to keep the mainstream financial system insulated from further crypto-ructions.

theft and fraud are minimised, as with any financial activity

regulators should be guided by two principles

An upgrade to Ethereum’s blockchain in September radically reduced its energy consumption, paving the way for it to handle high transaction volumes efficiently.

Vast quantities of money, time, talent and energy have been used to build what amount to virtual casinos.

The disappointment is that, 14 years after the Bitcoin blockchain was invented, little of this promise has been realised.

As at the end of any mania, the question now is whether crypto can ever be useful for anything other than scams and speculation. The promise was of a technology that could make financial intermediation faster, cheaper and more efficient. Each new scandal that erupts makes it more likely that genuine innovators will be frightened off and the industry will dwindle. Yet a chance remains, diminishing though it is, that some lasting innovation will one day emerge. As crypto falls to Earth, that slim chance should be kept alive.

Never before has crypto looked so criminal, wasteful and useless.

He also claims that the fall is no big deal as it represents 0.2% of GDP. He reckons that bitcoin boosts tourism.

his association with the “Chicago school” of economics, his growing influence on the political right and the hardening of his pro-market views as he aged. That there is still so much to learn about Hayek hints at the biggest problem with this biography: its size.

DeFi still has much room for improvement, but through its transparency and self-custody it has begun to prove the utility of new forms of consumer protection for a digital world.

FTX operated out of the Bahamas yet people around the world have been affected by the fallout of its implosion

That contains any risks from interdependency. Over time, both centralised finance and traditional finance would benefit from a similar degree of segregation

In DeFi, where data and analytics are free and publicly accessible, the balance sheets supporting lending or trading are transparent.

But because FTX is a CeFi company, there was no visibility into how much was owed to customers and where those withdrawn funds were going.

Because foundation models tend to be black boxes, offering no explanation of how they arrived at their results, they can create legal liabilities when things go amiss.

“random bullshit generator”

“It’s all about writing prompts these days,”

PromptBase is a marketplace where users can buy and sell prompts that produce particularly spiffy results from the large image-based generative models, such as DALLE-2 and Midjourney.

on “a Copilot for knowledge workers”, says Kelsey Szot, a co-founder.

CodeWhisperer, its own version of the tool. Alphabet is reportedly using something similiar, codenamed PitchFork, internally.

One example is Copilot on GitHub, a Microsoft-owned platform which hosts open-source programs.

Jasper and Copy.AI both pay OpenAI for access to GPT3, which enables their applications to convert simple prompts into marketing copy.

Stability AI and Midjourney

Ali Ghodsi, boss of Databricks, a company that helps customers manage data for AI applications, see an explosion of such “boring AI”.

deep slump

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

THE ARTEMIS ACCORDS

how to limit the potential destructive capabilities of artificial intelligence,

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.

“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.

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.

they prioritise the upside of long-shot projects rather than seeking to minimise failure.

handing out grants by lottery

darpa models

a one-size-fits-all approach

to fund “people not projects”

the darpa model does best when its programme directors have a clear understanding of the sort of breakthroughs that are needed

The dARPA model, which has more in common with venture capital than traditional funding structures, is an attempt to do just that

The most common way research is funded, through peer review—in which academics in similar fields score proposals—deserves some blame

The more knowledge humans have, the longer it takes a budding researcher to get to the frontier, and thus to push things forward. In a paper provocatively titled, “The burden of knowledge and the death of the Renaissance man”, Mr Jones argued humanity’s growing knowledge would slow scientific progress and thus economic growth.

empowering long-serving career officials ensures the most experienced officials are influential in the policy process and incentivizes the development of expertise through a career in government service

especially to American and other Western observers, is the inclusion of a reference to “indivisible security”, a term associated with Russian rhetoric. But the Chinese-language equivalent can also mean “inalienable” or “inseparable”.

China put forward the Global Development Initiative (GDI) last year. Seen as a continuation of the Belt and Road Initiative, the GDI prioritises the alignment of areas for cooperation with the UN’s 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. China emphasises cooperation through UN development agencies in implementing the GDI, as opposed to the Belt and Road Initiative, which is primarily a bilateral endeavour.

Mao Zedong would call him a forerunner in China’s pursuit of modernisation. In terms of China’s foreign relations, Sun’s idea that “all [nations] are equal” (tianxia datong) resonates with framings such as the “five principles of peaceful coexistence” and “a world community with a shared future”.

Voltaire remains today an iconic hero for everyone who sees a positive linkage between critical reason and political resistance in projects of progressive, modernizing reform.

Marx’s famous thesis that philosophy should aspire to change the world, not merely interpret it, owes more than a little debt Voltaire.

The model he offered of the philosophe as critical public citizen and advocate first and foremost, and as abstruse and systematic thinker only when absolutely necessary, was especially influential in the subsequent development of the European philosophy.

By also attaching what many in the nineteenth century saw as Voltaire’s proto-positivism to his celebrated campaigns to eradicate priestly and aristo-monarchical authority through the debunking of the “irrational superstitions” that appeared to anchor such authority

All of Voltaire’s public campaigns, in fact, deployed empirical fact as the ultimate solvent for irrational prejudice and blind adherence to preexisting understandings

the most important project was defending empirical science as an alternative to traditional natural philosophy

made him in some respects the leading philosophical advocate and ideologist for the new empirico-scientific conception of philosophy that Newton initiated.