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In lands turned over to slavery, Wright had observed, there was little incentive to provide so-called public goods—schools, libraries, and other institutions—that attract migrants. In the North, by contrast, the need to attract and retain free labor in areas resulted in a far greater investment in public goods—institutions that would, over the succeeding decades, offer far greater opportunities for social mobility and lay the foundation for sustained, superior economic growth.

Nathan Nunn offered a more detailed statistical analysis of this “Engerman-Sokoloff hypothesis” in a paper first published in 2008. His research confirmed that early slave use in the Americas was correlated with poor long-term growth. More specifically, he examined county-level data on slavery and inequality in the United States, and found a robust correlation between past reliance on slave labor and both economic underdevelopment and contemporary inequality.

the message couldn’t be more unmistakable if you happen to be living in such countries — the “aliens” are here, and they’re planning to take control, weapons loaded and ready to fire.

. In 2004, near Samarra in Iraq’s Salahuddin province, for instance, then-Major Guy Parmeter recalled asking a farmer if he’d “seen any foreign fighters” about. The farmer’s reply was as simple as it was telling: “Yes, you.

It’s not the fault of the individual American soldier that, in these years, he’s been outfitted like a “Star Wars” storm trooper. His equipment is designed to be rugged and redundant, meaning difficult to break, but it comes at a cost. In Iraq, U.S. troops were often encased in 80 to 100 pounds of equipment, including a rifle, body armor, helmet, ammunition, water, radio, batteries and night-vision goggles. And, light as they are, let’s not forget the ominous dark sunglasses meant to dim the glare of Iraq’s foreign sun.

Think for a moment about the optics of a typical twenty-first-century U.S. military intervention. As our troops deploy to places that for most Americans might as well be in a galaxy far, far away, with all their depersonalizing body armor and high-tech weaponry, they certainly have the look of imperial storm troopers.

Do you recall what the aliens were after in the first “Independence Day” movie? Resources. In that film, they were compared to locusts, traveling from planet to planet, stripping them of their valuables while killing their inhabitants. These days, that narrative should sound a lot less alien to us. After all, would Washington have committed itself quite so fully to the Greater Middle East if it hadn’t possessed all that oil so vital to our consumption-driven way of life?

American troops in that country often moved about in huge MRAPs (mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles) described to me by an Army battalion commander as “ungainly” and “un-soldier like.” Along with M1 Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles, those MRAPs were the American equivalents of the Imperial Walkers in “Star Wars.”

As Iraq war veteran Roy Scranton recently wrote in The New York Times, “I was the faceless storm trooper, and the scrappy rebels were the Iraqis.” Ouch.

Now, think how that soldier appeared to ordinary Iraqis — or Afghans, Yemenis, Libyans or almost any other non-Western people. Wouldn’t he or she seem both intimidating and foreign, indeed, hostile and “alien,” especially while pointing a rifle at you and jabbering away in a foreign tongue?

Now, think of the typical U.S. military response to the nimbleness and speed of such “rebels.” It usually involves deploying yet more and bigger technologies. The United States has even sent its version of Imperial Star Destroyers (we call them B-52s) to Syria and Iraq to take out “rebels” riding their version of “speeders” (i.e. Toyota trucks).

unlike the evil empire of “Star Wars” or the ruthless aliens of “Independence Day,” the U.S. military never claimed to be seeking total control (or destruction) of the lands it invaded, nor did it claim to desire the total annihilation of their populations (unless you count the “carpet bombing” fantasies of wannabe Sith Lord Ted Cruz). Instead, it promised to leave quickly once its liberating mission was accomplished, taking its troops, attack craft and motherships with it.After 15 years and counting on Planet Afghanistan and 13 on Planet Iraq, tell me again how those promises have played out.

Like it or not, as the world’s sole superpower, dependent on advanced technology to implement its global ambitions, the U.S. provides a remarkably good model for the imperial and imperious aliens of our screen life.

So what does football mean to our culture, and why does it occupy such an important place? I think it means everything. I think it feeds and fills a lot of gaps.

