Download or read book Predicted Humans written by Simona Chiodo and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-06-14 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Predicting our future as individuals is central to the role of much emerging technology, from hiring algorithms that predict our professional success (or failure) to biomarkers that predict how long (or short) our healthy (or unhealthy) life will be. Yet, much in Western culture, from scripture to mythology to philosophy, suggests that knowing one’s future may not be in the subject’s best interests and might even lead to disaster. If predicting our future as individuals can be harmful as well as beneficial, why are we so willing to engage in so much prediction, from cradle to grave? This book offers a philosophical answer, reflecting on seminal texts in Western culture to argue that predicting our future renders much of our existence the automated effect of various causes, which, in turn, helps to alleviate the existential burden of autonomously making sense of our lives in a more competitive, demanding, accelerated society. An exploration of our tendency in a technological era to engineer and so rid ourselves of that which has hitherto been our primary reason for being – making life plans for a successful future, while faced with epistemological and ethical uncertainties – Predicted Humans will appeal to scholars of philosophy and social theory with interests in questions of moral responsibility and meaning in an increasingly technological world.
Download or read book The Singularity Is Near written by Ray Kurzweil and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2005-09-22 with total page 992 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Celebrated futurist Ray Kurzweil, hailed by Bill Gates as “the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence,” presents an “elaborate, smart, and persuasive” (The Boston Globe) view of the future course of human development. “Artfully envisions a breathtakingly better world.”—Los Angeles Times “Startling in scope and bravado.”—Janet Maslin, The New York Times “An important book.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer At the onset of the twenty-first century, humanity stands on the verge of the most transforming and thrilling period in its history. It will be an era in which the very nature of what it means to be human will be both enriched and challenged as our species breaks the shackles of its genetic legacy and achieves inconceivable heights of intelligence, material progress, and longevity. While the social and philosophical ramifications of these changes will be profound, and the threats they pose considerable, The Singularity Is Near presents a radical and optimistic view of the coming age that is both a dramatic culmination of centuries of technological ingenuity and a genuinely inspiring vision of our ultimate destiny.
Download or read book Predicting Future Oceans written by William Cheung and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2019-08-17 with total page 584 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Predicting Future Oceans: Sustainability of Ocean and Human Systems Amidst Global Environmental Change provides a synthesis of our knowledge of the future state of the oceans. The editors undertake the challenge of integrating diverse perspectives—from oceanography to anthropology—to exhibit the changes in ecological conditions and their socioeconomic implications. Each contributing author provides a novel perspective, with the book as a whole collating scholarly understandings of future oceans and coastal communities across the world. The diverse perspectives, syntheses and state-of-the-art natural and social sciences contributions are led by past and current research fellows and principal investigators of the Nereus Program network. This includes members at 17 leading research institutes, addressing themes such as oceanography, biodiversity, fisheries, mariculture production, economics, pollution, public health and marine policy. This book is a comprehensive resource for senior undergraduate and postgraduate readers studying social and natural science, as well as practitioners working in the field of natural resources management and marine conservation. - Provides a synthesis of our knowledge on the future state of the oceans - Includes recommendations on how to move forwards - Highlights key social aspects linked to ocean ecosystems, including health, equity and sovereignty
Download or read book The Future of Humanity written by Michio Kaku and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2018-02-20 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The national bestselling author of The God Equation traverses the frontiers of astrophysics, artificial intelligence, and technology to offer a stunning vision of man's future in space, from settling Mars to traveling to distant galaxies. “Amazing … Kaku is in smooth perfect control of it the entire time.” —The Christian Science Monitor We are entering a new Golden Age of space exploration. With irrepressible enthusiasm and a deep understanding of the cutting-edge research in space travel, world-renowned physicist and futurist Dr. Michio Kaku presents a compelling vision of how humanity may develop a sustainable civilization in outer space. He reveals the developments in robotics, nanotechnology, and biotechnology that may allow us to terraform and build habitable cities on Mars and beyond. He then journeys out of our solar system and discusses how new technologies such as nanoships, laser sails, and fusion rockets may actually make interstellar travel a possibility. We travel beyond our galaxy, and even beyond our universe, as Kaku investigates some of the hottest topics in science today, including warp drive, wormholes, hyperspace, parallel universes, and the multiverse. Ultimately, he shows us how humans may someday achieve a form of immortality and be able to leave our bodies entirely, laser porting to new havens in space.
