which might make people likely to defer to the algorithms more often than they should.

increase human decision-makers’ accountability

fallen back on standard antidiscrimination legislation

exploring four factors:

the potential scale of bias: Any flaw could affect millions of people, exposing companies to class-action lawsuits of historic proportions and putting their reputations at risk.

no agreed-upon definition of fairness

to code some concept of fairness into the software, requiring that all outcomes meet certain conditions.

If that data is biased, then the AI will acquire and may even amplify the bias.

AI systems that produce biased results have been making headlines. One well-known example is Apple’s credit card algorithm, which has been accused of discriminating against women, triggering an investigation by New York’s Department of Financial Services. But the problem crops up in many other guises: for instance, in ubiquitous online advertisement algorithms, which may target viewers by race, religion, or gender, and in Amazon’s automated résumé screener, which filtered out female candidates. A recent study published in Science showed that risk prediction tools used in health care, which affect millions of people in the United States every year, exhibit significant racial bias. Another study, published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, found that the software used by leading hospitals to prioritize recipients of kidney transplants discriminated against Black patients.

to guide executives through those tasks, drawing in part on concepts applied to the management of strategic risks.

“On Artificial Intelligence—A European Approach to Excellence and Trust” and its 2021 proposal for an AI legal framework

put smaller European companies at a considerable disadvantage

Some argue that curbing it will hamper the economic performance of Europe and the United States relative to less restrictive countries, notably China, whose digital giants have thrived with the help of ready, lightly regulated access to personal information of all sorts.

It is precisely on account of the humility the Lord had instilled in the mind of Calvin that I am drawn to him.

Humility is the supreme virtue according to Calvin, not only in attitude but in all of life.42

"Calvinism is the doctrine that teaches that God picks those He wants and condemns those He doesn't want."

Modesty and Humility

The technologies of humility I propose would require us to improve our skills of normative forecasting: to ask whether we framed our questions right; to draw in marginalized and uncomfortable viewpoints; to review our history of crises with less triumphalist eyes; and always to identify who is most vulnerable if we go wrong, and who would bear the costs.

the absence of mechanisms for generating, even temporarily, a sense of a common purpose in the United States, the very failing that Kaufman also bewail

The U.S. self-understanding of a technologically superior society, able to cure any ill with a well-timed technological fix, has to be sure enjoyed wide currency in the post-colonial world, but that technocratic vision is precisely what needs to be shaken in the aftermath of the pandemic, with a turn toward humility as I suspect White would agree.

this results in an over-valuation of predictive, technical knowledge in relation to insights from history, sociology and politics

there are deep-seated, systematic, institutional commitments to ways of knowing—civic epistemologies as I call them—that consistently demote some kinds of knowledge at the expense of others.

Her emphasis was on more biological knowledge and better management, not absence of political understanding and resulting lack of control.

Instead of worrying about the political context into which their decisions would land, they repeatedly focused on closing gaps in our scientific knowledge of how pandemics arise and spread

rather a set of “institutional mechanisms” designed to incorporate “memory, experience, and concerns for justice into our schemes of governance and public policy.”

we could all do better to stay grounded, conscious of our humble natures, fragilities, and interdependence.

the problem is that we don’t agree on this priority, not that we are too certain in our evaluations of risk.

It is just that the governors of Florida and Texas have a very different set of priorities and values from those that Jasanoff embraces.

the United States also lacks shared values

The U.S. Achilles’s heel is not lack of humility; it is a toxic social ideology rooted in a blind obsession with individual freedom.

virulent opposition to social reciprocity, to any sense of a common and mutual commitment to one another as members of a shared community

One potential consequence is that while the United States suffered over 244 excess deaths per 100,000 population since March 2020, cumulative excess deaths have totaled only 93 per 100,000 in Vietnam and 150 per 100,000 in Cuba, despite being substantially poorer countries.

“we embraced preparedness when we should have opted for precaution.”

The Afghan army in the summer of 2021 seemed formidable when judged by advanced weapons and numbers of soldiers but proved to be a proverbial “paper tiger” by evaporating overnight when challenged militarily.

the most fundamental ethical question posed by prediction is not how we can better assess whether certain events will take place; it’s what we should do once it is clear they cannot be avoided.

The burden of responsibility is reliably passed around until it simply dissipates into resignation to the status quo.