Football means money for television networks. It means escapism for most of the country. I read a book by Mariah Burton Nelson called The Stronger Women Get, the More Men Love Football. That's a really interesting concept. The game feeds something that's primal in males; in a lot of women, it feeds something sexual.

You've also written, "Any parent who has a young tackle football playing child with an underdeveloped brain is committing apathetic child abuse if they do not educate themselves on this issue." Why? I wrote that because I interviewed a neurorehabilitation specialist. She talked to me about when she has kids in her office. I asked her, what's the difference between the times when she has the kids by themselves versus when the parents are there? When the parents are in there, it's scholarships. How they can make it in football. When the kids are alone, it's a different story. They feel so much pressure. They feel they have to do this to mitigate the financial damage they're going to cause their families by going to college

They don't understand that it's not just about second-impact syndrome killing you. It goes way deeper than that. There are people who literally do not become the people they were supposed to be becoming. Or they experience huge bouts of depression.

Are you allowing your son to play football? No. Now, if he's a 16-, 17-year-old kid and says, "Dad, it's in my blood, I have to do this," I would have a hard time saying no. I honestly would. I don't want to live his life for him. But I think my kid is smart. The last thing he wants to do is affect his brain because he knows it's his future. If you give him enough information, he can make smart choices. I hope people who see my film can make informed decisions. I think there are young kids who will watch this film and actually be able to challenge their parents, to say, "You know what? I don't think football is a good idea for me." I'd love to give young people the strength to stand up to their fathers. And it's not me saying that. It's all the people in the film.

How did we get here? The problem is surely not poor teaching. Rather, it is the stuff that teachers are expected to do, which is the product of an unholy alliance between well-meaning politicians and educationalists, not forgetting over-mighty examination boards.

Such initiatives from above provided the proponents of a so-called new history with a golden opportunity to reshape historical education. Historical "skills" such as source analysis, they argued, should be elevated above mere factual knowledge. And "discovery" by children should count for more than dusty old pedagogy.The result was a national curriculum designed to instil in schoolchildren all kinds of "key concepts" like "chronological understanding", "cultural, ethnic and religious diversity", "change and continuity", "cause and consequence", "significance" and "interpretation".And these were to be taught with reference to an impressively wide range of subject matter.

The trouble is not so much with the theory as with the practice that has evolved in too many schools. As Ofsted admits in a damning passage on primary pupils, "some … found it difficult to place the historical episodes they had studied within any coherent, long-term narrative. They knew about particular events, characters and periods, but did not have an overview. Their chronological understanding was often underdeveloped and so they found it difficult to link developments together."

In fact, as the inspectors concede elsewhere, in 28 of the 58 secondary schools they visited, "students' chronological understanding was not sufficiently well developed: they had … a poor sense of the historical narrative". This is hardly a minor deficiency. It's a bit like saying that maths is a successful subject in British schools, apart from the fact that pupils in half of schools can't count.

Commenting on a not untypical primary curriculum, the authors of History for All say that "its principal weaknesses are the disconnected topics and the potential for the pupils to be left with a fragmented overview". You can say that again. Consider this list of topics spread in this order over four years:

The word smorgasbord doesn't really do justice to this random assortment. Lost, as Simon Schama has justly lamented, is the "long arc of time", to be replaced by odds and sods.

Chinese and American companies are on relatively even footing when it comes to breadth. Though American Internet companies have a smaller domestic user base than China, which has over a billion users on 4G devices, the best American companies can also draw in users from around the globe, bringing their total user base to over a billion.

when it comes to depth of data, China has the upper hand. Chinese Internet users channel a much larger portion of their daily activities, transactions and interactions through their smartphones. They use their smartphones for managing their daily lives, from buying groceries at the market to paying their utility bills, booking train or bus tickets and to take out loans, among other things.

