Deep space missions regularly rely on nuclear power, using the heat emitted by radioactive substances to generate electricity without an atom-splitting chain reaction. NASA’s Perseverance rover, currently exploring the surface of Mars, is powered by one of these devices.

“dramatically reduce the need to scale up”. And novel methods to do more with less are being developed all the time.

Epoch, a non-profit research institute, estimates that at current rates, big language models will run out of high-quality text on the internet by 2026 (though other less-tapped formats, like video, will remain abundant for a while).

That in turn is generating tonnes of user data that could make its models better (“reinforcement learning with human feedback”, if you must know)—and thus attract more users.

As a result of all this, reckons Yann LeCun, Meta’s top AI boffin, “Nobody is ahead of anybody else by more than two to six months.”

Neither AI was clearly superior. Google’s was slightly better at maths, answering five questions correctly, compared with three for ChatGPT. Their dating advice was uneven: fed some actual exchanges in a dating app each gave specific suggestions on one occasion, and generic platitudes such as “be open minded” and “communicate effectively” on another. ChatGPT, meanwhile, answered nine SAT questions correctly compared with seven for its Google rival. It also appeared more responsive to our feedback and got a few questions right on a second try. Another test by Riley Goodside of Scale AI, an AI startup, suggests Anthropic’s chatbot, Claude, might perform better than ChatGPT at realistic-sounding conversation, though it performs worse at generating computer code.

Meta’s “Diplomacy” player, Cicero, gets kudos for its use of strategic reasoning and deception against human opponents

the world’s biggest natural-language model, Wu Dao 2.0

The Chinese labs, for example, appear to have a big lead in the subdiscipline of computer vision, which involves analysing images, where they are responsible for the largest share of the most highly cited papers. According to a ranking devised by Microsoft, the top five computer-vision teams in the world are all Chinese.

Stability AI, a startup that has assembled an open-source consortium of other small firms, universities and non-profits to pool computing resources, has created a popular model that converts text to images.

In 2017 Ashish Arora, an economist, and colleagues examined the period from 1980 to 2006 and found that firms had moved away from basic science towards developing existing ideas.

When Alphabet, its parent company, presents quarterly earnings on February 2nd, investors will be listening out for its answer to ChatGPT.

By declining to use the G-20 as a platform for meaningfully challenging digital authoritarianism, it may reduce its own ability to capitalize on its international stature as the world’s largest digital democracy.

the Indian presidency is increasing its prospects of crafting at least basic consensus – maybe even a ministerial declaration

Evidently, this approach differs from the G-7 countries’ commitment to promoting cross-border “data free flow with trust.”

In the digital realm, that translates into an approach centering on “data sovereignty” and countering “data colonialism.”

locally developed 5G technology

“India stack” digitization project. It comprises four technology layers designed to provide individuals with digital identities, an interoperable payments system, virtual documents and verification, and personal data management through regulated intermediaries.

to generate jobs, facilitate citizen-centered inclusive growth, and enhance connectivity.

According to a study by the Reserve Bank of India, India’s digital economy grew 2.4 times faster than the overall economy.

its “human-centric approach to technology” to the grand diplomatic stage are in full swing.

But digital is among those areas where careful optimism still prevails.

advancing inclusive cooperation on digital trade, expanding affordable and high-quality digital infrastructure, enabling cross-border data flows and developing digital skills and literacy.

Brazil Justice Moraes fines Telegram for not complying with court order

by IARPA, the research hub of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees America’s spies.

Wi-Fi signals undergo subtle shifts when they encounter objects—human beings included.

to turn any building’s Wi-Fi network into a mini panopticon

interactive gaming and exercise monitoring.

to “monitor the well-being of elder people”

this work employed standard antennas of the sort used in household Wi-Fi routers.

describes how they ran Wi-Fi signals from a room with appropriate routers in it through an artificial-intelligence algorithm trained on signals from people engaging in various, known activities.

Technology is advancing and courtroom rules are very outdated."

The AI tools developed by DoNotPay, which remain completely untested in actual courtrooms, require recording audio of arguments in order for the machine-learning algorithm to generate responses.

