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Javier E

Americans Under 50 Fare Poorly on Health Measures, New Report Says - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-measures-new-report-says.html

health US comparative international report

shared by Javier E on 11 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • Younger Americans die earlier and live in poorer health than their counterparts in other developed countries, with far higher rates of death from guns, car accidents and drug addiction, according to a new analysis of health and longevity in the United States.
  • The panel called the pattern of higher rates of disease and shorter lives “the U.S. health disadvantage,” and said it was responsible for dragging the country to the bottom in terms of life expectancy over the past 30 years. American men ranked last in life expectancy among the 17 countries in the study, and American women ranked second to last.
  • “This is not the product of a particular administration or political party. Something at the core is causing the U.S. to slip behind these other high-income countries. And it’s getting worse.”
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  • The rate of firearm homicides was 20 times higher in the United States than in the other countries, according to the report, which cited a 2011 study of 23 countries. And though suicide rates were lower in the United States, firearm suicide rates were six times higher.
  • Panelists were surprised at just how consistently Americans ended up at the bottom of the rankings. The United States had the second-highest death rate from the most common form of heart disease, the kind that causes heart attacks, and the second-highest death rate from lung disease, a legacy of high smoking rates in past decades. American adults also have the highest diabetes rates.
  • Youths fared no better. The United States has the highest infant mortality rate among these countries, and its young people have the highest rates of sexually transmitted diseases, teen pregnancy and deaths from car crashes. Americans lose more years of life before age 50 to alcohol and drug abuse than people in any of the other countries.
  • Americans also had the lowest probability over all of surviving to the age of 50. The report’s second chapter details health indicators for youths where the United States ranks near or at the bottom. There are so many that the list takes up four pages.
  • the U.S. ranked near and at the bottom in almost every heath indicator. That stunned us.”
  • The panel sought to explain the poor performance. It noted the United States has a highly fragmented health care system, with limited primary care resources and a large uninsured population. It has the highest rates of poverty among the countries studied.
  • In the other countries, more generous social safety nets buffer families from the health consequences of poverty, the report said.
  • Could cultural factors like individualism and dislike of government interference play a role? Americans are less likely to wear seat belts and more likely to ride motorcycles without helmets.  
  • The United States is a bigger, more heterogeneous society with greater levels of economic inequality, and comparing its health outcomes to those in countries like Sweden or France may seem lopsided. B
  • the panelists point out that this country spends more on health care than any other in the survey. And as recently as the 1950s, Americans scored better in life expectancy and disease than many of the other countries in the current study.
Javier E

The Rich Are Fighting the Superrich Over Britain's Manicured Lawns - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-britains-manicured-lawns.html

rich billionaire wealth London conflict

shared by Javier E on 25 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Writ small, social researchers say, the tussle could foretell a future in which an ever-smaller upper crust will command financial heights far beyond the dreams of lesser mortals, even those who qualify, like many of the folks in Highgate, as pretty well off themselves.
  • These days, equality campaigners say, 80 immensely rich people have amassed the same wealth as the poorer half of the world’s entire population.
  • Among the most talked about is a 25-bedroom house called Witanhurst, said to be the second-biggest residential property in London, after Buckingham Palace, a vast pile with vistas over the 800-acre Hampstead Heath.
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  • According to news reports, the buyer paid some $75 million for it and resolved to spend the same again on enhancements, including basement excavations for features including a 70-foot swimming pool and a garage for 25 cars. Once the renovations are complete, the house will command a resale value of $450 million.
Javier E

Opinion | More Republicans Than You Think Support Action on Climate Change - The New Yo... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...cans-climate-change-polls.html

