Ideas, Actions, and Inspiration for a Better Tomorrow - October 9 Edition

Las Vegas, Remembrances

Before tragedy in Las Vegas, these victims touched the lives of their loved ones

“…we return to our remembrances of the 58 people murdered in Las Vegas last Sunday when a gunman fired into the crowd at a country music concert.

As more stories of heroism emerge, so do clearer pictures of the victims’ lives.

Here now, 10 more.”

Addiction, Education

Read or watch:

At an innovative high school, students get support battling their addictions while they learn

“…now to our America Addicted series.

Drug use has been down among teenagers, but mortality is rising. And that is leading many to seek out new options for their children.

The “NewsHour”’s Pamela Kirkland went to look at how one so-called recovery school in Indianapolis is giving new hope to students battling addiction.

It’s part of our weekly Making the Grade look at education.”

Sex Trafficking

This Sex Trafficking Survivor Protects Girls From ‘Hell’ She Endured

To many, Emmy Myers appeared to be a model student during high school. She was involved in gymnastics, track and the agricultural club.

But her life took a dark turn into drugs and, eventually, sex trafficking.

Today, the 28-year-old Wisconsin native wants people to know that sex trafficking can happen to anyone ― and that the people buying women and girls can come from every income level and from every community.

Artificial Intelligence

How To Make AI The Best Thing To Happen To Us

“If we get it right, the upside is huge: Since everything we love about civilization is the product of intelligence, amplifying our own intelligence with AI has the potential to solve tomorrow's thorniest problems. For example, why risk our loved ones dying in traffic accidents that self-driving cars could prevent or succumbing to cancers that AI might help us find cures for? Why not grow productivity and prosperity through automation and use AI to accelerate our research and development of affordable sustainable energy?

I'm optimistic that we can thrive with advanced AI as long as we win the race between the growing power of our technology and the wisdom with which we manage it. But this requires ditching our outdated strategy of learning from mistakes. That helped us win the wisdom race with less powerful technology: We messed up with fire and then invented fire extinguishers, and we messed up with cars and then invented seat belts. However, it's an awful strategy for more powerful technologies, such as nuclear weapons or superintelligent AI — where even a single mistake is unacceptable and we need to get things right the first time. Studying AI risk isn't Luddite scaremongering — it's safety engineering. When the leaders of the Apollo program carefully thought through everything that could go wrong when sending a rocket with astronauts to the moon, they weren't being alarmist. They were doing precisely what ultimately led to the success of the mission.

So what can we do to keep future AI beneficial? Here are are four steps that have broad support from AI researchers:”

Nobel Prize, Economics

Richard Thaler Wins the Nobel in Economics For Killing Homo Economicus

“Richard Thaler, one of the fathers of behavioral economics and a professor at the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago, has won the 2017 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science.

Renowned for his use of data to observe and predict how people behave in the real world, Thaler’s career has been a lifelong war on Homo economicus, that mythical species of purely rational hominids who dwell exclusively in the models of classical economic theory. In studies that borrowed from psychology, sociology, and plain-old curiosity, Thaler demonstrated that mankind was afflicted by emotion and irrationality, which influences their decision making on everything from retirement savings, to health-care policy, to professional sports.

But Thaler didn’t contend that humans were randomly irrational. More importantly, he observed that people are predictably irrational (to borrow a term from the economist Dan Ariely). Some of Thaler’s most interesting work studied the predictably irrational effects of ownership, confidence, and a sense of fairness.”