Suchergebnisse

The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the Framework Convention on Climate Change seeks to reduce the costs for industrialized states of reducing greenhouse gas emissions while supporting abatement efforts in developing countries. Implementing an effective CDM system (whether under the Kyoto Protocol or any agreement that replaces it) will require recognizing that projects may fail because of intentional nonperformance by participants, the withholding of necessary cooperation by nonparticipants, adverse external events, or any combination of these. Maximizing the benefits to the climate change regime will require establishing project criteria and monitoring procedures that distinguish project-related from participant-related risk. Rather than adopting an exclusively adversarial approach focused on identifying and punishing those causing project failure, effective implementation will benefit from facilitative measures to avert failures before they occur and will reward projects that succeed under adversity. The CDM system's ultimate success also will require progressively evaluating and refining the system as a whole, as well as individual projects.

Artificial intelligence (AI), particularly various methods of machine learning (ML), has achieved landmark advances over the past few years in applications as diverse as playing complex games, language processing, speech recognition and synthesis, image identification, and facial recognition. These breakthroughs have brought a surge of popular, journalistic, and policy attention to the field, including both excitement about anticipated advances and the benefits they promise, and concern about societal impacts and risks – potentially arising through whatever combination of accident, malicious or reckless use, or just social and political disruption from the scale and rapidity of change.

The potential societal impacts of artificial intelligence (AI) and related technologiesare so vast, they are often likened to those of past transformative technologicalchanges such as the industrial or agricultural revolutions. They are also deeplyuncertain, presenting a wide range of possibilities for good or ill – as indeed thediverse technologies lumped under the term AI are themselves diffuse, labile, anduncertain. Speculation about AI's broad social impacts ranges from full-on utopia todystopia, both in fictional and non-fiction accounts. Narrowing the field of view fromaggregate impacts to particular impacts and their mechanisms, there is substantial(but far from total) agreement on some – e.g., profound disruption of labor markets,with the prospect of unemployment that is novel in scale and breadth – but greatuncertainty on others, even as to sign. Will AI concentrate or distribute economicand political power – and if concentrate, then in whom? Will it make human lives andsocieties more diverse or more uniform? Expand or contract individual liberty?Enrich or degrade human capabilities? On all these points, the range of presentspeculation is vast.