Artificial Intelligence is rapidly embedding itself within militaries, economies, and societies, reshaping their very foundations. Given the depth and breadth of its consequences, it has never been more pressing to understand how to ensure that AI systems are safe, ethical, and have a positive societal impact. This book aims to provide a comprehensive approach to understanding AI risk. Our primary goals include consolidating fragmented knowledge on AI risk, increasing the precision of core ideas, and reducing barriers to entry by making content simpler and more comprehensible. The book has been designed to be accessible to readers from diverse backgrounds. You do not need to have studied AI, philosophy, or other such topics. The content is skimmable and somewhat modular, so that you can choose which chapters to read. We introduce mathematical formulas in a few places to specify claims more precisely, but readers should be able to understand the main points without these.

Keeping count of nostril hairs and investigating the promiscuity of anchovies may seem completely unrelated. But these studies are among 10 others to win this year's spoof'Ig Nobels', thanks to their ability to make scientists chuckle. Traditionally hosted at Harvard University, this ceremony is the 33rd of its kind, and sees genuine Nobel laureates handing out awards to lucky academics. The prize is ten trillion Zimbabwean dollars, which might sound like a huge amount, but is actually only the equivalent of 30p in the UK (40 cents in the US). MailOnline spoke with some of the wackiest prize winners of 2023.

In 1982, one of the first 3D games ever released doubled as one of the earliest examples of survival horror. In the pixelated 3D Monster Maze, you not only had to find your way out of a maze but survive being hunted by a T. rex. In the decades since, the dino-horror genre has only grown, from 1999's DinoCrisis to 2016's Far Cry Primal, but dinosaurs have also become more than in-game monsters. We've seen dinosaurs as allies (Yoshi, Pokemon), dinosaurs as attractions (park sims like Zoo Tycoon or Jurassic World), or dinosaurs and their fossils as collectibles (see the in-game markets of Sims or Animal Crossing). The way games have depicted both ancient animals and the paleontologists who study them has gotten richer and deeper as time has passed--though there's still plenty of pixelated T. rexes chomping off people's heads.

One recent afternoon, Tina Seeger and Diana Trujillo were showing off a few snaps from their latest trip. "I have a soft spot for rover selfies," Seeger, a twenty-seven-year-old NASA geologist, said. She was screen-sharing a shot of the Perseverance rover posing at the Jezero Crater on Mars, taken April 6th. Jezero (rhymes with "hetero") is just north of the Martian equator. "It's really special, because it used to have this ancient lake environment with rivers flowing into a delta," Seeger, who has wavy hair and was seated outside a coffee shop in Bellingham, Washington, said.

The platform uses geospatial data and satellite imagery to provide data-based applications for mineral exploration and discovery and promises to increase hypothesis testing and the speed of the exploration lifecycle. "Traditionally, remote sensing is carried out by specialists (remote sensing geologists) on behalf of the mineral exploration team. Although they still have a role in supporting the process, the Descartes Labs platform puts the technology into the hands of the exploration geologists who know the project areas the best. By leveraging the data obtained from satellite and airborne imagery, they can accelerate their hypothesis formulation and exploration strategies to find new deposits," James Orsulak, senior director of business and sales at Descartes Labs, told MINING.COM. MDC: Your platform puts emphasis on the data refinery.

The Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) is transforming its business through digital projects that range from deciding where to drill for oil and gas, to helping the company decide where to sell its final products. The state-owned oil company has driven the United Arab Emirates' economy since it was founded almost half a century ago, and its head of digital, Abdul Nasser Al Mughairbi, has been driving digital transformation since 2017. Each day, ADNOC produces three million barrels of oil and processes billions of cubic feet of gas. It has businesses involved in the extraction of raw materials upstream as well as the processing of materials to add value downstream. Add to this the transportation, sales and marketing of oil and gas, and you have a large, complex organisation.

Emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are rapidly proving their value across many industries. Today's infographic comes from GoldSpot Discoveries, and it shows that when this tech is applied to massive geological data sets, that there is growing potential to unlock the next wave of mineral discoveries. Discovering new sources of minerals, such as copper, gold, or even cobalt, can be notoriously difficult but also very rewarding. According to Goldspot, the chance of finding a new deposit is around 0.5%, with odds improving to 5% if exploration takes place near a known resource. On the whole, mineral exploration has not been a winning prospect if you compare the total dollar spend and the actual value of the resulting discoveries.

As a geologist and professor I speak and write rather cavalierly about eras and eons. One of the courses I routinely teach is "History of Earth and Life," a survey of the 4.5-billion-year saga of the entire planet--in a 10-week trimester. But as a human, and more specifically as a daughter, mother, and widow, I struggle like everyone else to look Time honestly in the face. That is, I admit to some time hypocrisy. The now risible "Y2K" crisis that threatened to cripple global computer systems and the world economy at the turn of the millennium was caused by programmers in the 1960s and '70s who apparently didn't really think the year 2000 would ever arrive.

Maura Kolb is more familiar with analyzing rock samples than computer code, but as exploration manager at Goldcorp's Red Lake gold mine, she now finds herself in charge of an innovative approach to exploration that involves both. The project, in partnership with IBM, uses IBM's Watson artificial intelligence platform to identify exploration targets at the Ontario mine. Since the project was launched in March 2017 at the Disrupt Mining event at PDAC, Goldcorp says the time it takes to process survey data has fallen by 97 per cent. "Being able to go through [our data] quickly, that's something no one else can do right now," said Kolb. "We can ask questions of our data that we haven't been able to in the past." The main goal of the project is to use Watson to help identify high-grade areas at Red Lake that were previously overlooked by human eyes.

Volcanic eruptions come in many different forms, from the explosive eruptions of Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull in 2010, which disrupted European air travel for a week, to the Hawaiian Islands' relatively tranquil May 2018 lava flows. Likewise, these eruptions have different associated threats, from ash clouds to lava. Sometimes the eruption mechanism (e.g., water and magma interaction) is not obvious, and needs to be carefully evaluated by volcanologists to determine future threats and responses. Volcanologists look closely at the ash produced by eruptions, as different eruptions produce ash particles of varying shapes. But how does one look at thousands of tiny samples objectively to produce a cohesive picture of the eruption?