Weaving together data from mobile payments, public services, financial management and shared mobility gives Chinese companies a deep and more multi-dimensional picture of their users. That allows their AI algorithms to precisely tailor product offerings to each individual. In the current age of AI implementation, this will likely lead to a substantial acceleration and deepening of AI’s impact across China’s economy. That is where the “data gap” appears

The radically different business model in China, married to Chinese user habits, creates indigenous branding and monetization strategies as well as an entirely alternative infrastructure for apps and content. It is therefore very difficult, if not impossible, for any American company to try to enter China’s market or vice versa

companies in both countries are pursuing their own form of international expansion. The United States uses a “full platform” approach — all Google, all Facebook. Essentially Australia, North America and Europe completely accept the American methodology. That technical empire is likely to continue.

The Chinese have realized that the U.S. empire is too difficult to penetrate, so they are looking elsewhere. They are trying, and generally succeeding, in Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Africa. Those regions and countries have not been a focus of U.S. tech, so their products are not built with the cultures of those countries in mind. And since their demographics are closer to China’s — lower income and lots of people, including youth — the Chinese products are a better fit.

The jobs that AI cannot do are those of creators, or what I call “empathetic jobs” in services, which will be the largest category that can absorb those displaced from routine jobs. Many jobs will become available in this sector, from teaching to elderly care and nursing. A great effort must be made not only to increase the number of those jobs and create a career path for them but to increase their social status, which also means increasing the pay of these jobs.

Policy-wise, we are seeing three approaches. The Chinese have unleashed entrepreneurs with a utilitarian passion to commercialize technology. The Americans are similarly pro-entrepreneur, but the government takes a laissez-faire attitude and the entrepreneurs carry out more moonshots. And Europe is more consumer-oriented, trying to give ownership and control of data back to the individual.

An AI arms race would be a grave mistake. The AI boom is more akin to the spread of electricity in the early Industrial Revolution than nuclear weapons during the Cold War. Those who take the arms-race view are more interested in political posturing than the flourishing of humanity. The value of AI as an omni-use technology rests in its creative, not destructive, potential.

In a way, having parallel universes should diminish conflict. They can coexist while each can learn from the other. It is not a zero-sum game of winners and losers.

We will see a massive migration from one kind of employment to another, not unlike during the transition from agriculture to manufacturing. It will largely be the lower-wage jobs in routine work that will be eliminated, while the ultra-rich will stand to make a lot of money from AI. Social inequality will thus widen.

If you were to draw a map a decade from now, you would see China’s tech zone — built not on ownership but partnerships — stretching across Southeast Asia, Indonesia, Africa and to some extent South America. The U.S. zone would entail North America, Australia and Europe. Over time, the “parallel universes” already extant in the United States and China will grow to cover the whole world.

There are also issues related to poorer countries who have relied on either following the old China model of low-wage manufacturing jobs or of India’s call centers. AI will replace those jobs that were created by outsourcing from the West. They will be the first to go in the next 10 years. So, underdeveloped countries will also have to look to jobs for creators and in services.

I am opposed to the idea of universal basic income because it provides money both to those who don’t need it as well as those who do. And it doesn’t stimulate people’s desire to work. It puts them into a kind of “useless class” category with the terrible consequence of a resentful class without dignity or status.

To reinvigorate people’s desire to work with dignity, some subsidy can help offset the costs of critical needs that only humans can provide. That would be a much better use of the distribution of income than giving it to every person whether they need it or not. A far better idea would be for workers of the future to have an equity share in owning the robots — universal basic capital instead of universal basic income.

This movie is an emotional reflection of our current reality. Every theme has a contemporary equivalent: absent male figures and the effects of abandonment; invisible women; a hegemonic state; marked underdevelopment; the exploitation of marginal groups and an ever-present threat of violence.

You can say that makes them hypocrites. A more generous and in many cases more accurate take is that we can’t always control or amend our ingrained impulses and prejudices. We all have prejudices which compromise us. Every single one of us. But the instinctive and ingrained is not the entirety of who we are. We also have the ability to see beyond our own limitations, shortcomings, and acculturation to see what is fair, what is right and what the future can and should be.

