Starting points 1. Natural disasters 2. Fitness/Health 3. New - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Starting points

• 1. Natural disasters
• 2. Fitness/Health
• 3. New technology
• 4. Artificial Intelligence

List of Natural Disasters

• Hurricanes, tornadoes and storms
• Floods
• Tsunamis
• Avalanches and landslides
• Forest fires and wild fires
• Drought
• Earthquakes
• Volcanoes
• Disease – famine, bacteria, ecoli, Zika
• Nuclear explosion
• Oil spills (Exxon)
• Corporate pollution (gas leaks. oil spills, water contamination)
• Climate change/global warming (rising sea levels, rising temperatures, financial

costs)

• Poverty/under-development
• Unplanned urbanisation (too many people moving to cities to avoid disasters/lack
• f opportunities) slums, sanitation, discrimination.
• Wars and conflicts

What causes Natural Disasters ?

Three broad groups Movements of the earth

• earth quakes, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis.
• They are difficult to predict and impossible to stop.

Weather related disasters

• Hurricanes, tornadoes, extreme heat and cold weather
• Some advanced warning but nothing can be done to

stop them. Floods, mud slides, land slides and famine

• These are usually as result of extreme weather events

and are unforseen

Human – caused disasters

• Shootings
• Acts of terrorism
• Industrial accidents (oil spills).

Negative Effects of Natural Disasters

• Gas and oil prices are affected
• Taxpayers and governments have to spend billions to

rebuild cities

• Infrastructure such as public transport and business are

closed

• Mental health of survivors, first responders and recovery

workers

• Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
• Emotional distress, grief, anxiety and constant worrying
• Disease
• Bacteria spread from contaminated water and bad sewage

How much do they cost the world?

• Natural Disasters cost a total of $1.5 trillion in

damage world-wide between 2003 and 2013.

• They caused more than 1.1 million deaths and

effected the lives of 2 billion people.

• There have been 15 “weather and climate

disaster events” in the US in 2017 to date where financial loses exceeded $1 billion each.

Fitness/Health

• I like the gym and keeping fit
• This directed me towards a healthy lifestyle as a

starting point

• Researched exercise, healthy eating and mental

health

Benefit of exercise

• Can reduce your risk of major illnesses, such

as heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes and cancer by up to 50% and lower your risk of early death by up to 30%.

• Improves sleep
• Makes you feel more relaxed and more

positive about yourself

Obsession or excess exercise is bad for you

• Becomes addictive and you over train, miss

social and family events or worry if you miss a day of exercise

• Body dysmorphic disorder – if you are

excessively concerned with your physical features and defects

• Damages joints and your heart and causes

inflammation

Your mind can’t function if your body isn’t working

• properly. Your mind affects your body

Impact of exercise and on mental health

Studies show that exercise can help depression:

• Promotes changes to the brain including

neural growth, reduced inflammation and new activity patterns that promote feelings of calm and well-being.

• Releases endorphins, chemicals in your brain

that make you feel good

• Acts as a distraction allowing you to break
• ut of a cycle of negative thoughts

Benefits of healthy eating

A well-balanced diet provides:

• The energy you need throughout the day
• Nutrients you need for growth and repair

helping to prevent poor diet-related illness

What is a balance diet?

• Five a day – fruit and vegetable
• Base meals on starchy food such as potatoes, pasta, rice and bread

(should make up a third of what we eat)–

• Have some dairy such as cheese and yogurt or dairy alternatives

such as soya milk

• Fish, eggs, meat, beans and pulses are good sources of protein
• Choose unsaturated oils and spreads and eat in small amounts
• Drink plenty of fluids

It is recommended that men have around 2,500 calories a day (10,500 kilojoules). Women should have around 2,000 calories a day (8,400 kilojoules). Most adults are eating more calories than they need, and should eat fewer calories.

Other general research issues

• Creativity and mental health is there a link?

Munch, Van Gogh etc.

