One of the profound lessons on Ubuntu is that it integrates African organisations with the local communities. The reviewed literature also reveals that organisations are able to realise synergies through communalism and collectivism that arise from the Ubuntu principles.

through listening to elders

(Experience is the best teacher)

the idea of knowledge in Africa resides in the community and not in the individuals that make up the community.

arguing that reason is the source of knowledge while others view experience or the use of the senses as the gateway to knowledge.

Communities are allowed to exercise their free will but remain responsible for the choices they make as well as their actions.

the community is the source, author and custodian of moral standards and personhood is defined in terms of conformity to these established moral standards whose objective is to have a person who is communo-centric than one who is individualistic.

The CMP is not a position established by one person as is the case with Plato’s justice theory, Aristotle’s eudaimonism, Kant’s deontology or Bentham’s hedonism (2012: 11).

Metaphysics is onto-triadic or tripartite in character. It involves the Supreme Being (God), other lesser spirits (ancestral/alien and avenging) and human beings.

to remark that the idea of being has its full expression through participation.

the idea of being is relational.

a human being is always in communion with other human beings as well as with the spiritual world. Sekou Toure (1959) calls this “the communion of persons” whereby being is a function of the “us” or “we” as opposed to the “I” as found in “the autonomy of the individuals”

Yes in the sense that in non-Western cultures being is also explained in terms of appearance and reality as well as change and permanence and no in the sense that non-Western philosophies, especially the hunhu/ubuntu traditional philosophy of Southern Africa has a communal character, not an individual character.

What is reality?

The objective is to show that while Western philosophy is persona-centric and is summarised by Descartes’ famous phrase, Cogito ergo sum which when translated to English means “I think therefore I am”; hunhu/ubuntu traditional philosophy, on the other hand, is communo-centric and is summarised by Pobee’s famous dictum, Cognatus ergo sum which when translated to English means, “I am related by blood, therefore, I exist.”

This is quite understandable because in Western societies, the individual is conceived of as the centre of human existence and so there is need to respect his or her rights to privacy. 

Ubuntu is the idea that no one can be healthy when the community is sick. Ubuntu says I am human only because you are human. If I undermine your humanity, I dehumanise myself.

African humanism, on the other hand; would, then, refer to an ideology or outlook or thought system that values peaceful co-existence and the valorisation of community.  In other words, it is a philosophy that sees human needs, interests and dignity as of fundamental importance and concern (Gyekye 1997: 158).

I have located three texts from the 1970s in which Ubuntu is identified as ‘African humanism.’ The texts do not explain what African humanism is, so it is possible that their authors understood African humanism as something different from a human quality.

his means that Ubuntu as a traditional thought has not been restricted to the academy alone but has also found its place in the public sphere where it has been utilised to solve political conflicts and thereby bring about socio-political harmony

“the single main ingredient that made the achievements of the TRC possible was a uniquely African ingredient – Ubuntu.”

a person through other persons. This maxim, for Metz, “has descriptive senses to the effect that one’s identity as a human being causally and even metaphysically depends on a community.”

A person’s humanity is dependent on the appreciation, preservation and affirmation of other person’s humanity. To be a person is to recognize therefore that my subjectivity is in part constituted by other persons with whom I share the social world.

is not only an ontological and epistemological concept; it is also an ethical concept.

This means that the diversity that characterise African people, in terms of geographical location, history and ethnicity, does not take away the fact that Africans have “a unified form of knowledge” that is based on group identity or community. 

ethno-philosophy as a system of thought that deals with the collective worldviews of diverse African people as a unified form of knowledge based on myths, folk wisdom and the proverbs of the people.

