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

they should be seen as the interface between technology and society.

or people to increasingly be affected by the illusion

had warned about in a paper about the harms of large language models that got them pushed out of Google.

it doesn’t make sense to do so by anthropomorphizing today’s conversational models, which are not sentient.

doesn’t signify that the model understands meaning.

In May, Facebook parent Meta opened its language model to academics, civil society and government organizations.

the models rely on pattern recognition — not wit, candor or intent.

He was told that there was no evidence that LaMDA was sentient (and lots of evidence against it).”

LaMDA, short for Language Model for Dialogue Applications

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

This is all good news for the chipmakers. The ai boom is one of the things that have made Nvidia the world’s most valuable designer of semiconductors, with a market value of $468bn.

April Google released palm

Codex and Copilot, now aim to turn programmers’ descriptions of what they want into the code which will do it.

Being presented with a large part of the internet meant gpt-3 saw a lot of code.

Instead of guessing the next combination of letters, graphical models such as Openai’s dall-e predict the next cluster of pixels.

After a few billion guess-compare-improve-guess cycles this Mad-Libs approach gives new statistical power to an adage coined by J.R. Frith, a 20th-century linguist: “You shall know a word by the company it keeps.”

they hide specific words from themselves and then guess, on the basis of the surrounding text, what the hidden word should be

uses chips called “graphics processing units” (gpus)

more processing power.

had become powerful enough to run large ones and the internet provided the huge amounts of training data such networks required

will further concentrate economic and political power

We’re building a supercar before we have invented the steering wheel,” warns Ian Hogarth, a British entrepreneur and co-author of the “State of ai”, a widely read annual report.

more than 80% of ai research is now focused on foundation models

about “general-purpose technologies”

“foundation models”.

GitHub Copilot,

what words are associated with the features it is picking up

Text-to-image processes are also impressive. The illustration at the top of this article was produced by using the article’s headline and rubric as a prompt for an ai service called Midjourney. The next illustration is what it made out of “Speculations concerning the first ultraintelligent machine”; “On the dangers of stochastic parrots”, another relevant paper, comes later. Abstract notions do not always produce illustrations that make much or indeed any sense, as the rendering of Mr Etzioni’s declaration that “it was flabbergasting” shows. Less abstract nouns give clearer representations; further on you will see “A woman sitting down with a cat on her lap”.

“Enlightenment”—a trillion-parameter model built at the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence

most advanced ai programs are 10,000 times larger, with over a trillion parameters

Four years ago the 110m parameters boasted by a game-changing model called bert made it a big model

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”

For now ipef is simply a talking-shop. But as Asian officials recognise, that is better than not talking.

With just vague goals, it is easier to show enthusiasm.

There is not much to lose and potentially a lot to gain,

It is also useful to have another venue to speak regularly to America, especially for leaders of smaller countries that lack such opportunities

boosting trade, especially of the digital kind; making supply chains more resilient; tackling climate change through clean energy; and fighting corruption in business

The chief complaint is that ipef, which American officials call an “initiative” or an “arrangement” rather than a trade deal (which it is not), does not give signatories any greater access to the American market.

happy to engage with their countries on matters of security and geopolitics, but seems uninterested in talking about trade

But that is something voters must fix at the ballot box, not billionaires smuggling in their political views via the backdoor at annual general meetings. Saving the planet is one thing. Saving it by committee smacks of plutocratic overreach. Sadly, that appears to be part of the future Messrs Carney, Fink and Dimon have in mind.

it is governments’ responsibility to solve societal problems

Bosses should speak out when events occur that materially impact their businesses, rather than pontificate about all manner of extra-curricular concerns.

Governments are abjectly failing to take steps, such as high and co-ordinated carbon taxes, to tackle climate change.

Companies have got away for too long without taking account of—or paying for—their externalities, especially their impact on the natural world

the sustainability mantra has switched from shunning oil and defence stocks to embracing them.

a big force behind a surge in environmental, social and governance (esg) investing in recent years

attacked the “unsubstantiated, shrill, partisan, self-serving, apocalyptic warnings” about the risks a changing climate pose to financial markets.

he set in motion a blitzkrieg of regulatory activity to press companies and their lenders to disclose their exposure to the risks of global warming

to stop global warming and create a fairer, more enlightened form of capitalism

The Committee to Save the World”

Nigeria also deploys technology in the pursuance of its foreign policy objectives by providing diplomatic functions, including representation and promotion of the home nation, establishing both bilateral and multilateral relations, consular services and social engagements via digital tools.

The Washington Post Accessibility Statement

sees the scheme in part as a response to the West’s efforts to challenge the bri with its own infrastructure-building schemes such as the Build Back Better World plan announced by the g7 in June last year.

may regard China as helpfully “filling a space” from which Western donors will retreat as they focus on the crisis in Ukraine.

