why it is working on a way to “watermark” AI-generated content

will fund musical curricula focused on conflict resolution and foreign exchange programs for young musicians across the globe

Alongside funding for military jets and naval warships, the new $857.9 billion US defense spending bill includes a program to fund musical exchanges around the globe. Dubbed the PEACE Through Music Diplomacy Act, the legislation funds US State Department cultural exchange projects that encourage artistic collaboration across borders.

Covid misinformation spikes in wake of Damar Hamlin’s on-field collapse

The ideal for which Schwab is aiming, judging from his speeches and writings, is something akin to a globalised EU, with its supranational and ingrained bureaucratic ways being transposed to an international level, and the levers of power vested in the hands of reliable Davos men and women.

short-hand description of ‘academics, international civil servants and executives in global companies, as well as successful high-technology entrepreneurs’

embodies supreme confidence in the imperative of a particular type of person running the world from the top-down.

the EU’s governance structures – and the democratic deficit which they personify – exemplify such arrangements.

disenfranchise voters and put an ever-growing number of important decisions in the hands of unaccountable bureaucracies

On an economic level, corporatism discourages innovation, produces inflexible labour markets dominated by unions whose priority is maintaining the status quo, and riddle the marketplace with privileges for well-connected businesses.

the model reflects a positive distrust of bottom-up initiatives because these are harder to control and less likely to buy into the established consensus.

corporatist-style stakeholder capitalism is decidedly ambivalent about democracy.

Insiders are those companies who sign up to the consensus, play the corporatist game, and consequently do very well out of their cosy relationships with governments.

Another problem is the collusion and cronyism fostered by corporatism.

It encourages the marginalisation of those who dispute the consensus. 

For what matters is the harmonisation of views, no matter how absurd the idea and or how high the cost in liberty.

corporatism doesn’t cope well with dissent.

maintaining a consensus on economic and social policies.

a process overseen and, if necessary, enforced by government officials for the sake of the common good.

the necessity of limiting market competition in order to preserve social cohesion.

All forms of corporatism, however, share some common themes.

There was a strong linkage between companies and their community.

Schwab’s core commitment is to political and economic arrangements which used to be known as corporatism.

they are ‘governments,’ ‘companies,’ and ‘civil society’

By value-creation, Schwab partly has in mind economic prosperity. But he also calls for the promotion of three other values: ‘People,’ ‘Planet,’ and ‘Peace.’

to coordinate the reorganisation of 8 billion souls, 195 countries, international relations, social policy writ-large, and a $104 trillion global economy

The entire planet needs a new ‘social contract’ to reshape ‘the future state of global relations, the direction of national economies, the priorities of societies, the nature of business models, and the management of a global commons.’

Chief among these is the neoliberal ideology. Free-market fundamentalism has eroded worker rights and economic security, triggered a deregulatory race to the bottom and ruinous tax competition.

To encourage travel by tGV, France in 2021 banned flights between cities that are under two and a half hours from each other by train.

Mr Macron won a huge share of votes in big cities linked by the TGV, such as Rennes (84%), Nantes (81%), Bordeaux (80%) or Lyon (80%).

this focus on centralised moderation rules his “biggest mistake”

demolish the notion that a centrally controlled entity can write down a set of rules to facilitate the control of a public digital space in which hundreds of millions of users send billions of messages a day.

Speaking and listening do not mean much without each other.

fully homomorphic encryption (FHE).

Data in storage and transit are normally encrypted,

it has become a fixture of corporate cyberspace, with more than 800m registered users worldwide

Emirates operates 118 A380s and no 747s. More recently, carriers have been lured by new ultra-long-range, super-efficient planes such as Airbus’s A350 and Boeing’s own 777

But AI based on deep learning is developing fast, as recent brouhaha about ChatGPT, a program that can turn out passable prose (and even poetry) with only a little prompting, shows.

Unlike electrons, photons (which are electrically neutral) can cross each others’ paths without interacting, so glass fibres can handle many simultaneous signals in a way that copper wires cannot.

Photons carry data around the world and electrons process them.

to support effective altruism, a philosophical movement that purports to use rigorous cost-benefit analysis to do good.