We also have second generation scholars of Ubuntu such as Michael Onyebuchi Eze (2010), who is credited for his critical historicisation of the term Ubuntu,  Michael Battle (2009) who is credited for some deep insights on the linguistic meaning of the term Ubuntu as well as his famous claim that Ubuntu is a gift to the Western world; Fainos Mangena (2012a and 2012b) who is credited for defining Hunhu/Ubuntu and extracting from it the idea of the Common Moral Position (CMP) and Thaddeus Metz (2007) whose search for a basic principle that would define African ethics has attracted a lot of academic attention; Christian BN Gade (2011; 2012 and 2013) who has taken the discourse of Hunhu/Ubuntu to another level by looking at the historical development of discourses on Ubuntu as well as the meaning of Ubuntu among South Africans of African Descent (SAADs).  Finally, we have Martin H Prozesky who has outlined some of the distinctive qualities/features of Hunhu/Ubuntu philosophy that are important for this article.

we have first generation scholars of Ubuntu such as Mogobe Bernard Ramose (1999; 2014), who is credited for his definition of Ubuntu as humaneness, Stanlake Samkange and Tommie Marie Samkange (1980) who link Hunhu/Ubuntu with the idea of humanism and Desmond Tutu (1999) who sees Ubuntu as a conflict resolution philosophy. These three are regarded as first-generation scholars of Ubuntu because historically, they are among the first black philosophers hailing from Africa to write about Hunhu/Ubuntu as a philosophy.

Thus, Hunhu/Ubuntu, as an aspect of African philosophy, prides in the idea that the benefits and burdens of the community must be shared in such a way that no one is prejudiced but that everything is done to put the interests of the community ahead of the interests of the individual.

But AI is probably only about 10% of the secret sauce. The other 90% lies in the combination of data, experimentation, and talent that constantly activate and inform the intelligence behind the system. Personalization is the goal; it’s what constitutes a company’s strategic brawn.

Generative AI’s greatest potential is not replacing humans; it is to assist humans in their individual and collective efforts to create hitherto unimaginable solutions. It can truly democratize innovation.

However, the challenge of communicating their concepts in written or visual form restricts vast numbers of people from contributing new ideas.

the technology makes co-creation of new offerings much easier and less expensive.

ChatGPT determined that the food-donation app could encourage people to use up their food before it goes bad and reduce food waste by giving unopened, edible food to those in need.

onsider an innovation challenge where the goal is to identify ways to minimize food waste.

where the functions are determined first and the form is then designed to accommodate them.

We asked it to generate ideas through a process of trisociation by connecting three distinct entities (an extension of the bisociation creativity technique).

Generative AI can support divergent thinking by making associations among remote concepts and producing ideas drawn from them.

companies have trouble seeing the forest for the trees.

“democratizing innovation”

Notwithstanding the above, Zoom will not use audio, video or chat Customer Content to train our artificial intelligence models without your consent.

Marcus Aurelius to develop stoic qualities. Elon Musk to build a start-up. Alan Watts to find purpose and meaning in life. Carl Jung to assist in personal growth, and so on.

round the table, there are Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, Steve Jobs, and other great minds.

a personal board of advisors.

To get the mental juices flowing, all you need to do is ask a question.

o teach people critical thinking is to teach them to write.

Reflecting on your thoughts and feelings makes you understand yourself better, find uncovered self-knowledge, and improve your overall mental health & fitness.

I believe the world’s most valuable skill is clarity of thought.

At least Shakespeare and Freud would have understood the power of the irrational that provoked these and other madmen to destroy the human fabric of Yugoslavia.

A semi-heroic, semi-tragic figure, Marković failed, but at least he had fought the cancer instead of adjusting to it.

Whatever his motives, it was a disastrous political mistake. Serbia, Bosnia’s vastly more powerful neighbor, now had the pretext it needed to strike—the claim that 1.3 million Serbs were being taken out of “Yugoslavia” against their will. I believe that Milošević and Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić had already decided to annex the majority of Bosnia by military force (Milošević had spoken to me of 70 percent). The EC’s irresponsibility, the United States’ passivity, and Izetbegović’s miscalculation made their job easier.

On December 17, 1991, an EC summit decided to grant recognition. Carrington and Vance both complained loudly and publicly. The State Department’s statement, to avoid ruffling the EC, was nuanced. War in Bosnia, which had until then been probable, now became virtually inevitable.