It is China’s choice for improving global governance

security was a “precondition” for development

It says that economic advancement is itself a human right and that getting richer is a precondition for enjoying other human rights.

n attempt to push back against Western notions of development, which emphasise enhancing human rights as well as securing economic progress.

the Friends of the Global Development Initiative

They eagerly proclaim the latest tally of the number of countries that back it: about 100 so far (compared with about 150 that have signed up to the bri)

the Global Development Initiative (gdi), involving less concrete and more greenery.

Two EU delegations – in Kenya and Ethiopia – have developed ‘Team Europe’ Initiatives (TEIs) on digital for development (flagship projects developed jointly with EU member states and European development banks).

The D4D Hub is very much a work in progress and much remains to be clarified regarding how it works and how it fits together with the programming of funding under the EU’s new Neighbourhood, Development and International Cooperation Instrument - Global Europe (NDICI-Global Europe).

heap digital labour, illicit financial flows, data extraction, natural resource mining, infrastructure monopolies, digital lending, funding structures, beta testing and platform governance

Others have similarly highlighted the dangers of global firms mining Africa for data, making use of algorithms not suited to local environments and of an overdependence on external technologies (Travaly 2020, Birhane 2020, Center for Humane Technology 2020)

his is ultimately a simpler vision of digital sovereignty and one that appeals to many African leaders, who have a keen desire to protect and enhance state sovereignty (Handy and Djilo 2021).

a clearly state-centric vision of digital sovereignty, which seeks to make the state the arbiter of the data of its citizenry.

a bottom-up approach to sovereignty that allows for the building of a democratic digital space should be prioritised (

the need for the EU to be less dependent on foreign technology,

in human development in Africa

or access to education, training, employment and health.

then investing in data centres on the African continent is key.

n helping to build an African DSM

basic human development

it is clear that the EU will not be able to replace the role played by Chinese and US tech giants in rolling out tech infrastructure in Africa

to speak with one voice and to build a clear channel of communication with African counterparts

spectrum harmonisation across Africa and harmonisation of measurable ICT/telecommunications policy, legal and regulatory frameworks.

n African DSM, including in encouraging the adoption of human-centric regulation

I governance as laid out in the EU AI Strategy (EC 2021e) is clearly the next frontier in terms of the EU’s human-centric approach

With the elaboration of its digital governance model, the EU hopes to provide global leadership in the digital governance realm

as ‘digital sovereignty’

advocating for shared positions at multilateral fora.

nly large-scale domestic investment in Europe’s digital industry can truly make the EU into the kind of global actor it aspires to be.

A number of interviewees mentioned that Germany had taken a very strong leadership position, particularly in promoting a specific vision of cooperation around data. Some saw France as an equally important player, and as a leader on connectivity/infrastructure. It was noted by several that the two large states are undoubtedly the motor of the EU’s D4D agenda, along with the European Commission. Belgium’s role in pushing the D4D agenda forward when current Prime Minister Alexander de Croo was simultaneously Minister for Development Cooperation and the Digital Agenda was noted, together with the continued motivation that Belgium displays with regard to this agenda. It is leading the coordination of the EU-AU D4D Hub. Estonia’s motivation and outsize role on e-governance was also widely commented. Luxembourg was similarly mentioned as having a strong motivation and particular added value on cyber-security.

he doubts regarding the EU’s strategic approach relate to the sense that the EU lacks focus and can be held hostage to political concerns that ultimately are not very strategic.

in its human-centric approach to digital regulation

The EU’s D4D Hubis an effort to build a joined-up ‘Team Europe’ approach with a tangible implementation aspect between the EU institutions, EU member states and the EU financial architecture for development,

The rhetoric of ‘build back better’ – promoted by the EU and the White House alike – has tended to include an even stronger focus on digital investment alongside green growth as a means to drive economic recovery and future resilience.

As Africa works towards building its continental free trade area and a digital single market (DSM), the EU hopes that it will have a clear comparative advantage as a partner with experience of creating a similar regional market and regulatory framework.

EU member states are jointly the biggest overall investor and trade partner for Africa, but this is not the case in the important digital sector, where China eclipses all other partners.

he new D4D Hub, which was launched in December 2020

with the Global South (Arcesati and Stec 2021)

to counter China’s dominance in global digital infrastructure

“nurturing a competitive transatlantic tech space and overcoming divisions on the digital rulebook,”

The EU’s February 2021 Joint Communication on multilateralism specified digital policy as a focus area for extending multilateral cooperation, and expressed the EU’s interest to “push for more ambitious global standards and regulatory approaches in the digital economy.” (EC and EEAS 2021, pp. 5-6)

digital skills, secure and high-quality infrastructure, digital transformation of business, and digital public services

This human-centric vision can broadly be defined as making technology work for citizens, including using technology to fight the challenges our societies face, ensuring digital skills so that all citizens can benefit from technology, harnessing technology to fight climate change, ensuring personal data is protected and human rights are upheld, thereby strengthening democracy, ensuring open and competitive markets, and strengthening public services

he EU is taking a strong stance on digital governance and regulation, where it sees itself as a leader.

