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"Stress is the common factor in many behaviours widely understood to be bad for our health - drinking too much booze, smoking cigarettes, even eating unhealthy food. (There is some evidence to suggest that cortisol - the hormone released when we feel stress - makes us crave high fat and sugary foods.) And, these days, many of life's stressors are communicated via the mobile phone. I cannot stop these stressors, but by turning off notifications, I can at least stop them ambushing me. It's an action that helps me regain some sense of control. For example, when I open up a news app, I am ready to find out what is happening in the world. It is different from being in the supermarket cheese aisle and getting an alert, where - as part of a whole barrage of communications - I may feel blindsided."

"No matter how much our computers assure us they're backing everything up to a hard drive in the sky, memory failure remains a hardwired part of our lives. Writers reflect on when a digital loss created an emotional hole - from the college essay that disappeared minutes before the due date to an iPhone update that lost years of photographs."

"Contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks,[3] and we must ask ourselves: Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth? Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization? Such decisions must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders. Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable. This confidence must be well justified and increase with the magnitude of a system's potential effects. OpenAI's recent statement regarding artificial general intelligence, states that "At some point, it may be important to get independent review before starting to train future systems, and for the most advanced efforts to agree to limit the rate of growth of compute used for creating new models." We agree. That point is now."

"Such is the fallout from a surge in the manipulation of navigation signals - modern GPS warfare - that has played havoc with civilian smartphones, planes and vessels on three continents. So-called GPS jamming and spoofing have largely been the preserve of militaries over the past two decades, used to defend sensitive sites against drone or missile attacks or mask their own activities. But systematic interference by armed forces - particularly following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine and Israel's offensive against Hamas in Gaza - has caused widespread issues for civilian populations as well. The footprint of corrupted signals has become vast."