A survey by McKinsey Global Institute, the consultancy’s in-house think-tank, found that this year 50% of firms across the world had tried to use AI in some way, up from 20% in 2017.

Dr Harnett says, “is a lever for us to get into understanding learning in adults and how potentially we can get access to make it not degrade over the course of ageing or disease”.

Silent synapses—which, as their name suggests, transmit no signal from one nerve cell to another—are often found on the ends of slender, immature protrusions from nerve cells, called filopodia.

Each connection between nerve cells, called a synapse, is a tiny gap between the ends of branches ramifying from such cells. Messages jump across these gaps in the form of molecules called neurotransmitters. Current estimates suggest there are 600 trillion synapses in a human brain.

Learning is a result of changes in the pattern of neural connectivity in the brain

strike the right balance between stability and flexibility

These firms can use them to create content, such as articles, blog posts and entire books. They can help with customer service, providing quick and accurate responses to queries. And they can be used to help with research, providing insights into consumer behaviour and preferences.

The Allied decryption of Germany’s Enigma cipher machines in the second world war did not come to light until the 1970s. The ultimate impact of cyber-operations in Ukraine may remain obscure for years.

The Allied decryption of Germany’s Enigma cipher machines in the second world war did not come to light until the 1970s. The ultimate impact of cyber-operations in Ukraine may remain obscure for years.

One further point is that the most destructive cyber-operations, like Stuxnet, are actually most useful in peacetime, when missiles are off the table. In war, munitions can often do the job more easily and cheaply. Probably, the most important wartime cyber-activity, on both sides, is that aimed at intelligence gathering or psychological warfare rather than destruction.

Lennart Maschmeyer of ETH Zurich showed that GRU’s attack on Ukraine’s power grid in 2015 had taken 19 months of planning, while that in 2016 had required two and a half years. Launching such attacks also reveals to an enemy the tools (ie, code) and infrastructure (servers) being used, resulting in attrition of their effectiveness.

Mr Zhora singles out Microsoft and ESET, a Slovakian firm, as being particularly important for their large presence on Ukrainian networks and the “telemetry”, or network data, that they collect as a result.

“arguably…the most effective defensive cyber-activity in history”.

“Russian cyber-forces as well as their traditional military forces underperformed expectations.”

its computer hackers brought down the satellite communications system run by Viasat, an American firm, on which its opponents were relying.

The urgency and pressure are implied.

“Get this done as soon as possible!”

people often interpret a long deadline as permission to delay

only 5.5% of the people who were given a monthlong deadline returned our survey, compared with 6.6% of those who were given just a week

it often means that we postpone it over and over until eventually we forget all about it

America intends to send astronauts to the Moon in the next few years, with the long-term goal of establishing a permanent base there. As part of its Artemis programme it intends to put a space station, called the Lunar Gateway, in orbit around the Moon to act as a communications hub, science laboratory and short-term living space; it is due to launch in 2024. A series of preparatory robotic missions to the Moon will blast off in 2023. Things are hotting up in “cislunar” space—as the space between Earth and the orbit of the Moon is known.

Passkeys are a new technology, supported by tech giants including Apple, Google and Microsoft, that replace passwords with biometrically validated tokens that are automatically generated and cannot be guessed or forgotten.

A big question for 2023 is what Apple will choose to call the technology when it announces its first AR/VR/XR headset—which is rumoured to be powered by software called “realityOS”.

Mixed reality (XR or MR) goes a step further by allowing real and virtual items to interact.

To protect against this possibility, new “post-quantum” cryptography standards, designed to be invulnerable even to quantum computers, were approved in 2022, and preparations for their implementation will begin in earnest in 2023.

crash course in

European governments want American tech firms to fund improvements to Europe’s digital infrastructure, claiming they are free-riders. Whether the EU will act, and risk damaging the West’s united front against China’s tech dominance, is uncertain. But EU regulators will tighten the noose around big tech anyway. The Digital Markets Act, due to take effect in early 2023, aims to help new players compete with the tech oligopolies.

Nigeria, for instance, is aiming for 50% penetration by 2023. Still, wobbly economies will curb telecoms operators’ spending.