Buridan’s ass

we are too uncertain to select from, we postpone a decision until one course of action seems inevitable.

a neoliberal tool for shifting burdens onto individuals, rather than pursuing structural change

Existential ethics, she argued, requires us to act in the face of these constraints, not in spite of them.

we become aware of the contingency of our lives—and our responsibility in shaping them

the avoidance of choice.

not-knowing and not-doing:

the failure to act

how our present actions are directly contributing to bringing about, or at least making more likely, certain kinds of futures

to ourselves as knowing and acting subjects.

is right to point to the limitations of a “preparedness” regime, with its distinctive approaches to global risk assessment.

The more relevant virtue in preparing for the next crisis is willingness to improve, expand, and integrate our knowledge.

While it directs us to reflect on what we cannot do, it does not help us make better choices on things we can do.

It can serve to excuse not knowing what was in fact knowable, and not being prepared for what we should have seen coming.

The problem was not in the aspiration to preparedness but with a technocratic approach to preparedness that sidelined certain variables as irrelevant and ignored political realities and citizens’ needs.

Consistently missing was knowledge about social and political factors

a different kind of knowledge that would have allowed for better planning could have been pursued but wasn’t

All three assumed public buy-in and full compliance. Their assumptions about political unity were naïve

The Global Health Security Index model did not include variables on political polarization and trust, income inequality, racial disparities, or the marginalization of groups and regions in its calculations.

those who are involved in seeking knowledge and making policy have some control over what it looks like.

from choices about where to put our limited resources of time, money, and attention.

Any decision about what knowledge to pursue is also a decision about what areas of uncertainty and ignorance we can live with—whose problems we can safely ignore

We must pay attention to the possibility of mistakes and take precautions to make them less costly.

Scientists themselves are usually the first to acknowledge uncertainty and non-knowing due to these limitations.

It is almost a truism that scientific knowledge is inherently uncertain, fallible, and incomplete.

some inherent limitations of scientific inquiry are appropriately faced with humility

we acknowledge the likelihood of mistakes and accept the possibility of defeat rather than being confident in our predictions and capacity for control.

Jasanoff grounds her plea for humility in the uncertainty and unpredictability that characterize such crises.

Hume notoriously dismissed humility as a “monkish virtue,” arguing that it is neither useful nor agreeable to the self or to others.

umility has not always been among the popular virtues.

re too often based on the supposed greater rationality and modernity of Western societies.

The result is not a world unified in confronting illnesses all too capable of crossing national borders, but rather one in which the needs of the Western world are always put first.

we must care about the dying child of a distant land not because her suffering is intrinsically objectionable, but because the diseases of elsewhere can easily become our own.

The microbe that felled one child in a distant continent yesterday can reach yours today and seed a global pandemic tomorrow.

“to prevent, protect against, control and provide a public health response to the international spread of disease in ways that are commensurate with and restricted to public health risks, and which avoid unnecessary interference with international traffic and trade.”

humanism must be a central component of the humility

they are rooted in a distinctively Western vision of a history of self-styled superiority to the rest of the world

too confidently acting upon such imperfect knowledge.

The proposal, in short, meant risking the lives of tens of thousands of Muslims in a spurious effort to protect European lives and economic interests

the French delegation proposed suspending all maritime traffic into and out of Arabian ports. In effect, pilgrims who did not wish to remain in Mecca would be condemned to a perilous journey across the Arabian desert and most likely death from disease or dehydration.

866 the third International Sanitary Conference—an early forerunner of the World Health Organization (WHO)—convened in Constantinople at the request of the French government,

Humility demands just that kind of self-abnegation from power and policy: to win greater knowledge because it sees from the margins as well as the center, and deeper wisdom because it acknowledges the imperfections of human understanding.

The technologies of humility would have us reflect longer and harder on the obligations we incur when acting on imperfect knowledge, by adopting the perspectives of those who are acted upon or are themselves not able to intervene.

the technologies of humility may be less humble than the techniques of prediction.

to “inspire and mobilize the public.”

why people did not trust the experts when their children’s health was at stake

Had technologies of humility been more actively integrated into our schemes of governance and planning, we would not have missed phenomena such as vaccine hesitancy until they arrived on our doorstep as if unannounced.

to be sure we are asking the best questions.

