The Government of Japan’s “Society 5.0” initiative aims to create a cyber-physical society in which (among other things) citizens’ daily lives will be enhanced through increasingly close collaboration with artificially intelligent systems. However, an apparent paradox lies at the heart of efforts to create a more “human-centered” society in which human beings will live alongside a proliferating array of increasingly autonomous social robots and embodied AI. This study seeks to investigate the presumed human-centeredness of Society 5.0 by comparing its makeup with that of earlier societies. By distinguishing “technological” and “non-technological” processes of posthumanization and applying a phenomenological anthropological model, this study demonstrates: (1) how the diverse types of human and non-human members expected to participate in Society 5.0 differ qualitatively from one another; (2) how the dynamics that will shape the membership of Society 5.0 can be conceptualized; and (3) how the anticipated membership of Society 5.0 differs from that of Societies 1.0 through 4.0. This study describes six categories of prospective human and non-human members of Society 5.0 and shows that all six have analogues in earlier societies, which suggests that social scientific analysis of past societies may shed unexpected light on the nature of Society 5.0.

Prior research has established an association between sexual violence and HIV. Exposure to sexual violence during childhood can profoundly impact brain architecture and stress regulatory response. As a result, individuals who have experienced such trauma may engage in sexual risk-taking behavior and could benefit from targeted interventions. In 2009, nationally representative data were collected on violence against children in Tanzania from 13–24 year old respondents (n = 3,739). Analyses show that females aged 19–24 (n = 579) who experienced childhood sexual violence, were more likely to report no/infrequent condom use in the past 12 months (AOR = 3.0, CI [1.5, 6.1], p = 0.0017) and multiple sex partners in the past 12 months (AOR = 2.3, CI [1.0, 5.1], p = 0.0491), but no more likely to know where to get HIV testing or to have ever been tested. Victims of childhood sexual violence could benefit from targeted interventions to mitigate impacts of violence and prevent HIV.

In some circumstances, immersion in virtual environments with the aid of virtual reality (VR) equipment can create feelings of anxiety in users and be experienced as something “frightening”, “oppressive”, “alienating”, “dehumanizing”, or “dystopian”. Sometimes (e.g., in exposure therapy or VR gaming), a virtual environment is intended to have such psychological impacts on users; however, such effects can also arise unintentionally due to the environment’s poor architectural design. Designers of virtual environments may employ user-centered design (UCD) to incrementally improve a design and generate a user experience more closely resembling the type desired; however, UCD can yield suboptimal results if an initial design relied on an inappropriate architectural approach. This study developed a framework that can facilitate the purposeful selection of the most appropriate architectural approach by drawing on Norberg-Schulz’s established phenomenological account of real-world architectural modes. By considering the unique possibilities for structuring and experiencing space within virtual environments and reinterpreting Norberg-Schulz’s schemas in the context of virtual environment design, a novel framework was formulated that explicates six fundamental “architectural paradigms” available to designers of virtual environments. It was shown that the application of this framework could easily be incorporated as an additional step within the UCD process.

Abstract-Thanks to the growing sophistication of artificial agent technologies, businesses will increasingly face decisions of whether to have a human employee or artificial agent perform a particular function. This makes it desirable to have a common temporal measure for comparing the work effort that human beings and artificial agents can apply to a role. Existing temporal measures of work effort are formulated to apply either to human employees (e.g., FTE and billable hours) or computer-based systems (e.g., mean time to failure and availability) but not both. In this paper we propose a new temporal measure of work effort based on fractal dimension that applies equally to the work of human beings and artificial agents performing management functions. We then consider four potential cases to demonstrate the measure's diagnostic value in assessing strengths (e.g., flexibility) and risks (e.g., switch costs) reflected by the temporal work dynamics of particular managers. I. THE NEED FOR A COMMON TEMPORAL MEASURE OF WORK EFFORTHE increasing power and sophistication of artificial agent technology is allowing businesses to employ artificial agents in a growing number of roles. Artificial agents are no longer restricted simply to performing logistical functions such as resource scheduling, but are now capable of more complex interpersonal workplace behavior such as using social intelligence to effectively manage the limitations, abilities, and expectations of human employees [1], recognizing and manifesting culture-specific behaviors in interactions with human colleagues [2], and assessing the performance of human members of virtual teams [3]. It is thus gradually becoming more feasible to design artificial agents capable of performing the four key functions carried out by human managers, which are planning, organizing, leading, and controlling [4]. TAs a result of such recent and anticipated future advances, businesses will increasingly be faced with concrete decisions about whether, for example, the manager of a new corporate call center should be an experienced human manager or the latest artificial agent system. Such decisions will be shaped by a large number of strategic, financial, technological, political, legal, ethical, and operational factors. One particular element to be taken into account is that of temporal work effort: i.e., how much time would a human manager actually be able to dedicate to carrying out the necessary work functions, given the fact that physiological, cultural, legal, and ethical constraints limit the number of hours per week that a human being is capable of working? Similarly, how much time would an artificial agent be able to dedicate to carrying out the necessary work functions, given the fact that scheduled maintenance or unscheduled outages can limit the uptime of computer-based systems? Knowing how much time per day (or week, or other relevant time interval) a manager will be available to carry out his or her functions of planning, organizing, leading, and controlling becomes espe...

