Reasons of confidentiality mean that many medical, financial, educational and other personal records, from the analysis of which much public good could be derived, are in practice unavailable.

DATA ARE valuable. But not all of them are as valuable as they could be.

“Pioneers” are the people on a mission to change the world; “artisans” are interested in mastering a specific skill; “operators” derive a sense of meaning from life outside work; “strivers” are more focused on pay and status; “givers” want to do work that directly improves the lives of others; and “explorers” seek out new experiences.

And teams are likelier to perform well if they blend types of employees: visionaries to inspire, specialists to deliver and all those people who want to do a job well but not think about it at weekends. Like mayonnaise, the secret is in the mixture.

they felt their roles had less meaning when they no longer had direct responsibility for the well-being of passengers.

Having a purpose does not necessarily mean a desire to found a startup, head up the career ladder or log into virtual Davos. Some people are fired up by the prospect of learning new skills or of deepening their expertise.

“Pioneers” are the people on a mission to change the world; “artisans” are interested in mastering a specific skill; “operators” derive a sense of meaning from life outside work; “strivers” are more focused on pay and status; “givers” want to do work that directly improves the lives of others; and “explorers” seek out new experiences.

Last year Amazon Web Services (AWS), the online giant’s cloud-computing arm, introduced Amazon SageMaker Canvas, a set of tools that lets people deploy machine-learning models without writing code.

low code/no code (LC/NC) tools

Power Apps platform

Just 25m people around the world are fluent in standard programming languages

They allow anyone to write software using drag-and-drop visual interfaces alone (no code) or with a bit of code creeping in (low code).

“the future of coding is no coding at all”

Now its neighbours’ instability looks like a risk to the solemnly invoked peace that underpins the whole European project.

By contrast, France’s President Emmanuel Macron relentlessly pushes the idea that Europe must develop its own “strategic autonomy”.

Bits of eastern Europe see NATO, and specifically America, as the bedrock of their security.

The way Europe deals with its neighbourhood is an extension of how it was built.

Europe sends money, and recently vaccines, as part of its “neighbourhood policy”, which extends to bits of the Middle East. But the task is low on its list of priorities.

In the western Balkans, pound-shop demagogues rant and loot. Across the Mediterranean, a mere people-smuggling dinghy ride from the EU, North Africa now mixes a drift away from democracy (Tunisia) with civil war (Libya).

But peace stops at the EU’s borders.

the crucial thing about the European project is that it has delivered peace.

China has long nurtured ambitions—invigorated by American sanctions but so far unsuccessful—to build a fully fledged chip industry.

It aspires to double Europe’s share of chipmaking, currently around 10%.

The shortages, and America’s tech-flavoured trade war with China, have reminded politicians how vital chips are to the modern economy—and how over-reliant their supply is on a few giant firms.

TSMC’s boss, C.C. Wei, said this month that a correction could be “less volatile” for his firm thanks to its position at the technological cutting-edge.

The chip business has swung between over- and undercapacity since it emerged in the 1950s, observes Malcolm Penn of Future Horizons, a firm of analysts (see chart). If history is a guide, then, a glut is in on the way. The only question is when.

on January 20th both Meta and Twitter integrated NFTs into their platforms.

the creator economy

web3 will not dislodge web2.

the future may belong to a mix of the two, with web3 occupying certain niches.

One is that the ownership of the computing power that keeps many blockchains up to date is often very concentrated, which gives these “miners”, as they are called, undue influence.

at recently launched web3 projects, between 30% and 40% is owned by the people who launched them.

Despite being a relatively recent phenomenon, web3 is exhibiting signs of centralisation. Because of the complexity of the technology, most people cannot interact directly with blockchains—or find it too tedious. Rather they rely on middlemen, such as OpenSea for consumers and Alchemy for developers.

“If something is truly decentralised, it becomes very difficult to change, and often remains stuck in time,” he writes. That creates opportunities: “A sure recipe for success has been to take a 1990’s protocol that was stuck in time, centralise it, and iterate quickly.”

Lock-in, reckons Mr Marlinspike, tends to emerge almost automatically.

That was the problem of early web3 offerings (then called “peer-to-peer” or “the decentralised web”).

Unlike Google and Meta they do not control their users’ data. OpenSea (in which a16z also has a stake) and Alchemy are just pipes to the blockchain. If their customers are unhappy, they can move to a competing service.

Syndicate helps investment clubs organise themselves into “decentralised autonomous organisations” governed by “smart contracts”, which are rules encoded in software and baked into a blockchain.