"This could've shifted the balance and allowed people to use tools like ChatGPT in the courtroom that maybe could've helped them win cases."

focus on assisting people dealing with expensive medical bills, unwanted subscriptions and issues with credit reporting agencies.

Earlier this month, he claimed on Twitter that the company would pay any lawyer $1 million to argue in front of the U.S. Supreme Court wearing AirPods that would pipe AI-generated arguments from its "robot lawyer."

By contrast, the center-left is pushing for an overall increase of the sanctions and for removing size and market share consideration from the criteria authorities consider when imposing a penalty. 

Conservatives want to give the European Artificial Intelligence Board additional autonomy in setting its own agenda. The Greens want the European Data Protection Supervisor to provide the Board’s secretariat for the Board – and act as the supervisory authority for large companies.   

The Green group added a paragraph to add a transparency requirement to counter deceptive practices called dark patterns. 

he rules applied to providers not located or operating in the EU under certain circumstances. 

Liberals have introduced a new article to put them in the scope of the regulation, including a reference to blockchain-backed currencies.

Green MEPs extended the high-risk category to media recommendation software, algorithms used in the health insurance processes, payments, and debt collection. 

Obligations for high-risk applications should be partially or completely removed if programmers mitigate the risk with countermeasures or built-in features.  

But high-risk requires programmers to take a series of precautions to make sure their plans are safe. 

the majority look set to prohibit biometric recognition.

Green MEPs want to ban biometric categorization, emotion recognition, and all automated monitoring of human behavior.

the center-right European People’s Party insists on the definition agreed upon at the OECD.

Left-of-center parliamentarians are pushing for a broad general definition of artificial intelligence (AI) rather than accepting a narrow list of AI techniques.

topics is on definitions.

“requiring students to leave all their backpacks and electronics at the front of the exam room.”

some of whom are revamping their courses as a result.

Mostofi said student assignments will continue to be designed to “support students in developing linked thinking and writing skills,” including the drafting and revising processes, as well as citing sources.

Among other districts that have cracked down on its use, New York City’s education department has blocked the site on its networks, citing “concerns about negative impacts on student learning, and concerns regarding the safety and accuracy of content,” according to education department spokesperson Jenna Lyle in a statement to Chalkbeat New York.

“Students are expected to complete coursework without unpermitted aid,” wrote spokesperson Dee Mostofi. “In most courses, unpermitted aid includes AI tools like ChatGPT.”

The US is lobbying hard to dilute Europe’s AI regulation, aiming to narrow Europe’s definition of risky AI. In Washington’s view, it is too early to regulate a technology that they struggle to define. Europeans themselves are divided over the text, which is now the subject of negotiations in the European Parliament and the EU Council.

rather than get a direct answer to a query from a dubious source, readers are linked with an authoritative website.

it lacks a critical spirit:

Switzerland ranks 9th for countries with most trademark applications per 100,000 people

A python module to generate optimized prompts, Prompt-engineering & solve different NLP problems using GPT-n (GPT-3, ChatGPT) based models and return structured python object for easy parsing

when the entire thing might have been avoided by judicious diplomatic engagement?

And for a short time, the “Vietnam Syndrome,” (shorthand for a wariness and suspicion of unnecessary and unsupportable foreign interventions) occasionally informed policy at the highest levels and manifested itself in the promulgations of the Wienberger and Powell Doctrines which, in theory anyway, were set up as a kind of break on unnecessary military adventures.

And for a short time, the “Vietnam Syndrome,” (shorthand for a wariness and suspicion of unnecessary and unsupportable foreign interventions) occasionally informed policy at the highest levels and manifested itself in the promulgations of the Wienberger and Powell Doctrines which, in theory anyway, were set up as a kind of break on unnecessary military adventures.

Asteroid miners prepare for launch. AstroForge, which wants to pluck platinum-group metals from near-Earth objects, plans to launch a payload in April that will demonstrate the ability to mine metals in space. The company also expects to launch another spacecraft onboard Intuitive Machines’ lunar mission later this year that will fly to a target asteroid and assess its viability for future mining.

training for women, with a special focus on digital expertise.