The spread of 5G technology to middle-income countries such as Argentina, India and Vietnam will take 5G subscriptions past 1bn (though East Asia and North America will still boast more 5G users).

But retailers such as Amazon and Walmart, which own oodles of data on shoppers, will gain: other companies will want to use their websites to target consumers better.

Suffering most from the backlash will be Meta, which depends more than its peers on third-party data.

At least Google’s decision to delay cookie-blocking until 2024 promises some relief to advertisers and ad-dependent businesses.

Regulators and consumers are pressing the ad world to do away with “cookies”, starving advertisers of precious user-data.

depreciating currencies in emerging markets will mean lower profits for America’s technology giants.

Digital advertising will steal more print dollars, reaching 57% of total spending.

America is offering $52bn in chipmaking subsidies to spur production in the country, and will start handing out the cash in 2023.

In 2023 governments will tighten cyber controls, adding to red tape and imposing a big burden on small businesses.

Cloud computing will also grow, supporting remote work and companies’ desire to collect and crunch data. Spending on cloud services offered by tech giants such as Amazon and Microsoft will hit about $600bn, Gartner projects.

The artificial-intelligence market will swell to be worth $500bn, reckons IDC, a research firm

Gartner, a consultancy, expects tech spending to rise by more than 6% from the year before, propelled by firms’ need for software and IT services.

New EU rules for ESG accounting will apply from June, with America’s to follow.

The scramble for fuel will lift coal consumption to new records, with countries from Germany to China backtracking on planned cuts that were intended to tackle climate change.

Winter will deplete Europe’s gas stocks, and flows of liquefied natural gas (LNG) will fall short. Germany and Italy will open LNG regasification terminals, but compete with buyers in Asia.

Tech’s big shake-up, in other words, may help the sector’s giants grow even bigger in 2023.

Cash helps in two ways: it means firms can hire and retain the best talent, and it enables cash-rich firms to snap up small firms at bargain prices.

Size will be another decisive factor.

The growth of the cloud-computing arms of tech giants, including Amazon, Google and Microsoft, shows little sign of slowing as software, services and data move online

Makers of business software, such as Adobe, Oracle and Salesforce, will probably fare better.

Apple’s changes to its privacy rules, which make it hard to attribute online purchases to specific ads, will continue to weigh on the sector.

Those most reliant on inflation-hit Western consumers are most likely to suffer. That means American and European companies, which tend to sell to their home markets.

Consider three characteristics: a firm’s geographic region, its sector and its size

Today’s most popular quantum computer design—the kind being developed by IBM, Google, Rigetti and now Baidu—relies on a device that cools a computer chip to ultralow temperatures, coaxing its electrons into a quantum state.

Half of all published papers on quantum research result from international collaborations, and U.S. scientists co-author more quantum papers with scientists from China than any other country, the Rand Corp. analysis found.

Broader export controls on equipment for making advanced silicon chips have also impacted quantum computers, which sometimes use silicon chips that rely on the same fabrication technologies.

Compared with the U.S., China was a latecomer to quantum computing. It sought first to dominate a related field known as quantum communication, which aims to develop a method of encryption that’s nearly impossible to hack. China tech-policy experts say that initial focus likely came in response to the revelations in 2013 by former U.S. government contractor Edward Snowden that Washington had hacked deep into the backbone of China’s internet.

quantum entanglement,

superposition,

But qubits—which are encoded into subatomic and atomic particles including electrons, photons and ions—can exist as a zero and a one at the same time.

from their use of so-called quantum bits, or qubits, instead of the digital zeros and ones used to represent data in conventional computers.

“heaven is the origin of everything” in Mandarin Chinese. 

Collaborate with at least 5 partners to deliver training

an Internet fragmentation threat matrix

We encourage our community, partners, and decisionmakers to use the resources available in our Internet Impact Assessment Toolkit (IIAT) when analyzing forthcoming policies and the potential consequences to the Internet.

to engage in advocacy activities that increase awareness and promote and defend encryption.

to introduce a “government use of encryption” course in 2023 to improve policymaker awareness about the importance of encryption

the Global Encryption Coalition (GEC)

Internet shutdowns stifle human expression, threaten the Internet’s resilience, and weaken our ability to weather global challenges.

