The bill, passed on Wednesday, aims to accelerate the sweeping change of regulations across various fields to support the creation of such futuristic cities.

Addressing issues such as depopulation and an aging society will be the focus of the super cities. Technologies including big data and AI will be key to successfully tackling the challenging problems.

Large amounts of data will be collected and organised from across administrative organisations.

Local governments will be selected for the ambitious projects which will launch forums with the national government and private companies to take forward the plans.

Draft plans will be created from this deep public-private collaboration that will subsequently be submitted to the state government if approved by local residents.

As with many smart city plans, there are deep concerns about the collection of personal data and what it could mean for individual privacy. Local residents are sure to want assurance that any data collection is anonymous.

A similar bill was submitted to the Diet (Japan’s decision-making institution) last year. The bill was scrapped following calls from the ruling government to review it.

The revised bill was passed on Wednesday. Given the appetite for the project across the government; the plans are now expected to progress swiftly.

(Photo by Jezael Melgoza on Unsplash)

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A Japanese artist will use a song partly composed by AI to welcome Pope Francis, who recently shared his concerns about the technology.

The song, “Protect all Life – The Signs of the Times,” is written by Jun Inoue.

Inoue is a Catholic himself and created an AI program which can generate a song in just a few seconds.

“I thought I should give everything I had to the song, so I decided to put in all the cutting-edge technology I had,” Inoue told Reuters.

Inoue wasn’t sure about using AI but decided to do so because of how intertwined the history of technology and music is. However, last month, AI News reported on Pope Francis’s concerns about artificial intelligence.

Pope Francis shared his views on AI during a Vatican conference attended by theologians, academics, and tech executives such as Mozilla co-founder Mitchell Baker and Facebook’s director of cybersecurity law Gavin Corn.

“If mankind’s so-called technological progress were to become an enemy of the common good, this would lead to an unfortunate regression to a form of barbarism dictated by the law of the strongest,” Pope Francis warned.

The Vatican hopes the conference will lead to a future document on considerations to make when developing AI technologies.

Inoue’s song is unlikely to trigger much concern from the Pope and may even help to show how AI can have a positive impact on people’s lives if used responsibly.

Earlier this year, a firm called Canny AI used deepfakes of politicians to create the following music video for John Lennon’s track Imagine:

This is, as the creators’ intended, an example of AI’s dangers when it comes to convincingly manipulating content.

Politicians and other influential figures could be made to appear like they’re saying and doing things which they’re not.

Such means could be used to sway public opinion and influence elections, and it’s going to be very difficult teaching the public not to necessarily believe their eyes and what to look out for when it comes to fake content.

Pope Francis will visit Japan from Nov 23rd-26th and marks only the second papal visit to the country.

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The fallout occurred from a nuclear power plant accident is going to be devastating. Aside from the human impact, we’ve only got to look at Chernobyl to see how the environment can remain damaged for decades.

A new AI system developed in Japan, developed by a team from the Institute of Industrial Science at the University of Tokyo, can accurately predict the spread of nuclear fallout up to 33 hours in advance.

Armed with this information, evacuations can begin and emergency responders can allocate resources where needed to ensure the impact is limited as much as possible.

The researchers’ system takes into account many variables, including the use of weather forecasts to predict things such as wind speed and direction to see where – and how far – nuclear material will travel.

Takao Yoshikane, a researcher from the project, said:

“Our new tool was first trained using years of weather-related data to predict where radioactivity would be distributed if it were released from a particular point.

In subsequent testing, it could predict the direction of dispersion with at least 85 percent accuracy, with this rising to 95 percent in winter when there are more predictable weather patterns.”

Nuclear reactor meltdowns result in high temperatures which catapult radioactive material up to 2,000 metres (6,562 feet) into the air. This means it can end up in the upper troposphere that can spread fallout across the world.

A video showing the AI calculating the hourly distribution of radioactive material can be found below:

The researchers’ project demonstrates how AI can be used to analyse situations and take into account many different variables.

Despite the complex calculations made, the resulting information is provided in a simple manner which can be acted upon quickly to save lives and limit the impact of disasters.

What are your thoughts on the use of AI to predict the impact of disasters?

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The study believes government departments including the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) and Department of Science and Technology (DST) should take responsibility for building these relationships.

“Exchanging best practices and learnings from prior initiatives is one way of strengthening cooperation,” noted the study.

Collaboration between the countries is expected to help formulate strategies which tackle social and economic challenges by adopting technologies such as AI, machine learning, and other advancements such as the IoT.

The researchers wrote in the ‘Advance artificial intelligence for growth: Leveraging AI & robotics for India’s economic transformation’ report:

“While academia and the private sector focus their research activities on finding applications with diverse usage, the public sector, with its various schemes (Digital India, Make in India, Skill India, etc.), could identify areas where specific applications of AI and robotics can be utilised to increase reach, effectiveness and efficiency, thus giving direction to existing innovation across different fields.”

Some of the other measures which could drive AI growth is the creation of data banks and exchanges which allow the streaming of information from various industries. This data can then be used for training new machine learning models.

The report also notes an overhaul of the education system – in particular, secondary school and university curricula – will help to foster AI interest and prepare the next generation workforce.

Both of these suggestions feed into the researchers’ final idea, and that’s to set up centres of excellence. At these centres, inter-disciplinary research can be conducted across fields such as law, medicine, engineering, management, and social sciences.

“Government could act as a catalyst in furthering growth by opening training centres focused on equipping young individuals with high-end skills in the field of analytics and ML, which, in turn, could be tied in with inviting data-driven global enterprises to set up their centres of excellence in India,” the researchers say.

The full report can be downloaded here (PDF)

What are your thoughts on the researchers’ suggestions?

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