The focus is to be increasingly on software solutions (digital health),

stimulating the creation of jobs offering decent working conditions. It fo-cuses in particular on the promising industries of the future, such as information and communica-tion technologies (ICT),

Support digitalisation of the African economyThe BMZ aims to effectively support the rapidly developing digital economy, for example through the Make-IT in Africa initiative, the establishment of digicentres and activities to assist African initiatives including the Smart Africa Alliance. It helps African partner countries to enhance the economic and political framework for digital transformation, to create digital markets, provide secure, universal internet access and bridge the “digital divide” within the population. It is also fostering legal standards and data privacy regulations, for example through Team Europe Initiatives such as the African European Digital Innovation Bridge Network and the EU-AU Data Flagship

digital infrastructure and health infrastructure, the BMZ aims to mobilise invest-ment –

Support the AfCFTA and ensure trade agreements are pro-development

German development policy faces the challenge of finding differentiated and flexible responses that take account of the fact that African states have their own interests, and that each state has its own view of the world and its own vision of the best economic, political and social order.

digital transformation

Pillar 2: Human Capital Development

Pillar 1: Digital Economy and Infrastructure

DTA will foster an inclusive and resilient African digital ecosystem, led by African communities and built on an open, interoperable, reliable, and secure internet

invest over $350 million and facilitate over $450 million in financing for Africa

Another divide is between rural and urban India. The internet penetration rate is 103% in cities (because of individuals with multiple connections) and 38% in the countryside.

Only a quarter of Indian women did.

estimates that half of adult Indian men owned a smartphone in 2021.

The government is enthusiastically promoting digital payments through its Unified Payments Interface, a cashless system that has gained widespread popularity. Its biometrics-based national identity system now covers nearly every Indian resident and is all but mandatory when interacting with the state. A covid-tracking app was also voluntary in name only.

In October last year, the latest month for which figures are available, the telecoms regulator counted 790m wireless broadband connections, barely exceeding the previous peak of 789m, which was recorded in August 2021.

just peace

Based on my experience, talks succeed only if in the end the most powerful figures from each side are bold enough to meet and reach agreement.

History is filled with examples of peace negotiations failing because the right people or groups were not involved in the negotiations.

Many peace processes require quiet diplomacy, especially to get started.

channels of communication should be established as early as possible.

it is never too early to prepare for potential talks

We, the international community and the UN, should help provide a “tunnel” for Russia and Ukraine. We need to prepare now so as to be ready to provide effective support for eventual peace when the two sides want to negotiate.

In physical meetings you can entertain yourself by looking around the room or whispering to colleagues. In virtual meetings whoever has the floor has all your attention: their face fills your screen, their voice fills your ears (particularly if you’re wearing headphones) and their attention-seeking soul occupies your whole computer, sucking away your life-force.

Zoom removes all such mechanisms. The audience is muted.

In the physical world all sorts of micro-signals keep all but the most resolute speakers under some sort of control. The chairperson can raise an eyebrow, ostentatiously look around for someone else to interject, or, if the bore continues to plough on, interrupt to say “I’d like to bring Sarah in on this one”

The bore’s co-workers must stand in for the publican, shopkeeper, subordinate, neighbour or whomever routinely gets the benefit of their banality.

They take ten minutes to make a simple point. They raise their virtual hands at every possible occasion.

But above all there are Zoom bores – Zoombies? – who turn every meeting into a marathon of self-important tedium.

Writing is the business of turning time into words: the more time you have the more words you should be able to produce.

That seems likely to change in the next few weeks, when an uncrewed lander becomes the first commercial vehicle to touch down on the Moon

The Outer Space Treaty of 1967, space law’s foundational text, is showing its age. It dates back to the era when only governments had access to space. And it states that no claims of sovereignty can be made, on the Moon or elsewhere. Efforts to update the treaty to establish rules around resource extraction have run into the lunar regolith. America has refused to sign the Moon Agreement, adopted by 18 countries in 1984, whereas China and Russia have rejected America’s latest proposal, the Artemis accords of 2020.

