Whoever invents the best system will have to convince officialdom, not consumers, that it is indeed better.

Standardising chargers might make sense if they have reached the end-state of their development, like electric plugs.

But the eu is in a dirigiste mood these days (the official leading the charge on chargers, Thierry Breton, is the French internal-market commissioner).

The model selected is known as usb-c, an industry standard which most manufacturers already use. The big exception is Apple, which has stuck to its own system. It will either have to make Europe-only gadgets with a usb slot (which many Apple tablets and laptops already feature) or switch over all its iPhones globally to suit the edict.

by 2024 makers of devices including smartphones and cameras will have to switch to a single type of charger mandated by Brussels.

much of what happens in Brussels is noted primarily by policy wonks

have financed roads, electricity grids and whatnot in poorer bits of the continent.

there is peace

You can cross most of its borders without a passport, too, though people take them on holiday anyway

Click here to view original web page at timesofindia.indiatimes.com

premium Cambria headset

could actually be present in a virtual rendering of a period location, the ancient Rome in this case, and actually examine how people interacted at that time, how debates

using sensors on their fingertips

could help the students (especially surgeons) practise on a virtual 3D organ before actually going for the real surgery.

shows a university lecture

look beyond the hype and bluster of the crypto industry and understand not only its inherent flaws and extraordinary defects but also the litany of technological fallacies it is built upon.

They are the inevitable outcomes of a technology that is not built for purpose and will remain forever unsuitable as a foundation for large-scale economic activity.

threats to national security through money laundering and ransomware attacks, financial stability risks from high price volatility, speculation and susceptibility to run risk, massive climate emissions from the proof-of-work technology utilized by some of the most widely traded crypto-assets, and investor risk from large scale scams and other criminal financial activity.

have been the vehicle for unsound and highly volatile speculative investment schemes

this technology has been a solution in search of a problem and has now latched onto concepts such as financial inclusion and data transparency to justify its existence, despite far better solutions to these issues already in use

for fraud mitigation and allow a human-in-the-loop to reverse transactions; blockchain permits neither.

Blockchain technology cannot, and will not, have transaction reversal or data privacy mechanisms because they are antithetical to its base design.

Not all innovation is unqualifiedly good; not everything that we can build should be built.

that protects the public interest and ensures technology is deployed in genuine service to the needs of ordinary citizens.

are an innovative technology that is unreservedly good

The madeup study shows that technology lies at the heart of this squandered time. Technology can also help. Services that sync up diaries and autocorrect options already do; passwords will doubtless end up being replaced by facial recognition and fingerprint logins. Whether the time thereby saved would be put to more productive use, like reading this column, is a reasonable question. But years of workers’ lives are wasted on utterly pointless activities. All improvements warrant heartfelt thnaks.

Shakespeare wrote “King Lear” in the time an average office worker spends changing font sizes during their career.

Deleting emails takes up about six weeks of your life. Clicking on Slack channels to read through messages that are not meant for you, or clearing notifications on your phone screen for articles that you will never look at: tasks like these each eat up several days.

But months are wasted trying to remember passwords, entering them wrongly or updating them.

Correcting typos takes up an average of 20 minutes in every white-collar worker’s day, the equivalent of 180 days, or half a year, over a 45-year career.

you will spend one-third of your life asleep, almost a decade looking at your phone and four months deciding what to watch on streaming services.

how much time people spend on a specific activity over the course of their lives.

Myopia and insularity abound. But if you are a consumer of global goods and ideas—that is to say, a citizen of the world—you should hope globalisation’s next phase involves the maximum possible degree of openness. A new balance between efficiency and security is a reasonable goal. Living in a subsidised bunker is not.

esilience comes from diversification, not concentration at home

rampant protectionism, jobs schemes and hundreds of billions of dollars of industrial subsidies.

encouraged by governments that from Europe to India are keen on “strategic autonomy”.

are adopting dual sourcing and longer-term contracts.

from efficiency to resilience

what the Germans call “change through trade”—have been dashed: autocracies account for a third of world gdp.

to a dependency on autocracies that abuse human rights and use trade as a means of coercion.

