There are countless plant-based meats available in stores and restaurants now. From classic meatless brands like Gardein, Quorn, and Morningstar Farms to newer meaty mainstream brands like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods.Unlike meat, dairy, and eggs, plant-based foods are proven to be better for preventing diseases like type 2 diabetes, alleviating arthritis, healthier gut and digestion, better cholesterol levels, improved cognition, and more. Studies have proven that eating plant-based foods is much healthier than consuming animal products, but consumers still have an important concern: are plant-based meat alternatives really that much healthier, or healthy at all?

Well one startup company is aiming to relieve consumers of that worry. Daring Foods has created a plant-based chicken alternative that they claim is much healthier than meatandother meat replacements. It is made with five non-genetically modified ingredients water, soy, sunflower oil, salt and natural flavoring (a mix of paprika, pepper, ginger, nutmeg, mace, cardamom).

Daring Foods co-founder and CEO Ross Mackay told TechCrunch: Theres a big need for plant-based food thats actually healthy. The chicken is currently being sold in the United Kingdom as of this year, but after a $10 million investment from Rastelli Foods Group, a major U.S. food company, they plan to launch in the U.S. in February!

They will sell directly to consumers through their website, and to restaurants and retailers. Although the CEO Mackay is vegan, the consumers he hopes to reach are meat eaters who are looking to incorporate plant-based foods or transition to plant-based diets. He told Anthony Ha of TechCrunch that he is hoping to create what he calls a second generation of plant-based meat products healthier than the first, and therefore a bigger part of everyday diets.

Reducing your meat intake and eating more plant-based foods is known to help with chronic inflammation, heart health, mental wellbeing, fitness goals, nutritional needs, allergies, gut health and more! Dairy consumption also has been linked many health problems, including acne, hormonal imbalance, cancer, prostate cancer and has many side effects. Learn aboutsome Common Health Concerns That May Disappear Once You Ditch Dairyand 10 Calcium Supplements For Healthy Living on a Dairy-Free and 10 Carrageenan-Free Non-Dairy Products!

For those of you interested in eating more plant-based, we highly recommend downloading theFood Monster App with over 15,000 delicious recipes it is the largest meatless, plant-based, vegan and allergy-friendly recipe resource to help reduce your environmental footprint, save animals and get healthy! And, while you are at it, we encourage you to also learn about theenvironmentalandhealth benefitsof aplant-based diet.

For more Animal, Earth, Life, Vegan Food, Health, and Recipe content published daily, subscribe to the One Green Planet Newsletter!

Lastly, being publicly-funded gives us a greater chance to continue providing you with high quality content. Please consider supporting us by donating!

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Healthy Plant-Based Chicken Alternative Coming to the U.S. in February 2020! - One Green Planet

The burger giant has just announced that it will launch a fully vegan meal in January, 2020 (Picture: McDonalds)

Veganism has gone mainstream, so its easy to forget what life used to be like for us plant-munchers.

In restaurants we had to endure awkward conversations with bewildered waiters, who would disappear to the kitchen and return saying they could do us the salad with the cheese picked out and the dressing left off. Wed go home hungry.

Now virtually all chain restaurants and cafes offer delicious vegan options and we can dine almost as happily as everyone else and McDonalds is about to join the party.

The fast food chain will be rolling out its first fully vegan meal on 2 January a year on from the much-hyped launch of Greggs vegan sausage roll and just in time for the annual Veganuary gimmick.

As the burger giant becomes the latest brand to try to seduce vegans into its restaurants with a carefully-targeted product, you might think it wouldnt have a hope in hell. Vegans in McDonalds? No chance!

But despite criticism of the chain over animal suffering,as outlined in a report by World Animal Protection, the seduction will succeed.

Why? Because a lot of vegans believe that spending money at chains like McDonalds will show a demand for plant-based products and bring an end to the slaughter and exploitation of animals.

On social media, vegans post photographs of overflowing supermarket baskets or restaurant tables groaning under the weight of vegan meals, proudly boasting that theyre showing the demand for these dishes, and changing the world.

And when the likes of KFC and Burger King launch plant-based products, they are, astonishingly, given uncritical publicity by vegan publications.

Once McDonalds launches its plant-based meal, lots of vegans will undoubtedly pour through the doors, believing that by handing money to cow slaughterers they will somehow help bring the slaughtering of cows to an end.

Likewise, when Burger King launched its plant-based Impossible Whopper, many vegans said that it would encourage meat-eaters to stop eating meat but thats not what happened.

As Jos Cil, CEO of Burger Kings parent company, Restaurant Brands International, said: We arent seeing guests swap the original Whopper for the Impossible Whopper its attracting new guests.

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In other words, meat-eaters continue to buy beef burgers and they still account for most of Burger Kings profits.The only difference is that vegans and vegetarians have started to come through the doors, too.

That sound you can hear is burger bosses laughing all the way to the bank.

It was the same story at Greggs. When the bakery giant launched its vegan sausage roll, it enjoyed a 58 per cent rise in profits and a surge in customer numbers, but if it had just been Greggs regulars who switched from meat to the plant-based sausage roll, profits would have stayed much the same.

Vegans arent changing the world by buying plant-based products from big chains, theyre just making animal slaughterers even richer.

And this successful seduction from big business has left many small, independent vegan businesses struggling to stay afloat.

They cant compete with the hype of Greggs or KFC, so they watch on broken-hearted as vegans stampede to bankroll animal slaughter.

As veganism becomes increasingly trendy, I suspect that a lot of vegans are secretly vegan for the trendiness or vegan for the consumerism

This all comes down to why you are vegan.

Some in the community say they are vegan for the animals, or vegan for the environment or vegan for health. If you fall into any of those camps, I cant see why youd eat in a McDonalds.

Simon Cowell shows off results of vegan diet as he soaks up Barbados rays with son Eric

Insiders at Greggs reveal a vegan steak bake is on the horizon

Greggs is extending their vegan range but won't tell us which products they're releasing

As veganism becomes increasingly trendy, I suspect that a lot of vegans are secretly vegan for the trendiness or vegan for the consumerism.