But precaution, as a foil to preparedness, invites us to reflect with humility on the unknown unknowns, the surprises lurking beyond the imaginations of the best-trained minds that end up hurting those least able to defend themselves.

Hamburg spoke about “efforts to identify critical gaps in knowledge that would affect the contours and control measures for this pandemic.”

Garbage in, garbage out, as the computer scientists put it: everyone knows that bad inputs produce flawed outputs, and predictions are only as good as the data they rest on.

With massive advances in data science and technology, humankind is in a position to process information about almost anything that moves on the planet at sweeping scales and speeds.

early in the trajectory of emergence, more will be unknown than known, and decisionmakers will have to act on incomplete information.

the GHSI assumed that all nations agree it is in their collective best interest to act in unison in a pandemic. Sadly, the chronicle of COVID-19—from the still unresolved question of how the virus first infected humans, to the surprising persistence of vaccine hesitancy—contradicts that basic assumption.

securing public health and public safety requires human beings to give up aspects of their liberty in the interests of a common good

Nor had U.S. governance ever involved the centralized control that the nation’s leading public health experts yearned for.

Fast forward to October 2021. According to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Research Center, the United States, which led the GHSI as top scorer in preparedness, has the highest number of recorded COVID-19 deaths in the world, a staggering 740,000. The UK, ranked number two in the GHSI, has recorded more total deaths than any EU country. More tellingly, Britain ranks ahead of most major EU countries in deaths per 100,000 population.

none of the authors paid much attention to the swiftly moving, shape-shifting events, cutting across geopolitical lines, that impede rational analysis and effective response during an actual pandemic.

All three documents—the GHSI, the playbook, and the Fineberg editorial—earn high marks as delineations of steps that intelligent and decisive policymakers should take in their efforts to be prepared for emerging infectious diseases.

It was a valiant attempt to identify all the relevant questions that should be asked at the onset of an outbreak, compiled with the earnest attention that one might expect in a first-rate “policy analysis exercise” at one of our top public policy schools.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, the United States and the United Kingdom scored highest while small, war-torn, and politically unstable states fared worst, with North Korea, Somalia, and Equatorial Guinea bringing up the rear in national capacity.

The short answer is that we embraced preparedness when we should have opted for precaution.

Why did we not know when the information was there to be known? Why were we caught unprepared?

what we can do but who might get hurt, what happened when we tried before, whose perceptions were systematically ignored, and what protections are in place if we again guess wrong.

technologies of humility: institutional mechanisms—including greater citizen participation—for incorporating memory, experience, and concerns for justice into our schemes of governance and public policy.

Decades of effort to protect human health and the environment suggest that the choice is not so stark or binary.

Humility, by contrast, admits that defeat is possible

Preparedness, in short, is a heroic, can-do posture, bravely denying the possibility of defeat.

What I offer here is a plea for humility, not merely as a stance of modesty vis-à-vis the powerful and still poorly understood forces of nature and society, but also as a practice of reasoning and policy that accepts uncertainty as its foundation and harm mitigation as its goal.

Can one operationalize the precautionary mindset as a positive alternative to the known failures of prediction?

to enable and justify prudent forward movement to serve the common good, even when the consequences of acting cannot be completely known

Yet precaution remains deeply controversial. Critics frequently dismiss it as a recipe for inaction and stagnation.

reveals overconfidence in the pictures of nature and society on which predictions were based.

What I offer here is a plea for humility as a practice of reasoning and policy that accepts uncertainty as its foundation and harm mitigation as its goal.

People are led astray by confirmation bias, where they pay attention to data that confirms their idea, and they escalate commitments by continuing to advocate for their plans even in the face of negative information.

You want people to propose ideas and be passionate about them, but you also want them to be totally honest about the potential negatives.

“What are the key assumptions, and what data will make them flawed?”

his team failed to dissect a crucial assumption — that the invasion by some 1,400 Cuban exiles would lead to a popular uprising against the Castro regime.

You can also ask a colleague to play devil’s advocate, where you ask them, for the sake of argument, to take the opposing view. But make sure to get the opposing view on the table.

a “climate in which people feel free to express work-relevant thoughts and feelings.”

‘Hey, we’re going to have this meeting. I know you have a particular viewpoint, and I think it’s very important that it gets heard, so I’d like to make sure you share it with the group.’”