‘geopolitical’ European Commission planned to increase the focus on digital development – both in its domestic and external action, reflecting the idea that the internal and external dimensions of the EU’s work should be aligned

he EU’s Digital for Development (D4D) Hub, which marks a step forward for a more joined-up and strategic approach to cooperation.

The 2019 AU Digital Transformation Strategy (DTS) lays out the AU’s vision for Africa’s digital development, whilst the e-commerce protocol of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) is now being prioritised in this year’s negotiations, highlighting the added importance of the digital economy revealed by COVID-19. Many African countries are also developing their national information and communications technology (ICT) strategies and policy frameworks

he EU terms a ‘human-centric approach’ to global digital governance: an approach marked by a strong focus on making technology work for citizens and protecting individual liberties.

Noble or inert gasses – such as neon, argon, xenon, and others – are crucial in the semiconductor manufacturing process. Semiconductors are used to make the microchips needed for gadgets, cars, and household appliances.

China-Africa Partnership Plan on Digital Innovation.

community of shared future in cyberspace

The Electronic World Trade Platform (eWTP) has helped African products reach Chinese consumers. Huawei's "Seeds for the Future" program and Alibaba's "Africa's Business Heroes Competition" have also contributed to the training of young African professionals in the Internet industry.

The Electronic World Trade Platform (eWTP) has helped African products reach Chinese consumers. Huawei's "Seeds for the Future" program and Alibaba's "Africa's Business Heroes Competition" have also contributed to the training of young African professionals in the Internet industry.

Teniola however, stressed the need for the country to domicile its data in the country rather than host them outside of the country.

“In the case of locally generated data and more importantly data sets, then it is considered that this data is treated as data residing in Nigeria under Nigeria’s jurisdictions and covered by data protection laws or regulations in the case of the Nigeria Data Protection Regulation (NDPR), which is referenced by global tech companies, insurance companies, financial institutes and health organisations and other data mining companies on how they should use data originating from Nigeria.

January 28

A study by the Atlantic Council, a U.S.-based think tank, found that Huawei has developed 30% of the 3G network and 70% of the 4G network in Africa.

The fact that a standard-setting organization, like the O-RAN Alliance that was set up to reduce dependency on Huawei, includes multiple Chinese state-owned enterprises suggests the need to reimagine how democracies cooperate to set standards that reinforce liberal values. According to the O-RAN Alliance website, the following Chinese state-owned or CCP-controlled entities are members or contributors: China Mobile, China Telecom, China Unicom, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, CAICT (the Chinese Academy of Information and Communications Technology), CICT (China Information and Communication Technologies Group Corporation), Nanjing Diange Communication Technology Co. Ltd (Digitgate), Inspur, Wuhan Gewei Electronic Technologies Co. Ltd, State Grid Information and Communication Industry Group Co. Ltd, Suzhou Zhizhu Communication Technology Co. Ltd, Tsinghua University, Tongyu, Communication, and ZTE.

BeiDou’s combined second and third phases include 8 satellites in geostationary orbit, 27 in medium Earth orbit, and 10 in inclined geosynchronous orbit. Another 5 BeiDou-3 experimental satellites—3 in medium Earth orbit and 2 in inclined geosynchronous orbit—also exist within the constellation, albeit on a different signal system.

Beijing’s predictable opposition is why Washington does not prioritize the G-20 as a forum for meaningful debates around data flows and digital trade.

China used government and private-sector information and communications technology (ICT) projects to build support among African countries for New IP.

Smart Grids: Global Energy Interconnection

“China Proposes Global Rules for Managing Sovereign Digital Currencies,” Dezan Shira and Associates, April 4, 2021; and “China Suggests Principles for Cross Border CBDC to ‘Avoid Dollarization,’” Ledger Insights, March 25, 2021.

Open Platforms with Chinese Characteristics

China, in contrast, is developing blockchain capabilities to strengthen the state’s control of digital platforms and the information that passes through these networks.

An Overview of Digital Platforms

No matter how large an internet company is, no matter how high its market value is, if it is heavily dependent on foreign countries for its core components, and if the “major artery” of the supply chain is in the hands of others, it is like building a house on someone else’s foundation. No matter how big and beautiful it is, it may not stand up to wind and rain, and it may be so vulnerable that it collapses at the first blow

has full authority on all aspects of e-commerce such as data and products being traded under e-commerce,

Insurtech refers to digital and technology-driven products that cover individuals and businesses against financial loss, from life insurance to car insurance and crop insurance for farmers. African insurtech startups are actively overcoming the historically low penetration rates of insurance products across the continent. According to McKinsey & Co., only 3% of Africa is insured -  by far the lowest coverage in the world. Excluding South Africa, Africa’s most insured market, this number drops to a staggering 1.12%. 

briterbridges.com

Africa had the fastest growth in internet access of the world’s regions between 2005 and 2018, from just 2.1 per cent of the population to 24.4 per cent. It is home to the fastest growing mobile phone industry, with 20 per cent annual growth between 2005 and 2017. I