If you are either of those, then sure, go and eat a vegan meal in McDonalds if youd like to.

But if you are vegan because you want animal exploitation to actually end, and if you hope that a fairer society for animals could lead to a fairer society for people, then handing money to McDonalds, a company that exploits humans as well as animals, would be heretical.

Lots of vegans say they are activists, but their activism is just tapping credit cards against the contactless machines of big corporations.

That isnt activism, its capitalism and talk of ethical capitalism is as laughable as the meat industrys claims of humane slaughter.

Im not lovin it

MORE: Token veggie burgers and vegan sausage rolls arent enough to save the world

MORE: Im not just a vegan. Im a fat vegan

MORE: Im on a mission to save the planet by being a terrible vegan

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You can't be a vegan and still eat at Mcdonald's - Metro.co.uk

We wish you a headless robot/ We wish you a headless robot/ We wish you a headless robot/ and an alpha zero. If that ditty lacked a certain something, you should be going Da da da doom! about the festive piece in Saturdays Post about a computer saying Roll Over Beethoven and finishing his fragmentary 10th Symphony for him, possibly as a weirdly soulless funeral march.

Evidently this most ambitious project of its type ever attempted will see AI replicate creative genius ending in a public performance by a symphony orchestra in Bonn, Beethovens birthplace part of celebrations to mark the 250th anniversary of the composers birth. Why its not being performed by flawless machines synthesizing perfect tones is unclear.

What is clear is that its one of those plans with only two obvious pitfalls. It might fail. Or it might work.

Its one of those plans with only two obvious pitfalls. It might fail. Or it might work

A bad computer symphony would be awful, like early chess programs beneath contempt in their non-human weakness. But now their non-human strength is above contempt, as they dispatch the strongest grandmasters without emotion.

So my main concern here isnt with the headless Beethoven thing failing. Its with it succeeding. I know theres no stopping progress, that from mustard gas we had to go on to nuclear weapons then autonomous killer bots. But must we whistle so cheerfully as we design heartless successors who will even whistle better than us?

Its strange how many people yearn for the abolition of man. From New Soviet Man to Walden II, radicals cant wait to reinvent everything, including getting rid of dumb old languages where bridges have gender, and dumb old Adam and Eve into the bargain. Our ancestors stank. And we stink. The founder of behaviourist B.F. Skinners utopian Walden II chortles that when his perfect successors arrive the rest of us will pass on to a well-deserved oblivion.

So who are these successors? In That Hideous Strength, C.S. Lewiss demented scientist Filostrato proclaims that In us organic life has produced Mind. It has done its work. After that we want no more of it. We do not want the world any longer furred over with organic life, like what you call the blue mould What if were nearly there?

Freed of the boring necessities of life we might be paddocked in a digital, this-worldly Garden of Eden. But unless we are remade, we shall be more than just restless there. Without purpose we would go insane, as in Logans Run or the planet Miranda.

Ah, but we shall be remade. Mondays Post profiled Jennifer Doudna, inventor of the Crispr-Cas9 gene-editing technique so simple and powerful theres an app for it. Scientists can now dial up better genes on their smartphones and leave all the messy calculating to the machines. But if the machines can outcompose Beethoven, why would they leave the creative redesign of humans to us?

If the machines can outcompose Beethoven, why would they leave the redesign of humans to us?

To her credit, Prof. Doudna has nightmares about Hitler welcoming her invention. But forget Hitler. Here comes Leela to edit us away. And if Walden IIs eagerly anticipated design of personalities and control of temperament are within reach, and desirable, why should the new ones look anything like our current wretched ones? Is there anything to cherish in fallible man? If not, what sleep shall come?

So as we ponder Christmas, if we do, let us remember that 2,000 years ago the world was turned upside down by a God made Man because he loved weakness not strength. As a baby, then in the hideous humiliation of crucifixion, Christ gave a dignity to the helpless and downtrodden you find nowhere else including operating systems. Is it all rubbish, from the theology to the morality?

Years ago I argued for genetic modifications to restore the normal human template. But not to improve it, from eagle eyes to three legs to eight feet tall. But what will the computers think, and why should they? If nature is an obstacle to transcendence, where will they get their standards? Not from us. Nor will they want a bunch of meat around, sweating, bruising, rotting. Say goodnight, HAL.

Already algorithmic pop music is not just worse but in some important way less human. Where is Greensleeves or Good King Wenceslas in this Brave New World? And where should it be?

Shall the digital future burst forth from our abdomens and laser away the mess? Or is there something precious about us frail, vain, petty and, yes, smelly mortals? If so, what?

Many people love Christmas without being Christian. But many do not. And I think it comes down to your ability, or inability, to love humans as we are, which the Bible says God did but which supercomputers have no obvious reason to do.

So sing a carol for fallen man while the machines work on a funeral march.

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John Robson: Why is man so keen to make man obsolete? - National Post

Whether were learning to cook an omelet or drive a car, the path to mastering new skills often begins by watching others. But can artificial intelligence learn the same way? A new challenge teaching AI agents to play Minecraft suggests its much trickier for computers.

Announced earlier this year, the MineRL competition asked teams of researchers to create AI bots that could successfully mine a diamond in Minecraft. This isnt an impossible task, but it does require a mastery of the games basics. Players need to know how to cut down trees, craft pickaxes, and explore underground caves while dodging monsters and lava. These are the sorts of skills that most adults could pick up after a few hours of experimentation or learn much faster by watching tutorials on YouTube.

But of the 660 entries in the MineRL competition, none were able to complete the challenge, according to results that will be announced at the AI conference NeurIPS and that were first reported by BBC News. Although bots were able to learn intermediary steps, like constructing a furnace to make durable pickaxes, none successfully found a diamond.

The task we posed is very hard, Katja Hofmann, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, which helped organize the challenge, told BBC News. While no submitted agent has fully solved the task, they have made a lot of progress and learned to make many of the tools needed along the way.

This may be a surprise, especially when you think that AI has managed to best humans at games like chess, Go, and Dota 2. But it reflects important limitations of the technology as well as restrictions put in place by MineRLs judges to really challenge the teams.