On its face, the idea of a merit-based policy doesn’t sound so crazy. We certainly want the best scientists and engineers and doctors and entrepreneurs to come to America. But we already do that. A big part of the immigration system is geared around doing just that

President Trump, his key advisors and key congressional supporters and the issue is often dressed up as a matter of ‘culture’. Too many immigrants from different cultures will overwhelm and wipe out the America we know

Here President Trump, along with Steve King and the rest of the more or less open racists on Capitol Hill is just making the point explicit. They want to keep the US a majority white and culturally homogenous country. That is Stephen Miller’s core policy agenda. He remains one of Trump’s closest advisors. It is simply keep America as white as possible.

With President Trump, using the most denigrating language to say we don’t want immigrants from African or African diaspora countries but want white people instead is clearly and ably captured in his policies. Scare immigrants off, work the internals of the immigration system to expel a few hundred thousand Haitians here, a few hundred thousand Salvadorans there.

But the key point is that if your whole immigration system is based on “merit” you’re going to exclude a ton of people from countries where the kinds of advanced degrees, training and wealth that constitute “merit” in this sense just aren’t available. Overwhelmingly those will be countries that are poor and don’t have white people.

Trumpism is ethnic-nationalism, rightist ethnic nationalism, specifically white ethnic nationalism. That’s been crystal clear from day one with the talk about Mexico sending its rapists and murderers to America, with the hyper-politicization of crimes committed by immigrants and especially undocumented immigrants.

The heart of Trumpism has always been fueled by panic over the decline of white privilege and a rapidly changing demography in which whites are no longer the overwhelming majority of Americans and in a few decades likely won’t be a majority at all.

In the shithole remarks we see it very unadorned: why do we want more low-quality non-white people? To Trump, it is an obvious and urgent question

“They are taking over” is the backdrop of Trumpism. The shithole comments make that crystal clear. It’s not just exclusion but a palpable dehumanizing contempt. The words only matter in as much as they illustrate the ugliness of what is currently happening and that is real and much more important than mere words

Trump administration policy means to and is in the process of, implementing the “shithole” mindset which is to say get rid of as many “outsiders” as we can and keep new ones from coming in.

"I do believe that the US is obligated to share vaccines with other countries," said Keisha Ray, an assistant professor and bioethicist at UTHealth McGovern Medical School in Houston, "especially those countries we might consider poorer countries or what we call underdeveloped countries."

From an ethical perspective, everyone should have access to protection from Covid-19, Kathy Kinlaw, associate director for Emory University's Center for Ethics, told CNN.

many countries lack vaccine access because of the "diminished purchasing power for healthcare in general, but also for Covid-19 treatments and vaccin

"I think the United States is definitely in a position where we should be sharing, absolutely,"

The US is not simply obligated to share vaccines by virtue of its resources, Ray said. Wealthier countries like the US have historically benefited by hindering other countries, she said, whether through government relations or colonialism.

"Now we are in a position to give back, we are in a position to go there and help these countries," she said, like "paying our debt." All three agreed it was right for the US to control its virus outbreaks before sharing vaccines. The pandemic is still an issue in the US, Ray said, but conditions have improved greatly.

"You need to stabilize your own nation before you assist others," he said. "And I think we're there. I think we're getting there now."

The US needs to continue to address vaccine hesitancy at home and be responsive to peoples' concerns, Kinlaw said. "But certainly there could be a point where there are people who will not take the vaccine and we have extra vaccine in this country, in which case it should be used and shared."

"Once this happens," the report said, "efforts to encourage vaccination will become much harder, presenting a challenge to reaching the levels of herd immunity that are expected to be needed."

One factor in deciding to release extra vaccines is the issue of supply and demand -- specifically, that the former will soon outstrip the latter in the US, Kinlaw said. And that could mean it's time to start shipping spare doses overseas, she said.

Data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that 30% of the US population is fully vaccinated. Experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, have estimated the US needs between 70% and 85% of the country to be immune -- either through vaccination or prior infection -- to reach herd immunity.