Izetbegović, briefed by the German ambassador to Yugoslavia on how to make his point with Genscher that EC recognition would bring violence to Bosnia, unaccountably failed to do so in his November meeting with the German foreign minister. The omission can only have led Genscher to assume that he had a green light from Izetbegović for recognition.

However, between July 1991 and March 1992, the United States was not a major factor in the Yugoslav crisis. In the fall of 1991, at a U.S. ambassadors’ meeting in Berlin, a friend from the State Department’s European Bureau told me that Yugoslavia had become a tar baby in Washington. Nobody wanted to touch it. With the American presidential election just a year away, it was seen as a loser.

He and Vance both argued—as did the U.S. government—that there should be no Western recognition of the independence of any Yugoslav republic until all had agreed on their mutual relationships. If this simple principle had been maintained, less blood would have been shed in Bosnia.

Unlike the JNA, they welcomed foreign journalists, to whom they retailed the epic struggle of their tiny republic against the Yugoslav colossus. It was the most brilliant public relations coup in the history of Yugoslavia.

Baker did, however, leave a strong political message. He said to Prime Minister Marković, a conduit to the army, “If you force the United States to choose between unity and democracy, we will always choose democracy.”

Baker told Croatian President Franjo Tudjman and Slovene President Milan Kučan that the United States would not encourage or support unilateral secession; he hoped they would not secede, but if they had to leave, he urged them to leave by negotiated agreement. H

t midyear that Secretary of State James Baker arrived in Belgrade on June 21, 1991.

The incident illustrated three important traits of Milošević’s character: his cynicism about Yugoslavia’s unity and institutions, his natural mendacity, and the pains he always took to avoid direct responsibility for aggressive actions. The third trait was to become particularly relevant to Milošević’s hidden hand in the Bosnia crisis.

“Serbia will always act in the spirit of the highest democratic principles,” replied Milošević, who was always at his most mellifluous when expatiating on his devotion to democracy. “There will be a democratic vote in the presidency.”

The fifth-largest army in Europe, well supplied by the Soviet Union and an enormous domestic arms industry, it was seen by many as the most important unifying institution in Yugoslavia. Its officer corps, however, had a Serbian majority who, when events forced them to choose, followed Milošević.

Izetbegović was succinct with me: “If Croatia goes independent, Bosnia will be destroyed.”

Milošević almost never delivered; Tudjman sometimes did.

Neither Milošević nor Tudjman could understand why we cared so much about people who were murdered, tortured, abused, or harassed.

The people being helped, and those who will succeed them, are part of the “other Serbia” and the “other Croatia”—the core of the democratic revival that in time must replace the current nationalist hysteria.

I urged Milošević to meet with the disciplined and impressive Albanian leader Ibrahim Rugova, who was urging a policy of peaceful resistance. Rugova agreed. Milošević refused, saying of the leader of some two million Albanian subjects of Serbia, “Who does he represent?”

Revealingly, Milošević was unwilling to give the Albanians in Kosovo the same right of self-determination that he demanded for Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia.

He presided over serious violations of the rights of Serbs, who made up 12 percent of the population of Croatia. They were dismissed from work, required to take loyalty oaths, and subjected to attacks on their homes and property.

If Milošević recalls a slick con man, Tudjman resembles an inflexible schoolteacher.

In their drive to separate from Yugoslavia they simply ignored the 22 million Yugoslavs who were not Slovenes. They bear considerable responsibility for the bloodbath that followed their secession.

Nationalism is by nature uncivil, antidemocratic, and separatist because it empowers one ethnic group over all others

confirmed that unity and democracy were the Siamese twins of Yugoslavia’s fate. The loss of one meant that the other would die.

The new Yugoslav prime minister, Ante Marković, a dynamic Croatian committed to economic reform and other Western policies, was pressing for both these objectives. The United States supported him and persuaded the West European governments to do so as well.