The bots in MineRL had to learn using a combination of methods known as imitation learning and reinforcement learning. In imitation learning, agents are shown data of the task ahead of them, and they try to imitate it. In reinforcement learning, theyre simply dumped into a virtual world and left to work things out for themselves using trial and error.

Often, AI is only able to take on big challenges by combining these two methods. The famous AlphaGo system, for example, first learned to play Go by being fed data of old games. It then honed its skills and surpassed all humans by playing itself over and over.

The MineRL bots took a similar approach, but the resources available to them were comparatively limited. While AI agents like AlphaGo are created with huge datasets, powerful computer hardware, and the equivalent of decades of training time, the MineRL bots had to make do with just 1,000 hours of recorded gameplay to learn from, a single Nvidia graphics processor to train with, and just four days to get up to speed.

Its the difference between the resources available to an MLB team coaches, nutritionists, the finest equipment money can buy and what a Little League squad has to make do with.

It may seem unfair to hamstring the MineRL bots in this way, but these constraints reflect the challenges of integrating AI into the real world. While bots like AlphaGo certainly push the boundary of what AI can achieve, very few companies and research labs can match the resources of Google-owned DeepMind.

The competitions lead organizer, Carnegie Mellon University PhD student William Guss, told BBC News that the challenge was meant to show that not every AI problem should be solved by throwing computing power at it. This mindset, said Guss, works directly against democratizing access to these reinforcement learning systems, and leaves the ability to train agents in complex environments to corporations with swathes of compute.

So while AI may be struggling in Minecraft now, when it cracks this challenge, itll hopefully deliver benefits to a wider audience. Just dont think about those poor Minecraft YouTubers who might be out of a job.

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AI has bested chess and Go, but it struggles to find a diamond in Minecraft - The Verge

In 1997, Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov, the reigning world chess champion. In 2011, Watson defeated Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, the worlds best Jeopardy players. In 2016, AlphaGo defeated Ke Jie, the worlds best Go player. In 2017, DeepMind unleashed AlphaZero, which trounced the world-champion computer programs at chess, Go, and shogi.

If humans are no longer worthy opponents, then perhaps computers have moved so far beyond our intelligence that we should rely on their superior intelligence to make our important decisions. Nope.

Despite their freakish skill at board games, computer algorithms do not possess anything resembling human wisdom, common sense, or critical thinking. Deciding whether to accept a job offer, sell a stock, or buy a house is very different from recognizing that moving a bishop three spaces will checkmate an opponent. That is why it is perilous to trust computer programs we dont understand to make decisions for us.

Consider the challenges identified by Stanford computer science professorTerry Winograd,which have come to be known asWinograd schemas.For example, what does the word it refer to in this sentence?

I cant cut that tree down with that axe; it is too [thick/small].

If the bracketed word is thick, then it refers to the tree; if the bracketed word is small, then it refers to the axe. Sentences like these are understood immediately by humans but are very difficult for computers because they do not have the real-world experience to place words in context.

ParaphrasingOren Etzioni,CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, how can machines take over the world when they cant even figure out what it refers to in a simple sentence?

When we see a tree, we know it is a tree. We might compare it to other trees and think about the similarities and differences between fruit trees and maple trees. We might recollect the smells wafting from some trees. We would not be surprised to see a squirrel run up a pine or a bird fly out of a dogwood. We might remember planting a tree and watching it grow year by year. We might remember cutting down a tree or watching a tree being cut down.

A computer does none of this. It can spellcheck the word tree, count the number of times the word is used in a story, and retrieve sentences that contain the word. But computers do not understand what trees are in any relevant sense. They are likeNigel Richards,who memorized the French Scrabble dictionary and has won the French-language Scrabble World Championship twice, even though he doesnt know the meaning of the French words he spells.

To demonstrate the dangers of relying on computer algorithms to make real-world decisions, consider an investigation of risk factors for fatal heart attacks.

I made up some household spending data for 1,000 imaginary people, of whom half had suffered heart attacks and half had not. For each such person, I used a random number generator to create fictitious data in 100 spending categories. These data were entirely random. There were no real people, no real spending, and no real heart attacks. It was just a bunch of random numbers. But the thing about random numbers is that coincidental patterns inevitably appear.

In 10 flips of a fair coin, there is a 46% chance of a streak of four or more heads in a row or four or more tails in a row. If that does not happen, heads and tails might alternate several times in a row. Or there might be two heads and a tail, followed by two more heads and a tail. In any event, some pattern will appear and it will be absolutely meaningless.

In the same way, some coincidental patterns were bound to turn up in my random spending numbers. As it turned out, by luck alone, the imaginary people who had not suffered heart attacks spent more money on small appliances and also on household paper products.

When we see these results, we should scoff and recognize that the patterns are meaningless coincidences. How could small appliances and household paper products prevent heart attacks?

A computer, by contrast, would take the results seriously because a computer has no idea what heart attacks, small appliances, and household paper products are. If the computer algorithm is hidden inside a black box, where we do not know how the result was attained, we would not have an opportunity to scoff.

Nonetheless, businesses and governments all over the world nowadays trust computers to make decisions based on coincidental statistical patterns just like these. One company, for example, decided that it would make more online sales if it changed the background color of the web page shown to British customers from blue to teal. Why? Because they tried several different colors in nearly 100 countries. Any given color was certain to fare better in some country than in others even if random numbers were analyzed instead of sales numbers. The change was made and sales went down.

Many marketing decisions, medical diagnoses, and stock trades are now done via computers. Loan applications and job applications are evaluated by computers. Election campaigns are run by computers, including Hillary Clintons disastrous 2016presidential campaign.If the algorithms are hidden inside black boxes, with no human supervision, then it is up to the computers to decide whether the discovered patterns make sense and they are utterly incapable of doing so because they do not understand anything about the real world.

Computers are not intelligent in any meaningful sense of the word, and it is hazardous to rely on them to make important decisions for us. The real danger today is not that computers are smarter than us, but that wethinkcomputers are smarter than us.

