In Rumours, Blanchett plays the Chancellor of Germany who hosts a G7 summit for other world leaders. She said the political characters were not based on real politicians and she "deliberately stepped away from that as that's what an audience is going to bring to bear". The film's director, Guy Maddin, added that he intentionally does not reveal the ideologies or allegories of the characters because "there's an attempt when making sense of a movie for an audience to project on to it a message, a lesson, to find themselves in it". Maddin explained that he started creating the characters "from a point of sheer contempt", but as the film progresses and more ludicrous things start to happen "you feel for them a little bit". "They're not politicians for very long, the structures that make them world leaders evaporate incredibly quickly," Blanchet told the BBC.

This story was originally published by Yale E360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Two months after its release in November 2022, OpenAI's ChatGPT had 100 million active users, and suddenly tech corporations were racing to offer the public more "generative AI" Pundits compared the new technology's impact to the Internet, or electrification, or the Industrial Revolution--or the discovery of fire. Time will sort hype from reality, but one consequence of the explosion of artificial intelligence is clear: this technology's environmental footprint is large and growing. AI use is directly responsible for carbon emissions from non-renewable electricity and for the consumption of millions of gallons of fresh water, and it indirectly boosts impacts from building and maintaining the power-hungry equipment on which AI runs. As tech companies seek to embed high-intensity AI into everything from resume-writing to kidney transplant medicine and from choosing dog food to climate modeling, they cite many ways AI could help reduce humanity's environmental footprint.

In 1960, Herbert Simon, who went on to win both the Nobel Prize for economics and the Turing Award for computer science, wrote in his book The New Science of Management Decision that "machines will be capable, within 20 years, of doing any work that a man can do." History is filled with exuberant technological predictions that have failed to materialize. Within the field of artificial intelligence, the brashest predictions have concerned the arrival of systems that can perform any task a human can, often referred to as artificial general intelligence, or AGI. So when Shane Legg, Google DeepMind's co-founder and chief AGI scientist, estimates that there's a 50% chance that AGI will be developed by 2028, it might be tempting to write him off as another AI pioneer who hasn't learnt the lessons of history. Still, AI is certainly progressing rapidly.

Rapid advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) have sparked growing concerns among experts, policymakers, and world leaders regarding the potential for increasingly advanced AI systems to pose existential risks. This paper reviews the evidence for existential risks from AI via misalignment, where AI systems develop goals misaligned with human values, and power-seeking, where misaligned AIs actively seek power. The review examines empirical findings, conceptual arguments and expert opinion relating to specification gaming, goal misgeneralization, and power-seeking. The current state of the evidence is found to be concerning but inconclusive regarding the existence of extreme forms of misaligned power-seeking. Strong empirical evidence of specification gaming combined with strong conceptual evidence for power-seeking make it difficult to dismiss the possibility of existential risk from misaligned power-seeking. On the other hand, to date there are no public empirical examples of misaligned power-seeking in AI systems, and so arguments that future systems will pose an existential risk remain somewhat speculative. Given the current state of the evidence, it is hard to be extremely confident either that misaligned power-seeking poses a large existential risk, or that it poses no existential risk. The fact that we cannot confidently rule out existential risk from AI via misaligned power-seeking is cause for serious concern.

Doctors believe Artificial Intelligence is now saving lives, after a major advancement in breast cancer screenings. A.I. is detecting early signs of the disease, in some cases years before doctors would find the cancer on a traditional scan. No matter what industry you work in, it is more than likely that artificial intelligence is going to impact your job in some capacity. That being said, it is going to affect some industries more than others. Predicting what jobs will look like 20 years from now or even ten for that matter is tricky. There are jobs that exist now that we couldn't have imagined ten years ago.

Last week the Center for Humane Technology summoned over 100 leaders in finance, philanthropy, industry, government, and media to the Kissinger Room at the Paley Center for Media in New York City to hear how artificial intelligence might wipe out humanity. The two speakers, Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin, began their doom-time presentation with a slide that read: "What nukes are to the physical world … AI is to everything else." We were told that this gathering was historic, one we would remember in the coming years as, presumably, the four horsemen of the apocalypse, in the guise of Bing chatbots, would descend to replace our intelligence with their own. It evoked the scene in old science fiction movies--or the more recent farce Don't Look Up--where scientists discover a menace and attempt to shake a slumbering population by its shoulders to explain that this deadly threat is headed right for us, and we will die if you don't do something NOW. At least that's what Harris and Raskin seem to have concluded after, in their account, some people working inside companies developing AI approached the Center with concerns that the products they were creating were phenomenally dangerous, saying an outside force was required to prevent catastrophe.

For decades, artificial intelligence (AI) research has coexisted in academia and industry, but the balance is tilting toward industry as deep learning, a data-and-compute-driven subfield of AI, has become the leading technology in the field. E.g.: Industry's AI successes are easy to see on the news. This article is quite interesting about how AI impacts both the academia and industry, so I just made some review or summary on it. For decades, artificial intelligence (AI) research has coexisted in academia and industry, but the balance is tilting toward industry as deep learning, a data-and-compute-driven subfield of AI, has become the leading technology in the field. E.g.: Industry's AI successes are easy to see on the news.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to have a significant impact on the future of work in the finance industry. One of the key ways that AI is likely to affect the industry is by automating many of the tasks that are currently performed by humans. This could include tasks such as data entry, account reconciliation, and even some types of financial analysis. One of the biggest benefits of using AI in the finance industry is that it has the potential to greatly increase efficiency and accuracy. AI algorithms can process large amounts of data quickly and accurately, which can help financial institutions make better decisions and reduce errors.

AI is being used to help improve teaching and learner engagement and assist with workload faced by teachers. Associate Professor Kelly Matthews and Associate Professor Hassan Khosravi from the Institute for Teaching and Learning Innovation discuss how AI is being used to assist teachers in the delivery of lessons and the many teaching challenges they face.

With increased pressure and demand on the healthcare system, AI allows clinicians to outsource some of the routine thinking so they can focus on the difficult parts of clinician work such as empathy, understanding, listening and delivering the human touch. A/Prof Clair Sullivan and A/Prof Guido Zuccon from The University of Queensland discuss how AI is being used in this field.