Today our diplomats are not trained in the scientific aspects of dealing with issues of global health, climate change, energy renewal, cyber threats, food and water resources, regional or global supply chains and outer space among others.

No global issue of significance today or for the foreseeable future will be solely national - allocating more of the diplomatic circle graph to the multilateral slice is both in our interest and more likely than ever to be the methodology of the future.

to engage with the larger issues looming just over the horizon.

is consumed with managing the moment, the immediate.

by engaging with others at the “early stages” of issues to keep us on the front lines of managing global trends.

one that recognizes the changing nature of the challenges we will inevitably face in the future – not just the problems we face now.

The Luddites were not anti-technology; what they wanted was economic justice.

A.I. researchers are increasing the concentration of wealth to such extreme levels that the only way to avoid societal collapse is for the government to step in.

the only way to make things better is to make things worse.

What Žižek advocated for is an example of an idea in political philosophy known as accelerationism

it seems like a way for the people developing A.I. to pass the buck to the government.

A.I. assists capital at the expense of labor.

by hiring consultants, management can say that they were just following independent, expert advice.

we rely on metaphor,

it triggers a mental shortcut in the minds of users that we call a “machine heuristic.” This shortcut is the belief that machines are accurate, objective, unbiased, infallible and so on.

Copyleft licensing allows for content to be used, reused or modified easily under the terms of a license – for example, open-source software.

But with self-driving cars, the engineers can never be sure how it will perform in novel situations.

that people treat computers as social beings when the machines show even the slightest hint of humanness, such as the use of conversational language.

Such beliefs build on “automation bias” or the tendency to let your guard down when machines are performing a task

However, if not coupled with resources and pressure to actually perform this sector-specific adaptation, this approach runs the risk of resulting in no meaningfully binding regulation at all.

a unique blend of horizontal and vertical elements

sectoral regulators will be outmatched in their efforts to meaningfully constrain businesses applying AI.

If agencies do not coordinate to build common regulatory tools, they risk reinventing the wheel each time a new department is tasked with regulating a specific application of AI.

if industry-dominated standards bodies set weak standards for compliance, the regulation itself becomes weak.

Their legislative bodies will need the ability to amend or add to its main horizontal regulation in order to keep pace with the technology.

the heavy lifting of articulating specific compliance thresholds will be done by Europe’s main standardization bodies

the EU’s broad approach will stifle innovation, and analysts correctly assert that China’s targeted regulations will be used to tighten information controls.

they effectively function to shift power from technology companies to government regulators

such as their sources for training data and potential security risks.

the algorithm registry

disseminating information, as well as setting prices and dispatching workers.

has taken a fundamentally vertical approach: picking specific algorithm applications and writing regulations that address their deployment in certain contexts.

the standards process has historically been driven by industry, and it will be a challenge to ensure governments and the public have a meaningful seat at the table.

Another factor is whether the proposed central and horizontal European AI Office will be effective in supplementing the capacity of national and sectoral regulators.

risk-based approach

the dual imperatives of providing predictability and keeping pace with AI developments.

the requirements in the AI Act with co-regulatory strategies

The easiest way for developers to satisfy these mandates will be for them to adhere to technical standards that are being formulated by European standards-setting bodies.

Applications deemed to pose an “unacceptable risk” (such as social scoring and certain types of biometrics) are banned. “High risk” applications that pose a threat to safety or fundamental rights (think law enforcement or hiring procedures) are subject to certain pre- and post-market requirements. Applications seen as “limited risk” (emotion detection and chatbots, for instance) face only transparency requirements. The majority of AI uses are classified as “minimal risk” and subject only to voluntary measures.

In a horizontal approach, regulators create one comprehensive regulation that covers the many impacts AI can have. In a vertical strategy, policymakers take a bespoke approach, creating different regulations to target different applications or types of AI.

in July last year that about 40% of young people turn to TikTok or Meta Platforms-owned Instagram when searching for restaurants, citing an internal study.

Bing’s share of the search market has remained below 3%

to ask follow-up questions or swipe through visuals such as TikTok videos in response to their queries.

an advertising business that made more than $162 billion in revenue last year.

It plans to incorporate more human voices as part of the shift, supporting content creators in the same way it has historically done with websites, the documents say.

2023:

The hardware, hilariously, became very easy to procure because of the recent crypto mining boom and bust. Several companies offering AI hardware in the cloud were actually crypto mining operations until recently.

