Opinion | Who is FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried? He's a product of our time. - The Washi... - 0 views
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the story of FTX should also trigger some deep soul-searching among the rest of us. In a better world, people would not behave so irresponsibly — but nor would it be possible for someone this stupid to accumulate the kind of money and political influence that accrued to Bankman-Fried.
Pause or panic: battle to tame the AI monster - 0 views
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What exactly are they afraid of? How do you draw a line from a chatbot to global destruction
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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
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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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Opinion | Biden's course correction on China is smart and important - The Washington Post - 0 views
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French President Emmanuel Macron might have been too blunt about his worries about Europe becoming a “vassal” of the United States, but his views are in fact widely shared in Europe and beyond. The war in Ukraine has hurt Europe by raising its energy costs while benefiting the United States, which is the world’s top producer of hydrocarbons and sells many at low cost. European companies are shifting investment to the United States, lured in part by the Inflation Reduction Act’s generous subsidies. A German CEO said to me recently, “You cannot expect us to forgo cheap Russian energy as well as the Chinese market. That would be suicide for Europe.”
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More broadly, if geopolitical tensions win out and economic ties continue to weaken, we will move into a very different world, marked by much greater chaos and disorder at every level. One sign of this can be seen in the impasse over debt restructuring. Dozens of the world’s most vulnerable economies are in or at high risk of debt distress. (Lebanon, for example, has been in default for three years.) Yet the International Monetary Fund cannot bail out these countries because China (which is one of the world’s largest creditors) cannot come to an agreement with Western nations on the terms of relief. The two sides blame each other and hundreds of millions of people suffer.
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The last time two major world powers tried to manage a relationship of economic interdependence and rising geopolitical rivalry was Britain and Germany in the period from the 1880s to 1914. That experiment ended very badly, with a war that destroyed much of the industrialized world. Both sides should try to ensure we do better this time
In 'Equality,' Darrin McMahon shows the path has always been fraught - The Washington Post - 0 views
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When civilizations promote parity along one axis, they tend to lapse back toward hierarchy along another. Legal equality may be offset by widening economic rifts, as in Western democracies today; the expansion of the franchise to a larger segment of the male population may be accompanied by the fervent demonization of women or non-natives, as in ancient Athens; movements for justice may prompt reactionary backlash, as in France after the 1789 revolution.
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At a time when equality is widely lauded as an uncomplicated good, McMahon’s sweeping if occasionally schematic study provides a thought-provoking reminder of its pitfalls
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All too often, equality within a group is premised on the exclusion of those outside it.
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Tween trends get more expensive as they take cues from social media - The Washington Post - 0 views
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While earlier generations might have taken their cues from classmates or magazines, tweens and teens now see their peers on platforms like TikTok, Pinterest, Instagram and YouTube.
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And it’s spawning viral moments in retail, as evidenced by last week’s release of limited-edition Stanley tumblers at Target. Fans lined up outside stores before sunrise to nab the cup made in collaboration with Starbucks, and arguments broke out at a handful of locations. T
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This age group also is snapping up pricey makeup and skin care, even products usually reserved for “mature” skin. That’s given rise to viral TikToks from exasperated adults.
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AI fears are reaching the top levels of finance and law - The Washington Post - 0 views
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In a report released last week, the forum said that its survey of 1,500 policymakers and industry leaders found that fake news and propaganda written and boosted by AI chatbots is the biggest short-term risk to the global economy. Around half of the world’s population is participating in elections this year in countries including the United States, Mexico, Indonesia and Pakistan and disinformation researchers are concerned AI will make it easier for people to spread false information and increase societal conflict.
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AI also may be no better than humans at spotting unlikely dangers or “tail risks,” said Allen. Before 2008, few people on Wall Street foresaw the end of the housing bubble. One reason was that since housing prices had never declined nationwide before, Wall Street’s models assumed such a uniform decline would never occur. Even the best AI systems are only as good as the data they are based on, Allen said.
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As AI grows more complex and capable, some experts worry about “black box” automation that is unable to explain how it arrived at a decision, leaving humans uncertain about its soundness. Poorly designed or managed systems could undermine the trust between buyer and seller that is required for any financial transaction
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A 1993 Octavia Butler novel imagined the world in 2024-accurately - The Washington Post - 0 views
Opinion | The Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez You Don't Know - The New York Times - 0 views
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First impressions are hard to erase, and the obstinacy that made Ms. Ocasio-Cortez an instant national celebrity remains at the heart of her detractors’ most enduring critique: that she is a performer, out for herself, with a reach that exceeds her grasp.