Download or read book Human Activity Recognition and Prediction written by Yun Fu and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-12-23 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a unique view of human activity recognition, especially fine-grained human activity structure learning, human-interaction recognition, RGB-D data based action recognition, temporal decomposition, and causality learning in unconstrained human activity videos. The techniques discussed give readers tools that provide a significant improvement over existing methodologies of video content understanding by taking advantage of activity recognition. It links multiple popular research fields in computer vision, machine learning, human-centered computing, human-computer interaction, image classification, and pattern recognition. In addition, the book includes several key chapters covering multiple emerging topics in the field. Contributed by top experts and practitioners, the chapters present key topics from different angles and blend both methodology and application, composing a solid overview of the human activity recognition techniques.
Download or read book The Next 500 Years written by Christopher E. Mason and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2022-04-12 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An argument that we have a moral duty to explore other planets and solar systems--because human life on Earth has an expiration date. Inevitably, life on Earth will come to an end, whether by climate disaster, cataclysmic war, or the death of the sun in a few billion years. To avoid extinction, we will have to find a new home planet, perhaps even a new solar system, to inhabit. In this provocative and fascinating book, Christopher Mason argues that we have a moral duty to do just that. As the only species aware that life on Earth has an expiration date, we have a responsibility to act as the shepherd of life-forms--not only for our species but for all species on which we depend and for those still to come (by accidental or designed evolution). Mason argues that the same capacity for ingenuity that has enabled us to build rockets and land on other planets can be applied to redesigning biology so that we can sustainably inhabit those planets. And he lays out a 500-year plan for undertaking the massively ambitious project of reengineering human genetics for life on other worlds. As they are today, our frail human bodies could never survive travel to another habitable planet. Mason describes the toll that long-term space travel took on astronaut Scott Kelly, who returned from a year on the International Space Station with changes to his blood, bones, and genes. Mason proposes a ten-phase, 500-year program that would engineer the genome so that humans can tolerate the extreme environments of outer space--with the ultimate goal of achieving human settlement of new solar systems. He lays out a roadmap of which solar systems to visit first, and merges biotechnology, philosophy, and genetics to offer an unparalleled vision of the universe to come.
Download or read book The Uninhabitable Earth written by David Wallace-Wells and published by Tim Duggan Books. This book was released on 2019-02-19 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “The Uninhabitable Earth hits you like a comet, with an overflow of insanely lyrical prose about our pending Armageddon.”—Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New Yorker • The New York Times Book Review • Time • NPR • The Economist • The Paris Review • Toronto Star • GQ • The Times Literary Supplement • The New York Public Library • Kirkus Reviews It is worse, much worse, than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible—food shortages, refugee emergencies, climate wars and economic devastation. An “epoch-defining book” (The Guardian) and “this generation’s Silent Spring” (The Washington Post), The Uninhabitable Earth is both a travelogue of the near future and a meditation on how that future will look to those living through it—the ways that warming promises to transform global politics, the meaning of technology and nature in the modern world, the sustainability of capitalism and the trajectory of human progress. The Uninhabitable Earth is also an impassioned call to action. For just as the world was brought to the brink of catastrophe within the span of a lifetime, the responsibility to avoid it now belongs to a single generation—today’s. LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/E.O. WILSON LITERARY SCIENCE WRITING AWARD “The Uninhabitable Earth is the most terrifying book I have ever read. Its subject is climate change, and its method is scientific, but its mode is Old Testament. The book is a meticulously documented, white-knuckled tour through the cascading catastrophes that will soon engulf our warming planet.”—Farhad Manjoo, The New York Times “Riveting. . . . Some readers will find Mr. Wallace-Wells’s outline of possible futures alarmist. He is indeed alarmed. You should be, too.”—The Economist “Potent and evocative. . . . Wallace-Wells has resolved to offer something other than the standard narrative of climate change. . . . He avoids the ‘eerily banal language of climatology’ in favor of lush, rolling prose.”—Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times “The book has potential to be this generation’s Silent Spring.”—The Washington Post “The Uninhabitable Earth, which has become a best seller, taps into the underlying emotion of the day: fear. . . . I encourage people to read this book.”—Alan Weisman, The New York Review of Books
Download or read book Why and How Humans Trade Predict Aggregate and Innovate written by Maurizio Bovi and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-03-28 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Trading, forecasting, aggregating, and innovating (the Four) are key social interactions in human life at both the individual and aggregate levels. They are part of the human fabric because they stem from mankind’s peculiarities—heterogeneity, inclination to forecast, sociality, and inventiveness. But humans have multifaceted behavior, too. They are capable of having contradictory impulses towards one another, integrating and disintegrating as well as cooperating and dominating, and behaving prosocially and anti-socially. Hence, humans need to organize themselves in order to maintain, improve, and extend their social interactions as well as a safe and ordered life. Crucial intersections emerge naturally—the efficiency of humans’ way of tackling the Four is a joint product of economic systems, institutions, and behaviors. All told, the main idea of this book is to include in a single tour a collection of insights on why and how humans implement the Four. The narrative highlights several connections as well as how key these businesses are as the traveler is escorted through some Four-related behavioral problems and institutional solutions that humans have been, respectively, facing and elaborating over time. Economics students may exploit this book by both inserting what they are learning from textbooks into a wider framework and enjoying some of the hints revealed by the grand social theorizing of giants such as A. Smith and J. Schumpeter. But the proposed tour may also attract outsiders to economics who are curious about disparate economic themes linked to the Four but who wish to gain an overview without engaging in longer readings.