climate change gop crisis

shared by Javier E on 29 Dec 18 - No Cached
  • the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication polled 1,067 registered voters on climate change. The study found that while they disagree on the cause, majorities in both parties agree that the world is experiencing global warming and call for government action to address it.
  • The poll asked whether the United States should “set strict carbon dioxide emission limits on existing coal-fired power plants to reduce global warming and improve public heath,” even if “the cost of electricity to consumers and companies would likely increase.” Eighty-seven percent of Democrats and 56 percent of Republicans said yes.
  • Should the United States require fossil fuel companies to pay a carbon tax and use the money to reduce other taxes (such as income tax) by an equal amount? Eighty-four percent of Democrats and 56 percent of Republicans said yes.
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  • Asked, “When there’s a conflict between environmental protection and economic growth, which do you think is more important?” 85 percent of Democrats and 52 percent of Republicans said that environmental protection should come first.
  • A majority of Democrats and Republicans believe the United States should participate in the Paris climate accord and reduce greenhouse gas emissions regardless of what other countries do.
  • A study conducted in June by Stanford, ABC News and Resources for the Future uncovered a similar trend. It found that 66 percent of Republicans believe the increase in temperature is “mostly or partly caused by humans.” Another poll, released last month by Monmouth University in New Jersey, found that most Republicans now support action on climate change.
  • An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll recently asked people if they believed climate change is “serious” and requires “immediate action.” Only around 15 percent of Republicans said yes compared with 71 percent of Democrats. It’s notable that the poll did not ask, as the Yale study did, for views on specific remedies — which is where the two parties seem to find more common ground.
Javier E

We are Europeans. Brexit will make us face up to it | Rafael Behr | Opinion | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...xit-leaving-eu-irony-diplomacy

UK brexit

shared by Javier E on 17 Aug 16 - No Cached
  • Meanwhile, the prime minister has to persuade EU leaders that her country is not turning its back on them; that it offers something in return for favourable exit terms.
  • The best economic argument that the remain campaign failed to communicate to voters was that no EU satellite arrangement combining market access and influence over the rules could rival the one we already have as full members.
  • May’s negotiations have to go well beyond the list of current benefits that Britain might salvage. She needs a broader agenda to discuss what we have to offer as a strategic partner to the European project.
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  • But the pitch in Brussels, Berlin, Paris and Warsaw must aspire to more than tariff elimination. It must include promises to engage with continental challenges: Isis-inspired terrorism, Russian territorial expansion, energy security. The question is not whether we can cobble together a thin facsimile of EU membership but how the UK can be an upstanding friend and neighbour to the EU after we leave. That is the terrain on which the best deal is struck.
  • Brussels-baiting Euroscepticism and the internal dynamics of the Tory party have for a generation set the terms of the debate about Britain’s status as a European nation. Yet history, geography and global diplomacy dictate that we can be no other kind. A stark irony of the Brexit vote is that it demands of the prime minister a more thorough, ambitious and diligently applied vision of Britain’s strategic relationship with the rest of the continent than has been possessed by any of her predecessors since Ted Heath. Leaving the EU will involve diplomacy as ardently and explicitly pro-European as that required for joining in the first place. In the intervening years we have spent a lot of energy arguing about what Europe means to Britain. It is time to consider what the rest of Europe might see in us.
runlai_jiang

Sri Lanka's president rejects move to allow women to buy alcohol - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-asia-42682526

shared by runlai_jiang on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • A move to grant women in Sri Lanka the same rights as men to buy alcohol legally has been overruled by President Maithripala Sirisena.He told a rally he had ordered the government to withdraw the reform, which would also have allowed women to work in bars without a permit.
  • What would the reform have meant?While the previous law was not always strictly enforced, many Sri Lankan women had welcomed the change.It would have allowed women over the age of 18 to buy alcohol legally for the first time in more than 60 years.
  • Leading monks in the Buddhist-majority country had criticised the decision to lift the ban, arguing it would destroy Sri Lankan family culture by getting more women addicted to alcohol. Saying he had listened to criticism of the government's step, President Sirisena told the rally he had ordered the government to withdraw its notification announcing the lifting of the ban.
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  • Why is the president being accused of hypocrisy? Mr Sirisena has encouraged women in the country to play a more active part in politics, boasting last year that his government had acted to ensure more women were returned at future elections.
  • Just how much do women drink in Sri Lanka anyway?According to World Heath Organization data from 2014, 80.5% of women never drink, compared to 56.9% of men.Less than 0.1% of women above the age of 15 are prone to heavy drinking, compared with 0.8% of men in the same age bracket.
bluekoenig