Peregrine lander built by Astrobotic Technology, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, also operates under the CLPS programme

“commercial lunar payload services” (CLPS) programme

Nova-C, created by Intuitive Machines, a startup in Houston, Texas

One vehicle, HAKUTO-R Mission 1, operated by ispace, a Japanese firm, is already on its way and is scheduled to land in late April

Of 178 successful missions in 2022, 90 were by companies (in many cases subcontracted by governments), and of those 61 were by one firm, SpaceX.

there is no international agreement on the legal status of the Moon.

Many of NASA’s CLPS payloads are intended to pave the way for the return of people to the Moon, for example by scouting possible landing sites or searching for resources

Being able to put things into orbit around Earth has made all sorts of things possible, from GPS navigation and satellite TV to better internet access and weather monitoring, as well as military uses

the Peregrine lander built by Astrobotic Technology, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, also operates under the CLPS programme

The first of these is Nova-C, created by Intuitive Machines, a startup in Houston, Texas.

HAKUTO-R Mission 1 was launched on December 11th on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

Of 178 successful missions in 2022, 90 were by companies (in many cases subcontracted by governments), and of those 61 were by one firm, SpaceX. When it comes to sending things to the Moon, however, governments retain a monopoly of success.

False outrage

MyData

One vehicle for co-ordination is the Three Seas Initiative (3Si), a forum of 12 EU countries spanning the Adriatic, Baltic and Black seas, founded in 2015. Its investment fund, set up in 2019, says it has raised at least $1.2bn.

What matters more is the extent to which America and its allies blacklist China, where TSMC has a fab in Nanjing making mainstream chips for domestic use. The company may be right to believe that cool heads will prevail. But if it is wrong, at least it has started the long process of hedging its bets.

In that case, eventually TSMC may outgrow Taiwan, whose population is shrinking. Accessing more global brainpower, in America or elsewhere, will become an imperative.

Though construction costs in the United States are, officials said, up to five times higher than in Taiwan, they indicated that customers who wanted their chips to be made in America would pay a higher price, protecting profits

TSMC will bear the losses as a gesture of goodwill to the country

For the foreseeable future, though, most R&D is likely to remain in Taiwan. So will at least four-fifths of TMSC’s capacity.

Its biggest customer in Phoenix will be Apple. Beyond America, it plans to build its first fab in Japan for Sony, another gadget-maker. This looks like a strategy to move closer to its customers, which if you are sitting in Taiwan might look suspiciously like abandonment.

Yet it is thinking about a long-term future in which one day there may be a premium on geographical flexibility. In short, it is playing a subtle game of diplomacy in which its business interests come first.

Last year America strengthened its stranglehold on certain “choke-point” technologies, such as artificial-intelligence chip design, chip software and semiconductor-manufacturing equipment, in order to stymie China’s ambitions.

Many of its fabrication plants are on the west coast of Taiwan and perilously exposed to a Chinese invasion across the Taiwan Strait. Yet it refuses to be panicked. “If there is a war then, my goodness, we all have a lot more than just chips to worry about,”

growing support for a ban on anti-satellite weapons tests as one sign of progress, but that effort came after a series of particularly messy orbital tests, and can be seen as an effort to limit Chinese and Russian weapons development.

What might change that, the report suggests, is a disaster

most influential actors in the space economy, whether nation-states or companies, are still happier with a free hand than an insurance policy

global governance: Rules for space traffic management, protocols for space debris mitigation and removal, and norms for economic activity in space, from resource extraction to property rights.

Africa in digital geopolitics and geoeconomics

What geopolitical analysts have more recently come to call the “free and open Indo-Pacific” now takes in America and Australia as partners in the grouping known as the Quad, which seeks to counterbalance the rise of China.

Even the “Asian values” promoted by Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s founder, are best understood in opposition to Western ones.

Bosses are the most visible people in a firm; when they point fingers, others will, too. If your company has a blame culture, the fault lies there.

Power and punitiveness went together.

Blameless postmortems have long been part of the culture at Google, for instance, which has templates, reviews and discussion groups for them.

people “are not punished for actions, omissions or decisions taken by them that are commensurate with their experience and training”

promotes individual blame instead of collective learning.

not to assign blame or liability but to find out what went wrong and to issue recommendations to avoid a repeat.

