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This article introduces the use of emerging augmented reality technology to enable the next generation of structural infrastructure inspection and awareness. This work is driven by the prevalence of visual structural inspection. It is known that current visual inspection techniques have multiple sources of variance that should be reduced in order to achieve less ambiguous visual inspections. Emerging augmented reality tools feature a variety of sensors, computation, and communication resources that can enable relevant structural inspection data to be collected at very high resolution in an unambiguous manner. This work shows how emerging augmented reality tools can be used to greatly enhance our ability to capture comprehensive, high-resolution, three-dimensional measurements of critical infrastructure. This work also provides detailed information on the software architecture for augmented reality structural inspection applications that helps meet the goals of the framework. The fact that the framework is designed to accommodate the considerations associated with high-consequence infrastructure implies that it is also comprehensive enough to be applied to less hazardous but still high-value infrastructure such as bridges, dams, and tunnels. Augmented reality has great potential to enable the next generation of smart infrastructure, and this work focuses on addressing how augmented reality can be leveraged to enable the next generation of structural awareness for high-consequence, long-lifespan structures.

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To what extent, if any, should the law protect sentient artificial intelligence (that is, AI that can feel pleasure or pain)? Here we surveyed United States adults (n = 1,061) on their views regarding granting 1) general legal protection, 2) legal personhood, and 3) standing to bring forth a lawsuit, with respect to sentient AI and eight other groups: humans in the jurisdiction, humans outside the jurisdiction, corporations, unions, non-human animals, the environment, humans living in the near future, and humans living in the far future. Roughly one-third of participants endorsed granting personhood and standing to sentient AI (assuming its existence) in at least some cases, the lowest of any group surveyed on, and rated the desired level of protection for sentient AI as lower than all groups other than corporations. We further investigated and observed political differences in responses; liberals were more likely to endorse legal protection and personhood for sentient AI than conservatives. Taken together, these results suggest that laypeople are not by-and-large in favor of granting legal protection to AI, and that the ordinary conception of legal status, similar to codified legal doctrine, is not based on a mere capacity to feel pleasure and pain. At the same time, the observed political differences suggest that previous literature regarding political differences in empathy and moral circle expansion apply to artificially intelligent systems and extend partially, though not entirely, to legal consideration, as well.

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