Download or read book Radically Human written by Paul Daugherty and published by Harvard Business Press. This book was released on 2022-04-26 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Technology advances are making tech more . . . human. This changes everything you thought you knew about innovation and strategy. In their groundbreaking book, Human + Machine, Accenture technology leaders Paul R. Daugherty and H. James Wilson showed how leading organizations use the power of human-machine collaboration to transform their processes and their bottom lines. Now, as new AI powered technologies like the metaverse, natural language processing, and digital twins begin to rapidly impact both life and work, those companies and other pioneers across industries are tipping the balance even more strikingly toward the human side with technology-led strategy that is reshaping the very nature of innovation. In Radically Human, Daugherty and Wilson show this profound shift, fast-forwarded by the pandemic, toward more human—and more humane—technology. Artificial intelligence is becoming less artificial and more intelligent. Instead of data-hungry approaches to AI, innovators are pursuing data-efficient approaches that enable machines to learn as humans do. Instead of replacing workers with machines, they're unleashing human expertise to create human-centered AI. In place of lumbering legacy IT systems, they're building cloud-first IT architectures able to continuously adapt to a world of billions of connected devices. And they're pursuing strategies that will take their place alongside classic, winning business formulas like disruptive innovation. These against-the-grain approaches to the basic building blocks of business—Intelligence, Data, Expertise, Architecture, and Strategy (IDEAS)—are transforming competition. Industrial giants and startups alike are drawing on this radically human IDEAS framework to create new business models, optimize post-pandemic approaches to work and talent, rebuild trust with their stakeholders, and show the way toward a sustainable future. With compelling insights and fresh examples from a variety of industries, Radically Human will forever change the way you think about, practice, and win with innovation.
Download or read book Linguistic Structure Prediction written by Noah A. Smith and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-05-31 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major part of natural language processing now depends on the use of text data to build linguistic analyzers. We consider statistical, computational approaches to modeling linguistic structure. We seek to unify across many approaches and many kinds of linguistic structures. Assuming a basic understanding of natural language processing and/or machine learning, we seek to bridge the gap between the two fields. Approaches to decoding (i.e., carrying out linguistic structure prediction) and supervised and unsupervised learning of models that predict discrete structures as outputs are the focus. We also survey natural language processing problems to which these methods are being applied, and we address related topics in probabilistic inference, optimization, and experimental methodology. Table of Contents: Representations and Linguistic Data / Decoding: Making Predictions / Learning Structure from Annotated Data / Learning Structure from Incomplete Data / Beyond Decoding: Inference
Download or read book Surfing Uncertainty written by Andy Clark and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2016 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exciting new theories in neuroscience, psychology, and artificial intelligence are revealing minds like ours as predictive minds, forever trying to guess the incoming streams of sensory stimulation before they arrive. In this up-to-the-minute treatment, philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark explores new ways of thinking about perception, action, and the embodied mind.
Download or read book Feelings and Emotions written by Antony S. R. Manstead and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-04-05 with total page 506 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher Description
Download or read book Evolution Gone Wrong written by Alex Bezzerides and published by Harlequin. This book was released on 2021-05-18 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An unforgettable journey through this twisted miracle of evolution we call ‘our body.’” —Spike Carlsen, author of A Walk Around the Block From blurry vision to crooked teeth, ACLs that tear at alarming rates and spines that seem to spend a lifetime falling apart, it’s a curious thing that human beings have beaten the odds as a species. After all, we’re the only survivors on our branch of the tree of life. The flaws in our makeup raise more than a few questions, and this detailed foray into the many twists and turns of our ancestral past includes no shortage of curiosity and humor to find the answers. Why is it that human mothers have such a life-endangering experience giving birth? Why are there entire medical specialties for teeth and feet? And why is it that human babies can’t even hold their heads up, but horses are trotting around minutes after they’re born? In this funny, wide-ranging and often surprising book, biologist Alex Bezzerides tells us just where we inherited our adaptable, achy, brilliant bodies in the process of evolution.