While at university, Mr Lonsdale edited the Stanford Review, a contrarian publication co-founded by Mr Thiel. He went on to work for his mentor and the two men eventually helped found Palantir. He still calls Mr Thiel “a genius”—though he claims these days to be less “cynical” than his guru.

With a soft spot for Roman philosophy, he has created the Cicero Institute in Austin that aims to inject free-market principles such as competition and transparency into public policy. He is also bringing the startup culture to academia, backing a new place of learning called the University of Austin, which emphasises free speech.

“rationalists”, who were focused on removing cognitive biases from thinking

The most well known is Mr Thiel, a would-be libertarian philosopher and investor. The other is Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator, a startup accelerator, whose essays on everything from cities to politics are considered required reading on tech campuses.

As Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder of Facebook, memorably put it, “Move fast and break things.”

“We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.”

Some of them, like the Medicis in medieval Florence, are keen to use their money to bankroll the intellectual ferment.

the msf’s progress, or lack of it, will be one way to gauge whether the metaverse is an idea that has legs.

And almost every big firm in Silicon Valley has joined the Metaverse Standards Forum (MSF), which commits them to open, interoperable technical standards, so that an avatar designed for use in one company’s virtual world should work without trouble in another’s. (A notable exception is Apple, which has long prioritised keeping users within its own “walled garden” over compatibility with other firms’ products.

But the industry that is furthest along is the video-games business, which has been selling virtual worlds for decades.

Meta’s ambition is not just to produce VR hardware but also to build the sort of virtual worlds that, it hopes, VR users will want to inhabit.

metaverse

One is virtual- (VR) and augmented-reality (AR) headsets

This promises to fundamentally redefine human-machine interaction.

This new wave of AI will redefine what computers can do for their users, unleashing a torrent of advanced capabilities into existing and radically new products.

We’re now seeing impressive performance from small models that are a lot cheaper to run.

Parameter count”

language translation, summarization, information retrieval, and, most important, text generation

Transformers are neural networks designed to model sequential data and generate a prediction of what should come next in a series.

This geopolitical vantage point and the ethos of inclusivity, harmony, embracing diversity and promoting dialogue, enshrined in Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam (the world is one family), will be the essence of our much-anticipated G20 presidency.

the need to approach development with inclusivity and universality.

the Unified Payments Interface, the Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana, the Jan Dhan-Aadhaar-Mobile trinity and the CoWIN platform for vaccinations.

Global supply chains are witnessing unprecedented disruptions.

India rose to the occasion as a sound leader, a meticulous solution provider and a collaborative consensus builder through its positive and constructive approach.

The Indian narrative in the Bali declaration focussed on the message of dialogue, diplomacy and solidarity.

The G20 communique, Bali Leaders’ Declaration, was adopted and India contributed significantly to this document

India’s G20 Presidency is an opportune time to set a new gold standard for data. A gold standard which emphasises nations to invest in self-evaluation of their data governance architecture, calls for modernisation of national data systems to incorporate citizen voice and preferences regularly, advances principles of transparency for data governance and finally brings to the forefront the need for strategic leadership on data for sustainable development.

the National Data Analytics Platform (NDAP).

This plaque comes from databases being inaccessible and siloed, and data platforms being cluttered with complexity without any flexibility to innovate.

As we enter India’s techade, data must be accessible to all citizens.

less than 20% of low- and middle-income countries have modern data infrastructures such as colocation data centres and direct access to cloud computing facilities

The World Development Report 2021 asserts that there is a need for forging a new social contract for data which accelerates data use and reuse to realise greater value, creates equitable access to benefits, integrates national data systems, and finally fosters trust such that people are protected from the harms of data misuse.

In its G20 presidency, India will call for modernisation of data systems and advance principles of transparency to better use data for development

Looking ahead to 2023, we will start witnessing the legal and regulatory impact of these tools as courts, regulators, and policymakers begin to make decisions and take action on the practical implications of AI and ML technologies on existing IP laws and regulations

the Study notes that “the AI-generated output is not protected under copyright in the absence of human creative choices.”