This is possible thanks to blockchains, which turn the centralised databases to which big tech owes its power into a common good that can be used by anybody without permission. Blockchains are a special type of ledger that is not maintained centrally by a single entity (as a bank controls all its customers accounts) but collectively by its users. Blockchains have outgrown cryptocurrencies, their earliest application, and spread into NFTs and other sorts of “decentralised finance” (DeFi). Now they are increasingly underpinning non-financial services.

Web3, in Mr Dixon’s telling, “combines the decentralised, community-governed ethos of web1 with the advanced, modern functionality of web2”.

More recently, open-source software, which users can download for nothing and adapt to their needs, took over from proprietary programs in parts of the industry—only to be reappropriated by the tech giants to run their mobile operating systems (as Google does with Android) or cloud-computing data centres (including those owned by Amazon, Microsoft and Google).

since November some $1trn of the value of cryptocurrencies, the most mature province of web3, has gone up in flames.

“You don’t own ‘web3’. VCs and their [limited partners] do,”

Pitted against them are the sceptics.

On one side sit techno-Utopians, firms offering assorted web3 services and their VC backers.

His token showed that NFTs are not as non-fungible as advertised. And OpenSea’s reaction illustrated that the supposedly decentralised web3 has its own gatekeepers.

NFTs are the most visible instantiation of “web3”—an idea that its advocates and their venture-capital (VC) backers hail as a better, more decentralised version of the internet, built atop distributed ledgers known as blockchains.

NFTs are the most visible instantiation of “web3”—an idea that its advocates and their venture-capital (VC) backers hail as a better, more decentralised version of the internet,

The remedy for the failures of competition policy is not to abandon the consumer welfare standard but to bring it up to date.

The large and fluid tech ecosystems offered by Alphabet, Amazon, Apple and others show the complexity of the task: they are in an innovative phase with new services being created that are highly popular and they increasingly compete with each other. It would be easy to erode the quality of their products with ill-judged rules.

Regulators and governments, especially in Europe, must be realistic about their ability to anticipate consumers’ needs and should not pursue firms purely because they have grown big by being useful

Before the consumer welfare standard emerged in legal judgments in the 1970s and 1980s, America’s trustbusting was capricious.

a bill that would ban tech giants from using their platforms to favour their own services.

Since the 1990s the EU has tended to put consumers’ interests first, but now its commissioner wants to apply a “broader notion” of harm.

One school, named after Louis Brandeis, a judge, holds that big companies must be tamed because they corrupt politics and damage customers, competitors and staff. The other says the goal of antitrust is to protect the welfare of consumers, which can be enhanced by big, efficient firms. For decades the consumer approach has been ascendant, but now the consensus has frayed and trustbusters are heading in a Brandeisian direction.

Interoperability often requires a level of commercial and technical finesse rarely seen in the management of government contracts.

In 2017 thousands of Google employees signed a letter outlining their unhappiness with the company’s role in the Maven project. Microsoft’s bid for the JEDI contract faced internal opposition on similar grounds. Many others will also have concerns about data fusion on such a scale, for military or any other purposes.

to build “a continuous pipeline of all-source intelligence analysis” into “continually learning analytic engines”.

“data fusion”—combining different pieces of information to reveal things that one source cannot capture, including things no human would think to look for.

In 2019 the Pentagon awarded Microsoft a $10bn contract for its Joint Enterprise Defence Infrastructure (JEDI). Last year Amazon, which has been supplying the CIA with such services since 2013, got the contract annulled. A new tender issued in November will probably see the work shared among a number of firms. There will be more than enough to go around.

an increasing amount of processing be done “on the edge”—that is, on the platform carrying the sensor.

an narrow down a huge range of potential targets and pass information about them freely to where it is most needed.

But radar’s capabilities had to be built into systems that made use of them.

you need ways to combine their data into information that can be acted on at speed.

We labelled each of the roughly 1,700 songs with the lyrics language using an automated technique.

Many of the K-pop bands popular in South Korea manage to achieve global success by mixing in some English.

we plotted the most-streamed song for countries in each group weekly for the full five-year period, revealing precisely when and where these leaps happen.

the hegemony of English is in decline.

The Economist trawled through the top 100 tracks in 70 countries according to Spotify.

that price will be paid from the wallet rather than through physical suffering.

the amount of gas held in storage.

he thinks extra LNG could fill 15% of the shortfall that would result from a complete Russian cut-off.

to retire coal-fired power stations and its rash decision, taken in the wake of Japan’s Fukushima disaster, to shut down its nuclear plants, it remains more reliant on natural gas than it need be.

Germany is the most vulnerable.