Download or read book Attention predictions and expectations and their violation attentional control in the human brain written by Simone Vossel and published by Frontiers Media SA. This book was released on 2015-05-20 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the burdened scenes of everyday life, our brains must select from among many competing inputs for perceptual synthesis - so that only the most relevant receive full attention and irrelevant (distracting) information is suppressed. At the same time, we must remain responsive to salient events outside our current focus of attention - and balancing these two processing modes is a fundamental task our brain constantly needs to solve. Both the physical saliency of a stimulus, as well as top-down predictions about imminent sensations crucially influence attentional selection and consequently the response to unexpected events. Research over recent decades has identified two separate brain networks involved in predictive top-down control and reorientation to unattended events (or oddball stimuli): the dorsal and ventral fronto-parietal attention systems of the human brain. Moreover, specific electrophysiological brain responses are known to characterize attentional orienting as well as the processing of deviant stimuli. However, many key questions are outstanding. What are the exact functional differences between these cortical attention systems? How are they lateralised in the two hemispheres? How do top-down and bottom-up signals interact to enable flexible attentional control? How does structural damage to one system affect the functionality of the other in brain damaged patients? Are there sensory-specific and supra-modal attentional systems in the brain? In addition to these questions, it is now accepted that brain responses are not only affected by the saliency of external stimuli, but also by our expectations about sensory inputs. How these two influences are balanced, and how predictions are formed in cortical networks, or generated on the basis of experience-dependent learning, are intriguing issues. In this Research Topic, we aim to collect innovative contributions that shed further light on the (cortical) mechanisms of attentional control in the human brain. In particular, we would like to encourage submissions that investigate the behavioural correlates, functional anatomy or electrophysiological markers of attentional selection and reorientation. Special emphasis will be given to studies investigating the context-sensitivity of these attentional processes in relation to prior expectations, trial history, contextual cues or physical saliency. We would like to encourage submissions employing different research methods (psychophysical recordings, neuroimaging techniques such as fMRI, MEG, EEG or ECoG, as well as neurostimulation methods such as TMS or tDCS) in healthy volunteers or neurological patients. Computational models and animal studies are also welcome. Finally, we also welcome submission of meta-analyses and reviews articles that provide new insights into, or conclusions about recent work in the field.
Download or read book Human Compatible written by Stuart Jonathan Russell and published by Penguin Books. This book was released on 2019 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A leading artificial intelligence researcher lays out a new approach to AI that will enable people to coexist successfully with increasingly intelligent machines.
Download or read book Mapping and Sequencing the Human Genome written by National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 1988-01-01 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is growing enthusiasm in the scientific community about the prospect of mapping and sequencing the human genome, a monumental project that will have far-reaching consequences for medicine, biology, technology, and other fields. But how will such an effort be organized and funded? How will we develop the new technologies that are needed? What new legal, social, and ethical questions will be raised? Mapping and Sequencing the Human Genome is a blueprint for this proposed project. The authors offer a highly readable explanation of the technical aspects of genetic mapping and sequencing, and they recommend specific interim and long-range research goals, organizational strategies, and funding levels. They also outline some of the legal and social questions that might arise and urge their early consideration by policymakers.
Download or read book The Fourth Industrial Revolution written by Klaus Schwab and published by Crown Currency. This book was released on 2017-01-03 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: World-renowned economist Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, explains that we have an opportunity to shape the fourth industrial revolution, which will fundamentally alter how we live and work. Schwab argues that this revolution is different in scale, scope and complexity from any that have come before. Characterized by a range of new technologies that are fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds, the developments are affecting all disciplines, economies, industries and governments, and even challenging ideas about what it means to be human. Artificial intelligence is already all around us, from supercomputers, drones and virtual assistants to 3D printing, DNA sequencing, smart thermostats, wearable sensors and microchips smaller than a grain of sand. But this is just the beginning: nanomaterials 200 times stronger than steel and a million times thinner than a strand of hair and the first transplant of a 3D printed liver are already in development. Imagine “smart factories” in which global systems of manufacturing are coordinated virtually, or implantable mobile phones made of biosynthetic materials. The fourth industrial revolution, says Schwab, is more significant, and its ramifications more profound, than in any prior period of human history. He outlines the key technologies driving this revolution and discusses the major impacts expected on government, business, civil society and individuals. Schwab also offers bold ideas on how to harness these changes and shape a better future—one in which technology empowers people rather than replaces them; progress serves society rather than disrupts it; and in which innovators respect moral and ethical boundaries rather than cross them. We all have the opportunity to contribute to developing new frameworks that advance progress.