When the Slovenian and Croatian independence movements, together with Milošević’s own disruptive actions in the name of unity, made the preservation of Yugoslavia impossible, he fell back on an even more aggressive approach

for him, people are groups (Serbs, Muslims) or simply abstractions.

His cherubic cheeks do not fit the strongman image; in fact, he has to work hard at looking tough for his public posters. His manner is affable and displays his light side. Unfortunately, the man is almost totally dominated by his dark side.

When Tito died, leaving a Yugoslavia too decentralized for any ethnic group to dominate, it became inevitable that a Serbian nationalist would rise up to redress the perceived wrongs dealt his people.

Serbs are a naturally talented and ebullient people with an instinctive liking for Americans that is based partly on a shared garrulity and partly on a military alliance spanning both world wars.

he later cited it as the reason he waited nearly a year before agreeing to meet me.

if Yugoslavia wanted to continue its close relations with the United States, it would have to curb human rights abuses in the province.

But I would add that the United States could only support unity in the context of democracy; it would strongly oppose unity imposed or preserved by force.

Yugoslavia no longer enjoyed the geopolitical importance that the United States had given it during the Cold War.

Like an unusually large number of Foreign Service officers—myself included—he served twice in Yugoslavia.

"Yes, the words "aiphobia" and "aiphobic" have been used to describe a fear or aversion to artificial intelligence. The word "aiphobia" is a portmanteau of the words "artificial" and "phobia", and it was first used in print in 1998. The word "aiphobic" is an adjective that means "having or showing a fear or aversion to artificial intelligence'."

Vicuna is good at general chat and not good at math/coding.

Choose appropriate datasets: select a dataset that is representative of your task and large enough to cover various scenarios without causing overfitting.

My final suggestion is to use learning curves as you tune your model. Keep track of the methods you use, how much data you are using, and the model performance. By tracking all of this, you can make a better quantitative assessment of whether to keep fine-tuning, get more data or if you have hit a point of diminishing returns and can stop.

The PEFT package is typically my starting point. It includes techniques like Low-Rank Adaption of LLMs which is gaining popularity.

The most frequent problem is fitting the model on a single GPU. That’s why it’s important to use parameter-efficient fine-tuning techniques like Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models (LoRA) and LLM Adapters. Also, use low precision like Brain Floating Point Format (bfp16), or 4-bit precision from QLoRA paper. The Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) package is a starting point.

It is crucial to have a deep understanding of the dataset you will use for fine-tuning including its nuances and biases.

in all areas except cybersecurity.

Strictly speaking, Switzerland offers international organisations the same legal framework as Luxembourg that ensures their digital and physical integrity. Although the ICRC does not have the status of an embassy in Switzerland, its buildings, land and infrastructure, as well as its IT service providers, which hold Red Cross data, are subject to the “principle of inviolability”.

Favarger chocolate

“We first had discussions with Geneva and Bern about our needs in terms of digital immunity and reported that we were in discussion with other states.”

On 13 July 2022, the Luxembourg parliament almost unanimously ratified the so-called headquarters agreement with the ICRC, making the establishment of the ICRC cyber delegation official.

it provides the services of a highly secure, high-performance data centre.

lasting several weeks

The first customer was Estonia, an ideal candidate for the test. The Baltic country is not only Europe's model state when it comes to digitisation, but it also knows what it means to be in the crosshairs of hackers.

built up its own digital sovereignty

Luxembourg politicians like to apply the fortress metaphor to other areas, Schmit said, to the financial industry as a “safe haven for money” and to cyberspace as a “safe haven for data”.

to create a digital emblem for humanitarian data protection. 

only a staggering 21 per cent of Swiss NGOs make full backups of their data or use two-factor authentication to log online securely.

which enjoy diplomatic protection.

The Kyiv city military administration said it was the eighth day in a row that Russia had launched Iran-made Shahed drones at the capital.

The Enlightenment is a complete delusion, because the Enlightenment is the idea that today’s rather reduced human beings can replace with their own feeble minds the true primordial tradition. And it just gets worse, because the Enlightenment leads to various other characteristics of modernity: for example, the ideas of equality, democracy and progress.