Covid-19 was a shock, but wars, extreme weather or another virus could easily disrupt supply chains in the next decade.

mostly they keep costs low, but when they break, the bill can be crippling.

Volatile capital flows destabilised financial markets. Many blue-collar workers in rich countries lost out.

All this kept prices low for consumers and helped lift 1bn people out of extreme poverty as the emerging world, including China, industrialised.

the lodestar of globalisation was efficiency

keeping the benefits of openness while improving resilience.

new kind of globalisation is about security, not efficiency

to the fight for workers as global firms shift from China into Vietnam.

a once-in-a-generation reimagining of global capitalism in boardrooms and governments.

No one knew if globalisation faced a blip or extinction.

“slowbalisation”

Increased economic integration did not bring about the greater global harmony that some had hoped it would.

The world economy could become less vulnerable to shocks at a time when climate change and geopolitical tensions are increasing their frequency and intensity. Improving resilience could be a case of running to stand still.

Redesigning supply chains takes time, and noticing an effect takes even longer. The boss of a giant American manufacturer which now produces 90% of its products in China says it plans to boost investment in American and European manufacturing dramatically over the next five years. That will still leave China producing about half its goods. But the shift is under way.

The share of American multinationals’ staff based in China is drifting downwards. At the same time those companies are boosting recruitment in other parts of Asia. They employ nearly 400,000 people in the Philippines, a 10% rise since 2016. Nearly 1.4m people in India work for American companies, a 14% rise from 2016.

Chinese firms have a dominant position in both the production of batteries and the processing of minerals required for them.

The American computer sector is about 50% more vertically integrated than in the mid-2000s, as measured by the share of the industry’s gross revenues accruing to companies in that industry (rather than outside suppliers).

Fully 81% of supply-chain leaders surveyed by McKinsey this year are now sourcing raw materials from two suppliers, rather than depending on merely one.

The European Commission is dangling subsidies in front of makers of batteries and semiconductors.

More than 100 countries accounting for over 90% of the world’s gdp now have formal industrial strategies, according to a survey by the un, with a particular frenzy of activity in recent years.

biotechnology software and the wherewithal for producing advanced semiconductors.

“We cannot allow countries to use their market position in key raw materials, technologies, or products to have the power to disrupt our economy or exercise unwanted geopolitical leverage,”

ew infrastructure and long-term contracts are pushing a global, fluid system in the direction of one less efficient but more secure.

It has also made manifest the geopolitical risks of dependence on an autocracy with aggressive ambitions. That has further intensified concerns about China.

he disasters in Japan “did not lead to reshoring, nearshoring, or diversification”.

In 2000 China’s average annual income per person expressed in dollars, a reasonable proxy for the wage costs facing a multinational firm, was 3% of America’s. That is one reason why the country’s accession to the World Trade Organisation the following year was so transformative. By 2019 that had risen to 16%.

One reason was automation, which reduced the labour intensity of manufacturing and therefore the competitive advantage of lower-wage countries that had become offshoring hubs in the 1990s and 2000s. Another was that wages in those countries rose.

In the two decades to 2008, trade as a share of global gdp jumped from 37% to 61%.

There are centrifugal and centripetal forces that pull the world together or apart,”

The market-based and Sino-centric system that started to emerge towards the end of the past century is being transformed into something which, though still global, is less unitary and more costly

Companies, for their part, are buying up suppliers at home and abroad in the name of vertical integration.

Decision-makers are increasingly concerned that supply chains should be robust, not just efficient.

First came America’s tariffs on Chinese exports. Then the covid-19 pandemic boosted demand for a particular constellation of goods while constraining their production and transport. Most recently Russia’s war in Ukraine sent commodity prices soaring and reminded firms how quickly a political shock can close one market and wreak havoc in others.

Supply chains are the fibres out of which the past decades’ globalisation is woven.

