consensus that environmental problems, particularly the effects of climate change, pose a grave challenge to humanity. Pollution, habitat destruction, intractable waste issues and, for many, deteriorating quality of life should be added to the list. Economic growth is the chief culprit. We forget, though, that environmental impacts are a consequence of per capita consumption multiplied by the number of people doing the consuming. Our own numbers matter. Population growth threatens environments at global, national and regional scales. Yet the policy agenda either ignores human population, or fosters alarm when perf...... Read Full article on HadNews