It’s called the splinternet, and this reality is closer than you think.

“The weird monoculture we’re in just loves to produce these, like, generic middlebrow things. I’m not sure if those things would be worse if GPT did it. I think it would be the same?” ♦

“These systems are a reflection of a collective Internet,”

rated as an “establishment liberal”—more or less the position that I am writing from right now.

with a passive-aggressive co-worker who just tells you what you want to hear, but mostly just wants you to leave them alone.

It seems, at least for now, that GPT-3 can generate its own stories, but can’t quite get beyond broad platitudes delivered in that same, officious voice.

To put it a bit more pointedly, why does it matter whether a human or a bot typed out the wall of text?

“The Internet itself is just patterns—so much of what we do online is just knee-jerk, meme reactions to everything, which means that most of the responses to things on the Internet are fairly predictable. So this is just showing that.”

Recent local, federal and international regulations and regulatory proposals have sought to address the potential of AI systems to discriminate, manipulate or otherwise cause harm in ways that assume a system is highly competent. They have largely left out the possibility of harm from such AI systems’ simply not working, which is more

the perception gap has crept into policy documents

guardrails

Along with their popularity come concerns over privacy, misinformation and problematic lack of context.

“One hour of googling was solved with just five minutes of ChatGPT.”

This isn’t like searching Google. If you don’t like the results, you can ask again, and you’re likely to get a different response.

many computational biologists expect protein-language models to yield benefits beyond faster drug development.

Recent advances in natural language processing and a dramatic drop in the cost of protein sequencing, which has yielded vast databases of amino-acid sequences, have largely overcome both problems, proponents say.

“We’re learning the blueprint from nature.”

the grammar of proteins

Natural language algorithms, which quickly analyze language and predict the next step in a conversation, can also be applied to this biological data to create protein-language models.

Southeast Asia’s population of 685 million has 240 million Muslims, 140 million Christians, 200 million Buddhists, and so on. Yet, owing to the intangible contributions of the Javanese ethos within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the region has remained peaceful.

Yet that is precisely the kind of flexibility we need if we are going to maintain relative peace and stability in the twenty-first century.

Culture matters for diplomacy, and Indonesian President Joko Widodo embodies the “soft” and sophisticated elements of Indonesia’s dominant Javanese culture, which prizes musyawarah and mufakat (consultation and consensus).

Indonesia’s dominant Javanese values, which emphasize consultation and consensus

Meta, the parent company of Facebook today said that it is partnering with the Independent National Elections Commission (INEC), civil society groups and local radio stations to stop spread of fake news and protect the integrity of the Nigerian 2023 general elections.

THE ARTEMIS ACCORDS

how to limit the potential destructive capabilities of artificial intelligence,

Taiwan says it sees less Chinese interference ahead of elections

Studies

France in 2013.

dissagreement

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS & LEGAL NOTICE

Hayek was sceptical of forecasting in general.

Published in 1944, “The Road to Serfdom” argued that state intervention often produced the need for further state intervention and, with it, raised the chances of fascism.

Hayek moved to Britain in 1931, and events there reinforced his belief that governments were clueless.

After fighting in the first world war—though he saw little action—he fell under the spell of Ludwig von Mises, a fellow Austrian economist.

Emmanuel Macron has accused Russia of feeding disinformation to further its “predatory project” in Africa, where France has had military setbacks.

How climate disinformation is spreading after Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was taken to hospital after arriving in Indonesia's Bali for the G20 summit, the Associated Press reported on Monday, a report that Moscow dismissed as "fake news".

“The human face is the highest bandwidth communications tool we have,”

The reason for building a humanoid machine, Mr Jackson maintains, is to perform tasks that involve human interaction.

Pressure for peace talks is growing, even as Russia retreats from Kherson

Will Ukraine become a new Finland, forced to cede land to its invaders and to remain neutral for decades? Or another West Germany, with its national territory partitioned by war and its democratic half absorbed into NATO? A much-discussed template is Israel, a country under constant threat that has been able to defend itself without formal alliances but with extensive military help from America.