Featured image credit: Lumberjack Adventures by Abby Savage. CC0 via Unsplash.

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AI is dangerous, but not for the reasons you think. - OUPblog

We humans are notoriously bad at predicting the consequences of achieving our technological goals. Add seat belts to cars for safety, speeding and accidents can go up. Burn hydrocarbons for cheap energy, warm the planet. Give experts new technologies like surgical robots or predictive policing algorithms to enhance productivity, block apprentices from learning. Still, we're amazing at predicting unintended consequences compared to the intelligent technologies we're building.

WIRED OPINION

ABOUT

Matt Beane (@mattbeane) is an assistant professor of technology management at UC Santa Barbara and a research affiliate at MIT's Institute for the Digital Economy.

Take reinforcement learning, one particularly potent flavor of AI that's behind some of the more stupendous demonstrations as of late. RL systems take in reward states (aka goals, outcomes that they get points for) and go after them without regard to unintended consequences of their actions. DeepMind's AlphaGo was designed to win the board game Go, whatever it took. OpenAI's system did the same for Defense of the Ancients (DOTA), a fiendishly complex, multiplayer online war game. Both came up with unconventional, in some cases radical, new tactics required to beat the best that humanity had to offer, yet consumed disproportionately large amounts of energy and natural resources to do so. This kind of single-mindedness has inspired all kinds of fun sci-fi, including an AI designed to produce as many paperclips as possible proceeding to destroying the earth, and then the entire cosmos, in an effort to get the job done.

While seemingly innocuous, this win-at-any-cost approach is untenable with the more practical uses of AI. Otherwise we may end up swamped by power outages, flash-trading market failures, or (even more) hyper-polarized, isolated online communities. To be clear, these threats are possible only because AI is delivering amazing improvements on previous best practices: electrical grids are becoming much more efficient and reliable, microsecond-frequency trading allows for major improvements in global market efficiency, and social media platforms suggest beneficial connections to goods, services, information, and people that would otherwise remain hidden. But the more we hand these and similar processes over to AI that is singularly focused on its goals, the more they can produce consequences we dont like, sometimes at the speed of light.

Some within the AI community are already addressing these concerns. One of the founders of DeepMind cofounded the Partnership on AI, which aims to direct attention and effort on harnessing AI to contribute to solutions for some of humanitys most challenging problems. On December 4, PAI announced the release of SafeLife, a proof-of-concept reinforcement-learning model that can avoid unintended side effects of its optimization activity in a simple game. SafeLife has a clear way of characterizing those consequences: increases in entropy (or the degree of disorder or randomness) in the game system. By definition this is not a practical system, but it does show how a reinforcement-learning-driven system can optimize towards a goal while minimizing collateral damage.

This is very exciting work, and in principle it could help with all kinds of unintended effects of intelligent technologies like AI and robots. For example, it could help factory robots know they should slow down if a red-tailed hawk flies in their way. (I've seen this happen. Those buildings house pigeons, and, if big enough, birds of prey). A SafeLife-like model could override its programmed setting to maximize throughput, because destroying living things adds a lot of entropy to the world. But some things that we expect to help in theory end up contributing to the very problems they're trying to solve. Yes, that means the unintended consequences module in next-gen AI systems could be the very thing that creates potent unintended consequences. What happens if that robot slows down for that hawk while a nearby human expects it to keep moving? Safety and productivity could be threatened.

This is particularly problematic when these consequences span significant amounts of space and time. Take the DOTA algorithm. During a match, when it calculates its win probability is above 90 percent, it's programmed to taunt other players via chat. "Win probability 92 percent," you might read as you watch your hard-won forces and devious strategy decimated by a computer program. What effects does that have on players' approaches to the game? And, even further removed, what about their commitment to the game? To gaming generally? Their career aspirations? Their contributions to society? If this seems like armchair speculation, note that Lee Sedolthe world's best professional Go player, a wunderkind who has devoted his entire life to mastering the gamehas just quit the game publicly and permanently, saying that no human can beat the system. It's not obvious that Sedol's retirement is good or bad for the game, for him or for society, but it is a symbolic and significant unintended consequence of the actions of an AI-based system optimizing on its reward function.

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The Perils and Promise of Artificial Conscientiousness - WIRED

With the recent switch of DeepMinds co-founder Mustafa Suleyman to its sister concern Google, researchers are raising questions as to whether this unexpected move will cause a crack between the two companies. Suleyman was termed on leave by this London-based AI company for the last six months, but earlier this month, he confirmed his joining at Google through a Twitter post. In the post, Suleyman portrayed his excitement of joining the team at Google to work on opportunities and impacts of applied AI technologies.

Acquired by Googles parent company Alphabet in 2014, DeepMind was aimed at using machine intelligence to solve real-world problems, including healthcare and energy. While the co-founder Hassabis was running the core artificial intelligence research at DeepMind, Suleyman was in charge of developing Streams, a controversial health app, which gathered data from millions of NHS patients without their direct consent.

However, the relationship between Google and DeepMind has been fairly complicated since last year. After a brawl with Facebook in 2014, Google decided to acquire DeepMind for $600 million. However, it got separated from the tech giant in the year 2015, as a part of the Alphabets restructure, rising tension among Googles AI researchers.

Suleymans key project, Streams has created a considerable suspicion between the three companies Alphabet, DeepMind and Google. Although DeepMind promised to keep a privacy check on all 1.6 million Royal Free data, keeping it independent, its dealings with Google of taking over Streams, formed no legal foundation for this claim. Experts believed that such dealing is breaking DeepMinds promise of encryption. Nevertheless, in an interview, a DeepMind spokesperson mentioned how the company is still committed to its privacy statements and any dealing with Google is not going to affect the acquired data.

Previously Google has gone through several complexities like disenfranchising its employees, creating conflicts with the government, and ignoring its customers and clients. Google has also recently admitted its interest in serving China with the development of a censored search engine. These steps have in turn placed this company in an outrageous position, making it unpredictable and not-so-trustworthy for the mainstream media, privacy experts, giants of the industry, and even for the general population.