Debunking Common Misconceptions about Prompt Engineering

Free courses and guides for learning Generative AI

Some key takeaways include :

"They" being the multiple competing entities working in the field right now, most of whom are trying to make the barrier to entry in this field millions of dollars higher than it otherwise would be through mandatory paid consultations with "Safety experts" that could hypothetically double as corporate espionage assets to steal your secrets before you publish them.

This form of analysis is antithetical to Wittgenstein's approach, particularly in his later work, where he stressed the importance of seeing things as interconnected wholes rather than reducing them to their constituent parts.

Wittgenstein introduced the idea of "language games," arguing that the meaning of words is determined by their usage in specific forms of life, or social practices. This stands somewhat in opposition to the detailed, precise and generalized logical framework outlined in the provided ontology, which assigns fixed roles and properties to human brains, AI models, and animal consciousness across all contexts.

There are a couple of reasons for this, and they predominantly center around Wittgenstein's ideas of language games, private language arguments, and his opposition to reductionism.

Heidegger's Dasein refers to the unique manner in which humans exist, embodying a subjective, in-the-world mode of being.

This restriction will stop these people from proliferating and creating fully open source LLMs based on Llama 2 outputs. So, say goodbye to improvements in some of the open source models.

"Teaching staff will need to continuously develop new methods of assessment that assess students at a level beyond the levels of AIs," it said.

Monash University described how it has tested using AI "personalised course advisers" to help students navigate their degrees and classes, AI-powered mock job interviews for real positions and simulated customers or clients for learning.

using more oral or other supervised exams, practical assessments and the use of portfolios.

Monash submitted that even if regulations were introduced to require AI tools to inject "watermarks" into their code to make AI detectable, other generative AI technologies could still be used to strip out those watermarks.

Figure 3: Components, types,and subfields of AI based on Regona et al (2022).

Educators are also aware of new risks

AI can be defined as “automation based on associations.”

We will consider “educational technology” (edtech) to include both (a) technologies specifically designed for educational use, as well as (b) general technologies that are widely used in educational settings

created a safe corridor for Ukraine’s grain exports from three Ukrainian ports – Odesa, Yuzhny and Chornomorsk.

metacognitive prompts.

hile AI has the potential to help students learn

In this scenario, the AI aids with personalized, readily available tutoring and coaching outside of the classroom and the classroom transforms into ahub of systematic engagement

Such changes foster an active learning environment, inviting each student to engage with class concepts, articulate reasoning, and actively construct knowledge

AI as Simulators: Build Your Own

AI as Simulator: Creating Opportunities for Practice

applying that concept actively in a novel situation requires a level of automation –students have to “think on their feet” as they apply what they know in a new way

Your assessment should focus on how well the AI has explained and illustrated the concept, not on the quality of its creative output; consider how the AI has applied the concept and not whether the poem or dialogue is engaging or unique.

Students can assess the AIs examples and explanations, identify gaps or inconsistencies in how the AI adapts theories to new scenarios,and then explain those issues to the AI.The student’s assessment of the AI’s output and their suggestions for improvement of that output is a learning opportunity.

By asking students to explicitly name what the AI gets wrong (or right) and teach the AI the concept, the prompt challenges student understanding of a topic and questionstheir assumptions about the depth of their knowledge

This is because teaching involves “elaborative interrogation” or explaining a fact or topic in detail and this requires a deep processing of the material and invokes comparison mechanisms: to generate an explanation, students much compare concepts and consider differences and similarities between concepts.

Teaching others helps students learn

AI as Coach: Reflection Prompt

Metacognition plays a pivotal role in learning, enabling students to digest, retain, and apply newfound knowledge.

This type of metacognition involves“reflection after action”

Metacognitive exercises can help students generalize and extract meaning from an experience or simulate future scenarios.

