“Sanction”, for example, can mean both “to approve of” and “to lay a penalty upon”. “Fast” can mean speedy or stuck in place. “Cleave” can mean to split, or to cling tightly. “Fulsome” praise can be full-throated and genuine, or cloyingly insincere. One class of Janus words is particularly troublesome: those that mean different things on opposite sides of the Atlantic. “Moot”, for instance, means “that which can be argued; debatable” in Britain; it means “not worthy of discussion” in America.

contronyms, auto-antonyms or, most poetically, “Janus words”, named for the two-faced Roman god who looks in opposite directions (and so gave his name to January, which faces back into the old year and forward to the new).

“the whole comprises the parts, and the parts compose the whole”

A messy, fragmented trade order might be brutal for small, open economies. But if rulers in Beijing thought it would give them leverage and security, they might take it.

Soon afterwards the People’s Bank of China began developing the Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS), a network that could one day replace SWIFT for Chinese financial institutions. China is working on a digital yuan that could further reduce its vulnerability to sanctions.

Western governments and business lobbies accuse China of using standards as sneaky barriers to trade.

In the West, standards are a form of private-sector self-regulation. In China, the state is the guide.

China’s government wants to be better represented in international bodies that set industrial and technical standards, determining everything from how the internet works to the steel used in railway tracks.

Perhaps a self-assured China might loosen controls on cross-border data flows and grant more access to foreign internet firms, he suggests—as long as WTO digital standards ensure that companies like Huawei cannot be excluded from Western markets just for being Chinese.

Rich economies advocated free trade in industries where they enjoyed a competitive advantage, at least before the rise of China and other Asian tigers, he says.

That is industrial policy, he concedes, but so is the basic research that underpins much rich-world innovation.

Western leaders predicted that growing Chinese prosperity would lead to ideological convergence with the rich world, as a rising middle class demanded accountable government and individual rights

China says it is now the largest trade partner of more than 120 of the world’s countries.

Today's game-theory software is not yet sufficiently advanced to mediate between warring countries.

The “principle of convergence”, as it is known, holds that armed conflict is, in essence, an information-gathering exercise.

Dr Ponsatí, now head of the Institute of Economic Analysis at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, says such “mediation machines” could lubricate negotiations by unlocking information that would otherwise be withheld from an opponent or human mediator.

But game-theory software can also work well outside the sphere of economics.

Sorting out people's motivations is much easier, however, when making money is the main object.

go astray when people unexpectedly give in to “non-rational emotions”, such as hatred, rather than pursuing what is apparently in their best interests.

Numerical values are placed on the goals, motivations and influence of “players”—negotiators, business leaders, political parties and organisations of all stripes, and, in some cases, their officials and supporters

ceos who play moralists with respect to Vladimir Putin are hard-pressed to justify—in ethical terms, if not financial ones—why they embrace realpolitik when it comes to Xi Jinping.

global expansion would not just be good for business; it would be good for peace and democracy, too. But reality has turned out differently

While bosses are busy encroaching on foreign affairs, foreign affairs are gradually encroaching on them

Yet the belief that the pursuit of profit will always benefit society as a whole is also sadly erroneous,

Ford’s cult of efficiency morphed into creepy control over his workers—parodied in Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World”, in which dates are measured from the “Year of Our Ford”

The Ford Motor Company was organised “to do as much good as we can, everywhere, for everybody concerned”

For much of corporate history, serving society was part of their charter.

Making deals palatable to 27 national governments with their own electorates is a messy business. While it attempts to do this, th

This is thankless but necessary work, best done out of the public gaze.

Coreper, short for Comité des représentants permanents, sounds to outsiders like a car body shop, but is in fact the powerful forum where national governments thrash out deals behind closed doors

They “assist” meetings instead of attending them. They “externalise” a task rather than merely outsourcing it. If they talk of an “actual” situation, they mean the current one.

National governments write in a way that a typical high-school pupil can understand. Eurocrats befuddle anyone who lacks a university education.

Most organisations, from the most gargantuan government to the tiniest start-up, develop their own jargon

Indonesia is relying on resources, surgical protectionism, big-tent politics and neutrality. Both are giant bets.

India is opting for tech- and manufacturing-led development, fuelled by subsidies, chauvinistic politics and decoupling from China.

a convener and peacemaker.

it wants to be neutral.

has developed that emphasises compromise and social harmony

With a fifth of global reserves of nickel, used in batteries, the country is a vital link in electric-vehicle (ev) supply chains

A source of dynamism is digital services, which are helping create a more integrated consumer market, with over 100m people collectively spending $80bn a year on everything from e-payments to apps for on-demand trucking.

It is the world’s largest Muslim-majority state, its third-biggest democracy and its fourth-most-populous country.

how can we act sensibly when we cannot know what the consequences will be in the distant future?

Derek Parfit, a British philosopher who died in 2017, raised the question of whether future generations can hold the current one responsible for their suffering: if our generation had acted differently those people would not have been born.

For long-termists like Will MacAskill, a philosopher at Oxford University who provided EA with many of its founding ideas and helped turn it into a movement, “distance in time is like distance in space”.

Effective altruists claim to use evidence and reason to maximise the good they do for others, no matter where the beneficiaries live or when they are born

Stani Kulechov, the creator of Aave, a decentralised-lending protocol, is building a social-media platform that would allow people to port their followers from application to application, thus allowing them to quit a platform without losing clout.

fficient, scalable blockchains are beginning to emerge

It is an indictment that, almost 14 years after bitcoin was created, there are only a handful of use cases for crypto, such as firms paying workers in countries suffering from hyperinflation, like Argentina, or efficient decentralised exchanges and lending tools. Even the

Stablecoins, which are meant to hold their value in real-world currency, should be regulated as if they were payment instruments at banks.

regulating the institutions that act as gatekeepers for the cryptosphere

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.