This would be felt most acutely in Slovakia, Austria and parts of Italy (see chart), reckons David Victor of the University of California, San Diego

Without a war, JPMorgan Chase, a bank, forecasts that higher prices will lead to Gazprom making over $90bn in gross operating profit this year, up from $20bn in 2019.

may yet agree on how to contain China’s semiconductor ambitions. But it may prove impossible for one state to control such a complex industry.

despite Mr Trump’s campaign to snuff out China’s indigenous industries and Mr Biden’s more multilateral attempts to achieve the same end.

American semiconductor companies and those in friendly countries could sell their most advanced chipmaking services to the Chinese market, yet still be able to prevent Chinese firms from developing the most sophisticated manufacturing capacity themselves.

should focus on protecting trade secrets.

controlling exports of specific machines and components is unwise anyway, because no net of controls can be drawn tightly enough to stop a determined,

a compromise by cutting off Chinese access to chips and chipmaking tools above a certain level of sophistication.

America is caught between choosing a softer set of controls which may work better in the long run, or a harsher set that could hurt Chinese technology more in the short run but might harm American industry overall.

Without America’s friends on board America’s hard line on exports threatens to weaken its own companies.

The Europeans and the Japanese both want a more formal multilateral approach. But America reckons its ability to react fast to a Chinese threat would inevitably be curbed.

narrower coalition-of-the-willing approach to diplomacy.

the leading countries in the chip supply chain—America, Japan and the Netherlands

the Semiconductor Industry Association

of meetings to discuss sanctions that might be put on Russia

the Quad, a club of countries that embraces America, Australia, India and Japan.

global chip diplomacy is still weak.

to co-operate in “rebalancing” global chip supply chains. That was diplomatic language for keeping them away from China.

he EU-US Trade and Technology Council,

Officials pay lip service to the idea of updating Wassenaar so that it might help control the trade in semiconductors.

the Organisation of the Semiconductor Exporting Countries: OSEC.

he has never seen semiconductors so consistently top the diplomatic agenda.

must build a consensus with friendly countries.

lose its grip over the chip supply chain.

to develop their own versions of chip technologies they had previously imported along supply chains linked to firms in America.

beyond the reach of American law.

to evade America’s Export Administration Regulations, qualifying them as “ EAR-free”

Last year Huawei’s revenues shrank for the first time in a decade, by almost a third.

Digitalization is the use of digital technologies to change a business model and provide new revenue and value-producing opportunities; it is the process of moving to a digital business.

“Fundamentally, this resulted in a breakdown of trust between the business and the data sides of the house. That inspired us to leave Flexport and really try to understand its problem and solve it.”

with heritage in design of fault-tolerant systems.

with no dependence on external technology or licenses,

To some extent, RISC-V is at hardware (HW) level what Linux was in its origins at Operating System level, offering a competitive open source platform able to compete with Windows-based products.

requires improved computing performance, and methods to ensure safe and reliable software (SW) execution

PRINCIPLES FOR DIGITAL DEVELOPMENT

Design for scale:Widespread distribution of digital projects requires more than a pilot project, but also sustainable models and funding and partners who are also able to implement the initiatives in other regions.4) Build for sustainability: To achieve long-term impact, it is important to support users and stakeholders equally – with sustainable programmes, platforms and digital tools

Vožnja električnim automobilom skuplja nego "dizelašem"

By calling on NATO to pull military infrastructure out of Eastern Europe, and on the U.S. to offer written guarantees that it will never support Ukraine’s accession to NATO, Sarotte told me, “he wants a do-over of 1997.”

“Just as a glacier sweeps across a landscape slowly, yet alters broad swathes of terrain profoundly, so too did NATO’s expansion eastward force elements of the post-Cold War political landscape to shift and settle, leaving behind landmarks for the twenty-first century.”

At a summit in Helsinki, Clinton promised to give Yeltsin four billion dollars in investment in 1997, as much as the U.S. had provided in the five years prior, while also dangling W.T.O. membership and other economic inducements.

Washington “must be very careful not to be seen as running after the Russians, offering them concessions,” Clinton’s Secretary of State at the time, Warren Christopher, said.

Putin’s current demand—clearly provocative and unrealistic—is for NATO to remove its military infrastructure from states that joined after the 1997 agreement.

a Russia-NATO agreement signed by his predecessor Boris Yeltsin in May, 1997

(Moscow, short on cash and presiding over a collapsing empire, was in desperate need of the fifteen billion Deutsche marks that it received in order to withdraw Soviet forces from East Germany); Western confidence and ambition (“To hell with that,” Bush had told Kohl at Camp David, dismissing the Soviets’ efforts to dictate Germany’s future relationship with NATO. “We prevailed and they didn’t”); and bungling negotiating on the part of Gorbachev (“This carelessness will take its revenge on us,” Valentin Falin, a top Soviet official and expert on Germany, remarked).