“We have to stop creating [regional] organisations based on the ideology of the governments of the day,” Chile’s Gabriel Boric argues. “It’s important that Latin America once against has a voice in the world.” For that, it needs to rediscover a path of progress.

more intra-regional trade is one of the best routes to economic growth.

The Biden administration, and many Latin Americans, believe that negotiation with Mr Maduro, hard though that will be, is the only option.

Today Mr Maduro is stronger than before, and the economy is reviving thanks to de facto dollarisation.

wo core institutions that link Latin America and the United States, the idb and the Organisation of American States, are troubled, with leaders who do not command support and deep divisions over the treatment of Venezuela.

Mercosur, founded in 1994 as a putative customs union, was a cornerstone of Brazilian foreign policy. But it is declining into irrelevance, partly because agribusiness (whose main market is China) has eclipsed manufacturing.

Mr Fernández visited Russia and China shortly before the war began. He said his country should be the “gateway” for Russia in Latin America. Venezuela and Nicaragua are close allies of Vladimir Putin. “We don’t want the multilateral order to fall apart,” says a Mexican official, who opposes Russia being kicked out of the g20. “But that doesn’t mean we’re not on the side of democratic institutions.”

Latin America’s preference for a multipolar world to one of geopolitical confrontation has led some to question whether it is still part of the West

Most Latin American countries do not want to have to choose between the United States and China, as Donald Trump once suggested.

China is now a bigger trading partner than the United States for all the main Latin American economies except Mexico and Colombia.

The final plan calls for 15 quays and a large industrial park that would make Chancay the biggest port on the Pacific coast of South America, with the aim of becoming a trans-shipment centre for the region.

The agency said it had discovered that Russian intelligence was using smartphone games to induce unwitting youngsters to snap and upload geotagged photos of critical infrastructure, military and civilian. In exchange, players receive virtual prizes of no value outside the video-game world. And Russia gets to wreck their country.

Olga Khmil, one of Molfar’s intelligence analysts, says Russia is now using group channels in messaging apps like Telegram to aim its artillery better. Russians pretending to be Ukrainians on these channels feign fear of shelling in order to elicit information about infrastructure that has and has not been hit. On May 24th the sbu revealed an even more devious approach to such espionage.

Training people to use this sort of kit will take three weeks. But Ukraine is unlikely to receive the 60 launchers that an adviser to Volodymyr Zelensky, the country’s president, has said would be needed to halt Russia’s advance.

the French caesar system (pictured above), made by Nexter, a firm in Versailles. This can hurl shells about 40km, which is 16km farther than the firm’s previous model, the trf1, could manage. So far, France has anted-up five or six of a promised dozen caesar howitzers, enabling Ukrainian crews to smash targets 50% farther away than they could manage just a few weeks ago.

America’s share of the “hash rate”—the computing power on the network—rose from 11% to 38% in the year to January.

After China banned bitcoin mining last year, a lot of Chinese mining computers ended up in places like Kazakhstan. But that equipment is ageing and the power it consumes is not so cheap.

When the price falls, it is the miners with the least efficient equipment and the most expensive energy who are wiped out. But since the amount of bitcoin created is fixed, that means the remaining firms in the market each win more, counteracting the fall in price.

In recent months, the cryptocurrency boom has deflated dramatically. Bitcoin has lost 70% of its value since November; it dropped by 17% on June 13th alone. Many firms that had flourished are in trouble. Coinbase, a big bitcoin exchange originally from California, which went public last August at a valuation of $86bn, this month has rescinded job offers and is cutting 18% of its staff. But mining projects, curiously, still seem to be growing. Computer farms making use of solar power, wind power and, more worryingly, gas and coal continue to be set up. In New York legislators are concerned enough about the prospect of redundant fossil-fuel plants being resurrected for crypto mining that on June 3rd they passed a law banning such projects. It remains to be seen whether Kathy Hochul, the governor, will sign it.

when a business is built on lies, there are always clues. You just have to be willing to see them—even if that means swallowing some national pride.