AI Tutor: Instructions for students

students get more opportunities to restate ideasin their own words, explain, think out loud, answer questions, and elaborate on responses than they would in a classroom, where time is limited and one-on-one instruction isn’t possible

Tutoring is inherently interactive and can involve a number of learning strategies including:questioning(by both the tutor and the student); personalized explanations and feedback(the tutor can correct misunderstandings in real-time and provide targeted advice based on the student's unique needs); collaborative problem-solving(tutors may work through problems together with students, and not justshow them the solution); and real-time adjustment(based on the student's responses and progress, a tutor mayadjust the pace, difficulty level, making the learning process dynamic and responsive)

Tutoring,particularly high-dosage tutoring,has been shown to improve learning outcomes

n a paragraph,briefly discuss what you learned from using the tool. How well did it work? Did anything surprise you? What are some of your takeaways in working with the AI? What did you learn about your own work? What advice or suggestions did it give you? Was the advice helpful?

hat reflection can also serve as a springboard for a class discussion that serves a dual purpose: a discussion about the topic or concept and about how to work with the AI

Getting feedback on their work from the AI is an opportunity to practiceand improve,but that feedback should be considered critically, and students should be asked to articulate how and why the feedback they received is effective (or not).

Unlike educators in classroom,it doesn’t know the students or understand the students’ context; while the feedback may be helpful it should be coupled with an in-class discussion and clear guidelines

s one possible form of feedback

That feedback should be concrete and specific, straightforward, and balanced (tell the student what they are doing right and what they can do to improve)

an also give you a sense of where students are in their learning journey

Students should report out their interactions with the AI and write a reflection about the guidance and help the AI provided and how they plan to incorporate (or not) the AI’s feedback to help improve their work.

While ongoing, tailored feedback is important, it is difficultand time-consuming to implement in a large class setting. The time and effort required to consistently provide personalized feedback to numerous students can be daunting.

When feedback is coupled with practice itcreates anenvironment that helps students learn

Researchers notethe significance of incorporating feedback intothe broader learning process, as opposed to providing it at the conclusion of a project, test, or assignment.

Effective feedback pinpoints gaps and errors, and offers explanations about what students should do to improve

Making mistakes can help students learn. particularly if those mistakes are followed by feedback tailored to the individual student

Large Language Models are prone to producing incorrect, but plausible facts, a phenomenon known as confabulation or hallucination.

Prompts are simply the text given to the LLM in order to produce an output.

Our guidelines challenge students to remain the “human in the loop” and maintain that not only are students responsible for their own work but they should actively oversee the AIs output, check with reliable sources, and complement any AI output with their unique perspectives and insights. Our aim is to encourage students to critically assess and interrogate AI outputs, rather than passively accept them.

increasing metacognition

: to help students learn with AI and to helpthem learn about AI

how and when to use AI as they instill best practices in AI-assisted learning.

hese tools offer the potential for adaptivelearning experiences tailored to individual students’needs and abilities, as well as opportunities to increase learning through a variety of other pedagogical methods.

This paper examines the transformative role of Large Language Models (LLMs) in education and their potential as learning tools, despite their inherent risks and limitations. The authors propose seven approaches for utilizing AI in classrooms: AI-tutor, AI-coach, AI-mentor, AI-teammate, AI-tool, AI-simulator, and AI-student, each with distinct pedagogical benefits and risks. The aim is to help students learn with and about AI, with practical strategies designed to mitigate risks such as complacency about the AI’s output, errors, and biases. These strategies promote active oversight, critical assessment of AI outputs, and complementation of AI's capabilities with the students' unique insights. By challenging students to remain the "human in the loop", the authors aim to enhance learning outcomes while ensuring that AI serves as a supportive tool rather than a replacement. The proposed framework offers a guide for educators navigating the integration ofAI-assisted learning in classrooms.

A company that doesn’t like the rules could threaten to pack up and leave. Then what? 

“Keeping the details of AI technologies secret is likely to thwart good-faith researchers trying to protect the public interest, as well as competition, and open science,”

agreed not to share: the parameters that are known as the “weights” of their algorithms.

a detailed metadata trail that reflects the history of a given image.