On the other side, Google has been wanting to capitalise on owning the highest concentration of AI talent, in the field of deep learning. But, DeepMinds contribution to Googles bottom line has been shocking. The company has been making a significant breakthrough with AI either in terms of diagnosing fatal diseases, engineering a bacteria to eat up plastic, or creating a computer program that plays the board game, called AlphaGo. However, the company turned out to be a big disaster for its investors considering the loss of $571 million last year with a constant debt to its parent company of approximately $1.4 billion. Such concerns added more complexities for DeepMind, which led Google to take over the control of the company contradicting the initial agreement, which allows DeepMind to operate independently.

Why did it come to this? The answer is a big gap in DeepMinds commercialisation research. According to industry experts, the company has been fixated with the development of general intelligence, however, the important aspect should have been working on short term projects which could potentially turn into products to solve real-world problems. Haitham Bou-Ammar, an executive at Cambridge-based AI startup Prowler.io, believed that the company requires a shift in focus, with strategies to make money with deep learning assets rather than creating an education lab.

With a single focus on deep-learning neural networks, DeepMinds AI approach hasnt been inclusive. The company should have rather focused on a multi-segment approach, which would have helped in creating evolutionary algorithms and decision making in a realistic environment. DeepMind has been putting all its eggs in one basket Deep Reinforcement Learning. Many also believe that that company should have been focusing on bridging gaps, instead, it has been dealing with issues related to their apparent independence.

DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis once declined Googles offer of leading their robotics unit. On the other hand, while the companys provided with its WaveNet software to Google for replicating a human voice, the companys leadership totally declined its association with its cloud platform. Such developments showcased a bumpy relationship between the two. Critics started to fear that the change in management will shift the focus from research to products, while the privacy experts are worried about Googles unsolicited access to NHS data.

From a distance, DeepMind looks to have made great progress with built-in software that can learn to perform tasks at a superhuman level, and other strides at the gaming industry, demonstrating the power of reinforcement learning and the extraordinary ability of its computer programs. However, the company has missed a huge aspect that says that DeepMinds program has always been so restricted with no ability to react to changes in the environment, lacking in flexibility.

Another aspect which is hardly been touched by the company is the reward function a signal that allows the software to measure its progress which is directly related to the success of virtual environments. The company has always been focused on developing reward function for AlphaGo, however, in the real world, the progress is never measured with single scores and is usually varied according to the sectors.

Therefore, for now, deep reinforcement learning can now only be used in trusted and controlled environments with few or no changes in the system that works fine for Go games, but real-world problems cannot rely upon the same. The company, therefore, has to focus on finding a large scale commercial application of this technology. So far, the parent company has invested roughly $2 billion on DeepMind with a decent financial return some of which came from applying deep reinforcement learning within Alphabet to reduce power costs for cooling Googles servers.

According to experts and researchers, although the technology works fine for Go, it might not be suitable for real-world challenging problems, that the company is aspiring to solve with AI. Cutting DeepMind some slack, we all have to agree that no scientific innovation turns profitable overnight. However, the company definitely needs to dig deeper and bring in the technology with other techniques to create more stable results.

Even if DeepMinds current strategy is turning out to be less fruitful, nobody can exclude the vision of the company. Although it is taking time to bridge the gap between deep reinforcement learning and artificial intelligence, its impossible to ignore that the company is held by hundreds of PHDs and is also running on good funding. In fact, the success of Go, Atari, and Starcraft has given a promising name to the company.

Meanwhile, the substantial cash burn along with the departure of a high-level executive has caused wreckage, placing the subsidiary in deep confusion. According to the policies, DeepMind is supposed to provide AI-related assets to various companies and products under Alphabet, however, on the other hand, Googles in-house AI management Google Brain already started occupying a similar role within the Alphabets ecosystem. This perplexity is deepening the problems for the company, pushing it to work in silos. In its present condition, DeepMind seems to be in a critical point, where the company is constantly investing in deep learning research and developing AI assets, but not living up to its potential.

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DeepMind Vs Google: The Inner Feud Between Two Tech Behemoths - Analytics India Magazine

Democrats have Andrew Yang. Republicans have Zoltan Istvan.

Both men are running for the presidency as political outsiders and pitching radical, future-focused ideas to voters. For Yang, its universal basic income and a slew of other technocratic policy proposals.

Istvan also supports a form of universal basic income, but his primary focus is even wilder he wants the country to prepare for the transhumanist future.

Istvan defines transhumanism as the movement to upgrade human bodies and lives with technology. He predicts a future in which our bodies will be significantly augmented, such as with robotic arms or computer displays in our eyes.

He expects human life spans will drastically increase and robots will take on more humanlike characteristics, including consciousness.

Outside of science fiction entertainment, these are not ideas most Americans think about as public policy issues.

When I was traveling in Iowa and told people about it, they thought I was on some other space ship, Istvan told me during a phone interview last week.

Istvan ran for president in 2016 under the Transhumanist Party, and ran in the California gubernatorial primary with the Libertarian Party last year. Hes not a traditional Republican, but hopes to find allies among GOP primary voters.

As an entrepreneur Ive always been fiscally conservative. Totally socially liberal. Libertarian to the core when it comes to social ideas, Istvan said.

There is a great deal of disagreement about whether and how soon the huge technological developments Istvan discusses might be achieved. It might be 10 or 20 years as he predicts, but also could be more than 100 years away, or never.

Nevertheless, some form of transhumanism and an increasing level of artificial-intelligence-aided automation already are upon us. Istvan warns that the United States will be ill-equipped to manage social and economic changes.

Im worried were going to wake up in four or eight years and China will be the dominant player in the world both culturally and with innovation and with money and the economy, Istvan said.

To prepare, Istvan suggests several steps that will make many Americans uncomfortable.

As a few examples, the transhumanist campaign proposes mandatory college attendance for most people, licensure testing for parents and merging the United States, Canada and the European Union into a joined partnership.

Istvan wants to partially fund the government through leasing federal lands, vast spaces of which sit mostly unused in the western United States with trillions of dollars of natural resources. He has no affinity for nature, which he sees as antagonistic and immoral.

