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Science and Technology links (December 14th 2019)
- The computation capacity needed by artificial intelligence doubles every 3.4 months. In parallel, we are making fast progress in hardware and software: what took three hours a year and half ago can now take less than two minutes.
- In Luxembourg, a small European country, all public transportation is free. Luxembourg has also a gay prime minister who is married.
- Men and women have very different personalities. Knowing only the personality traits of someone, you can tell whether they are a man or a woman with 85% accuracy.
- We are deploying drones equipped with machine guns.
- Alzheimer’s is a terrible disease and there is currently no proven way to even slow down the disease. We might be very close to approving the first drug which might favorably alter the progression of the disease.
- We are approving new medical therapies at record rates.
- Many worry that computers and artificial intelligence will destroy so many jobs so quickly that human workers will never recover. Scholl and Hanson find no evidence for the emergence of such a trend.
- Crows can use tools and solve multi-step puzzles.
- As we age, we accumulate defective non-dividing cells called senescent cells. The older we get the more quickly we accumulate them. The progression is exponential.
Credit: Thanks to Peter Turney for sending me a link to the 2019 AI Index report.