When King Henry VI of England founded Eton College in 1440 as “The King’s College of Our Lady of Eton besides Wyndsor”, he could scarcely have imagined that 578 years later it would be attended by students from all over the world, and least of all that they would not even need to leave their home countries to study there. But modern witchcraft (the internet) has made it so in the form of Eton’s online teaching arm, EtonX.
Computers are dumb. They do what they are told to do, and that’s it. Powerful as they are, computers cannot (yet) make decisions on anything like a human level. If a nasty piece of code gets injected into a computer, it will execute it - unless other software tells it not to. The computer doesn’t ‘know’ that the code is undesirable.
Over 50 leading AI and robotics researchers have said they will boycott a leading Korean research institute over its plans to develop AI-powered weapons.
In February, KAIST (the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology) announced that it was launching a joint research project with defense company Hanwha Systems to develop AI technologies for lethal autonomous weapons that search for and eliminate targets without human control.
In the wake of the Facebook / Cambridge Analytica data scandal, which saw 50 million Facebook users’ data skimmed off by an unscrupulous British firm and used to help politicians target voters in Trump’s 2016 presidential election campaign, many users of the social network have woken up to the fact that their previously blasé attitudes towards what Facebook does with their data may need revising.
Online university EdX was started in 2012 by Harvard and MIT. It’s a not-for-profit MOOC (Massively Open Online Course) platform providing free online courses to advance careers and improve lives. It is now a leading provider of stripped-down, no-fluff, laser-focused postgraduate qualifications from top universities designed with today’s job market in mind. And employers love it because it provides them with candidates with up-to-date, relevant, job-specific skills.
Drones are filling our skies. If companies like Amazon manage to negotiate their way past aviation restrictions, drones will soon be delivering our shopping to our homes and workplaces. No longer just toys and aerial photography tools, drones are here to stay. They are used in search and rescue, disaster relief, bomb disposal, military and civilian reconnaissance, archaeology, infrastructure inspection, anti-poaching, conservation, construction and law enforcement.
In 2014 The University of California, Irvine staged an eight-week MOOC on the sociological, scientific and ethical questions posed by the zombie apocalypse portrayed in AMC’s The Walking Dead. With the mega-popular TV series as its starting point, the course explored key science and survival themes ranging from understanding social identities to modeling the spread of disease.
The well-known manufacturing principle of just-in-time aims to ensure that the right part arrives on the assembly line in the right place and the exact moment it is needed, thus reducing inventory overheads and making for a lean and efficient process. The same principle is being applied to learning for today’s busy professionals, by using algorithms to deliver just the learning content they need – and nothing else – at the time they need it.
According to Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the universe was sneezed out of the nose of a being named the Great Green Arkleseizure. But that theory was only accepted by the Jatravartid people of Viltvodle VI, who lived in perpetual fear of the time they called the Coming of the Great White Handkerchief. Here on Earth, we have our own theories on how the universe began, and thankfully they are a lot less icky and a lot more peer-reviewed.
After regional conflicts, when one side has won, both have given up and gone home, or when there’s nobody left to fight, there is work to do. Post-conflict reconstruction does what it can to clean up the mess, and business has a key role in it. Many conflicts are started by demagogues stirring up anger over real or perceived economic inequalities, which often still persist after the fighting has ended. The task of business in reconstruction is to restore production and distribution systems to energize the economy, create jobs and growth, and positively influence local perceptions.
Gardeners everywhere know the benefits of getting outside, getting their hands into the earth and, when the right time comes, enjoying the fruits of their labours. Working with the seasons rather than against them has a calming and grounding effect that can reduce worrying about life stresses by keeping in touch with nature. People who regularly work their gardens often have an aura of contentment about them that non-gardeners envy.