Shutterstock announced a partnership with OpenAI to offer text-to-image generation services, while simultaneously prohibiting the sale of generative works from third-party AI tools, given the inability to validate the models, and underlying training data sets, that were used.

In June, GitHub announced Copilot, an OpenAI-powered tool that can be used to auto-generate code output ranging from a simple autocomplete to an entire function.

In October, the White House published the Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights, which contains a technical companion “that should guide the design, use, and deployment of automated systems to protect the American public in the age of artificial intelligence.”

In August, the Department of Commerce’s International Trade Administration (ITA) published a request for comment on international AI policies, regulations, and related measures that could impact U.S. exports of AI technologies.

“As AI technology continues to evolve and questions arise about how copyright laws apply to the creation of AI-generated works,”

the USCO continued its efforts to address registrations of generative works through a cancellation notice sent to Kristina Kashtanova in connection with her recently registered graphic novel, “Zarya Of The Dawn.”

2022 has seen significant legal, regulatory, and policy developments around the world across the fields of intellectual property law that will impact and shape the future uses and developments of AI and ML technologies.

The initial request of ChatGPT was the prompt: “Explain the social impacts of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies over the past year.”

It is a shifting concept, a promise, an illusion, and an amorphous one at that, at least for now. We need not accept Zuckerberg’s vision of the metaverse or Stephenson’s or anyone else’s, for that matter. Instead let us be as bold as they are, and imagine a future of our very own.

brought together over 40 scholars from different disciplines all around the world to take stock of the metaverse “beyond the hype,” once again pointing out that although it doesn’t yet exist, discussion of its transformative power is unavoidable.

“despite its democratic overtures, the Metaverse is still dominated by wealth,” as less than 1 percent of the world’s population can afford the hardware to get online.

This is Stephenson’s conception in its most hopeful iteration. Zuckerberg and other advocates including Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speak of the metaverse in similarly rosy terms.

At present the metaverse is nothing more than a trendy prompt in marketing copy.

The only thing they appear to agree on in this adoption is to use the term with abandon; what the metaverse actually is or will be is another question altogether. Seemingly any entity can claim a place in the metaverse.

As a result, AI initiatives are viewed by top executives as exercises in damage avoidance

More importantly, data classified as "noise" often contain valuable clues that offer AI algorithms context.

Companies cannot install data-driven cultures overnight, but now is the best time to begin.

there’s been a “perfect storm” of crisis conditions:

Writers argued that excessively focusing on democracy might alienate rather than persuade voters, or even corrupt institutions by intertwining constitutional and partisan concerns.

There are deep versions of this debate, and reductive ones you catch a glimpse of in Instagram comments or in an opinion column that just gets it all wrong. This can even be a debate you have with yourself.

we’re actually witnessing that the system holds, that democracy prevails, that the danger is fading.

A much more productive strategy is to think about futures; rather than “prediction,” it pays to think probabilistically about a range of potential outcomes and evaluate them against a range of different sources.

But very rarely do we hear the voices of the populations governed by the decisionmakers.

the approach of the forecaster

to model a set of possibilities

Followers of this approach search not for patterns, but for emergent variables from which futures can be extrapolated.

Auguste Comte, Karl Marx, Oswald Spengler, Arnold Tonynbee, Nicolai Kondratiev, and, of course, Turchin.

war-gaming.

It then requires careful interpretation, whether based in quantitative (like polls of voter intention) or qualitative (like the Rand corporation’s DELPHI technique) analysis.

By the 1970s, the Club of Rome could turn to the World3 computer simulation to model the flow of energy through human and natural systems via key variables such as industrialization, environmental loss, and population growth.

oracles, shamans, and prophets

between individuals who have an intrinsic gift or ability to predict the future, and systems that provide rules for calculating futures

the results of computer programs are, after all, only as accurate as their data input.

Rulers from Mesopotamia to Manhattan have sought knowledge of the future in order to obtain strategic advantages

In 2023, more and more countries will accelerate the building of such nationwide digital architectures, allowing them to deliver more AI-powered responsive services that cater to the individual and help the population at large. In 2023, bold governments will be making this move—and they will be examples to follow for the rest of the world.