How Hospitals Could Decide Who Gets a Ventilator During the Coronavirus Pandemic - YouTube - 0 views

www.youtube.com/watch

politics US history crisis culture heath medicine covid19 coronavirus

shared by bluekoenig on 24 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • bluekoenig on 24 Mar 20
     
    This is a video about one of the scariest aspects of this Coronavirus outbreak, who is allowed to go on a ventilator in the case of shortages in America's hospitals and how do hospitals make that decision? From where we stand now, this isn't a decision we need to make right away, but doctors in New York state with the Department of Health are looking to guidelines they created before to help doctors make those decisions should the time come. The guidelines state that all ventilators should be reserved for the purpose of the disease, meaning no more elective surgeries and assessing stockpiles from both the state and country and that their use should be on the people sick enough to need a ventilator, but generally well enough that the ventilator will actually help them recover as opposed to just keeping them alive. The guidelines state that the decision to use or not use a ventilator on a patient would be made by a panel of unbiased and unassociated doctors who make that decision based on the information they are given about the patient and the benefit the patient would have from that ventilator. These guidelines are not in place yet and they are voluntary but it's extremely important that we have them so the most people can come out of this epidemic alive and well and the doctors and nurses on the front lines who are already overstretching themselves can make sound decisions they can feel more comfortable with. These are extremely hard choices that no one should have to make but in the case of an epidemic like this one, these may be choices that have to be made with the worst of consequences.
Javier E

Democrats Should Worry about British Labour's Collapse | Talking Points Memo - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...about-british-labours-collapse

labour UK Politics crisis history policy Democratic party

shared by Javier E on 09 May 21 - No Cached
  • With the rise of Momentum, what had been implicit in Blair and Brown’s politics — the parties’ identification with London and the university towns — became codified in the group’s support for a cultural politics that broke with Labour’s historical commitments to family, community, and nation
  • This politics consisted of enthusiastic support for Remain.  In the runup to the 2019 vote, the activists joined hands with the pro-Blair MPs to favor a second referendum, a “people’s vote,” which they assumed would repudiate the 2016 results
  • They championed “open borders,” immediate eligibility for migrants to Britain’s extensive social services, including its free National Health Services, and voting rights for migrants, regardless of their citizenship, in national elections. They extolled “diversity” and condemned supporters of Leave as bigots and xenophobes.  Patriotism itself was identified with xenophobia.
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  • The other factor in Labour’s defeat in 2019 and on Thursday was Boris Johnson’s ability to get a deal on Brexit and his  move leftward on economic policy.
  • The young activists also espoused controversial views on family and gender
  • Prior to the 2019 election, an ad hoc group, the Labour Committee for Trans Rights, called for the expulsion from the party of two longstanding feminist organizations that restricted membership in their rape shelters to biological women
  • But Labour’s equivocal stand on Brexit and its identification with the cultural views of young, urban, college-educated activists overrode any appeal that its economic platform might have had.
  • In a post-election study, Paula Surridge, Matthew Goodwin, Oliver Heath, and David Cutts found the that support for Brexit was “strongly associated with cultural values.”  These values “cut across the traditional left-right divide” and undermined Labour’s historic identification with the economic left. 
  • After the election, trade unionist Paul Embery, a member of the group, wrote in his book Despised, “Labour today has virtually nothing to say to the small town and post-industrial Britain, the kind of places out there in the provinces which were once its mainstay.  It is no longer the ‘people’s party’, but the party for the woke, the Toytown revolutionary and Twitter.”
  • At the pre-election Labour Conference in Brighton in September 2019, which I attended, speakers called on Britain to provide reparations to make amends for its imperial past and even condemned Britain for global warming — presumably, by initiating the industrial revolution.
  • Democrats’ identification with these kind of views played a role in Democratic losses in Congressional races in 2020.
  • Johnson’s success with the vaccine and his budget boosted his popularity and laid the basis for the Tories’ success in Thursday’s election.
  • Starmer tried to distance Labour from Momentum, Corbyn, and the cultural left.  He declared that he was “proud to be patriotic” and advised Labour officials to display the Union Jack at their appearances.  He opposed the demand to expel the feminist groups and called on the party to “put family first.”  But as Thursday’s results showed, the damage was already done.  Barring a major misstep by Johnson and the Tories, Labour could be out of power for the rest of the decade.
  • the Democrats’ success in 2020 could prove fleeting.  In 2020, they were blessed with a candidate who was able to stem, and in a few instances slightly reverse, the flight of working class voters in middle America from the Democratic Party. That was critical to Biden’s success in a state like Pennsylvania.
  • But Biden is a 78-year-old relic who in his person and in his emphasis on economics reflects an older labor-oriented Democratic party that is being replaced by a party preoccupied with culture and identity.
  • Many of the young Democrats elevate racial issues above those of class — framing what could be universal appeals to national betterment in racial terms; they want to increase immigration and grant citizenship to unauthorized immigrants, but appear indifferent to securing America’s borders
  • they justifiably champion the rights of transgender women —  biological men who identify as women — to be free from discrimination in employment or housing, but dismiss concerns that a blanket identification of sex with declared gender could threaten rights specific to biological women;
  • and as homicides rise, and as justifiable protests against police brutality turned into mayhem and looting, they have advocated defunding  rather than reforming the police.
  • Johnson, who replaced May in July 2019,  made none of those mistakes. He got parliament to endorse the outlines of a Brexit deal, and he pledged to increase funding for the NHS and to initiate an industrial policy to “level up” Britain’s deindustrialized regions. Johnson’s politics hit the sweet spot in the British electorate: social democratic on economics, but conservative (although not in the American sense of the religious right) on social and cultural policy.  That’s the magic formula that allowed the Tories to lay siege to Labour’s Red Wall.
  • Democrats in 2020 were also blessed with a perfect opponent in Donald Trump.  Trump’s bigotry and corruption turned off far more voters than it attracted.
  • If Trump continues to be the poster-boy for the Republican Party, Democrats will benefit in 2022 and 2024, but if he recedes, and his most ardent followers fade into the background, the Democrats could suffer defeat in Congressional elections and in the presidential election of 2024
hannahcarter11