In September, 1990, Gorbachev signed off on the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany

as a sign that the secretary had only been test-driving one potential option of many.”

Soviet leaders would rather see Germany anchored in a multilateral alliance than left on its own.

the West should lock in as many gains as it could before the political climate shifted yet again and Moscow’s position became more entrenched

“An extension of NATO’s territory to the east, that is, nearer to the borders of the Soviet Union, will not happen,” he said in one address, as Sarotte recounts.

the context of the moment

the truth looks to be somewhere in between.”

Did the West, led by the U.S., promise to limit NATO expansion eastward?

The phrase “not one inch” is a reference to a statement made by U.S. Secretary of State James Baker, in 1990

“ ‘Not one inch to the East,’ they told us in the nineties. So what? They cheated, just brazenly tricked us!”

have different interpretations of history

Why Washington Can’t Learn

Only if Americans abandon their fealty to the idea of American Exceptionalism and the militarism that has sustained it, might it be possible to conclude that the wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan served some faintly useful purpose.

Almost certainly, the North Vietnamese would have succeeded in uniting their divided country with much less bloodshed. And Taliban control of Afghanistan would in all likelihood have continued without interruption in the years following 2001, with the Afghan people left to sort out their own destiny. Yet, despite immense sacrifices by U.S. troops, a vast expenditure of treasure, and quite literally millions of dead in Southeast Asia and Afghanistan, that’s exactly how things turned out anyway.

too few Americans are willing to confront the disaster that has befallen the United States as a consequence of our serial misuse of military power.

Reliance on conscription to raise the force that fought in Vietnam spurred widespread popular opposition to that war. Reliance on a so-called volunteer military to carry the burden of waging the Afghan War allowed ordinary Americans to ignore what was being done in their name, especially when field commanders devised methods for keeping a lid on U.S. casualties.

It’s time to substitute a narrative describing an American military enterprise that began when the first U.S. combat troops came ashore in South Vietnam and persisted until the last American soldier departed Kabul in defeat some 56 years later.

Subsuming them, however, was the concept of American exceptionalism.

While these events unleashed a torrent of self-congratulation in the U.S., the passing of the Cold War did not substantively modify the aspirations or expectations of the American people. For decades, the United States had exerted itself to uphold and enhance the advantageous position it gained in 1945. Its tacit goal was not only to hold the communist world in check but to achieve ideological, economic, political, and military primacy on a global scale, with all but the most cynical American leaders genuinely persuaded that U.S. supremacy served the interests of humankind.

Among the things it left fully intact was a stubborn resistance to learning in Washington that poses a greater threat to the wellbeing of the American people than communism or terrorism ever did.

That war was destined to continue for 20 years. By the time it ended, many observers had long since begun to compare it to Vietnam. The similarities were impossible to miss. Both were wars of doubtful strategic necessity. Both dragged on endlessly. Both concluded in mortifying failure. To capture the essence of the war in Afghanistan, it didn’t take long for critics to revive a term that had been widely used to describe Vietnam: each was a quagmire. Here was all you needed to know.

The Global War on Terror now became the organizing principle for American statecraft, serving a function comparable to the Cold War during the second half of the prior century.

When President Richard Nixon visited “Red” China in 1972, the Cold War morphed into something quite different. With the nation’s most prominent anticommunist taking obvious delight in shaking hands with Chairman Mao Zedong in Beijing, the war effort in Vietnam became utterly inexplicable — and so it has remained ever since.

In history, context is everything.

The senior administration official said basic human rights and freedoms have been “core to any affirmative vision of the internet” from the beginning.

encourage any splintering of the internet”

Asking governments around the world to root out any internet infrastructure made by Chinese companies like Huawei as a barrier to entry into the alliance struck Pielemeier,

including a pledge “to use only trustworthy providers” in core internet infrastructure — a stipulation that freaked out some digital rights advocates and called to mind the “clean network” initiative that began under the Trump administration.