And Istvan would radically expand the use of police surveillance technology, including facial recognition and tracking devices. He generally wants to rollback privacy norms that inhibit technology.

I think these are ideas whose time might never come, but Istvan predicts the rest of us will eventually come around.

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The transhumanist age will be upon us sometime. People will remember Zoltan has been out there talking about these ideas for a long time, he said.

(319) 339-3156; adam.sullivan@thegazette.com

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GOP candidate pitches robots and immortality to Iowa voters - The Gazette

Transgender ideology wasnt invented in the 2010s, but this was the decade when it gripped our culture in its venomous maw and refused to let go. Heres how trans grew from fringe oddity to a massive force affecting schools, parenting, prisons, policy, academia, sports, law enforcement, language and the arts.

In 2009, Susie Green, who will become Chair of UK gender clinic Mermaids, takes her son to Thailand for vaginoplasty. Jackie Green becomes the youngest person in the world to undergo a sex change operation, at age 16. Meanwhile, trans woman and trans humanist Martine Rothblatt foresees the end of our species as we know it, andclaimsthat transhumanism builds on transgenderism, broadening the driving mindset from a gender ideal to a human development ideal.

Trans began the decadeas an outlier. It became something tolerated out of compassion. It has become a medical-legal monster, with activists claiming to redefine woman as a feeling, with self-identification trumping the basic facts of biological sex.And if you disagree, youre transphobic. Welcome to the 2020s!

At 10 years old,Jazz Jenningsis already out as trans.

Children become the subject ofmedical experimentation. Britains National Health Service approves medical experiments which will chemically castrate gay children in attempt to correct gender-nonconformity.

We now being told that affirmation of trans individuals is all about compassion. We need to knowwhat trans gender meansand how important surgery is.New York magazinesays that it takes a powerful act of imagination to understand what a transgender child, in his perfect little body on the changing table, might be feeling, or why he might become terrified as adolescence approaches.

The American Psychiatric Associationupdates its manual, to replace gender identity disorder with gender dysphoria.

Now 13 years old and wearing dental braces as well as female dress, Jazz Jennings isparadedon ABC News.

In Britain, the gender clinic at theTavistock Clinic gives 12 year-olds hormone blockers to prepare for transition. The treatment halts the onset of puberty preventing children from developing the sexual characteristics of the gender they were born.

Trans woman Parker Molloy writes amissive:I am a woman, but on such a frequent basis, Im told this is not true. Im told that Im genetically or biologically male. Im told that Im not a real woman. I have to ask: What constitutes a real woman? How am I not one? Is it because of my chromosomes? I dont think thats fair

The splendidly surnamed trans actress Laverne Cox, the first trans person to grace the cover ofTIMEmagazine, explains that most of us are insecure about our gender.

IntheNew Yorker, Michelle Goldberg sits on the fence: Trans women say that they are women because they feel femalethey have womens brains in mens bodies. Radical feministsbelieve that if women think and act differently from men its because society forces them to.

Facebook offers56 gender optionsfor users to choose from.

Susie Greens trans daughter Jackie is now 21, and Green speaks out against those who call her parentingabusive. She claims that even before she could speak my daughter had made her preferences clear.

Bruce Jenner becomes Caitlyn, and graces the cover ofVanity Fair. Trans MMA fighterFallon Foxdefeated her opponent, Tamikka Brents, by TKO at 2:17 of the first round of their match. Brents eye injury resulted in a damaged orbital bone that required seven staples. Now thats equality.

Michelle Goldberg is back. InSlate, she reminds us that, Most progressives now take it for granted that gender is a matter of identity, not biology, and that refusing to recognize a persons gender identity is an outrageous offense.

In the UK, theParliamentary Women and Equalities Committee Reportremoves sex-based protections.My Transgender Kidappears on the BBC. Itsreported that the Tavistock and Portman gender clinic has seen referrals increase by 50 percent every year since 2009.

Rachel Dolezal claims to betransracial.Trans abledturns out to be a thing.

Teen girls protest trans girls use of girlslocker room.

The year of the bathroom. A North Carolina law ispasseddisallowing trans people from using the bathroom of their choice. The State issuedby Obamas Department of Justice, whichtellsevery public school district in the country to allow transgender students to use the bathrooms that match their gender identity.

The director of the ACLU in Georgialeaves her postrather than fight for trans bathroom rights.

Male bodied trans studentscompeteagainst girls in high school sports. Female bodied transpregnant personsare lauded as the first male mothers.

The National Institute of Healthlaunchesthe largest-ever study of transgender youth, but also only the second to track the psychological effects of delaying puberty. Its notable that theres no control group.

Canadian feminist Meghan Murphy speaks out against the lack of debate. Because representation matters, a call goes outnot to castcis women as trans.

Jill SollowaysTransparentcomes underfirefor not being woke enough.

A male to female detransitionerspeaks. TheNew York Timesadmitsthat scientists have no conclusive explanation for what causes some people to feel dissonance between their gender identity and aspects of their anatomy.

Philosopher Slavoj iek gets called out for his claimthat the vision of social relations that sustains transgenderism is the so-called postgenderism: a social, political and cultural movement whose adherents advocate a voluntary abolition of gender, rendered possible by recent scientific progress in biotechnology and reproductive technologies.

The Womens March takes to the streets in Washington, DC, wearingtransphobic, pink pussy hats. Bill Maher and Milo Yiannopoulos misgender Jenner and are slammedby Dan Savage.Neuterbecomes a thing, so does drilling down into biology to determine that sex is not binary in otherspecies. Which it is, really.

Stonewall UKs Rachel Steinconfirmsthat being trans is about an innate sense of self. To imply anything other than this is reductive and hurtful to many trans people who are only trying to live life as their authentic selves.

Thegender spectrumemerges.

Trans advocatessuggestthatprevious restrictions on transing kids be eased so that children under 16 years old can begin hormone therapy in order to physically transform their bodies.

Teachers socially trans kidswithout parents consent. Jazz Jenningss book I Am Jazzis acontroversialpick for kindergarten story time.