Mr Braun has been charged with fraud, breach of trust and accounting manipulation; he denies wrongdoing. Mr Marsalek is on the run, wanted by Interpol.

its perma-optimistic, turtleneck-wearing chief executive, Markus Braun, and Jan Marsalek, the cunning, narcissistic chief operating officer.

he business newspaper of record, mostly swallowed the firm’s line that the attacks on it were illegal moneymaking schemes, or part of an Anglo-Saxon plot to destroy a continental European champion

Many investors, caught up in the general tech optimism, refused to believe Wirecard could be rotten, even as the incriminating evidence mounted.

according to an ex-policeman the author interviewed, Wirecard had more than 30 private detectives “running round London” and trying to dig up dirt on Mr McCrum, ftcolleagues and the short-sellers.

Over seven years, aided by a handful of short-sellers and carefully cultivated whistleblowers, he pieced together a picture of a firm built on fraud, with fake customers, invented profits and cash balances that looked flimsier the closer you got.

to assess candidates’ soft skills rather than their intellect alone, or screening candidates for emotional traits such as empathy, motivation and resilience through questionnaires, letters or essays

Some are tailoring classes for the Zoom age, for example pointing out the common traps of virtual negotiations.

More than a third of their communications was via video chat, email or the phone. The difference now is that everyone else spends just as little time in the office—if not less

anecdotal evidence suggests that hybrid work may be skewing executives’ workday even more towards people management

They find that bosses spend 25% of their working lives on fostering relationships with insiders and outsiders, more than they devote to strategy (21%), corporate culture (16%), routine tasks (11%) and dealmaking (4%).

Prince Harry is the “chief impact officer” of a Silicon Valley firm. Clifford Chance, a law firm, has appointed a global “wellbeing and employee experience” chief. Nearly 5,000 people on LinkedIn, a social network, describe themselves as “chief happiness officers”. Still, most high-ranking managers will almost certainly need to perform each of these novel tasks to a greater or lesser extent.

ever-expanding list of credentials and competences.

to a growing number of “stakeholders”, from employees to social activists, and face public scrutiny on their companies’ environmental, social and governance (esg) record

used to focus on number-crunching and business strategy. Executives must still master these skills.

does an America so polarised at home have the will to sustain its dominance abroad?

instead of a nato-like treaty in Asia, a small nato-like military structure.

Another prize is asean, the ten-country South-East Asian club. It includes fence-sitters such as Indonesia. “We do not believe in alliances that could in the end threaten other countries,” said Prabowo Subianto, its defence minister. Indonesia holds drills with America but does not want to upset a “benevolent” China.

India, the world’s largest democracy, is the trophy in America’s quest for stronger alliances. It is increasingly at odds with China. Its help in controlling the Strait of Malacca would be invaluable in any war with China. The Quad, which has started meeting at the level of leaders, seeks gradually to draw India in. Yet India is wary of an alliance, and remains close to Russia, which supplies a lot of its weapons.

This web may not be strong enough to contain China.

“It’s not hub-and-spokes. It’s not nato. It’s a spider’s web.”

The “Five Eyes” (with Australia, Britain, Canada and New Zealand) share intelligence; aukus (with Australia and Britain) is developing nuclear-powered submarines and other weapons; and the Quad (with Australia, India and Japan) discusses everything from vaccines to maritime security.

a “networked security architecture”,

lled a “non-treaty organisation”: a hub-and-spokes system of bilateral defence agreements with Japan, South Korea, Australia, the Philippines and Thailand, which do not have obligations towards each other.

“The message is that security in Europe and Asia cannot be separated.”

nato’s summit in Madrid on June 29th-30th will focus on the threat from Russia but will keep an eye on Asia

He has stopped talking about helping Ukraine “win”. The blurry aim is something less—giving it “the means to deter and to defend” itself.

Many foreign-policy experts think the war in Ukraine, if it results in a defeat for Russia, would strengthen the West’s hand against China.