In Finland, a similar platform called AuroraAI

the Estonian government launched a new AI-based virtual assistant called Bürokratt.

OpenAI’s DALL-E 2, Google’s MINERVA, and DeepMind’s Gato

talk about media literacy interventions, primarily to help the less politically sophisticated.

as labeling posts as misinformation

for independent audits, including tools that assess social media algorithms.

Social media platforms have morphed into public information utilities

The research paper from February 2022 is called Learning to Summarize from Human Feedback.

the new InstructGPT (a “sibling model” of ChatGPT).

Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF)

This church has always been regional and existed in different periods on the territory of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Austria-Hungary and the Russian Empire. Following the Second World War, the Soviet government decided to abolish the Greek Catholic Church and transfer its parishes to the Russian Orthodox Church.

Minister of Culture of Ukraine Alexander Tkachenko later denied this information, calling the incident not a transfer, but a “registration of a legal entity of the OCU on the territory of the Kiev Pechersk Lavra Reserve.”

“someone just taking that minute to be a human being and connect,”

that the presence of alt text is an important step toward making the internet more accessible.

“Lots of information about identity is communicated visually, but that information is often filtered through guesswork, interpretation and bias,” Coklyat and Finnegan write. “When and how do we describe race, gender, disability status, age, height, weight, etc.?”

Alt Text Reminder, another Twitter bot, notifies followers when they have tweeted an image without alt text. (The bot’s creator, Hannah Kolbeck, has also built a tool to quickly generate alt text for Wordle results that can be shared on social media.)

“You don’t need to describe every leaf and detail. Write one or two sentences describing the main point of the image,” the caption of one of her Instagram posts reads.

It “does a good enough job” for CloudSight’s clients, he said. (The company still offers human-reviewed services at a premium.)

“Alt text needs to be short and succinct, so we have to make a call on which details that we choose to highlight.”

One analysis of a million homepages, by WebAIM, a nonprofit organization affiliated with Utah State University that focuses on web accessibility, found that as of February 2021, 60.6 percent had instances of missing alt text.

The text boxes above are examples of alt text, which people who are blind or have low vision often rely on when navigating the web. When it’s available, the text can be detected and read aloud or translated into Braille through screen readers, assistive technology that can be accessed in the form of software programs, apps or even browser extensions. For these users, alt text is essential to the online experience.

Even though quantum computers can't do most computing jobs, they hold strong potential for changing our lives, enabling better batteries, speeding up financial calculations, making aircraft more efficient, discovering new drugs and accelerating AI.

What are prompts? These are simply words, phrases, questions, keywords, etc., entered into AI tools to generate results.  What is promptology? The art of creating the most effective prompts to achieve your desired result.

Promptology, Or The Art Of Creating Good Prompts

Ukraine says it has neutralized more than 4,500 cyberattacks this year

Tech firms worldwide have announced more than 150,000 job cuts so far in 2022, according to Layoffs.fyi, a website. Meta alone accounts for 11,000 of those.

Supply-chain hiccups have weighed on the world’s most valuable company, which despite outperforming its peers has still lost more than a quarter of its market value in the past 12 months.

Semiconductors have been another sore spot in the tech world

Part of the reason for Meta’s pain was that new rivals, particularly TikTok, caused the first-ever drop in user numbers at Facebook, its flagship social network.

The next change is competition.

Take advertising, the lifeblood of Alphabet and Meta, and a growing sideline for Amazon, Apple and Microsoft

digital markets are maturing

The most dramatic loser, Meta, barely even counts as part of “big” tech any more—nearly two-thirds of its value was wiped out, leaving its market capitalisation at just over $300bn.

But digital firms have been hit harder, with the NASDAQ composite, a tech-heavy index, losing a third of its value.

The big hole in his strategy is the lack of an appealing economic and trade policy to bind allies and friends closer together. The US-EU Trade and Technology Council is a useful talking shop for emerging tech. The 14-country Indo-Pacific Economic Framework promises future initiatives on the digital economy, supply-chain resilience, clean energy and fairness (ie, rules on tax, money laundering and bribery). But these do not amount to substantial trade deals. America will not, for instance, heed Asian allies’ wish for it to join the 11-country Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (formerly the TPP).