Radical feministsspeak outagainst transing kids. One lady istrans species.And trans affirmation is noweveryones job.Topshopopensfitting rooms to trans women. Theres money in them there trans.

The Department of Justice reverses the Obama era directives andsaysthat sex means only biologically male or female.

Katie Herzogwritesabout detransitioners, and gets intense heat for it. Debra Sohsaysthat the entire gender conversation has brain science wrong.

We will change our bodies however we want, theTrans Health Manifestoinsists. We will have universally accessible and freely available hormones & blockers, surgical procedures, and any other relevant treatments and therapies.

The real question is: how does a female bodied gay mannavigate Grindr?

Who could have guessed, even a decade ago, that in 2018 the word woman would be treated as an expletive? asks Joanna Williams in Britains PC-bible theNew Statesman.

The Gender Recognition Act allows for self-ID in the UK. The NHSmust offerfertility services to those looking to remove their genitals.Britain;s Labour party alienates gender-critical feminists by stating that self-ID is all thats required to be on Laboursshort listof women candidates. Women try to meet and talk about this mess, but their events arecanceleddue to trans protests.

UK Schools policy comes underfirefor insisting that all kids have a gender identity. Girl Guides inclusion policycalled outas anti-girl. Amother of fouris interrogated by the police for referring to male to female trans surgery as castration on Twitter. The mere concept ofdebating trans becomes transphobic.

Jess Bradley, the first elected Trans Officer in the UK National Union of Student, says I self-identify as a non-binary woman, I dont believe there is such a thing as a real woman. Male bodied trans person Rachel McKinnonwinsa womens cycling race.

Bill B-16 isadoptedin Canada. This effectively redefines what it means to be a woman from something biological to something defined by external appearance. A Toronto womens shelter admits a male bodied trans person, and an abused womansues.

In academia, Camille Paglia says sex change is impossible. Jordan Peterson is almost fired from the University of Toronto for refusing to go along with compelled speech for pronouns. There are callsfor colleges to let trans athletes play on their chosen gender.

Heather Brunskell-Evans and Michele Moores bookTransgender Children and Young People: Born In Your Own Bodyisrejectedby trans activists. Oxfordbansgender critical voices. Lisa Littmans academic paper on Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria is pulled from Plos One for being transphobic. Jesse Singal writes about gender confused youth inthe Atlantic, and takes masses of abuse for it. Reports emerge on the danger in the drugs used tocastratechildren, and concerns thattransing is homophobia.

TheParis Reviewadvocates for atrans literary canon. No one buys theParis Review.

Trans surgeries dont always have an amazingresult.YettheAmerican Academy of Pediatriciansasserts thattransgender kids know their genderas clearly and consistently as their developmentally equivalent peers and that theres no need for watchful waiting.Trans toyscome to market.

TheNew York Timessayssex doesnt have anything to do with reproductive organs. Researchclaimsthat gender dysphoric kids show functional brain characteristics that are typical of their desired gender.

US prisonsopposetrans inmates in womens prisons. Canadian prisonsallowprisoners to be housed according to gender identity.

How much longer must transgender people continue to participate in public conversations about whether or not we know our own souls? Jennifer Finney Boylanasksin theNew York Times equating gender to a religious belief. Quillettemakes a splash by publishing opposition to the trans agenda, even fromtrans persons.

The question of how tofuck trans lesbiansis a thing. So isgirldick,how to eat out a non-op trans woman, andrewriting gay historyto be trans. Andrea Long Chu says shewont be happywith her new coochie, but she should get one anyway. Andtrans lesbiansreally have trouble dating.

Cis women areasked to do more for trans women, becauseit costs you zero dollars to be nice. Cis peoplewont date trans people, and lesbians decide to get the L outof LGBT.

Twitterprohibitsmisgendering and deadnaming to curtail anti-trans abuse. Meghan Murphy isbanned from Twitter for misgendering Jessica Yaniv, a male-bodied trans woman a transvestite, in traditional terms who wants to force immigrant women to wax her balls.

Trans English arrives, withtonsof new words for gender.Trans kidsknowwho they are, and its eitheraffirmationor death if you disagree.

Self-IDcomes to New Hampshire. Trans model Munroe Bergdorf ischosento speak by the London chapter of the globalWomens March. New York goesall-inon bathrooms and the abolition of women only spaces. South Dakotasayslet trans kids compete in sports

The Vancouver Rape Relief and Womens Shelterloses municipal funding after refusing to accept trans women. Morgane Oger wins a Human Rights Tribunal againstChristian activist Bill Whatcott after he distributedflyers disparaging herfor being a trans woman. A woman isarrestedfor referring to a transgender woman as a man online.

Liberal womenspeak on trans issues atthe Heritage Foundation, because they have beenabandonedby the left.

Butfacial recognitiondoesnt get trans. Neither dostraight men. Tennis legend Marina Navratilovaopposesmen in womens sports.

Even though thequick transingof kids is obviously a terrible idea, itsnot OKto talk about detransitioning. But girls start pushingbackon the locker room thing. So dograndmothers.

Students in the English town of Brighton are issued with stickers on which they write their preferredpronouns. Transtoolkitsarrive. Experts say that there has been aglobal surgein young people presenting to gender clinics. This mirrors the huge rise in referrals to the Gids, up from 94 to 2,519 since 2010.

Cosmopublishes a detailed account ofbottom surgery.

Trans advocatesdecrymental health screening prior to accessing cross-sex hormones. Trans offendersseek rightto remove crimes committed under previous gender. Hayden Patterson, held in womens prison in Canada, doesnt think she should have toact femaleto stay.Womb transplantsso men can bear children might be a thing. Elizabeth Warrenstatesher pronouns.

The firsttrans prison unitopens in the UK. In the US, a trans sex offender ismovedto womens prison. The World Health Organizationreclassestrans as not actually a mental health condition. Jessica Yaniv brings acasein Human Rights Tribunal against independent aestheticians who wouldnt wax her balls. She loses.

The winners of womens high school track and fieldcompetitionsin Connecticut are male bodied. In Australia, newguidelines encourage sporting organizationsto permit transgender and non-binary athletes to compete against members of the opposite sex. Laurel Hubbard wins gold in womens weightlifting in the Pacific Games, to the dismayof the president of Samoa.