America thinks only China can challenge its global supremacy. Yet Russia is consuming much of the country’s attention, and billions of dollars, as America seeks to help Ukraine and strengthen nato.

He flew on an e4-b, “the Doomsday plane” from which American leaders can wage nuclear war, trailed by a c-17 transporter.

“guardrails”

The British English alternative to the subjunctive—using “should”, as in It is essential that every parent should remain supportive—has declined on the islands as the subjunctive has returned.

Apparently nationalism is an even stronger force than conservatism. Americans in the early republic tried to distance their English from Britain’s. And for its part, Britain has more recently pushed away from American English, first as an empire that could afford to condescend to its former colonies, later as a medium-sized power that both admired and fretted about American might. Those worrying about the Americanisation of British English have a point.

Britain and America even have distinctive national refrains with a subjunctive: God save the queen and God bless America

of Americans being more conservative than the mother country in this aspect of grammar.

the subjunctive

The country has few productive industries; it is instead dependent on remittances, which amount to more than 20% of gdp.

Mr Bukele’s approval ratings hover at around 80-90%.

Many fret that bitcoin will decrease transparency. Some reckon it is a way for officials to evade possible American sanctions. Others fear bitcoin opens the way for money-laundering and corruption. Several ministers were under investigation for misuse of pandemic funds before Mr Bukele fired the attorney-general. Cybersecurity is also an issue. It is unclear if anyone aside from Mr Bukele knows El Salvador’s bitcoin keys, the codes needed to prove ownership and make transactions.

That such a volatile asset could be made legal tender at all says much about Mr Bukele’s style of leadership.

Félix Ulloa, the vice-president, argues that the cryptocurrency is a long-term investment.

Bitcoin, which has lost 70% of its value since November, is far too volatile to be a good store of value, especially in a country where gdp per person is $4,400. (This has not deterred the Central African Republic, which is even poorer, from following El Salvador’s lead and adopting bitcoin in April.)

by the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, a state think-tank, spoke of the need for laws and regulations surrounding “virtual labour”

According to fans, the performer behind the virtual idol had complained that she was bullied, overworked and underpaid.

fed up with “996” schedules (ie, working 9am to 9pm six days a week).

by the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, a state think-tank, spoke of the need for laws and regulations surrounding “virtual labour”

ByteDance spent a small fortune on Pico, a maker of virtual-reality headsets.

The most popular virtual idols sing and dance before millions of viewers on live-streaming platforms.

Little wonder, then, that many Chinese firms are choosing to work with “virtual idols” instead of the human kind.

some countries in the region were “fed up with the preachings” of the West

The war in Ethiopia has disrupted use of a $3.4bn Chinese-built railway line, opened in 2018, that connects Addis Ababa with the port of neighbouring Djibouti. Resurgent jihadists in Somalia have spread across the border into Kenya, carrying out attacks as far south as a port refurbished by Chinese firms in Lamu county.

By governance it means maintaining social order, not encouraging free and fair elections.

the Horn of Africa talks, which involve Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan and Uganda (it is unclear whether Eritrea, a big source of the region’s instability, will attend: diplomats say it has not yet replied to its invitation).

The usual aim of China’s diplomats is to preserve the status quo or restore it, says Helena Legarda of the Mercator Institute for China Studies, a research group based in Berlin. “They are quite risk-averse,” she says.

where China has substantial economic interests that could be threatened by local conflict. Often these are also places with large numbers of Chinese citizens who might be in harm’s way.

for China to “get more actively involved in international affairs” and “play its due role as a major responsible country”

It was China’s proposal to hold the talks. They follow its appointment in February of a special envoy to the Horn of Africa—a signal of its intent to step up diplomacy in the region.

On June 20th a two-day “peace conference” is due to begin in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia

it would have been difficult even to imagine China as a mediator in a European war.

China, its close friend, has made only vague suggestions that it would be willing to mediate, “when needed”

The eu and America could not act as mediators, said Mr Borrell. “Who else? It has to be China.”