Institutional investors including Temasek, a Singaporean wealth fund; SoftBank, a Japanese tech-investing group; and Teachers’ Pension Plan, a Canadian pension fund, had all dipped their toes into crypto by buying stakes in ftx. Legislators will now eye the industry with even deeper suspicion.

the collapse of ftx may be enough to reverse the embrace of crypto by institutions, ordinary folk and the occasional government.

the World Cup can seem a kind of secular religion, or a benign global conspiracy for quadrennial fun.

Since then many international players have used computers to help them train. But Chinese players have not embraced AI as much as the Koreans have, argues Stephen Hu, an instructor in Beijing whose company is developing a Go learning app. Mr Ke, who is still China’s best player, has complained about AI training techniques, saying they tarnish the game’s beauty.

the rest of us do have agency and do have choices, and to the maximum extent (we) will seek to raft ourselves to each other in open, inclusive architectures. In typical Asian fashion, more circles, less lines, more balance

I do not believe any self-respecting Asian country wants to be trapped, or to be a vassal, or worse to be a theatre for proxy battles

is overlapping circles of friends

commitment to open science, the fair sharing and harvesting of intellectual property

it has to be multipolar, open, and rules-based

the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) came about, basically to counterbalance the rapid bipolarisation of the globe at that point in time.

we can have a more open, inclusive, multilateral network of science, technology, and supply chains

But if they do not, or (if they) force us to choose one side or the other, we would be in a real tough spot.

If they reach a modus vivendi, that would be ideal for a place like Singapore.

The technological decoupling will also further disrupt global systems, which in fact have been the enabler of peace, stability, and prosperity for the last 75 years after the end of the Second World War.

Since the Renaissance in Europe and the Industrial Revolution, the entire globe has worked on a single technology stack: basic science, applied science, technology, goods, and products

The absence of strategic trust will lead both sides to always assume the worst.

to a self-fulfilling prophecy that fractures science, technology, and the economy. It is self-fulfilling.

Even as President Xi and other senior Chinese leaders denounce protectionism, decoupling, and unilateral sanctions, they continue to reiterate the importance of building China’s own global network of partnerships, and making China’s industrial and supply chains more resilient and secure.

such as AI software and quantum computing

The US is concerned that advancements in critical and emerging technologies can transform and empower foreign militaries, and ultimately impinge on US national security

I say all this so that we try to relieve our obsession with ideological labels, and to understand how and why countries and leaders adopt certain postures.

But the West was wrong when it wishfully believed or hoped that economic openness would invariably lead to Western-style political reforms

Sometimes when my American friends complain about this apparent attempt at autarky and self-reliance, we forget that it is not confined to China. In fact, today, we also have “Made in America”. That is not new either. If you go back to the 80s, there was “Made in Japan”.

referred to science and technology as foundational and strategic pillars,

But China never forgets its sense of history or its place in the world, and quite naturally and legitimately wants to reclaim its place in the world.

Within Asia itself, the first country to embark on modernisation was Japan. We saw that during the Meiji Restoration.

Consequently, it missed out on the Industrial Revolution

the compass, gunpowder, paper-making, and printing.

A thousand years ago, that country – and obviously, I am referring to China – probably constituted at least 30% of global GDP.

To be fair, the rest of the word, especially small city-states like us in Southeast Asia, benefited from those five decades. In the case of Singapore, our per capita GDP grew from about US$500 57 years ago – it went up more than a hundredfold.

at a time when it was about 40% of global GDP (gross domestic product), to benefit,

it basically set up a world which was not based on ‘winner takes all’.

the United States did to rebuild its enemies during th

The febrile relationship between the United States and China is of great concern to us – I think not just to Singapore, but indeed to all countries in the world.

The first word – trust. The second word is fracture. The third is Newton’s third law of motion.

rade and investment promotion

The company said that its Texas fab would start volume production in the first quarter of 2025 at the earliest.

Such wafers are mostly used to manufacture chips for 5G phones, high-performance computing and medical devices.

