Israel Pulls Funds; May Encounters Reality; The Uniting Begins; Think Turtle; SAM the Builder; and Memories of AI

Israel

Prime Minister cuts funding to UN israelnationalnews

Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs Benjamin Netanyahu instructed the Foreign Ministry to cut $2 million from Israel's payments to the UN, in light of the hostile proposals adopted by the UN Human Rights Council last week.

Brexit

Theresa May's Article 50 launch trashed after top EU politicians reject key demands independent.co.uk

The fallout followed the delivery of Ms May’s historic letter reuters to President of the European Council Donald Tusk, officially notifying him of the UK’s intention to trigger Article 50 and quit the bloc.

False Religion

Catholics and Lutherans hold joint service 500 years after Reformation london-se1.co.uk

"For over fifty years Lutherans and Catholics have been on a journey from conflict to communion," said the Rt Revd Dr Martin Lind, Bishop of the Lutheran Church in Great Britain. "With joy we have come to recognise that what unites us is far greater than what divides us. On this journey, mutual understanding and trust have grown."

Research

See the cyborg system that lets humans control turtles with their minds digitaltrends

The human-turtle interface combines features from brain-computer interfaces and computer-brain interfaces, which send signals from brains to computers and computers to brains respectively.

Why not?

Robots

Meet SAM, Brick Laying Robot That Does The Work Of 6 Humans zerohedge v

Each SAM can be rented at a monthly cost of ~$3,300 according to The Sun. With an average efficiency of 3,000 bricks per day, that breaks down to about 4.5 cents per brick. Meanwhile, using using Bernie's preferred $15 per hour minimum wage rate, plus benefits, and a daily efficiency of about 500 bricks brings the human labor cost equivalent to roughly 32 cents per brick, or a little over 7x.

AI

Google Chases General Intelligence With New AI That Has a Memory singularityhub

Humans are exceptionally good at transferring old skills to new problems. Machines, despite all their recent wins against humans, aren’t. This is partly due to how they’re trained: artificial neural networks like Google’s DeepMind learn to master a singular task and call it quits. To learn a new task, it has to reset, wiping out previous memories and starting again from scratch.