Background. Strategic management instruments (SMIs) are tools used to analyze an organization's strategic situation, formulate effective strategies, and successfully implement them. Despite SMIs' importance, there has been little systematic research into them -and especially regarding the impact of emerging technologies on SMIs.Research aims. Here we investigate whether the forces of technological posthumanization that are creating a new class of 'cyber-physical organizations' can be expected to affect innovation in the use of SMIs within such organizations.Methodology. Through a review of strategic management literature, we identify nearly 100 SMIs and categorize them according to their use in (a) strategic analysis, (b) strategy formulation, or (c) strategy implementation. Meanwhile, an analysis of cyber-physical systems and technological posthumanization reveals three dynamics that are converging to create an emerging class of cyber-physical organizations: (a) roboticization of the workforce; (b) deepening human-computer integration; and (c) the ubiquitization of computation. A framework is developed for mapping the impacts of these dynamics onto the inputs, agents, processes, and outputs involved with the three types of SMIs.Key findings. Application of the framework shows that technological posthumanization should be expected to both facilitate and require innovation in cyber-physical organizations' use of all three types of SMIs.

Please cite this paper as: Fry et al. (2012) The first cases of 2009 pandemic influenza A (H1N1) virus infection in the United States: a serologic investigation demonstrating early transmission. Influenza and Other Respiratory Viruses 6(3), e48–e53. Background  The first two laboratory‐confirmed cases of 2009 pandemic influenza A (H1N1) virus (H1N1pdm09) infection were detected in San Diego (SD) and Imperial County (IC) in southern California, April 2009. Objectives  To describe H1N1pdm09 infections and transmission early in the 2009 H1N1 pandemic. Patients/Methods  We identified index case‐patients from SD and IC with polymerase chain reaction (PCR)‐confirmed H1N1pdm09 infections and investigated close contacts for a subset of case‐patients from April 17–May 6, 2009. Acute and convalescent serum was collected. Serologic evidence for H1N1pdm09 infection was determined by microneutralization and hemagglutination inhibition assays. Results  Among 75 close contacts of seven index case‐patients, three reported illness onset prior to patient A or B, including two patient B contacts and a third with no links to patient A or B. Among the 69 close contacts with serum collected >14 days after the onset of index case symptoms, 23 (33%) were seropositive for H1N1pdm09, and 8 (35%) had no fever, cough, or sore throat. Among 15 household contacts, 8 (53%) were seropositive for H1N1pdm09. The proportion of contacts seropositive for H1N1pdm09 was highest in persons aged 5–24 years (50%) and lowest in persons aged ≥50 years (13%) (P = 0·07). Conclusions  By the end of April 2009, before H1N1pdm09 was circulating widely in the community, a third of persons with close contact to confirmed H1N1pdm09 cases had H1N1pdm09 infection in SD and IC. Three unrelated clusters during March 21–30 suggest that transmission of H1N1pdm09 had begun earlier in southern California.

Increasingly, organizations are becoming “technologically posthumanized” through the integration of social robots, AI, virtual reality, and ubiquitous computing into the workplace. Here a phenomenological approach is used to anticipate architectural transformations of the workplace resulting from posthumanization’s challenge to traditional anthropocentric paradigms of the workplace as a space that exists at “human” scale, possesses a trifold boundary, and serves as a spatiotemporal filter.

Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are offering new avenues for economic empowerment to individuals around the world. However, they also provide a powerful tool that facilitates criminal activities such as human trafficking and illegal weapons sales that cause great harm to individuals and communities. Cryptocurrency advocates have argued that the ethical dimensions of cryptocurrency are not qualitatively new, insofar as money has always been understood as a passive instrument that lacks ethical values and can be used for good or ill purposes. In this paper, we challenge such a presumption that money must be 'value-neutral.' Building on advances in artificial intelligence, cryptography, and machine ethics, we argue that it is possible to design artificially intelligent cryptocurrencies that are not ethically neutral but which autonomously regulate their own use in a way that reflects the ethical values of particular human beings -or even entire human societies. We propose a technological framework for such cryptocurrencies and then analyse the legal, ethical, and economic implications of their use. Finally, we suggest that the development of cryptocurrencies possessing ethical as well as monetary value can provide human beings with a new economic means of positively influencing the ethos and values of their societies.