"The world's wealthiest nations have locked up much of the near-term supply," wrote Dr. Krishna Udayakumar and Dr. Mark McClellan, health experts at Duke. "At the current rate vaccines are being administered, 92 of the world's poorest countries won't vaccinate 60% of their populations until 2023 or later."

"That is an education, a public outreach and an access issue," she said. "We have other hurdles that are not supply hurdles. So we do have the supply to help other countries."

"Epidemiologically, we should be working to suppress the virus and to decrease transmission and decrease the continue evolution of the virus and the variants," she said. "That is going to be beneficial to every single person."

But vaccinations everywhere could also present economic benefits, Kinlaw said, allowing people to travel more freely and conduct business around the world.

"One of the ethical challenges is, are we going to insist on fair distribution within those countries? Or are we just going to give them vaccine and let them give it to the military and elite?" he said.

"It sounds nice to say we're going to aid others, but its simplistic, because some governments are corrupt," he said. "Some governments have no distribution plan other than to give it first to their own leaders, rather than to those in need."

The problem echoes the country’s catastrophic stumbles early in the pandemic, when a lack of testing allowed the virus to spread widely. Currently, only a tiny fraction of all positive coronavirus tests in the United States are forwarded for further sequencing.

t if scientists don’t know what strains are moving through the population, the mutations that matter may pop up undetected.

For months, scientists have been sounding alarms and trying to ramp up genetic sequencing of test samples, but the effort has been plagued by a lack of funding, political will and federal coordination

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky said Friday that the government is increasing the level of sequencing nationwide.“We have scaled up surveillance dramatically just in the last 10 days, in fact. But our plans for scaling up surveillance are even more than what we’ve done so far,”

Ultimately, the country needs real-time data — similar to the dashboards now used to track daily cases, hospitalizations and deaths — to track variants and their prevalence across the country

“None of that exists right now. We’re incredibly behind compared to other countries,”

The U.S. effort is so underdeveloped that it’s impossible to say exactly how many virus cases are sequenced daily.

The CDC has warned that the variant found in the United Kingdom — which British scientists said could be up to 70 percent more transmissible — could become dominant in the United States by March.

It also recently contracted with four private companies — Quest, Labcorp, Illumina and Helix — to conduct more sequencing. By mid-February, those contracts should hit full capacity, analyzing 6,000 samples per week, CDC officials said.

Illumina estimates that the country needs to sequence 5 percent of its coronavirus cases to detect a new variant when the variant represents about 0.1 percent to 1.0 percent of the country’s case

However, the United States so far has only sequenced about 0.32 percent of its total cases

the country ranks 38th out of 130 countries reporting whole-genome sequencing data.

The United States has sequenced 84,177 samples out of 25.7 million cases as of Friday, according to a Washington Post analysis. By comparison, the United Kingdom, in ninth place, has sequenced 214,000 genomes — almost 6 percent — of the country’s 3.7 million cases.

Unlike the United States, the U.K. invested in genetic sequencing early on in the pandemic, launching its genomics consortium in March with a $27 million investment and a multimillion-dollar boost late last year.

Even before the emergence of mutations such as the variants first discovered in South Africa and the United Kingdom, U.S. experts had been warning for months about the need for a national standard for genetic surveillance.

In May, the CDC launched a surveillance program for the coronavirus called SPHERES (SARS-CoV-2 Sequencing for Public Health Emergency Response, Epidemiology, and Surveillance). But, in practice, the program relied on a haphazard patchwork of academic labs contributing genetic sequencing on a volunteer basis.

A July report by the National Academies of Science said that “poor funding, coordination, and capacity” had led to a “patchy, typically passive, and reactive” U.S. sequencing effort.

Experts say the slowdown is rooted in several trends, including the rise of women in the work force who are educated and don’t see marriage as necessary to achieving financial security, at least for themselves. For Chinese couples, many cannot afford to have children as living costs increase and their jobs demand more time and energy. And attitudes have shifted.