Republicans Release $928B Infrastructure Counteroffer In Response To Biden Plan : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...on-infrastructure-counteroffer

republicans infrastructure biden

shared by hannahcarter11 on 31 May 21 - No Cached
  • A group of Senate Republicans on Thursday unveiled a $928 billion infrastructure proposal to counter President Biden's plan for a nearly $2 trillion bill.
  • The proposal outlines a significant increase from the most recent GOP plan to spend $568 billion. The new version includes additional money for roads, bridges, water, rail and airports, but the majority of the proposed spending is part of an existing baseline plan for investments. The total new money is just $257 billion.
  • Republicans plan to pay for the vast majority of the spending by repurposing funds Congress has already approved for other projects. They are primarily targeting unspent money meant for COVID-19 relief.
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  • In a statement, White House officials called the GOP counteroffer "encouraging" but said they were concerned about the proposal to use COVID-19 relief funding to pay for the plan and that some concerns remained about funding proposals for VA hospitals, rail, transit, lead pipes and climate. Biden said he plans to meet with Republican senators on infrastructure talks next week.
  • Democrats want to increase taxes on corporations and high income earners — a plan that Republicans have flatly rejected.
  • Biden and his allies have also firmly supported plans to pay for the spending by increasing the corporate tax rate to 28%, increasing the top federal income tax rate to 39.6% for those earning more than $400,000, and expanding the capital gains tax.
  • "Of the remaining 5% the largest categories of unobligated balances are in the Heath Care Provider Relief Fund—funding for rural hospitals, health care providers and disaster loans for small businesses," the White House said. Targeting that money risks dragging infrastructure into ongoing political arguments about the coronavirus and the pandemic response.
  • Biden has recently called for $1.7 trillion in spending in a package that broadly redefines the definition of infrastructure as well as expanding federal spending priorities and the role of the federal government in the everyday lives of Americans.
  • Biden's plan expands the term infrastructure to cover virtually every aspect of a worker's relationship to the economy. His plan includes measures to combat climate change and promote green energy, funding for child care and early childhood education, union-friendly measures and worker protections.
anonymous