The people who are already well versed in something are going to be the ones capable of making the most helpful applications for that particular field or industry.

arent there already LLM models that cite their sources? or I heard that new plugin with chat GPT can cite its sources

The general consensus is that, especially customer facing automation, MUST be "explainable." Meaning whenever a chat bot or autonomous system writes something or makes a decision, we have to know exactly how and why it came to that conclusion.

They are caught up in the hype and just like everyone else have zero clue what's actually going to happen.

Across the global South, the conflict in Ukraine is seen largely as a European affair, one without an obvious hero or villain.

The overwhelming majority, 720 million, lived in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. More than 400 million lived in Latin America alone. By 2025, only one in five Catholics will be a non-Hispanic Caucasian.

the Holy See has practiced what academics call the “great power” model of diplomacy, attaching itself to the superpower of the day.

More Catholics than ever before live outside the West and don’t see the war in Ukraine on the same terms as Europe and the United States do.

the Stanford Politeness Dataset,

ensuring the LLM produces reliable outputs for a particular business use-case often requires additional training on actual data from this domain labeled with the desired outputs.

a fine-tuned Large Language Model (LLM; a.k.a. Foundation Model).

Only half say their organizations are well prepared to anticipate and react to external shocks, and two-thirds see their organizations as overly complex and inefficient.

to shore up resilience

Open source alternatives can and will eventually eclipse them unless they change their stance. In this respect, at least, we can make the first move.

Research institutions all over the world are building on each other’s work, exploring the solution space in a breadth-first way that far outstrips our own capacity. We can try to hold tightly to our secrets while outside innovation dilutes their value, or we can try to learn from each other.

Part of what makes LoRA so effective is that—like other forms of fine-tuning—it’s stackable. Improvements like instruction tuning can be applied and then leveraged as other contributors add on dialogue, or reasoning, or tool use. While the individual fine tunings are low rank, their sum need not be, allowing full-rank updates to the model to accumulate over time.

calling this the "Stable Diffusion moment" for LLMs.

their efforts are rapidly being eclipsed by the work happening in the open source community.

Yuval Noah Harari

The Vedic principles have influenced the Indian psyche for many centuries. These principles have underpinned the socio-cultural-religious framework for the development of individual and social moral principles. The Indian psyche and society is in a phase of rapid evolution. Pursuit of Artha and Kama are overtaking the responsibility of Dharma.

Dharma embraces every type of righteous conduct, covering every aspect of life, both religious and secular, that is essential for the sustenance and welfare of the individual, society and creation.

Ontological nature of existence and Dharma (which approximately translates into morality).

These teachings comprehensively bring out the essence of Vedas, primarily Upanishads, in a language that is less terse than that in the original Upanishads

It is then that Lord Krishna enlightens him through the teachings that together form the Bhagavad Gita.

It forms a part of the great epic, Mahabharata which is traditionally ascribed to the sage Vyasa.

The Bhagavad Gita

set of dialogues

Upanishads are passages from the Jnana-kanda section of the Vedas. They are the core of Vedic wisdom and are essentially philosophical in nature

These four Vedas are further divided into two parts, Karma-Kanda and Jnana-Kanda. Karma Kanda is the section dealing with rituals and prayers while Jnana-Kanda deals only with the ontological realities – the nature of world, consciousness (or self) and God known as Brahman in the Vedas

Gilligan argued that females act from concerns about social relationships and that their moral development has elements of compassion and caring strongly built in. On the other hand, according to her, justice dominates men's morality.

The next stage is that of “Autonomous morality”, in which they are able to move beyond the consequences and are able to see morality as linked to intentions and that rules are flexible.

The first stage is that of “Heteronomous morality” in which children are able to see rules as fixed and dictated by authority

both our genetic makeup and the environment we experience would influence our overall development, including our moral development.

AI platforms such as ChatGPT

the Belarus Russia-inspired attempt

l anticipatory diplomacy.

The policy response has been different, too, with the European Union has taken a predictably tougher stance by proposing to bring in a new AI Act that segregates artificial intelligence as per use case scenarios, based broadly on the degree of invasiveness and risk

Do we want a world filled with A. I. systems that are designed to seem human in their interactions with human beings?

Making them bear at least some liability for what their models do would encourage a lot more caution.

liability.