While many countries are struggling with low fertility rates and aging populations, these issues are even more pressing in China, because the country’s underdeveloped social safety net means that most older adults rely heavily on their families to pay for health care, retirement and other expenses.

the slowing birthrate has meant that China’s main state pension fund, which relies on tax revenues from its work force, risks running out of money by 2035 because of a decline in the number of workers

Despite the looming demographic crisis, the government still maintains tight control over reproduction.

The government’s effort to raise the birthrate is also running into broader economic and social changes. Education, housing and health care costs are rising. More women are getting university degrees and are reluctant to interrupt their careers. Some among the current generation of women of childbearing age, themselves the product of the “one child” policy, don’t see what the fuss about offspring is all about.

China’s total fertility rate — an estimate of the number of babies a woman would have over her lifetime — has fallen to 1.6 children per woman, and for years has generally remained below the “replacement” level of 2.1. That means China could soon see a shrinking population and a work force too small to support its pensioners.

Shoggoths are fictional creatures, introduced by the science fiction author H.P. Lovecraft in his 1936 novella “At the Mountains of Madness.” In Lovecraft’s telling, Shoggoths were massive, blob-like monsters made out of iridescent black goo, covered in tentacles and eyes.

In a nutshell, the joke was that in order to prevent A.I. language models from behaving in scary and dangerous ways, A.I. companies have had to train them to act polite and harmless. One popular way to do this is called “reinforcement learning from human feedback,” or R.L.H.F., a process that involves asking humans to score chatbot responses, and feeding those scores back into the A.I. model.

Most A.I. researchers agree that models trained using R.L.H.F. are better behaved than models without it. But some argue that fine-tuning a language model this way doesn’t actually make the underlying model less weird and inscrutable. In their view, it’s just a flimsy, friendly mask that obscures the mysterious beast underneath.

@TetraspaceWest, the meme’s creator, told me in a Twitter message that the Shoggoth “represents something that thinks in a way that humans don’t understand and that’s totally different from the way that humans think.”

@TetraspaceWest said, wasn’t necessarily implying that it was evil or sentient, just that its true nature might be unknowable.

“I was also thinking about how Lovecraft’s most powerful entities are dangerous — not because they don’t like humans, but because they’re indifferent and their priorities are totally alien to us and don’t involve humans, which is what I think will be true about possible future powerful A.I.”

when Bing’s chatbot became unhinged and tried to break up my marriage, an A.I. researcher I know congratulated me on “glimpsing the Shoggoth.” A fellow A.I. journalist joked that when it came to fine-tuning Bing, Microsoft had forgotten to put on its smiley-face mask.

If it’s an A.I. safety researcher talking about the Shoggoth, maybe that person is passionate about preventing A.I. systems from displaying their true, Shoggoth-like nature.

In any case, the Shoggoth is a potent metaphor that encapsulates one of the most bizarre facts about the A.I. world, which is that many of the people working on this technology are somewhat mystified by their own creations. They don’t fully understand the inner workings of A.I. language models, how they acquire new capabilities or why they behave unpredictably at times. They aren’t totally sure if A.I. is going to be net-good or net-bad for the world.

That some A.I. insiders refer to their creations as Lovecraftian horrors, even as a joke, is unusual by historical standards. (Put it this way: Fifteen years ago, Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t going around comparing Facebook to Cthulhu.)

And it reinforces the notion that what’s happening in A.I. today feels, to some of its participants, more like an act of summoning than a software development process. They are creating the blobby, alien Shoggoths, making them bigger and more powerful, and hoping that there are enough smiley faces to cover the scary parts.

A great many people are dismissive of suggestions that any of these systems are “really” thinking, because they’re “just” doing something banal (like making statistical predictions about the next word in a sentence). What they fail to appreciate is that there is every reason to suspect that human cognition is “just” doing those exact same things. It matters not that birds flap their wings but airliners don’t. Both fly. And these machines think. And, just as airliners fly faster and higher and farther than birds while carrying far more weight, these machines are already outthinking the majority of humans at the majority of tasks. Further, that machines aren’t perfect thinkers is about as relevant as the fact that air travel isn’t instantaneous. Now consider: we’re well past the Wright flyer level of thinking machine, past the early biplanes, somewhere about the first commercial airline level. Not quite the DC-10, I think. Can you imagine what the AI equivalent of a 777 will be like? Fasten your seatbelts.