Biden's Budget Removes A Longstanding Ban On Abortion Funding : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...s-long-ban-on-abortion-funding

shared by anonymous on 31 May 21 - No Cached
  • President Biden's budget proposal fulfills a campaign promise to remove a longstanding ban on federal funding for most abortions known as the Hyde Amendment.
  • Abortion rights advocates have praised the move; a statement from Planned Parenthood President Alexis McGill Johnson called the Hyde Amendment "racist, sexist, deeply unjust" and thanked Biden for working to remove it.
  • Biden reversed his longtime position on Hyde, joining other Democratic hopefuls in saying he would work to overturn it. "If I believe heath care is a right, as I do, I can no longer support an amendment that makes that right dependent on someone's zip code," Biden said in June 2019.
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  • Biden said his position had changed in response to changing circumstances, including increasing efforts by Republican lawmakers to restrict abortion. "It was not under attack," Biden said. "As it is now."
  • At the same time, Republican state lawmakers have continued a nationwide push to limit abortion, introducing hundreds of restrictions this year alone. Anti-abortion rights groups hope one of those laws will invite the U.S. Supreme Court to reconsider the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide in 1973.
  • The budget plan, released late last week, would drop the policy which has restricted funding for abortion through federal programs such as Medicaid. The rule, in effect since 1980, includes exceptions in cases of rape, incest, or to save a pregnant woman's life.
  • Biden, a lifelong Catholic, supported Hyde for decades — as did many other Democrats, often as a compromise position with Republicans. It often has been a sticking point in negotiations over healthcare policy, including the debate surrounding the Affordable Care Act and subsequent legislation.
  • Later that month, in a forum on abortion rights hosted by Planned Parenthood in South Carolina, Biden explained his reversal, saying he'd supported Hyde in an effort to expand federally-funded healthcare. But he suggested that for low-income women who rely on federal programs, Hyde had become an obstacle to full healthcare access.
  • Promising to reverse multiple Trump-era abortion restrictions, Biden ultimately marshaled the support of Planned Parenthood and other reproductive rights advocacy groups, who put the weight of their campaign operation behind him in his fight against Trump in 2020.
  • Since taking office, Biden has taken steps toward providing federal funding for abortions for low-income people. Like other Democratic Presidents before him, Biden announced plans soon after taking office to reverse the Mexico City Policy, or what critics describe as the "Global Gag Rule." It forbids international aid groups who receive U.S. funding from providing or referring patients for abortion.
  • Abortion rights groups are asking the administration to take additional steps, including reversing the Helms Amendment, which also restricts the use of U.S. dollars in paying for abortions abroad.
ethanshilling

Turkey's Looming Lockdown Prompts a Rush to Stock Up - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...covid-turkey-lockdown.html

pandemic turkey

shared by ethanshilling on 30 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • The streets of Istanbul were abuzz, the grocery stores packed, the seaside promenades crowded — but it was not the bustle of an ordinary spring Thursday. People were flocking to take advantage of the last day before a new lockdown takes hold, the strictest in Turkey since the pandemic began.
  • The country’s heath minister, Fahrettin Koca, has said that more contagious variants of the virus are partly to blame for the accelerating spread. Critics say the government relaxed too soon in March, before the country had made much progress with vaccination.
  • Turkey has fully vaccinated only about 11 percent of its people so far — 8.8 million out of a population of 83 million — using mainly the CoronaVac vaccine developed in China and the Pfizer-BioNtech vaccine.
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  • For weeks, scientists have been calling for a total lockdown to stem the surge, but President Recep Tayyip Erdogan held off, mainly for economic reasons. He changed course after a cabinet meeting on Monday, and announced a new three-week lockdown to take effect Thursday evening and last through the end of Ramadan.
  • The announcement prompted a rush to stock up on groceries, alcohol and other supplies for the lockdown, which will include Eid al-Fitr, the three-day festival to mark the end of Ramadan. And many city dwellers hurried to reach rural hometowns or holiday resorts while travel was still allowed.
  • The lockdown will land hardest on the many Turks who depend on informal day work. A single mother with five small children in Istanbul who collects and sells paper said her family can eat only on days when she can work.
  • “I really don’t know what to do,” she said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid jeopardizing her welfare payments from the government. “I wish the state would give me a job.”
kaylynfreeman

