Yasuhiro Kanakog, the lead author of a study, states that morality is an important but mysterious part of what makes us human. The study in very young children indicates that it may be intrinsic. Humans may have developed behavioural tendencies toward moral behaviour during the course of evolution, specifically the punishment of antisocial behaviour may have evolved as an element of human cooperation.

A new study wanted to discover whether morality is learned

Researchers may have determined whether or not morality is a learned behavior or if it is intrinsic.

philosophy

Philosophy

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

Determining The Origin Of Our Moral Compass

The internet and social media spread has helped people share and discuss societal problems and provide tools to find solutions.  Access to information is a significant catalyst in this process, for example, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

Global connectivity is accelerating the sharing of information

Contrary to what many believe, big businesses contribute more to alleviating global poverty. <ul><li>They develop cheaper products for people at the bottom of the income pyramid - around four billion people. This is a huge potential market and the opportunity to make a profit while raising the standard of living for the poorest citizens.</li><li>Technophilanthropists have a global vision and business and political connections to get things moving forward, such as Bill Gates, founder of the Gates Foundation.</li></ul>

Big business can raise standards of living among the world's poorest people

Access to education is a major global problem. Those students with access to education follow an outdated framework that does not provide students with the skills needed to handle the problems of the twenty-first century. ICT could offer a solution to address both issues of quality and delivery. For example, Sugata Mitra ran experiments on self-directed learning in Indian slums. He found that by just providing a computer terminal and internet access, groups of young children could teach themselves.

Traditional methods of education are outdated and in need of a re-think

Access to biotechnology is multiplying the potential to find innovative solutions to food, energy and other global problems. <ul><li>Advances in genetic engineering provide solutions that can feed an ever-increasing population. </li><li>Biotechnology is also used for other applications such as developing strains of algae as a biofuel source.</li></ul>

Biotechnology provides solutions to global problems

Nanotechnology allows us to create new materials leading to major advances in many areas. Nanotechnology involves building things on an atomic scale and create anocomposites, even tiny programmable assemblers, called nanomachines. These nanomachines can build other nanomaterials and create greater efficiency in the technology. Examples include nanocomposites much stronger than steel produced at a fraction of the cost. Lifesaver is a water filter that can make water safe to drink without chemical or energy-intensive methods.

Technological advances

The world consists of complex systems where changes in one area can impact another area. For example, population changes in one species affect living and survival conditions for others.  While some systems may seem to exacerbate current problems, they also present great opportunities because they create momentum and positive benefits in others.

Solving complex problems together

A stigma is attached to failure, and many people will do anything to avoid it. This can prevent innovation.  Failure should be viewed as part of a longer learning curve and an important stepping stone toward innovation.

A successful future depends on overcoming the fear of failure

We live in turbulent times. When we glance at the headlines, it is enough to put anybody on edge. However, a quick look at history shows that progress continues through the good and the bad times. Global living standards will continue to improve regardless of the horrors in the headlines. For example, the 20th century saw advancement and tragedy. The 1918 influenza epidemic killed fifty million people, and World War II killed another sixty million. Yet, this period also saw infant mortality decrease by 90 per cent and maternal mortality decrease by 99 per cent.

The future is brighter than the media portrays

Underlying influences tend to push us towards a pessimistic view of the future. <ul><li>The amygdala is always looking for threats in our environment. When triggered, it starts the fight or flight response. But modern society threats are probabilistic. For example, the economy could crash, or there could be a terrorist attack.</li><li>Information we receive. Media outlets know that good news doesn’t sell as well as threatening news, so we are constantly bombarded with fearful images and possible situations that feed the amygdala and prevent us from seeing the future objectively.</li></ul>

Why we have an overly pessimistic view of the future

<ul><li>Advances in solar energy technology can further innovation and lower production prices. New Energy Technologies has recently found a way to turn an ordinary window into a solar panel by using the world’s smallest organic solar cell that performs ten times better than current commercial models.</li><li>More efficient methods of growing food, like urban farming, hydroponics and vertical farming, can reduce the need for arable land.</li></ul>

Other advances that point to an abundance

“Abundance is not about providing everyone on this planet with a life of luxury—rather it's about providing all with a life of possibility.”

Abundance shows practical solutions to humanity’s most significant concerns such as lack of quality food, water, education, healthcare, and freedom. The author shows us how exponential technologies can help us improve our quality of life to achieve abundance.