The government needs to do more here than just write up some standards. It needs to make investments and build institutions to conduct the monitoring.

evaluations and audits.

Any firm building A.I. systems above a certain scale should be operating with hardened cybersecurity

security

whether this problem is solvable.

interpretability

China seems perfectly willing to cripple the development of general A.I. so it can concentrate on systems that will more reliably serve state interests.

Should there be an opt-out from A.I. systems?

“you should be able to opt out from automated systems in favor of a human alternative, where appropriate.”

This, too, is essential, but we do not understand these systems well enough to test and audit them effectively.

For now, we have no idea what is happening inside these prediction systems.

But where the European Commission’s approach is much too tailored, the White House blueprint may well be too broad.

“alignment risk,”

Choosing this strategy meant “repeatedly catching on fire, crashing into other boats, and going the wrong way on the track,” but it also meant the highest scores, so that’s what the model did.

Those sets can’t plausibly be free of error, and it’s not clear what it would mean for them to be representative.

“training, validation and testing data sets shall be relevant, representative, free of errors and complete.”

as new A.I. systems have already thrown the bill’s clean definitions into chaos.

That’s where the government comes in — or so they hope.

The United States-India technology corridor will give India the skills, technology, markets, and confidence to become a global player. 

the United States must openly communicate the path for reduced controls toward India, and India should dismantle barriers through exceptions for American technology companies to enable true partnerships to form

Policymakers in the United States and India should both work to reform trade policies and promote an open system of technology transfer and innovation between the two countries.

They must also think in more ambitious terms, planning for massive expansions that would rival China in terms of the size and scope of their factories, fabrications, labs, and operations.

Take India’s Aadhaar, for example, the world’s largest and most sophisticated biometric identification system that remarkably enables efficient and secure payments using just an ID number (compared to the near-century old American Social Security number standard)

India is poised to be an increasingly influential economic actor, and its growth can help compensate for America’s loss of trade with China under re-globalization. 

from one of outsourcing to one of radical collaboration

But by collaborating with American companies and encouraging reciprocal cycles of innovation, more Indian companies can become genuine technological leaders, developing original intellectual property with its deep wells of talent.

In 2020, after a series of border disputes with China, the Indian government banned dozens of well-known Chinese apps, including TikTok, from India.

If India’s technology sector wants to continue expanding and modernizing, public officials in India need to think strategically about India’s relations with international partners in this next stage. 

Thanks to the establishment of technical education through the Indian Institutes of Technology in the 1950s and 60s, India was able to cultivate a large pool of skilled professionals

But when it comes to technology, a sector in which clear decoupling has begun, India must choose which partner it wants to prioritize. 

Trade relations with the United States are important at $100 billion a year but trade with neighboring China is double that

While globalization will continue as normal for certain industries — basic consumer goods where consumer surplus is high and existential risk is low, for example — other sectors are moving toward some degree of decoupling, chief among them technology

It is neither complete interconnection nor complete decoupling, but rather a mix of the two. 

Re-globalization is distinctive from the economic systems which preceded it: During the period before World War I, and then again over the past 30 years, global interconnection was the norm, as goods and services proliferated easily across the world thanks to open markets and favorable regulatory environments.

the most important potential geo-economic partner for the United States today as it “re-globalizes” with greater concern for national security and resilience.

And as the United States’ concerns about China grow, India shines as a promising alternative in supply chains, innovation hubs, and joint-ventures.

the BRICS are looking to progressively develop and encourage the production of medicines and vaccines, with the aim of eventually breaking away from their dependance on Western pharmaceutical companies

Xi now wants the club to expand and admit Saudi Arabia, Iran, Indonesia and Argentina.

The two countries signed a total of 15 agreements, covering technology, satellites, semiconductors, 6G, artificial intelligence, internet expansion, climate, tourism, investments in clean energy, and other strategic sectors

The two countries signed a total of 15 agreements, covering technology, satellites, semiconductors, 6G, artificial intelligence, internet expansion, climate, tourism, investments in clean energy, and other strategic sectors.

the Moscow-backed International North South Transport Corridor (INSTC), a 7,200-kilometere network of trains, roads and sea routes to connect Russia to India through Iran and Central Asia.

the maiden India-Central Asia Joint Working Group (JWG) meeting on Chabahar in Mumbai

The risk is that this coming together deepens the estrangement of the global south from the international order. It would be a tragic result if, in uniting the West, America alienates the rest.