“With the global chips shortage and ongoing geopolitical concerns, GlobalWafers is taking this opportunity to address the United States semiconductor supply chain resiliency issue by building an advanced node, state-of-the-art, 300-millimeter silicon wafer factory.  Instead of importing wafers from Asia, GlobalWafers USA (GWA) will produce and supply wafers locally thereby reducing significant carbon footprint benefitting both customers and GWA in the current ESG tide worldwide.”

his new Texas investment could also support as many as 1,500 jobs with production volumes ultimately reaching 1.2 mn wafers per month after multiple stages of equipment installation, in alignment with market demand.

Taiwan-based global semiconductor silicon wafer company, GlobalWafers, announced today that it plans to build a state-of-the-art 300-millimeter silicon wafer factory in Sherman, Texas, which is the first of its kind in the USA over twenty (20) years.

電也比亞洲便宜很多。同時，加上當地人才支援（德州很多優秀的大學）最終在德州設廠拍板

徐秀蘭向記者強調環球晶圓到美國設廠，絶對是理性計算過後的選擇。她解釋，公司這幾年受許多國家邀請，最後選擇美國有完全的自主性。

這次美國禁令確實針對AI或超級電腦，目標是限制中國軍事發展，對於手機等消費性產業鏈影響不大，而力積電只做40奈米以上的成熟制程晶片，沒有受到美國影響，甚至未來美國會更依賴台灣的成熟制程代工。

我們政策一直就是不能歧視，沒有對來自哪裏的客戶特別排斥……不過，我們也是守法的公司，所以如果國際之間有一些特殊約定，那我們當然就必須要遵循。

晶片大戰，絶對不僅是台灣海峽兩岸的角逐，還與日本韓國等半導體大國相關。而美國的角色在這場晶片大戰中，是重中之重。2019年前任美國總統就開始以國家安全為由，對中國電信巨頭華為等進行制裁，拜登上任後，進一步加碼制裁中國半導體產業，全力限制美國晶片技術進入中國公司。

新的「全球本土化」（Glocalization）正在半導體生態圈發生。他說，美國為鉗制中國在5G等運算科技的發展，與主要戰略合作伙伴特別是七大工業國（G7），及三星和台積電半導體大廠協作，融入當地的半導體供應鏈及產業生態系統，這些生態系統和供應鏈會被安全地包圍起來，這就是所謂新的「全球本土化」。

此次談併購德國將這一因素看得如此之重——過去在併購時主要都在回答有關壟斷或綠電一類的問題，但此次併購德國公司，則花費許多氣力在解釋地緣政治風險。

Fighting Misinformation Online

Primera condena en España por difundir ‘fake news’ sobre los menores migrantes

when threatened, the United States resolved to tightly control the technologies underpinning economic growth and military superiority.

Brazil and Indonesia, leaders in orchestrating past nonalignment movements, are also taking advantage of their new pull. Europe should not underestimate the interest of postcolonial elites in charting an independent course. 

“If China and India spoke with one voice, the whole world will listen. If China and India joined hands, the whole world will pay attention.”

Brazil will indeed be back, but possibly in a minor key.

What Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s autocrat, wants is relief from American sanctions. So Brazil would have to work closely with Mr Biden’s people.

Lula’s victory means that left-wing governments are in charge in all of Latin America’s bigger countries.

Russia is one of the few issues on which Lula and Mr Bolsonaro agree. Brazil condemns the invasion but, like many developing countries, will not cut ties. Though Lula will be friendly to China, his team worry that the two countries’ trade has undermined Brazilian industry.

Its main instruments were the BRICS group (in which Brazil joined Russia, India, China and South Africa) and initiatives in Latin America and Africa, including the Mercosur trade block with Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay. “Back then multipolarity seemed reasonably easy to achieve in a quite benign way,” Celso Amorim, who was foreign minister and is now Lula’s chief foreign-policy adviser, told Bello. “Now things are much fuzzier.”

Expecting geopolitical tensions between the West and China to go away is naive at best. So is expecting an autocrat like Mr Xi, who makes no bones about wanting to indigenise Chinese industry, to respect all commercial commitments to foreigners. Not cutting all business ties with China is understandable, and perfectly sensible. Deepening them looks reckless.

The project, which is planned to be completed in 2026, will be the first industrial scale, integrated epitaxy SiC wafers production line in Europe