Old geopolitical theories are being re-examined. In 1904 the British geostrategist Halford Mackinder argued that whoever controlled the core of Eurasia—roughly between the Arctic Sea and the Himalayas—could command the world. In that analysis, an alliance between Russia and China could pose a grievous threat. In contrast, Mackinder’s American contemporary Alfred Thayer Mahan reckoned that control of commercial sea lanes was the key to global power. Somewhere in between, Nicholas Spykman, another American, argued in 1942 that what mattered was not Eurasia’s heartland but its rim. He held that the maritime borderlands stretching from the Atlantic, through the Mediterranean, around south Asia to Japan were the vital ground. “Who controls the Rimland rules Eurasia,” he wrote. “Who rules Eurasia controls the destinies of the world.” In seeking to boost its alliances to counterbalance its Eurasian rivals, America seems to be hewing closest to Spykman’s thesis.

many commercial projects are based on tokamaks—an established approach that goes back to the 1950s. This heats the deuterium-tritium mixture into a plasma rather than freezing it into a pellet, and does the compressing magnetically. Breakthroughs in magnet technology, in particular, have enabled this renaissance

there are now real ideas and real firms with real money pursuing it in the private sector

fusion power is 30 years away—and always will be

observation that it releases no CO2 is true also of nuclear fission, solar energy and wind power, all of which are actual, developed technologies

which is radioactive and has a half-life of 12 years, has to be synthesised

But this approach can be a power source only if the energy released exceeds not merely that incident on the pellet, but rather that employed to generate the beams.

the NIF’s researchers have released more energy from an imploding pellet than was inserted by the laser beams

In one of NIF’s pellets it is done by the convergence on the pellet of 192 beams from a powerful laser. In both cases the aim is to overcome the mutual electrical repulsion of the positively charged nuclei of the atoms, and push those nuclei close enough to one another for a different fundamental force, the strong nuclear force (which operates only at short ranges) to take over.

Do this to enough pairs of atoms and you get a lot of energy—and a big bang

But a useful step towards electricity generation by fusion it is not

In the case of Ethiopia, perhaps the message to the African Union should be that while the solutions should be African, support for them should not be exclusively so.

there is still a risk that Ethiopia could disintegrate, an outcome that would have devastating consequences for Ethiopians and their neighbors and affect countries around the world.     

The more unified Ethiopia becomes, the less meddlesome outsiders will be able to exploit its divisions.

But expertise from the UN and elsewhere can help make the team as credible a confidence-building mechanism as possible.   

resolving differences among Egypt, Ethiopia, and Sudan over Ethiopia’s controversial Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam would give Afwerki fewer regional divisions to exploit.  

the Intergovernmental Authority on Development,

the lack of agreement among regional powers and other partners of Ethiopia on how to deal with Eritrea gives Afwerki much room to maneuver.

By interfering in Djibouti, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Sudan, Afwerki seeks to become the regional hegemon.

the Ethiopians deserve credit for agreeing to end the bloodshed. 

both sides blinked, halting the bloodshed and accepting an invitation from the African Union to attend peace talks in Pretoria, South Africa.  

The three rotating African members of the UN Security Council—ostensibly at the behest of Ethiopia—largely succeeded in keeping the war in Tigray out of council debates, despite the threat it posed to international peace and security.

But China, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) doubled down on backing Abiy, providing his government with military support, including sophisticated drones.

(Millions of Ethiopians already loathe the TPLF because it dominated the country’s repressive government from 1991 until 2018, when Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed came to power).

Up to 600,000 people, mostly ethnic Tigrayans, are estimated to have died, the majority from starvation and disease.

To combat crimes committed online or planned and communicated using digital services

the digital euro

Sweden will work to better integrate cyber diplomacy issues and the EU’s external digital policy into its overall foreign policy.

Prime Minister Modi recognizes the potential that collaboration with SCO members holds for improving India’s trade relations in the region and cementing itself as a reliable trade partner, especially since East Asia is poised to become the new center of development of world economy.