China can undermine the effectiveness of global institutions

Western unity to hold

It will prioritise relations with its core democratic allies in Europe and Asia (which it hopes might one day include India)—and then try to maintain creaking global institutions in order to mediate meet the needs of a broader group of countries, including most non-aligned ones, whether on development, debt relief, security or finance.

Chinese visitors bring loans and engineers while Americans bring playlists.

“Countries don’t want to choose, and we don’t want them to,” Jake Sullivan, Mr Biden’s national security adviser

AidData also finds that a 10% increase in voting similarity with Beijing at the un is associated with an increase in the number of Chinese projects in that country.

Between 2007 and 2020 it provided more infrastructure financing in sub-Saharan Africa than the next eight lenders combined

China is the main trading partner for around 120 countries.

It draws a contrast with the West, which it says prefers smaller clubs (like the g7). “China shows up where and when the West will not,” says Yemi Osinbajo, Nigeria’s outgoing vice-president.

The non-aligned countries want to avoid taking sides.

China offers “hardware”: bridges, roads, ports—and the loans to build them.

West has generally been the preferred source of “software”: support for schooling, health and, should the African government want it, human rights

audi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates

Qatar is playing novel diplomatic roles.

Last month Saudi Arabia signed a Chinese-brokered deal with Iran and joined the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation, a Eurasian talking shop.

Saudi Arabia,

Turkish exports to Russia reached $7.6bn in 2022, a 45% increase on the previous year.

he “New Turkey” can select its partners.

Turkey also wants to be more influential across the global south

India promises to use its chair of the g20 this year to be the “voice of the global south”.

India

Lula will soon visit Africa to revive Brazil’s influence there.

Brazil is also classed by America as a “major non-nato ally”, a legal status entitling enhanced co-operation with America’s armed forces.

what Mauro Vieira, foreign minister, calls “automatic alignments”.

New research by the imf notes that since 2018 geopolitical alignment, measured by similarity in un voting patterns, has become ever more important in determining the location of foreign direct investment.

ore than a third of Chile’s is with China, a higher share than any other t25 country (but 40% of its trade involves the West).

77% of Mexico’s total trade occurs with the West; over 60% of Israel’s and Algeria’s trade also does.

In Saudi Arabia gdp per person is more than $27,000, on a par with some European countries, while in Pakistan it still lingers around just $1,600.

the world’s largest democracies, India and Indonesia, alongside Vietnam, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, which are all run by autocrats of various flavours.

“Europe has to grow out of the mindset that Europe’s problems are the world’s problems, but the world’s problems are not Europe’s problems,”

Some $170bn in aid was pledged to Ukraine in the first year of the war—equivalent to about 90% of all the aid spent globally in 2021 by the oecd’s Development Assistance Committee, a group of 31 Western donors.

Some call it “minilateralism” (as opposed to multilateralism)—the use of discrete alliances or groupings to achieve results in dedicated areas, rather than lumping your lot in with one bloc.

These middle powers are pragmatic and opportunistic.

A formal institution, the Non-Aligned Movement, was joined by nearly every African, Asian and Latin American state. With the end of the cold war it became, in the words of an Indian academic, “a moribund organisation in need of a decent burial”.

Today they represent 45% of the world’s population and their share of global gdp has risen from 11% in 1992 to 18% in 2023, more than the eu’s.

the transactional 25 (t25)

the 25 biggest economies that have sat on the fence on the Ukraine war, or wish to remain non-aligned in the Sino-American confrontation, or both.

Although 52 countries comprising 15% of the global population—the West and its friends—lambast and punish Russia’s actions, and just 12 countries laud Russia, some 127 states are categorised as being firmly in neither camp (see map).

This makes the GSB the perfect place to glimpse the future of management.