In the future, 3GPP and O-RAN are going to co-exist and share a number of key technological features, at the same time that they complement and compete with each other. Operators have and should continue to have the freedom to choose, and suppliers should need no permission from policy makers to make their choices and place their bets.   Therefore, market-based competition ­– where merits of technical performance and the competitiveness of different solutions and architectures decide market outcomes – should be ensured. The freedom of the market should prevail and not be taken away from commercial players’ ability to make their investment choices. This means that different approaches can compete on technical merits, price, security, flexibility and functionality.  Presence of market forces, innovation and open interfaces are meant to ensure that competition prevails and delivers end-user and societal benefits.   Therefore, policy makers should not pick winners, but continue to ensure the following outcomes:  Open markets for competition while letting the market decide   Technology-neutral regulation, not mandating any architecture  Technology-neutral fixed broadband and wireless roll-out subsidies, which only target geographies where commercial, market-driven investments are not a viable option to ensure digital inclusion. 

Amarna Letters

Writing as the key ancient diplomatic ‘technology’

The United States

Maybe we make our decisions on the basis of vastly complex processes that bear very little resemblance to the explanations we give for our decisions. Maybe all or nearly all explanations are just post-hoc rationalisations.

translate them into reasoning a human can understand.

giving the student an approximate rule and advising them that there are exceptions.

experiencing a poem means experiencing something too complicated to be explained systematically. I see this as having kinship with the conceptual richness problem, although it’s not quite the same thing.

Poetry criticism:

Partly the answer is a judgment call- I think that the statistics I gave were, broadly speaking, very fair.

But that question contains a series of thick concepts- e.g “unusually bad period”, “economically speaking” “American working class”.

“has the American working class had an unusually bad period, economically speaking, in the last 55+ years”.

I would object to this objection that it was fairer on the whole just to look at the aggregate if we are to assess the position of the working class qua working class.

The right often maintains that the law here is clear, and it is not the job of judges to legislate from the bench- even where the law will lead to tragedy as in this case.

no Schelling point of literalism

everyone in the room is interpreting the law in terms of policy goals and ethical values to some degree.

So does this case break down into a Sophie’s choice between going with the law and going with morality?

This is why sentiments like “the law is the law” are so silly

Laws are designed as far as is possible to create socially desirable flexibility while avoiding socially undesirable uncertainty.

it undermines the rule of law

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on who you ask) because law cannot be turned into an algorithim we often face what contemporary legal scholars call legal indeterminacy- a situation in which there is no single right answer to many important legal questions.

the Drefyus critique.

at dealing with certain kinds of toy problems

Symbolic AI tried to capture intelligence through explicit representations, operations using rules, etc.

Philosophical work (e.g. Wittgenstein’s metaphor of family resemblance as a replacement for the idea of necessary and sufficient conditions) has informed many psychologists working on concepts in turn.

the apparent impossibility of finding necessary and sufficient conditions

Even this ‘simple’ term, understood well enough that just about any native speaker could check whether a given use was right, wrong or dubious, cannot be turned into an algorithm.

compact lists of necessary and sufficient conditions-.

Maybe by teasing out the transdisciplinary nature of the problem, we’ll encourage cross-pollination, or at least that’s my hope.

The conceptual richness problems are problems of trying to cope with thick concepts, either by (quixotically) trying to spell them out in all their detail and creating an algorithm, or by finding an alternative to having to spell them out.

A thick concept is a concept for which we can check whether any given instance falls under that concept relatively easily.

[A]spects of how to build AI systems such that they will aid rather than harm their creators.

Two little things forced them together: history and geography.

illusion of permanence

One of the many things Brexiters could never understand is this notion that the supposedly oppressive EU could be, for small nations, a route out of domination by bigger neighbours.)

one of profound and deeply rooted animosity, the other of intense cooperation

made it clear the British state had no interest in acknowledging what had happened

Only by updating our understanding of theirgeopolitical power can we make better sense of this brave new digitalworld.

no longer tenable to talk about big technology companies aspawns their government masters can move around on a geopoliticalchessboard

the techno-utopians will usetraditional companies and decentralized projects, such as Ethereum, toexplore new frontiers in digital space, such as the metaverse, or newapproaches to providing essential service

e. e Chineseglobalists will argue that the CCP’s ability to sustain robust growth—andtherefore domestic legitimacy—will ride on whether China can establishitself as a hub of global innovation.

ey will also press for greater decoupling,arguing that their vital work needs maximum protection from adversarialhacking.

If they manage to establishthemselves as “the indispensable companies”

e United States believes that its foremostgeopolitical imperative is to prevent its displacement by its techno-authoritarian rival. China’s top priority is to ensure that it can stand onits own two feet economically and technologically before a coalition ofadvanced industrial democracies sties its further expansion.

the Internet was that itwould accelerate the globalization that transformed economics andpolitics in the 1990s.

people are so accustomed tothinking of the state as the principal problem-solving actor.