• Overdoing it – body dysmorphia and

anorexia

• Physical and mental exercise and the positive

affects on dementia and aging

Quotes

• Quotes
• “To keep the body in good health is a duty… otherwise we shall not be able to

keep our mind strong and clear.” – Buddha

• “A bear, however hard he tries, grows tubby without exercise.” – A.A. Milne,

Winnie the Pooh

• Lack of activity destroys the good condition of every human being, while

movement and methodical physical exercise save it and preserve it. ~Plato

• “Physical fitness is not only one of the most important keys to a healthy body, it is

the basis of dynamic and creative intellectual activity.” - John F. Kennedy

• “The first time I see a jogger smiling, I’ll consider it.” - Joan Rivers

New Technology

• The wheel
• The nail
• The compass
• The printing press
• The internal combustion engine
• The telephone
• The light bulb
• Penicillin
• Contraceptives

Even newer technology

• DNA finger printing
• The Internet
• Wireless electricity

Now

• Virtual Reality head set
• The 360-Degree Selfie
• Gene Therapy 2.0
• Paying with your Face
• Botnets of Things
• Reinforcement Learning

Coming soon

• Reversing Paralysis
• Self Driving Trucks
• Practical Quantum Computers
• Hot Solar Cells
• The Cell Atlas
• Paper Diagnostics
• Ingestible robots
• Carbon –breathing batteries

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZliZdAn

Kl8

Artificial Intelligence

What is it? “The theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision- making, and translation between languages.”

Artificial intelligence has the potential to be more intelligent than humans. People now control the planet because we are the smartest. Will be still in control if we are no longer the smartest?

AI products

• Facial recognition
• SIRI
• Self-driving cars
• Google’s search algorithms
• IBM’s Watson
• Autonomous weapons

AI safety is important to:

• To prevent an arms race in lethal autonomous

weapons.

• To prevent an AI system becoming better than

humans at all cognitive tasks

• Whereas it may be little more than a minor

nuisance if your laptop crashes or gets hacked, it becomes all the more important that an AI system does what you want it to do if it controls your car, your airplane, your pacemaker, your automated trading system or your power grid.

What about the ethics of AI?

“trolley problem”

• What kind of ethics we should programme

into the car.

• Would you buy a car that would sacrifice the

driver to save the pedestrians?

• Who makes these programming decisions the

government, manufacturer or consumer?

AlphaGo Zero

• Google’s DeepMind has made another big advance in artificial intelligence by

getting a machine AlpahaGo Zero to master the Chinese game of Go without help from humans.

• The Chinese game of Go dates back to ancient China. Players move black and

white stones on a grid, surrounding their opponents’ stones with their own. While the rules are simpler than chess a player typically has a choice of 200 moves at most point in the game, compared with about 20 in chess.

• The AlphaGo programm has already beaten two of the world’s best players at the

Chinese game of Go. It had learned from thousands of games played by humans and lots of computer-processing power.

• The new AlphaGo Zero began with no knowledge of Go and no data apart from

the rules and a blank Go board, and played itself. Within 72 hours it went on to beat the original program by 100 games to zero.

• AlphaGo took months to learn how to play well but AlphaGo Zero learnt in 3

days.

• David Silver, who led Google’s AI team, is excited that a machine learnt in days

what it took humanity over a thousand years. He also says it shows that it’s the “novel algorithms that count, not the compute power of the data.”

Autonomous weapons

In an open letter AI and Robotics Researchers said that starting a military AI arms race was a bad idea and should be prevented by a ban putting offensive autonomous weapons beyond meaningful human controls. US, China, Russia and Israel are hoping to develop autonomous weapons. Elon Musk, head of Tesla, asked the UN to take action against the use of AI in weapons sometimes called “killer robots”

• Pros
• Reduces causalities of war – less people can be killed
• Easy to obtain unlike nuclear weapons so cost of war less
• Cons
• Makes the decision to go war easier
• Not beneficial for humanity because they could fall into the wrong hands and be

used for assassinations and ethnic cleansing

An opinion which cannot be ignored

Prof Stephen Hawking told the BBC: "The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race." He says that it could go off on its own and re-design itself and supersede humans. He is worried that it could be “either the best or the worst thing ever to happen to humanity.”

General opinion

• According to the consultancy firm PWC, 30% of jobs in Britain

are potentially under threat from breakthroughs in AI.

• It turns out that humans don’t trust AI either.
• According to Pew Research 70% of Americans are concerned

about machines performing task done by humans.

• 62% are worried that it will increase economic inequality
• 75% think the economy won’t create new jobs for the human

workers who lose their jobs to machines.

• There was also a split between college-educated respondents and

those who didn’t attend college. College educated workers saw it positively as something that would improve their opportunities and advancements but more working class people didn’t think it would.

• Three-quarters of Americans expect that machines doing human

jobs will increase inequality between the rich and the poor.