Pointing fingers saps team cohesion. It makes it less likely that people will own up to mistakes, and thus less likely that organisations can learn from them

when a third of the world’s economies are projected to go into recession, Russia’s war on Ukraine continues unabated and countries are struggling with a global debt crisis.

India does not have a data protection law, but recently introduced a revised draft that would curb how companies can use personal data.

“Earlier, you had small pilots. But now these are big enough projects across the population — income, education and age group — that it can work.”

This includes the country’s 13-year-old digital ID scheme Aadhaar, which is linked to an individual’s biometrics, as well as schemes such as UPI, which was launched in 2016.

the India Stack is an important element of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s soft-power push, as New Delhi seeks to present itself as a democratic, business-friendly counterweight to China.

Countries including Singapore, the United Arab Emirates and Nepal are already adopting elements of India’s payments infrastructure.

to facilitate cross-border transactions for Indians overseas

other nations about making their payments systems “interoperable” with the technology.

the “India Stack”,

would make “special presentations” about its digital infrastructure

to give ourselves time to develop disagreement and perhaps gain understanding of what the decision is all about.”

they would speak in reverse order of seniority, so that less experienced judges wouldn’t tailor their opinions to fit those of senior ones.

The longer people talked to each other, the dumber they became. Meetings didn’t open minds, it closed them.

But the Talmudic principle embodies an important insight about the perils of consensus: if everyone is seeing things a certain way, you may well have missed something important.

As well as giving people a sense that their voice matters, consulting a wider group gives leaders access to a collective judgment that – as a large body of literature on the wisdom of crowds shows – is likely to be a good one.

But perhaps they don’t want to acknowledge that, in getting people to vote for his preferred outcome, Satan was simply really good at meetings.

The result wasn’t always the right one, but the procedure was represented as admirable.

Moloch advocates “open Warr”. Belial, whom Milton describes as an artful and cynical speaker, suggests that they do nothing and hope God sees fit to forgive them. Mammon argues for abandoning any idea of returning to Heaven and instead building an empire in Hell. And Beelzebub counsels sending a demon to Earth to seduce or destroy this “new Race call’d Man”. The issue is put to a vote.

Meetings without order don’t achieve anything except the entrenchment of powerful personalities, as Piggy learned the hard way

We seem to assume that people speak because they have something useful to say.

Studies show that the more someone contributes in a meeting, the more they are likely to be asked questions

people tend to think of them as influential by default

It’s time some people knew they’ve got to keep quiet and leave deciding things to the rest of us.”

inds it impossible to translate talk into action

Meetings become central to their attempt to structure their mini-society, and they adopt a rule that anyone can speak if they’re holding the group’s conch shell (a prefiguration of Zoom’s yellow halo).

“Even in egalitarian Denmark, we very rarely observed meeting participants challenge their leaders’ right to speak as much as they please.”

leaders are better at pretending to listen to their subordinates.

But Cordelia, his youngest – and the only one who genuinely loves her father, as the play goes on to demonstrate – refuses to flatter him (“I cannot heave my heart into my mouth”).

The real purpose of the meeting, it becomes clear, is for the old king to be lavished with “opulent” praise.

they are confident in their own judgment and willing to assert themselves.

But getting the view from the floor isn’t just good for employees’ morale; it’s a way to gather useful information and different opinions.

Encouraging junior staff to voice their opinions is one of the biggest difficulties modern managers face.

Homer makes clear that the Greeks did not believe in a frank exchange of views.

turns on arguments between key individuals

the Western canon is ripe with unharvested wisdom on how to make meetings more productive.

“The Iliad”, Western literature’s foundational text, kicks off with a meeting.

people have been gathering to discuss decisions since Adam and Eve

a mini-industry in management books

In many office cultures, a meeting is a byword for a tedious, time-wasting exercise.

moved away from manufacturing towards “knowledge” industries

The average executive now spends 23 hours in them each week, a figure that has more than doubled since the 1960s

Climate change denial is making a ‘stark comeback’ on social media, study finds

12-15 June 2023Washington, D.C.

Using the term “smart contract” can lead to confusion and potential equalization with the contract in the general legal sense of the term used in everyday commerce.

The Fourth Annual National News Literacy Week

04 - 08 December 2023

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