Covid-19 Live News and Updates - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...covid-19-coronavirus

pandemic economics crisis

shared by kaylynfreeman on 28 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • On Wednesday, Spain became the first European country to partly suspend immunizations because of a lack of doses. It did so first in Madrid, for two weeks, and said that Catalonia, the northeastern region that includes Barcelona, could soon follow.
  • It is unclear when the supply might improve.
  • Last week, the European Union’s executive branch, the European Commission, set a goal of having 70 percent of its population inoculated by this summer. Just days later, the president of the European Council, Charles Michel, pronounced that “difficult.”
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  • “We reject the logic of first-come, first-served,” the bloc’s heath commissioner, Stella Kyriakides, said at a news conference on Wednesday. “That may work at the neighborhood butcher, but not in contracts and not in our advanced purchase agreements.”
criscimagnael

Park Geun-hye, Ex-Leader of South Korea, to Be Pardoned - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...orea-park-geun-hye-pardon.html

shared by criscimagnael on 27 Dec 21 - No Cached
  • SEOUL, South Korea — The government of President Moon Jae-in said on Friday that it would pardon former President Park Geun-hye, who is serving a 20-year prison term after she was convicted on bribery and other criminal charges.
  • Ms. Park, 69, who became the first democratically elected South Korean leader to be removed from office through parliamentary impeachment,
  • will be freed on Dec. 31 to promote “reconciliation and consolidate national power to help overcome the national crisis caused by the Covid-19 pandemic,” the Justice Ministry said in a statement.
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  • She has served four years and nine months of her sentence so far. Concerns about her health were raised after she was taken to a hospital in Seoul, the capital, for various illnesses last month.
  • Mr. Moon said that Ms. Park’s declining heath had also been a factor in his government’s decision to release her.
  • Ms. Park was pardoned under a broad amnesty that benefited 700 other prisoners, whose remaining prison terms will be eradicated or cut in half. The South Korean president has the power to grant amnesty to prisoners under the Constitution, and has often exercised it to mark major national holidays or the beginning of a new year.
  • Ms. Park, a daughter of the former military dictator Park Chung-hee, was in her fourth year in power in 2016 when hundreds of thousands of protesters began months of weekly rallies in central Seoul demanding that she be forced from office for corruption and incompetence.
  • In January this year, the Supreme Court approved a reduced 20-year prison term for Ms. Park and ordered her to pay 18 billion won ($15 million) in fines, saying that she and her longtime friend and confidante Choi Soon-sil had collected or demanded $19.3 million in bribes from three big businesses, including $7 million from Samsung, South Korea’s largest and most lucrative business group.
  • The younger Mr. Lee, who was sentenced to two and a half years in prison in the corruption scandal, was released on parole in August, when South Korea freed hundreds of prisoners to mark the Aug. 15 National Liberation Day, which commemorates the end of Japanese colonial rule of South Korea at the end of World War II.
  • Despite her conviction, Ms. Park still had a sizable following of die-hard supporters, mostly older conservative South Koreans, who have held rallies in downtown Seoul calling her innocent and demanding her release.
  • Those who have argued for her pardon have compared her case to those of the former military dictators Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo.
  • Mr. Moon’s government granted a special amnesty to former Prime Minister Han Myeong-sook, one of the president’s former political allies. Ms. Han was sentenced to two years in prison in 2015 on charges of collecting illegal political donations. She finished her term in 2017.
  • The government also released Lee Seok-ki, a progressive politician, on parole on Friday. He was arrested by Ms. Park’s government in 2013 on charges of conspiring to start an armed revolt to overthrow the Seoul government in the event of war with North Korea. He has served all but nine months of his nine-year sentence.
  • calling him a victim of what they saw as a political witch hunt by Ms. Park to repress her political enemies.
Javier E