The authors document how four forces--exponential technologies, the DIY innovator, the Technophilanthropist, and the Rising Billion--are conspiring to solve our biggest problems. "Abundance" establishes hard targets for change and lays out a strategic roadmap for governments, industry and entrepreneurs, giving us plenty of reason for optimism.

technologyandthefuture

Technology & The Future

creativity

Creativity

books

Books

artsandculture

Society, Arts & Culture

The New York Times bestselling “manifesto for the future that is grounded in practical solutions addressing the world’s most pressing concerns: overpopulation, food, water, energy, education, health care and freedom” (The Wall Street Journal). Since the dawn of humanity, a privileged few have lived in stark contrast to the hardscrabble majority. Conventional wisdom says this gap cannot be closed. But it is closing—and fast. In Abundance, space entrepreneur turned innovation pioneer Peter H. Diamandis and award-winning science writer Steven Kotler document how progress in artificial intelligence, robotics, digital manufacturing synthetic biology, and other exponentially growing technologies will enable us to make greater gains in the next two decades than we have in the previous 200 years. We will soon have the ability to meet and exceed the basic needs of every person on the planet. Abundance for all is within our grasp. Breaking down human needs by category—water, food, energy, healthcare, education, freedom—Diamandis and Kotler introduce us to innovators and industry captains making tremendous strides in each area. “Not only is Abundance a riveting page-turner…but it’s a book that gives us a future worth fighting for” (The Christian Science Monitor).

Peter H. Diamandis is an accomplished writer whose work has resonated with readers around the world. Peter H. Diamandis has published several books that explore a range of topics, from fiction to nonfiction, and has received critical acclaim for the ability to weave compelling narratives. Peter H. Diamandis's writing style is known for its depth and authenticity, and has earned quite a loyal following of readers.

Peter H. Diamandis

Steven Kotler

Abundance

<ul><li>Build awareness of misinformation. Remember that misinformation is common, and train yourself to immediately interrogate the information or data you are presented with.</li><li>Develop healthy meta-beliefs. A meta-belief is a belief that one holds following a thorough reasoning process or cognitive interrogation to check the validity of the belief.</li><li>Practice self-reflection. If this process of reflection indicates that you are drawn to the same news sources, or solely rely on influencers or social media platforms for your updates, your information diet may not be varied enough.</li></ul>

How to strengthen your mental immune system

Mental immunity is a psychological theory that is also known as cognitive immunology.People with a healthy mental immune system are more likely to detect misinformation. A strong cognitive immune system can also help spot bad ideas at an earlier stage, so you may avoid wasting time, energy, or money.

Mental immunity

The mental immune system is believed to function in a similar way to the body’s physical immune system.<ul><li>The purpose of the physical system of immune cells is to detect pathogens including bacteria and viruses, so that they can be eradicated from our bloodstream and organ systems before they have a chance to cause damage.</li><li>Similarly, a healthy mental immune system will detect harmful or incorrect information that enters our mind, so that it can be recognised as such and then promptly rejected.</li><li>Mental immunity research has deep roots dating back to the 1950s. </li></ul>

A mental immune system

Every day, a new video goes “viral”, and an “infectious” idea starts spreading. Mental immunity is a psychological theory that is also known as cognitive immunology.

Understand yourself and those around you.

psychology

Psychology

problemsolving

Problem Solving

How developing mental immunity can protect us from bad ideas

AI can’t be funny. Funny as interpreted by the recipient of a joke is subjective. And funny as an intended construct requires intent.Just like fashion, being funny is as complex as the people you surround yourself with. What a group of AI devs might find funny or fashionable will likely differ from the tastes at Fashion Week in a Comedy Central writer’s room. And both the individual and public perception of what’s humorous is constantly changing and evolving.

The Bottomline

Jokes can be reduced to formulas. Just about anything can be reduced to a formula, but “funny” isn’t a thing. It’s a perception. Just like you can’t hand me an ounce of satisfaction or purchase a mile’s worth of courage, you can’t quantitatively produce funniness in a lab.

Funny is a Perception

A few years back, a former Microsoft intern named Nabil Hossain and a pair of Microsoft AI researchers developed a machine learning system to generate humorous headlines from existing news articles.The big idea was that the AI would make microedits by changing a single word in a serious headline to make it a funny one.

Making AI Funny

The AI picks a noun or verb from a headline and replaces it with a word that can be objectively quantified as humorous.So here’s the simple answer to the question of whether AI can be funny or not: If you get to define what is and isn’t funny, sure. AI can be just as funny as you decide it is or isn’t.

The Machine Workings Of Humor

Robots don’t have personalities, ideas, thoughts, or desires. Any human-like qualities we could attribute to a machine or its output are merely reflections of ourselves or its programmers.That doesn’t sit well with the mainstream perceptions of AI. Thousands of articles promise a near-future where human creators are either displaced or forced to work in tandem with machines.

Robots Are What We Make Them

Most of what AI does is prestidigitation. That’s because there’s only a handful of things a typical deep learning system can actually do. Much like a real-world magician, developers create incredible programs out of some fairly basic algorithmic foundations.The only difference between a disappearing coin trick and what David Copperfield does is scale. There is no more or less “real magic” involved in the former’s illusions and the latter’s.

The Perception Of AI

Can an AI be funny? What does funny mean? Who gets to decide? Luckily for all of us, Microsoft went ahead and answered these questions on our behalf.

computerscience

Computer Science

entertainment

Entertainment

artificialintelligence

Artificial Intelligence

Codifying humanity: Can humor be reduced to an algorithm?

