How Internet Pioneers Celebrated 50 Years of the Internet

Founded in 1963, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers held a special event Sunday that they said would be “inspiring engineering for the next 50 years.”

The event featured talks on the origins of the internet from 80-year-old “father of the internet” Vint Cerf, along with John Shoch (who helped develop the Ethernet and internetwork protocols at Xerox PARC), Judith Estrin (who worked with Cerf on the TCP project), and Robert Kahn (who with Cerf first proposed the IP and TCP protocols). Ethernet co-inventor Bob Metcalfe also spoke at the end of the event.

Long-time Slashdot reader repett0 was an onsite volunteer, and shares that “it was incredible to meet and greet such a wonderful mix of people making technology happen… [T]he event celebrated many key technologies and innovators from the past 50 years and considerations of what is to come in the next 50 years.”

Video streams are available and more are coming online (including interviews with key innovators, society leadership, and more). If you could not make this event event, follow-on activities continue, including the People-Centered Internet Imagine Workshop where a mix of society is working together to consider how to improve humanity’s intersection with ever-expanding abilities thanks to technology.

They add that the event was made possible “through the collaboration of many professional computing societies” including the IEEE, People-Centered Internet, Google, Internet Society, IEEE Computer Society, GIANT Protocol, IEEE Foundation — and volunteers from the SF Bay Area ACM and Internet Society.

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Elon Musk Says AI Could Eliminate Our Need to Work at Jobs

In the future, “Probably none of us will have a job,” Elon Musk said Thursday, speaking remotely to the VivaTech 2024 conference in Paris. Instead, jobs will be optional — something we’d do like a hobby — “But otherwise, AI and the robots will provide any goods and services that you want.”
CNN reports that Musk added this would require “universal high income” — and “There would be no shortage of goods or services.”
In a job-free future, though, Musk questioned whether people would feel emotionally fulfilled. “The question will really be one of meaning — if the computer and robots can do everything better than you, does your life have meaning?” he said. “I do think there’s perhaps still a role for humans in this — in that we may give AI meaning.”

CNN accompanied their article with this counterargument:
In January, researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab found workplaces are adopting AI much more slowly than some had expected and feared. The report also said the majority of jobs previously identified as vulnerable to AI were not economically beneficial for employers to automate at that time. Experts also largely believe that many jobs that require a high emotional intelligence and human interaction will not need replacing, such as mental health professionals, creatives and teachers.

CNN notes that Musk “also used his stage time to urge parents to limit the amount of social media that children can see because ‘they’re being programmed by a dopamine-maximizing AI’.”

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Proposed Zero-Carbon Cement Solution Called ‘Absolute Miracle’

“Concrete and steel production are major sources of CO2 emissions,” writes New Atlas, “but a new solution from Cambridge could recycle both at the same time.”

Throwing old concrete into steel-processing furnaces not only purifies iron but produces “reactivated cement” as a byproduct. If done using renewable energy, the process could make for completely carbon-zero cement.

Concrete is the world’s most used building material, and making it is a particularly dirty business — concrete production alone is responsible for about 8% of total global CO2 emissions. Unfortunately it’s not easy to recycle back into a form that can be used to make new concrete structures… For the new study, Cambridge researchers investigated how waste concrete could be converted back into clinker, the dry component of cement, ready to be used again. “I had a vague idea from previous work that if it were possible to crush old concrete, taking out the sand and stones, heating the cement would remove the water, and then it would form clinker again,” said Dr. Cyrille Dunant, first author of the study…

An electric arc furnace needs a “flux” material, usually lime, to purify the steel. This molten rocky substance captures the impurities, then bubbles to the surface and forms a protective layer that prevents the new pure steel from becoming exposed to air. At the end of the process, the used flux is discarded as a waste material. So for the Cambridge method, the lime flux was swapped out for the recycled cement paste. And sure enough, not only was it able to purify the steel just fine, but if the leftover slag is cooled quickly in air, it becomes new Portland cement.

The resulting concrete has similar performance to the original stuff. Importantly, the team says this technique doesn’t add major costs to either concrete or steel production, and significantly reduces CO2 emissions compared to the usual methods of making both. If the electric arc furnace was powered by renewable sources, it could essentially make for zero-emission cement.

“The first industrial-scale trials are underway this month,” the article adds.
“Producing zero emissions cement is an absolute miracle, but we’ve also got to reduce the amount of cement and concrete we use,” said Professor Julian Allwood, who led the research.

And the professor has also recorded a thoughtful video visualizing the process — and explaining the significance of their breakthrough.

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FTC Chair: AI Models Could Violate Antitrust Laws

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chair Lina Khan said Wednesday that companies that train their artificial intelligence (A) models on data from news websites, artists’ creations or people’s personal information could be in violation of antitrust laws. At The Wall Street Journal’s “Future of Everything Festival,” Khan said the FTC is examining ways in which major companies’ data scraping could hinder competition or potentially violate people’s privacy rights. “The FTC Act prohibits unfair methods of competition and unfair or deceptive acts or practices,” Khan said at the event. “So, you can imagine, if somebody’s content or information is being scraped that they have produced, and then is being used in ways to compete with them and to dislodge them from the market and divert businesses, in some cases, that could be an unfair method of competition.”

Khan said concern also lies in companies using people’s data without their knowledge or consent, which can also raise legal concerns. “We’ve also seen a lot of concern about deception, about unfairness, if firms are making one set of representations when you’re signing up to use them, but then are secretly or quietly using the data you’re feeding them — be it your personal data, be it, if you’re a business, your proprietary data, your competitively significant data — if they’re then using that to feed their models, to compete with you, to abuse your privacy, that can also raise legal concerns,” she said.

Khan also recognized people’s concerns about companies retroactively changing their terms of service to let them use customers’ content, including personal photos or family videos, to feed into their AI models. “I think that’s where people feel a sense of violation, that that’s not really what they signed up for and oftentimes, they feel that they don’t have recourse,” Khan said. “Some of these services are essential for navigating day to day life,” she continued, “and so, if the choice — ‘choice’ — you’re being presented with is: sign off on not just being endlessly surveilled, but all of that data being fed into these models, or forego using these services entirely, I think that’s a really tough spot to put people in.” Khan said she thinks many government agencies have an important role to play as AI continues to develop, saying, “I think in Washington, there’s increasingly a recognition that we can’t, as a government, just be totally hands off and stand out of the way.” You can watch the interview with Khan here.

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