Artificial Intelligence/Robotics: Have we opened a Pandora's Box? As AI/robotics eliminates jobs across the spectrum, governmental revenues will plummet while the debt increases dramatically. This crisis of limited resources on all levels—underfunded or non-existent pensions, health problems, lack of savings, and job destruction without comparable job creation—will drive many into homelessness and produce a dramatic rise in violence as we fight over shrinking resources. “Ambitious, deeply researched, and far reaching in its scope and conclusions, Contagion is actually several books in one. Its summary of what AI is and will likely become is a standalone revelation. It also offers a critique of socio-economic ripple effects that verge on dystopian, and essays and “case studies” of specific sectors or regions, notably a chapter on China’s fusion of AI and social control.” JEFF LONG, New York Times Best-selling Author “A sobering look at the far-reaching impact that artificial intelligence may have on the economy, the workforce, democracy and all of humanity. The Artificial Intelligence Contagion is a bellwether for anyone seeking to comprehend the global disruption coming our way.” —DAVID COOPER, President and Technologist , Massive Designs “We see in the rush to develop AI the arrogance of the human species. Often buried by the exuberance over what AI might do is the massive dislocation it can cause. David and Daniel Barnhizer masterfully lead us through the societal challenges AI poses and offer possible solutions that will enable us to survive the AI contagion.” —KENNETH A. GRADY, Member, Advisory Boards, Elevate Services, Inc., MDR Lab, and LARI Ltd. This may be "the scariest book ever".

The analysis of interconnectedness and contagion is an important part of the financial stability and risk assessment of a country’s financial system. This paper offers detailed and practical guidance on how to conduct a comprehensive analysis of interconnectedness and contagion for a country’s financial system under various circumstances. We survey current approaches at the IMF for analyzing interconnectedness within the interbank, cross-sector and cross-border dimensions through an overview and examples of the data and methodologies used in the Financial Sector Assessment Program. Finally, this paper offers practical advice on how to interpret results and discusses potential financial stability policy recommendations that can be drawn from this type of in-depth analysis.

Would you want to be cared for by a robot? Michael C. Brannigan’s Caregiving, Carebots, and Contagion explores caring robots’ lifesaving benefits, particularly during contagion, while probing the threat they pose to interpersonal engagement and genuine human caregiving. As our COVID-19 purgatory lingers on, caring robots will join our nursing and healthcare frontlines. Carebots can perform lifesaving tasks to minimize infection, safeguard vulnerable persons, and relieve caregivers of certain burdens. They also spark profound moral and existential questions: What is caring? How will we relate with each other? What does it mean to be human? Underscoring carebots' hands-on benefits, Brannigan also warns us of perils. They can be a dangerous lure in a culture that settles for substitutes and venerates the screen. Alerting us to the threatening prospect of carebots becoming our surrogate for interpersonal connection, he maintains they are not the culprits. The challenge lies in how we relate to them. While they beneficially complement our caregiving, carebots cannot replace human caring. Caring is a fundamentally human act and lies at the heart of ethics. As humans, we have a binding moral responsibility to care for the Other, and genuine caring demands our embodied, human-to-human presence.

He woke to a dying world. AI's failing. Datastreams withering. The Verse crumbling. Populations shattered. Civilizations lost. And his thoughts were on his lost love. He had every right to be selfish. His self was all he had left. The nanoswarms had taken everything else. Tags/Related Terms: science fiction, sf, sci-fi, nanotechnology, nanomachines, sff, biology, hard sf, genetic engineering, genetics, apocalypse, horror, action, speculative fiction, biotechnology, cyberpunk, 20th century, bailey, joseph bailey, joseph j bailey, joseph j. bailey, singularity, american, transhumanism, evolution, apocalyptic, quest, disaster, near future, science, ai, blood, science fiction, disease, end of the world, fantasy, future, hard science, nano, plague, sf/f/h, aliens, american fiction, american literature, anthropology, artificial intelligence, bioengineering, biological, biopunk, catastrophe, constructivism, contemporary science fiction, earth, english, experiments, germs, information architecture, medical, mutations, nanobots, pc, post-apocalyptic, postcyberpunk, post-holocaust, prehistory, pulp, science thriller, short stories, short story, novella, technology, transcendence, high tech, love story, action adventure, adventure, neural network, grey goo, gray goo, cyborg, computers, suspense, technothriller, nano, robots, swarm, nanoswarm, computer science, weapons, techno, scary, terror, 21st century, algorithms, cautionary, cautionary tale, collective intelligence, computer simulation, emergence, engineering, relationships, machine learning, microbiology, mimicry, virus, viral, molecular biology, romance, predators, scientific thriller, armageddon, survival, microbiome, tech, distributed intelligence, terraform, terraforming, coevolution, bots