Lemoine

Huge “foundation models” are turbo-charging AI progress

We gave a selection of Economist covers to an application developed by Microsoft that combines their Florence model and OpenAI’s GPT-3 to generate text descriptions of images.

It needs something to kick off the writing process, something that sparks the journalist's imagination and offers a clear path towards writing. The best models, then, are not just predictive but also inspirational.

it did sometimes provide inspiration for how to finish a sentence or a paragraph.

EconoBot off and on while writing this article

writing tool called “CoAuthor” using his most recent 100 articles for The Economist and a host of material on ai from one of the university’s courses

ai-based transcription tools have already made one particularly tiresome aspect of journalism far easier;

Covid has taught us that exponentials move very quickly,

Foundation models which can think up strategies for corporate consultants may be able to do the same for generals; if they can create realistic video streams they can create misinformation; if they can create art they can create propaganda.

Enhanced Representation through kNowledge IntEgration, or ernie.

Its ai research institute is pushing for a government-funded “National Research Cloud” to provide universities with computing power and data sets so that the field does not end up entirely dominated by the research agendas of private companies.

Some companies continue to make their models open-source, and thus freely available; bert is one such, as is a 30bn-parameter version of a model from Meta.

No one can build a foundation model in a garage

focus lends itself to the automation of human activities using brute computational force when alternative approaches could focus on augmenting what people do.

and neglecting more qualitative assessments, as well as the technology’s social impact.

They are seen as the path to academic kudos, gobs of money or national prestige.

“reinforcement learning with human feedback”

ranging from better curation of training data to “red teams” that try to make them misbehave.

the amount of internet data they ingest can give foundation models misleading and unsavoury hang-ups.

Fernando Lucini, who sets the ai agenda at Accenture, another big corporate-tech firm, predicts the rise of “industry foundation models”

The roller coaster in the clouds is a metaphor for the economy. It's a fun, exciting ride that everyone loves until it crashes down to earth, causing economic loss and recession. A market crash is the final nail in the coffin, leaving people reeling in its wake.

Elicit it helps people directly answer research questions based on academic papers.

turning the output of foundation models into products

Consider these sample exchanges:

For consciousness to emerge would require that the system come to know itself, in the sense of being very familiar with its own behaviour, its own predilections, its own strengths, its own weaknesses and more. It would require the system to know itself as well as you or I know ourselves. That’s what I’ve called a “strange loop” in the past, and it’s still a long way off.

But that still wouldn’t amount to consciousness

They give it easy slow pitches (questions whose answers are provided in publicly available text) instead of sneaky curveballs

People who interact with GPT-3 usually don’t probe it sceptically.

But since it had no input text about, say, dropping things onto the Andromeda galaxy (an idea that clearly makes no sense), the system just starts babbling randomly—but it has no sense that its random babbling is random babbling.

I would call GPT-3’s answers not just clueless but cluelessly clueless, meaning that GPT-3 has no idea that it has no idea about what it is saying.

that all the amazing properties of minds (creativity, humour, music, consciousness, empathy and more) are emergent outcomes of trillions of tiny computational processes taking place in brains, I might be expected to agree with such claims—but I do not

This is high order social modelling. I find these results exciting and encouraging, not least because they illustrate the pro-social nature of intelligence.

we must carry out the procedure to higher orders: what do they think we think? What might they imagine a mutual friend thinks about me?

It allows us to empathise with others, predict their behaviour and influence their actions without threat of force.

the intelligence explosion came from competition to model the most complex entities in the known universe: other people.

to correlate them all,

Keep in mind that by the time our brain receives sensory input, whether from sight, sound, touch or anything else, it has been encoded in the activations of neurons.

earned by optimising the model’s ability to predict missing words from text on the web.

They consist mainly of instructions to add and multiply enormous tables of numbers together. These numbers in turn consist of painstakingly learned parameters or “weights”, roughly analogous to the strengths of synapses between neurons in the brain, and “activations”, roughly analogous to the dynamic activity levels of those neurons

Language models are not yet reliable conversationalists

“narrow AI”