Value-chain owners looking to increase efficiency and resilience must tackle the following tasks: <ul><li>Identifying constraints in the value chain and how they shift over time.</li><li>Determining the optimal value-chain setup under variable conditions.</li><li>Selecting the best way to schedule capacity across the end-to-end value chain.</li><li>Adopting the best value-maximizing production strategy and setting up the value chain to support this strategy.</li><li>Identifying which value chains are exposed to risk from factors such as the COVID-19 crisis or difficult geographies.</li></ul>

The Main Challenges

The next generation of end-to-end planning processes will be fundamentally different from today’s. AI can help balance efficiency and resilience by incorporating uncertainty into realistic simulations of reality to help organizations evaluate scenarios and identify risks. AI can also find optimal plans for different time horizons. In doing so, it can recommend operational decisions that balance cost with revenue and provide real-time end-to-end visibility to better anticipate and react to supply-chain disruption.

Integrated Planning: Simulation, Optimization, And Real-Time Monitoring

Enhancing end-to-end decision making with AI requires companies to think in terms of the concrete answers they want to obtain. For example, do you want a step-by-step action plan to help run your value chain? Is the goal to produce a go-no-go decision for investment based on normal conditions? Or are you primarily looking to ease communication and centralize decision making?

Enhancing Value-Chain Resilience With A Threefold Approach

Deploying the right AI capabilities to look deeply into an organization’s value chain can enable teams to quickly pivot while balancing efficiency and resilience. Armed with the right processes, organizations can create and adjust plans for the entire organization while keeping everyone aligned on risks and rewards. Operationally, AI capabilities can enable fact-based discussions across the entire value chain, which not only affects business processes but also results in better alignment across different business units.

AI Capabilities Put To Use

Begin by making the relevant data available. Ensure close collaboration among data scientists, operators, and stakeholders while building AI-enabled solutions. Develop user interfaces and user experiences (UI and UX) to support processes and integrate solutions into the organizational IT landscape.

Creating Value With AI: Seamless Technological Implementation

Across industries, value chains are facing increasing uncertainty from climatic anomalies, market volatility, and the COVID-19 pandemic, among other factors. Industries as diverse as agriculture, oil and gas, and mining face essentially the same problem: they need the ability to both run with increased efficiency and recover quickly from unforeseen or unexpected challenges.  If companies simply increase production levels, they’ll inevitably run into bottlenecks—and if failures occur that worsen those bottlenecks, the entire network can slow down and become less resilient.

Value Chains In 2021

Simulations are descriptive analytics tools. In a simulation, a digital twin is constructed with uncertainty measures and operational inputs. Next, a number of simulations of the future are performed using this digital twin and a summary is presented to the user for analysis. The end result—a set of key performance indicators (KPIs) describing current challenges—helps companies build resilience in the current environment.

Simulations Of Reality

Define which challenges each digital solution should address, who should be the primary user, and which process should benefit from the enabled technology.

Creating Value With AI: Value-Driven Solution Design

Redesign or enhance the business processes expected to benefit from new AI-enabled solutions. Improve data governance to facilitate high-quality data for enabling these AI solutions. Bring in expected end users to codesign AI solutions while upskilling them with the required technological capabilities.

Creating Value With AI: Enhanced Business Process And Capability Building

Most companies have a control tower serving as an operating nerve center. However, fully digital end-to-end control towers can increase resilience by expanding the scope of real-time monitoring to anticipate and respond to upcoming or potential supply-chain disruption. In this way, AI allows for enhanced end-to-end planning, giving historically isolated functions the benefit of full transparency.

Real-Time Supply-Chain Monitoring

Increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) technologies—such as advanced analytics-based forecasting, digital-twin supply-chain simulations, and supply-chain optimization tools—can help companies improve the resilience-efficiency balance of their value chains.

Enter AI

Coping with the highly unpredictable dynamic in an intrinsically uncertain environment can be difficult. The probabilistic nature of value chains must be accounted for in any strategic and operational initiative. Further complicating matters, processes must be continually updated and people reskilled. AI technologies can effectively deal with complexity, helping organizations keep up with changes, mitigate risk, and create value.

Opportunities And Challenges In Uncertainty

Optimization models are prescriptive analytics tools. The main output is an optimal execution plan for the current environment, in which decisions are made accounting for the end-to-end impact. Given operational considerations, an optimization model finds the optimal plan. These considerations capture the current operational conditions, a detailed view of how the supply network functions, and can include uncertainties about the future.

Optimization For Execution

Value chains are facing increased uncertainty. A threefold approach underpinned by artificial intelligence can help companies adapt to rapidly changing markets and operational challenges.

Determining The Origin Of Our Moral Compass

Abundance

How developing mental immunity can protect us from bad ideas

It's time to
Read like a Pro.

Codifying humanity: Can humor be reduced to an algorithm?

CURATED BY

Determining The Origin Of Our Moral Compass

Abundance

How developing mental immunity can protect us from bad ideas

It's time to Read like a Pro.

Codifying humanity: Can humor be reduced to an algorithm?

CURATED BY

It's time to
Read like a Pro.