“democracy, dialogue, and diplomacy”

And with the recently announced National Logistics Policy—a national initiative to reduce logistics costs, digitalize the logistics sector, and increase supply chain efficiency—India could become globally competitive on a scale comparable to China and the United States.

to take a people-centric development model, an approach that will in turn transform the population into a competitive workforce and will also value the spread of technology.

Trade cooperation was a hot topic at the summit. India pressed on the need to address the major disruptions caused to trade, supply chains, food security, and the energy sector as a result of the Ukraine crisis and Covid-19. India’s interests in having stronger supply chains coincides with the country’s ambitions to become a manufacturing hub, which, therefore, requires it to collaborate with the region’s major economies. In this vein, Prime Minister Modi pressed for transit rights at the summit in order to facilitate stronger supply chains through enhanced connectivity; previously, India has struggled to access Central Asian markets without transit rights across Pakistan’s territory.

Solve Discussion Questions

People using the stimulator and their physicians could no longer access the proprietary software needed to recalibrate the device and maintain its effectiveness.

TechChina is about to get tougher on deepfakes in an unprecedented way.

has readers fretting about space debris and traffic management. Given the attention to the problem, it’s unfair to say that this will sneak up on us, but the lack of urgency around addressing space safety might leave us with a nasty surprise. The leak in the Soyuz spacecraft at the ISS, likely caused by a micrometeroid impact, may be a warning for congested space lanes to come. It’s a champagne problem, in the sense that space junk worries us because of the growing value of space activity. But as I will ruefully attest on Jan. 1, champagne problems can still hurt.

Robots are headed for the moon en masse: Attempted landings from companies including Japan’s iSpace, Intuitive Machines (two different missions!), Astrobotic, plus robots built by space agencies in Japan, India, and Russia.

China’s new space station will be complete, and western researchers have already started signing up to collaborate there. Will we see a non-Chinese astronaut visit?

Russia’s decision to invade Ukraine, for example, has been a debacle, but it put an incredible spotlight everything changing in space. One of Russia’s first acts of war was hacking satellite communications networks, while SpaceX’s Starlink network became a vital tool for Ukrainian resistance. The public, along with intelligence agencies and militaries, relied on satellite data to understand and prosecute the fighting. Drones and missiles that rely on satellite navigation and communications have become central to the conflict. AdvertisementIt’s not the first “space war”—the 1990 Gulf War typically gets that distinction—but never before have space assets been so front and center.

Realise the OECD Global Forum on Technology Governance to foster multi-stakeholder collaboration on digital and emerging technology policy, to facilitate future-facing strategic discussions on technology governance and inform the development and use of technology in line with shared democratic values.

Yes. Go to Settings -> Modern Footnotes and choose the “Display footnote list at bottom of posts” option. Or, if you only want the footnotes at the bottom of the post when printing, choose the “When printing, list footnotes at the bottom of posts” option.

Musk is baiting mainstream media companies to cover a manufactured scandal about something that happened years ago and it is still not yielding returns. So far, the media largely isn’t taking the bait, showing that news coverage doesn’t just happen simply because a billionaire tries to engineer it. Silence is still the editor’s best kept weapon in the content wars.

Over at Twitter, Musk has given privileged access to some ideologically friendly journalists who must publish their findings on his platform.

But that same morning, Twitter staff assigned to evaluate tweets had quickly concluded that Trump had not violated Twitter’s policies.

multiple tweeps [Twitter employees] have quoted the Banality of Evil suggesting that people implementing our policies are like Nazis following orders.” 

“A lot of times, SI [Twitter’s Site Integrity team] has used technicality spam enforcements as a way to solve a problem created by Safety [team at Twitter] under-enforcing their policies.”In a follow-up message with a colleague, Roth said he was looking for ways to marginalize accounts that had fallen into disfavor without banning them outright.

Site Integrity Policy-Policy Escalation Support team, or SIP-PES

trategic Response Team-Global Escalation Team, or SRT-GET. It handled up to 200 cases a day.

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