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In straddling the line between outsider and insider, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is trying to achieve the one thing that might just shore up her fractured party: building a new Democratic coalition that can consistently draw a majority of American support.
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In some ways, she’s asking the obvious questions: What’s broadly popular among a vast majority of Americans, and how can I make it happen? To achieve progress on these issues, she has sought common ground in places where her peers are not thinking to look. Her willingness to forge unlikely alliances, in surprisingly productive places, has opened a path to new voters — for her party, her ideas and her own political ambitions if she ever decides to run for higher office.
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Glenn Loury's 'Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative' reviewed - The Was... - 0 views
Suddenly There Aren't Enough Babies. The Whole World Is Alarmed. - WSJ - 0 views
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The world is at a startling demographic milestone. Sometime soon, the global fertility rate will drop below the point needed to keep population constant. It may have already happened.
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Fertility is falling almost everywhere, for women across all levels of income, education and labor-force participation.
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Governments have rolled out programs to stop the decline—but so far they’ve barely made a dent.
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Germany, a Loyal Israel Ally, Begins to Shift Tone as Gaza Toll Mounts - The New York T... - 0 views
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“What changed for Germany is that it’s untenable, this unconditional support for Israel,” said Thorsten Benner, director of the Global Public Policy Institute in Berlin. “In sticking to this notion of Staatsraison, they gave the false impression that Germany actually offered carte blanche to Netanyahu.”
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Foreign-policy experts say that by hewing to its strong support of Israel, Germany has also undermined its ability to credibly criticize authoritarian governments like that of Russia’s Vladimir V. Putin for human rights violations.
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During a visit to the region, her sixth since the attack, Ms. Baerbock also described the situation in Gaza as “hell” and insisted that a major offensive on Rafah, where more than a million people have sought shelter, must not happen.“People cannot vanish into thin air,”
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Science is revealing why American politics are so intensely polarized - The Washington ... - 0 views
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One theme emerges in much of the research: Our politics tend be more emotional now. Policy preferences are increasingly likely to be entangled with a visceral dislike of the opposition. The newly embraced academic term for this is “affective polarization.”
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“It’s feelings based,” said Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University and author of “Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity.” “It’s polarization that’s based on our feelings for each other, not based on extremely divergent policy preferences.”
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The tendency to form tightly knit groups has roots in evolution, according to experts in political psychology. Humans evolved in a challenging world of limited resources in which survival required cooperation — and identifying the rivals, the competitors for those resources.
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Best of 2023: The Decadent Opulence of Modern Capitalism - 0 views
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while we tend to focus on stories about everything that has gone wrong, in the long run, the bigger news always ends up being the impact of growth and innovation. But because we’re so pre-occupied with everything else, it tends to sneak up on us.
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In the left’s view, market crashes and recessions reveal the real essence of the capitalist system. In reality, they are just temporary glitches and setbacks in a larger story of persistent innovation and growth.
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new figures showing the widening gap in wealth between the US and Europe. Jim Pethokoukis describes it as a Doom Loop of Decline and attributes it partly to the impact of heavy European regulation.
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'Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth' delivers on emotional writing and acting - The Washing... - 0 views
Elon Musk takes his speech fight global - The Washington Post - 0 views
As U.S. sends Ukraine military aid, a lobbying coalition is forged - The Washington Post - 0 views
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Ukrainian civil society, she said, has “this approach, which is called ‘we are a drop in the ocean,’ which means that we all, all the efforts, are modest because we are not gods, we are human beings,” Matviichuk said. “But together … we can change the reality for better.”
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As part of a nationwide campaign, they also aired television and radio spots and bought billboard ads highlighting that Russian forces have destroyed hundreds of churches and tortured and killed Christian pastors.
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One such billboard popped up across the street from the church Johnson attends in his district. “We pushed on every lever,” said Mykola Murskyj, director of advocacy at Razom
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New York Times Bosses Seek to Quash Rebellion in the Newsroom - WSJ - 0 views
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The internal probe was meant to find out who leaked information related to a planned podcast episode about that article. But its intensity and scope suggests the Times’s leadership, after years of fights with its workforce over a variety of issues involving journalistic integrity, is sending a signal: Enough.
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“The idea that someone dips into that process in the middle, and finds something that they considered might be interesting or damaging to the story under way, and then provides that to people outside, felt to me and my colleagues like a breakdown in the sort of trust and collaboration that’s necessary in the editorial process,” Executive Editor Joe Kahn said in an interview. “I haven’t seen that happen before.”
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while its business hums along, the Times’s culture has been under strain.
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Opinion | How China is ironically driving a key new U.S.-Pacific alliance - The Washing... - 0 views
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