In the age of HIV, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, the Ebola Virus and BSE, metaphors and experience of contagion are a central concern of government, biomedicine and popular culture. Contagion explores cultural responses of infectious diseases and their biomedical management over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It also investigates the use of 'contagion' as a concept in postmodern reconceptualisations of embodied subjectivity. The essays are written from within the fields of cultural studies, biomedical history and critical sociology. The contributors examine the geographies, policies and identities which have been produced in the massive social effort to contain diseases. They explore both social responses to infectious diseases in the past, and contemporary theoretical and biomedical sites for the study of contagion.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 27th Canadian Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Canadian AI 2014, held in Montréal, QC, Canada, in May 2014. The 22 regular papers and 18 short papers presented together with 3 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 94 submissions. The papers cover a variety of topics within AI, such as: agent systems; AI applications; automated reasoning; bioinformatics and BioNLP; case-based reasoning; cognitive models; constraint satisfaction; data mining; E-commerce; evolutionary computation; games; information retrieval; knowledge representation; machine learning; multi-media processing; natural language processing; neural nets; planning; privacy-preserving data mining; robotics; search; smart graphics; uncertainty; user modeling; web applications.

This volume is a collection of ten essays that direct their gaze to the unfolding of contagions in the non-classical contexts of Asia and Africa. Or, to borrow from the title of one of Partha Chatterjee’s books, they are reflections on the pandemic in most of the world. Featuring many scholars (of the humanities and social sciences) in the Global South, these chapters take as their intellectual focus the political-social as well as the ethical challenges posed by the contagions in the "East." Through analyses of literary narratives/films/video games, this Contagion Narratives traces the manufactured narratives of victimization by majority-communities and the lethal divides consequently being drawn between a reconstituted "authentic majority" and the more vulnerable minority ‘other’ in these societies. The essays in this collection are animated by imaginations of liveable alternatives on a planet on the brink. This volume traces lineages to Buchi Emecheta and Rabindranath Tagore rather than Albert Camus, to Satyajit Ray and the indie traditions rather than Hollywood, and to Buddhism rather than Christianity, to track the historic journeys of "modernity." Using an eclectic set of analytical tools and strategies of textual criticism, this volume argues that ideas of "democracy," even while they carry echoes of other societies, are markedly different as they travel from Gaddafi’s Libya to Wuhan under lockdown to colonial Bengal.

Examining the potential benefits and risks of using artificial intelligence to advance global sustainability. Drones with night vision are tracking elephant and rhino poachers in African wildlife parks and sanctuaries; smart submersibles are saving coral from carnivorous starfish on Australia's Great Barrier Reef; recycled cell phones alert Brazilian forest rangers to the sound of illegal logging. The tools of artificial intelligence are being increasingly deployed in the battle for global sustainability. And yet, warns Peter Dauvergne, we should be cautious in declaring AI the planet's savior. In AI in the Wild, Dauvergne avoids the AI industry-powered hype and offers a critical view, exploring both the potential benefits and risks of using artificial intelligence to advance global sustainability.

When the Earth is threatened by a slowly expanding sun, mankind embarks upon a mission to send a mammoth Worldship to settle a new planet across the stars. The preternatural races step out of hiding to work with the humans to save what they can from their dying world. With the aid of the Fae, shape shifters, Vampires, and other creatures of supernatural lore, the Worldship, Leviathan, is complete one thousand years later. It is a time of celebration on the Worldship, and Knith and her growing circle of family and friends are enjoying the holiday at House Shade. Knith, Aurora, and Caitlyn have to make an appearance at the Capitol celebration, when everything goes awry. The gifting ceremony is interrupted by a citizen who contracted some sort of alien contagion, and the powers that be find themselves trying to contain the spread of the pathogen while the medical staff, aided by Aurora and Caitlyn, race against time to find a cure. Then the aliens came...