@BLA. You are incorrect. Everything has nature. Its nature is manifested in making humans react. Sure, no humans, no nature, but here we are. The writer and various sources are not attributing nature to AI so much as admitting that they don’t know what this nature might be, and there are reasons to be scared of it. More concerning to me is the idea that this field is resorting to geek culture reference points to explain and comprehend itself. It’s not so much the algorithm has no soul, but that the souls of the humans making it possible are stupendously and tragically underdeveloped.

@thomas h. You make my point perfectly. You’re observing that the way a plane flies — by using a turbine to generate thrust from combusting kerosene, for example — is nothing like the way that a bird flies, which is by using the energy from eating plant seeds to contract the muscles in its wings to make them flap. You are absolutely correct in that observation, but it’s also almost utterly irrelevant. And it ignores that, to a first approximation, there’s no difference in the physics you would use to describe a hawk riding a thermal and an airliner gliding (essentially) unpowered in its final descent to the runway. Further, you do yourself a grave disservice in being dismissive of the abilities of thinking machines, in exactly the same way that early skeptics have been dismissive of every new technology in all of human history. Writing would make people dumb; automobiles lacked the intelligence of horses; no computer could possibly beat a chess grandmaster because it can’t comprehend strategy; and on and on and on. Humans aren’t nearly as special as we fool ourselves into believing. If you want to have any hope of acting responsibly in the age of intelligent machines, you’ll have to accept that, like it or not, and whether or not it fits with your preconceived notions of what thinking is and how it is or should be done … machines can and do think, many of them better than you in a great many ways. b&

When even tech companies are saying AI is moving too fast, and the articles land on page 1 of the NYT (there's an old reference), I think the greedy will not think twice about exploiting this technology, with no ethical considerations, at all.

@nome sane? The problem is it isn't data as we understand it. We know what the datasets are -- they were used to train the AI's. But once trained, the AI is thinking for itself, with results that have surprised everybody.

The unique feature of a shoggoth is it can become whatever is needed for a particular job. There's no actual shape so it's not a bad metaphor, if an imperfect image. Shoghoths also turned upon and destroyed their creators, so the cautionary metaphor is in there, too. A shame more Asimov wasn't baked into AI. But then the conflict about how to handle AI in relation to people was key to those stories, too.

Berlin, like Washington, has tried to position itself as a concerned friend, intent on ensuring Israel’s long-term security by not allowing it to go so far that it loses even more international backing. But the stakes are high for Germany, too.

The country needs to maintain friendly relations around the world to pursue its own interests, whether Europe is cutting deals with Egypt to curb migration or seeking support for measures to back Ukraine against Russia

this week, Germany’s foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, said she would be sending a delegation to Israel because as a signatory to the Geneva Conventions, her country “is obliged to remind all parties of their duty to abide by international humanitarian law.”

The sense of diminishing credibility on human rights is particularly strong in the set of developing or underdeveloped countries sometimes referred to as the Global South, a point brought home during a visit to Berlin this month by Malaysia’s prime minister, Anwar Ibrahim.

“We oppose colonialism, or apartheid, or ethnic cleansing, or dispossession of any country, be it in Ukraine, or in Gaza,” Mr. Ibrahim told journalists as he stood beside Mr. Scholz. “Where have we thrown our humanity? Why this hypocrisy?”

polls by public broadcasters in recent weeks show that nearly 70 percent of Germans surveyed felt Israel’s military actions were not justifiable; just a few weeks earlier, the number was around 50 percent.

On the one hand, she said, Germany was calling on Israel not to invade Rafah. On the other, Germany remained one of Israel’s biggest arms suppliers. “We have to really do something to protect these people.”