Pause or panic: battle to tame the AI monster - 0 views

www.thetimes.co.uk/...-tame-the-ai-monster-mjd97lhkh

AI control threat report crisis

shared by Javier E on 21 Apr 23 - No Cached
  • What exactly are they afraid of? How do you draw a line from a chatbot to global destruction
  • This tribe feels we have made three crucial errors: giving the AI the capability to write code, connecting it to the internet and teaching it about human psychology. In those steps we have created a self-improving, potentially manipulative entity that can use the network to achieve its ends — which may not align with ours
  • This is a technology that learns from our every interaction with it. In an eerie glimpse of AI’s single-mindedness, OpenAI revealed in a paper that GPT-4 was willing to lie, telling a human online it was a blind person, to get a task done.
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  • For researchers concerned with more immediate AI risks, such as bias, disinformation and job displacement, the voices of doom are a distraction. Professor Brent Mittelstadt, director of research at the Oxford Internet Institute, said the warnings of “the existential risks community” are overblown. “The problem is you can’t disprove the future scenarios . . . in the same way you can’t disprove science fiction.” Emily Bender, a professor of linguistics at the University of Washington, believes the doomsters are propagating “unhinged AI hype, helping those building this stuff sell it”.
  • Those urging us to stop, pause and think again have a useful card up our sleeves: the people building these models do not fully understand them. AI like ChatGPT is made up of huge neural networks that can defy their creators by coming up with “emergent properties”.
  • Google’s PaLM model started translating Bengali despite not being trained to do so
  • Let’s not forget the excitement, because that is also part of Moloch, driving us forward. The lure of AI’s promises for humanity has been hinted at by DeepMind’s AlphaFold breakthrough, which predicted the 3D structures of nearly all the proteins known to humanity.
  • Noam Shazeer, a former Google engineer credited with setting large language models such as ChatGPT on their present path, was asked by The Sunday Times how the models worked. He replied: “I don’t think anybody really understands how they work, just like nobody really understands how the brain works. It’s pretty much alchemy.”
  • The industry is turning itself to understanding what has been created, but some predict it will take years, decades even.
  • A CBS interviewer challenged Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, this week: “You don’t fully understand how it works, and yet you’ve turned it loose on society?
  • Greg Brockman, co-founder of OpenAI, told the TED2023 conference this week: “We hear from people who are excited, we hear from people who are concerned. We hear from people who feel both those emotions at once. And, honestly, that’s how we feel.”
  • Alex Heath, deputy editor of The Verge, who recently attended an AI conference in San Francisco. “It’s clear the people working on generative AI are uneasy about the worst-case scenario of it destroying us all. These fears are much more pronounced in private than they are in public.” One figure building an AI product “said over lunch with a straight face that he is savoring the time before he is killed by AI”.
  • In 2020 there wasn’t a single drug in clinical trials developed using an AI-first approach. Today there are 18
  • Consider this from Bill Gates last month: “I think in the next five to ten years, AI-driven software will finally deliver on the promise of revolutionising the way people teach and learn.”
  • If the industry is aware of the risks, is it doing enough to mitigate them? Microsoft recently cut its ethics team, and researchers building AI outnumber those focused on safety by 30-to-1,
  • The concentration of AI power, which worries so many, also presents an opportunity to more easily develop some global rules. But there is little agreement on direction. Europe is proposing a centrally defined, top-down approach. Britain wants an innovation-friendly environment where rules are defined by each industry regulator. The US commerce department is consulting on whether risky AI models should be certified. China is proposing strict controls on generative AI that could upend social order.
  • Part of the drive to act now is to ensure we learn the lessons of social media. Twenty years after creating it, we are trying to put it back in a legal straitjacket after learning that its algorithms understand us only too well. “Social media was the first contact between AI and humanity, and humanity lost,” Yuval Harari, the Sapiens author,
  • Others point to bioethics, especially international agreements on human cloning. Tegmark said last week: “You could make so much money on human cloning. Why aren’t we doing it? Because biologists thought hard about this and felt this is way too risky. They got together in the Seventies and decided, let’s not do this because it’s too unpredictable. We could lose control over what happens to our species. So they paused.” Even China signed up.
  • One voice urging calm is Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief AI scientist. He has labelled ChatGPT a “flashy demo” and “not a particularly interesting scientific advance”. He tweeted: “A GPT-4-powered robot couldn’t clear up the dinner table and fill up the dishwasher, which any ten-year-old can do. And it couldn’t drive a car, which any 18-year-old can learn to do in 20 hours of practice. We’re still missing something big for human-level AI.” If this is sour grapes and he’s wrong, Moloch already has us in its thrall.
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