Unless their destruction offers a definite military advantage, data cables intended for civilian data traffic should be protected as civilian objects under humanitarian law.57

Marseille is the central hub for data traffic to the MENA region and Asia, with twelve active or planned systems.34

Cable repair and maintenance is handled by an industry that is separate from the operating and owning companies. Operators and owners enter into ‘contracts with marine maintenance companies that have cable and equipment storage depots and cable ships strategically positioned throughout the world, available on a 24/7 standby basis to repair cable faults.’86

The largest part of the submarine cables is located within the high seas, where there is almost no legal protection provided – besides Art. 113-115 of UNCLOS

Y. Yincan, J. Xinmin, P. Guofu, and J. Wei (Eds.), ‘Safety of Submarine Optical Cable’, Submarine Optical Cable Engineering, 2018, pp. 235–257

Distributed Acoustic Sensing is a ‘technology that enables continuous, real-time measurements along the entire length of a fibre optic cable.’85This technology utilizes the entire optical fibre as the sensing element. These systems allow acoustic signals to be detected over large distances and in harsh environments. They can be used to detect movements and vibrations in the vicinity of the cable, for instance, from shipping activities.

Positions are marked on navigational charts to ensure awareness of marine users.

With an average ocean depth of 3682m51, the 1.3 million km52 of submarine cable infrastructure is installed in a challenging environment.

Countries have full jurisdiction over the cable in their territorial waters, i.e. up to 12 nautical miles (or about 22 kilometres) from the baseline of their coastline. States also have particular law enforcement duties and obligations in the contiguous zone (24nm). States do not have jurisdiction over cables outside those zones. Indeed, on the high seas (the areas outside of national jurisdiction) as well as the Exclusive Economic Zones of states (200 nm), the legal status of cables and rights and responsibility for their protection is ambiguous.82

On average, non-island EU Member States have 4.5 internal cross-border cable systems available.65

a transnational landing station ‘spotting community’ exists that aims to take photographs of landing stations and post their precise location on the internet fora.8

the currently longest cable system SEA-ME-WE-3.

Second, Gozo, the second-largest island of the Maltese Archipelago with 31 000 inhabitants, is connected by only one submarine cable to the local Maltese network.72

extensive power outages that affect both cable landing stations result in loss of connectivity.

ata Centres and Internet Exchange Points (IXPs).

new cable landings of high-capacity projects at the French and Danish West coasts, as well as Bilbao, indicate a change of mindset in the landing location planning.

n the EU, the Netherlands have the most IXP (106), followed by Germany (83), France (35), and Italy (34).

The hotspots of data centre locations within the EU are Frankfurt (54 centres), Amsterdam (41), and Paris (31). Massive clusters of data centres exist in Stockholm (29), Milan (22), Dublin (19), Sofia (20), Madrid (19), Bucharest (19), Copenhagen (17), Riga (17) and Helsinki (17).3

While the information on cable owners is widely available,41 there is little information on the operators and buyers of the capacities

With the recent EllaLink project and the older systems of Atlantis 2 and COLUMBUS III, there are only three direct links between the European Union and Latin America.3

Various critical infrastructures are increasingly dependent on a stable internet connection. Examples of these services can be found in the finance sector (internet-based ATMs), transport sector (coordination systems for to-the-minute supply chains), water and food sectors (digitalised water supply systems and smart agriculture).

CER Directive)

94 % of EU’s businesses have a fixed broadband connection, and 78 % have a website. 41 % of all European enterprises use tools like cloud services that require a permanent internet connection, andfor large enterprises, this share grows to 71 %.19

Article 21(c), 1982.11 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, Article 113, 1982

The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS)

Alcatel Submarine Networks and Nexans (France), Prysmian Group (Italy), NKT A/S (Denmark), SubCom (United States), NEC (Japan), and Huawei Marine Networks (China).

his is also reflected at the EU level, where a broad range of agencies, including the European Maritime Safety Agency, the European Fishery Control Agency, the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity, and several Directorates of the European Commission, e.g. DG Connect, DG MOVE, or DG MARE,

here is a tendency to pay little attention to what happens at sea more generally —a phenomenon that has been described as collective sea blindness.6

The potential for sabotaging undersea cables during times of conflict, as part of grey zone or hybrid warfare operations or by transnational terrorism and organised crime exists, but such incidents have not been confirmed yet.

Information was collected through extensive desk research and review of key strategies, policy documents, incident reports and studies published on the issue, and thematic interviews and written inputs from practitioners and advisers from a range of backgrounds.

40 % of cable disruptions arise from bottom-tending commercial fishing equipment and related dredging. Another 15 % of damage is caused by anchoring incidents, such as improperly stored anchors, anchoring outside approved areas, sea conditions affecting anchor positioning, and the emergency dropping of an anchor.