The International Olympic Commissionconsidersrule changes to allow men to compete as women, but hits asnag. Womens rugby is toodangerousfor women once men get involved. A male runner is the female NCAAathlete of the week. But girlsspeak out: Female athletes around the globe feel that womens sports is no longersustainable.

Trans employment case goes to theSupreme Court. Trans guides come out for kids inQuebecandNew York City, as well as thegender unicorn. As domedical riskson chest binding, and thepushbackagainst that. Parental rights are chucked byAustralia, and courts in the US fromArizonatoTexastoVermont.

Puberty blockers arenota panacea. But kids are still beingfast trackedin the UK. Gender cliniciansrevealthey have tried to raise the alarm. Detransitioners start to make somenoise. Parents areaskedto resist the doctors.

It turns out the rhetoric about the trans murder epidemic isnot exactly true. Trans is apony tail. Not onlywomenget periods. Theresno such thingas biological sex. And not dating trans people isdiscriminatory.

More:
The 2010s were the decade of trans - The Spectator USA

Information is now easily and rapidly accessible. It is possible to say that being indifferent to new information is actually a success. However, knowing how we can actually use the information, well, that is the challenging part. Jason Silva, who gained millions of followers with his "Shots of Awe" video series seven years ago, when there was no "influencer" concept on social media, has managed to do this very well today, especially as a familiar "face of screens and internet influencer" widely known by young people.

As the world transforms with technology, Silva is turning everyone's heads with his unique, characteristic and literary expression style. Describing the relationship between technology and philosophy, Silva transforms himself in the meantime. As the star of National Geographic's Brain Games series, Silva takes his curiosity, which is his greatest motivation, everywhere he travels, adding depth to his "journey" that he started in 2012 as a storyteller on social media. Silva is now a futurist speaker answering the question "how?"

We talked to Silva in Qatar at the 2019 World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE), which was held in November under the theme "Unlearn, Relearn: What it means to be human." Silva focuses on "futurism and disruptive innovation, the physical and psychological effects of awe on the human body, and leaving the mind to the flow." What Silva wants to arrive at is to discover ways to maintain mental and physical health and to find out how the issues he contemplates stimulate creativity to tell people "how."

Silva has been invested in consciousness and staying in the flow lately. When asked if there was a particular reason, he said one of things he is passionate about is people's capacity to overcome limitations.

Silva said sometimes these limitations can come down to technical or practical reasons, but they can sometimes also just be our own minds. Pointing out that the number of suicide-related deaths nowadays is higher than the number of deaths due to natural disasters or conflict, he said the issue of mental health is a pressing matter.

Staying in the flow

When asked how he protects his sanity and looks after his mental health, Silva said: "I take care of myself. I rest and sleep very well. Sleep and exercise have a great place in my life."

"Besides that, I am actively meditating. Staying in the flow is an active type of meditation. So is going for a walk, swimming, traveling, making art, reading and watching movies," he added.

"If you have watched my videos, I describe them as a 'free flow of consciousness without written text.' I get into a flow while making videos. When you are in the flow, your brain tries to guess what you are going to say, while being completely insecure on the other hand," he said, adding that the beauty of this state of mind is that it silences your inner critic.

He said brain scans of free-flowing rappers and jazz musicians have revealed that parts of their brains shut down when they are really "in the flow."

He stressed that people often have the misconception that to get into a flow is to let it go, but it actually has a lot to do with planning and discipline.

"You have to surrender after you have worked on it," he added.

Advising everyone to find their own flow path, he said: "Flow brings focus. You need to find out what hinders your focus, what distracts you and what draws you in. This may be sports or music for some. For me, it is making videos and being on stage."

Are we living in a simulated universe?

The idea that the world around us is not real and that we are trapped inside some video game or computer like The Sims or The Matrix has become the subject of serious academic debate. SpaceX chief Elon Musk has been one of the many high-profile proponents of the "simulation hypothesis" a theory that proposes the Earth and the universe, and all reality is actually an artificial simulation and he recently explained his thoughts on the subject in a podcast.

Silva said he agreed with Musk to a degree, but in a different way.

"I think we live in an environment where everything is virtual. It is like you are in a perception field. What you think and your identity stand in virtual reality. None of this is physical or unchangeable. If you look at our planet from space, you do not see lines separating countries. These lines are our virtual reality," he said.

"(Yuval Noah) Harari, in his book Sapiens, says that society cannot exist without useful stories. A dream that only one person has is a dream, but a dream that everyone has becomes a reality. So, in a simulation where everyone moves together, these dreams are practically real," he added.

On the topic of transhumanism, Silva called it "an extension of natural life."

"We can extend and expand our capacity in natural life, just like tools. We came from Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago, and we used the tools to reach something physically. If we could not reach fruit, we got sticks, for example. Thanks to sticks, we were able to extend our arm. This process of extension was the extension of our intentions and our brains. From this point of view, I believe that being human is trans-human."

With the rapid development of technology, a lot of people fear the new and unknown. Silva said he believed people weren't exactly afraid of technology but rather afraid of change and resistant to it.

"It's because change brings uncertainty, which in turn spurs this biological effect of the uncertainty (our ancestors felt) thousands of years ago when we thought a lion would come out and eat us," he said.

He said this feeling of uncertainty should be embraced as it "allows us to dream and build the life we want."

According to Silva, this is very much in line with Wise's theme, which suggests that we are in an era, a process of "unlearning what we already know and relearning it."

What we want to do in the future and what we want to reveal is to inspire people to think bigger than ever.

Tips to overcome anxiety

Silva said he likes to think of himself as a software program with "bad coding." "Sometimes I have a lot of anxiety. I know what triggers this situation and I find where my bad programming is," he said.

"Sometimes I stop while reacting to something, I watch my reaction and try to figure out how I feel. Then, I decide how I want to move forward. When I react to something, there is always an element I take into account."

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From Brain Games to the philosophy of the future: Jason Silva - Daily Sabah