In many real world situations, like minor traffic offenses in big cities, a central authority is tasked with periodic administering punishments to a large number of individuals. Common practice is to give each individual a chance to suffer a smaller fine and be guaranteed to avoid the legal process with probable considerably larger punishment. However, thanks to the large number of offenders and a limited capacity of the central authority, the individual risk is typically small and a rational individual will not choose to pay the fine. Here we show that if the central authority processes the offenders in a publicly known order, it properly incentives the offenders to pay the fine. We show analytically and on realistic experiments that our mechanism promotes non-cooperation and incentives individuals to pay. Moreover, the same holds for an arbitrary coalition. We quantify the expected total payment the central authority receives, and show it increases considerably.

On August 27, 2020, Amazon introduced its Amazon Halo: a technology comprised of AI software and a wristband that monitors body indicators including voice to detect problems, suggests a behavioral change, or other actions to potentially improve our health.a One day later, Elon Musk and his team presented their Neuralink technology--AI software and a skull chip implant that receives and sends signals to our brain to compensate for brain malfunctioning, aiming to solve various brain-related health problems. These announcements seem like great news amid the health crisis that engulfs many of us, with technology coming to our rescue to confront some of the most critical diseases of humankind. Yet risks remain, and once the genie is out of the bottle, they are often difficult to manage and contain--they range from unintended consequences and side effects to threats to privacy and loss or misdirection of control. Endless devices surrounding us include processors that compute and monitor our abundant but wasteful lifestyle, with generations of products getting faster, cheaper, and "better."

Teamwork isn't just a human characteristic: Colonies of army ants will form living'scaffolding' to protect members from falling. The insects are blind and have no designated leader but, according to new research, they're able to use simple behavioral rules to develop these safety structures without the need for direct communication. Once a scaffold was built, worker ants were almost 100 percent protected from falling off steep inclines. Understanding how they design such complex structures could help engineers development self-healing materials and swarm robotics, researchers said. Army ants in Central American rainforests will build scaffolds out of their body to help them traverse steep terrain.

Our entire financial system is built on trust. We can exchange otherwise worthless paper bills for fresh groceries, or swipe a piece of plastic for new clothes. But this trust--typically in a central government-backed bank--is changing. As our financial lives are rapidly digitized, the resulting data turns into fodder for AI. Companies like Apple, Facebook and Google see it as an opportunity to disrupt the entire experience of how people think about and engage with their money. But will we as consumers really get more control over our finances? In this first of a series on automation and our wallets, we explore a digital revolution in how we pay for things. This episode was produced by Anthony Green, with help from Jennifer Strong, Karen Hao, Will Douglas Heaven and Emma Cillekens.

We live in an age of increasing centralization that pervades all aspects of our culture. In today's world, centralization equates to control; centralization equates to power. Centralization gave rise to bureaucratic institutions where decisions, borne by a few, ran through a hierarchical structure. This ensured a system where one authority determined how systems were run and how objectives were met. This is symbolic of how authoritarian governments operate.

We live in an age of increasing centralization that pervades all aspects of our culture. In today's world, centralization equates to control; centralization equates to power. Centralization gave rise to bureaucratic institutions where decisions, borne by a few, ran through a hierarchical structure. This ensured a system where one authority determined how systems were run and how objectives were met. This is symbolic of how authoritarian governments operate.

By now, we should be feeling quite familiar with artificial intelligence. Science fiction has shown us what happens when robots are gifted human-like intelligence. Typically, it doesn't end well, but what about the "intelligence" of automated blockchain networks? Smart contracts, like the ones that power Ethereum's ecosystem, can be seen as a simple form of machine intelligence, and one academic is convinced we are giving them far too much responsibility. Adam Kolber, a Brooklyn Law School professor, has shared a chilling vision of a not-so-distant future, in which humans live under threat of blockchain-based overlords.

A decade ago, the prospect of a religion that worships Artificial Intelligence would have seemed absurd, a fringe delusion both socially unacceptable and technologically improbable. In the last several years, however, advances in machine learning, robotics, cognitive science, genetic editing, and other fields have given rise to the belief that the destiny of our species will be determined by technology--whether it saves us or destroys us. Although the machine-as-god theme has appeared in science fiction as far back as far back as Isaac Asimov's short stories "The Last Question" and "Reason," and more recently in films like The Matrix and iRobot, the divinization of AI is no longer merely a fancy of fiction. It has become a mainstream metaphor, as evidenced by the growing number of scientists who openly describe technological progress in religious terms, including Hans Peter Moravec, Allen Newell, Ray Kurzweil, and Hugo de Garis. But this drive to replace the old gods and old religions with the new ones of science and technology doesn't stop at metaphor.

I've seen a lot of new ideas. I've been right a few times about what would succeed and been way off quite often. Sometimes my predictions were simply too early. Those that know me may recall that back in the middle 2000's I was bullish on virtual reality (VR). I spoke and wrote about it widely. Turns out I was at least 10 years too soon with my prediction.

In many "smart city" applications, congestion arises in part due to the nature of signals received by individuals from a central authority. In the model of Marecek et al. [arXiv:1406.7639, Int. J. Control 88(10), 2015], each agent uses one out of multiple resources at each time instant. The per-use cost of a resource depends on the number of concurrent users. A central authority has up-to-date knowledge of the congestion across all resources and uses randomisation to provide a scalar or an interval for each resource at each time. In this paper, the interval to broadcast per resource is obtained by taking the minima and maxima of costs observed within a time window of length r, rather than by randomisation. We show that the resulting distribution of agents across resources also converges in distribution, under plausible assumptions about the evolution of the population over time.