Month: April 2023

DUBAI, Dubai College of Tourism (DCT), part of Dubai’s Department of Economy and Tourism has launched the ‘Autism and Sensory Awareness’ course within the Dubai Way training platform.

The training course builds upon the ‘Inclusive Service’ training and ‘Dubai Way’ courses, ensuring that the tourist-facing workforce provides visitors with the highest standard of service when visiting Dubai. The course supports Dubai College of Tourism’s aim to secure Dubai’s position as a ‘certified autism destination’ and is being launched on the occasion of World Autism Awareness Day.

Through detailed audits from the International Board for Credentialing and Continuing Education Standards (IBCCES), Dubai seeks to become a certified autism-friendly destination. Many of Dubai’s hotels and attractions are now well underway in auditing their facilities, and staff can take the prerequisite training within the Dubai Way platform.

Essa Bin Hadher, General Manager of Dubai College of Tourism, commented, “With the launch of our new ‘Autism and Sensory Awareness’ course, we are taking an important step towards achieving our goal of becoming a certified autism destination. By equipping our tourist-facing workforce with the knowledge and tools to better serve visitors with autism, we are ensuring that all travellers to Dubai have a positive and enjoyable experience.”

The autism and sensory awareness training course ensures that staff take a knowledge assessment, are provided an autism overview, understand autism identification, common needs, autism perspectives, sensory awareness, and basic safety protocols. The course then goes on to explain the nuances of travelling with autism, attraction to water and animals, and specific lessons for each traveller interaction, including hotels, attractions, and transportation.

The drive to ensure Dubai becomes a certified autism-friendly destination is supported by Dubai Airports Sunflower lanyard initiative and the various services for hidden disabilities. The discrete lanyard is worn by autistic passengers and permits access to family and priority lanes both at departure and arrivals. Dubai entities are very focused on ensuring families with autism are provided with as much information as possible. The entire travel experience can be significantly enhanced by providing information to autistic passengers prior to travel.

Source: Emirates News Agency

COLOGNY, Key figures in artificial intelligence and digital technology have published an open letter calling for a six-month pause in the development of AI systems more powerful than OpenAI’s ChatGPT 4.

ccording to a World Economic Forum article, the signatories to the letter, published by the Future of Life Institute, warned that “advanced AI could represent a profound change in the history of life on Earth, and should be planned for and managed with commensurate care and resources”.

The letter has been signed by more than 1,400, people, including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Turing Prize winner professor Yoshua Bengio and Stuart Russell, Director of the Center for Intelligent Systems at Berkeley University.

The letter was also signed by Elon Musk, who co-founded OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT. Musk’s foundation also provides funding to the organisation that published the letter. A number of researchers at Alphabet’s DeepMind added their names to the list of signatories.

The letter accused AI labs of rushing into the development of systems with greater intelligence than humans, without properly weighing up the potential risks and consequences for humanity.

“Recent months have seen AI labs locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one not even their creators can understand, predict, or reliably control,” the letter stated.

The signatories to the letter called for AI developers to work alongside governments and policy-makers to create robust regulatory authorities and governance systems for AI.

In an apparent response to the open letter, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, whose ChatGPT-4 has led the development of AI in recent months, posted a tweet, saying that the things we need for a good AGI future are “the technical ability to align a superintelligence”, “sufficient coordination among most of the leading AGI [artificial general intelligence] efforts”, and “an effective global regulatory framework including democratic governance”.

The tweet essentially summarises a blog post by Altman dated 24th February 2023. In the blog, Altman says his company’s mission is, “to ensure that artificial general intelligence AI systems that are generally smarter than humans benefits all of humanity”.

ltman also acknowledged the potential risks of hyper-intelligent AI systems, citing “misuse, drastic accidents and societal disruption”. The OpenAI CEO went on to detail his company’s approach to mitigating those risks.

“As our systems get closer to AGI, we are becoming increasingly cautious with the creation and deployment of our models. Our decisions will require much more caution than society usually applies to new technologies, and more caution than many users would like. Some people in the AI field think the risks of AGI (and successor systems) are fictitious; we would be delighted if they turn out to be right, but we are going to operate as if these risks are existential.”

Source: Emirates News Agency