It is also not clear who those experts will be, how they will be chosen, whether the same experts will be tasked with examining all the systems, and by what measure they will determine risk.

he outlined a plan to bring lawmakers up to speed on emerging technology by convening at least nine panels of experts to give them a crash course in A.I. and help them craft informed legislation.

foundation model providers generally do not comply with draft requirements to describe the use of copyrighted training data, the hardware used and emissions produced in training, and how they evaluate and test models.

I support an Anti-AI movement in the sense that we should have some opposition questioning what's going on.

Bargaining is possible in relation to issues linked to tactical time – or even strategic time; but never on issues that belong to historical time.

by rejecting Christianity, we have in fact become hedonistic pagans.

thought that the rejection of religion and Christianity would be followed by the emergence of an ideal, enlightened community based on an understanding of the good and the common good, living a free and superior life according to recognised, sociologically based societal truths.

with spiritual foundations in mind, and digging a shovelful deeper, it is also worth saying that at the base of the Hungarian Constitution and the intellectual foundations of the new era there lies an anthropological insight

If you read the constitutions of other European countries, which are liberal constitutions, you will see that at the heart of them is the “I”. If you read the Hungarian Constitution, you will see that it is centred on the “we”.

the federalists are carrying out an attempt to oust us; they have openly said that they wanted a change of government in Hungary.

These could only be introduced in the European Union because the British left and we V4 members could not prevent them – and indeed the V4 was attacked by the federalists. We can all see the result.

I am not even going to talk about clever little European tricks such as the sudden doubling – in a single year – of the volume of goods exported from Germany to Kazakhstan.

either to decouple, or to participate in international competition. As they say in Brussels, “de-risking or connectivity”.

The amount paid for the European Union’s imports of gas and oil – the two together – was 300 billion euros before the Russian war, and 653 billion euros last year.

They call this seclusion “decoupling” – or, more subtly, “de-risking”, which is a form of risk reduction.

by the size of their economies, by their national GDPs, we see that in the rankings for 2030 Britain, Italy and France will have dropped out of the top ten where they still are today; and Germany – now fourth – will have slid down to tenth place.

“native genocide”, which I think means the extermination of indigenous peoples; slavery and the slave trade; and “reparatory justice”, meaning reparations for injustices.

The EU has about 400 million people; and if I add in the rest of the Western world, that is another 400 million. So this amounts to 800 million people, surrounded by another seven billion. And the European Union has an accurate view of itself: it is a rich union, but a weak one.

the settling of the new equilibrium will not happen overnight – or even from one month to the next

the “Thucydides Trap”,

Experience shows that the dominant great power tends to see itself as more benevolent and better-intentioned than it really is, and attributes malice to its challenger more often than is – or should be – justified

The bad news is that of the sixteen instances thus identified, twelve have ended in war, and only four were peacefully resolved

And it can neutralise the chief US weapon, the chief US weapon of power, which we call “universal values”

“Ending the century of humiliation” – or, to paraphrase the Americans, “Make China Great Again”.

So China has quite simply created its own: we see the BRICS and the One Belt One Road Initiative; and we also see the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the development resources of which are several times greater than the development resources of all the Western countries. 

there are no eternal winners and no eternal losers

In 2010 the US and the European Union contributed 22 – 23 per cent of total world production; today the US contributes 25 per cent and the European Union 17 per cent. In other words, the US has successfully repelled the European Union’s attempt to move up alongside it – or even ahead of it.

we also had a plan, which we expressed as the need to create a great free trade zone stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok.

after its own civil war, from the 1870s onwards the United States grew to be the preeminent country, and its inalienable right to world economic supremacy is part of its national identity, and a kind of article of faith.

What has happened is that China has made the roughly three-hundred-year journey from the Western industrial revolution to the global information revolution in just thirty years.

But it has turned out that in fact this issue, the liberation of China, belongs to the historical timeframe; because as a result of that liberation, the United States – and all of us – are now facing a greater force than the one we wanted to defeat.