Why? First, it frames the problem to be debated. If the problem is too general, the discussion will go all over the place; if it’s too narrow, that will limit the options. So spend time thinking about the best question. And make sure it isn’t leading, meaning it doesn’t bias the answers. Second, it signals that you want real debate, not just a charade of one. Third, it invites people with different ideas to speak up.

Why? First, it frames the problem to be debated. If the problem is too general, the discussion will go all over the place; if it’s too narrow, that will limit the options. So spend time thinking about the best question. And make sure it isn’t leading, meaning it doesn’t bias the answers. Second, it signals that you want real debate, not just a charade of one. Third, it invites people with different ideas to speak up.

Biases create opportunities, but they also surround them with behavioral and social traps that prevent strategists recognizing and acting upon them, which means that mainstream managers often lack the insight, capabilities, and self-confidence needed to disrupt the status quo — and all the more so if that status quo was their creation in the first place. To avoid those traps, be a smart contrarian: Lean into cognitive dissonance, cast a wide net, embrace diversity, and stay on the outside.

If you are to leverage diversity, you should avoid relying on consensus.

targeting counter-stereotypical applicants with decent debt/income ratio and credit scores

The ideas of the people in elite networks tended to converge as the networks did not change much, which trapped them in their prior experiences and made them less likely to evaluate new ideas differently from the way they had evaluated prior ideas.

a smart contrarian – someone who looks for business practices that don’t make sense, who’s not too reliant on a small group of like-minded people, who can embrace diversity, and who’s happier on the sidelines. Let’s look at what that involves.

They dismiss ideas that challenge their assumptions about how the world works, make judgments based on stereotyping, and create cultures that limit their choices.

Quantum computers solve many problems exponentially faster and with less energy consumption than classical, or binary, computers.

"The game allows you to organize pieces that, like in life, are coming at you faster and upside down, in such a way that they’ll literally leave the screen. It’s like a microcosm of what you’re trying to do in life, except you’re doing it on the screen in a more concrete and tangible way,” she says.

“When we’re seeking ways to soothe ourselves, we often use a version of something that has worked in the past, even the distant past,”

“To clarify, the paragraph about Xinjiang in the letter is only for expressing the original intention of compliance and legality, not its intention or position.”

Our lives, after all, are defined by what we choose to pay attention to.

anything you’ve always said you wanted to do or learn but didn’t have time for.

to “microdose” on fun

by prioritizing the people and activities that are the most likely to create it for you.

personal fun “magnets,”

Think of times when you laughed with other people and felt completely engrossed in the experience. What were you doing? Who were you with? What made the experience feel so good?

“Fake” fun is my term for activities that take up our leisure time, but they don’t inspire playfulness or connection, or result in the total engagement that happens with flow.

When people are having actual fun, they report feeling focused and present, free from anxiety and self-criticism.

And “flow” describes the state of being fully engaged and focused, often to the point that you lose track of time.

Connection

Playfulness

playful people are better at managing stress.

Digital Platforms and Global Value Chains

Where Is the iPhone Made?

Last-minute pressure from China and India resulted in heavily watered-down language in the final agreement: Rather than calling on countries to accelerate the “phasing out of coal and subsidies for fossil fuels,” the agreement’s final language states the goal of “accelerating efforts toward the phase-down of unabated coal power and inefficient fossil fuel subsidies.” This is not simply a matter of semantics. The text is littered with phrases like “requests” and “calls upon” and “invites” and “encourages,” starkly reminding us that the pact is not binding.

Policies that attempt to capitalize on digitalization can also help to address the trade-gender inequality nexus, as well as the trade-regional inequality nexus.

single windows (i.e., a single unified point through which documents can be submitted digitally)

Data protection laws in African countries should, and in some cases already do, recognise that there are various kinds of data with different degrees of sensitivity, and allow any data that requires protection to flow among jurisdictions in which the legal protections are equivalent.

creating a safe and secure cyber-realm for digital markets and e-trade to flourish is already recognised on the African continent through the African Union Convention (Malabo Convention) on Cyber Security and Personal Data Protection, which was finalized by the African Union in 2014.

although previously e-commerce and digital services were not specifically part of the agreement, they are now on the agenda for the third round of AfCFTA negotiations.

WORLD TRADE REPORT 202182OPINION PIECEBy Alison Gillwald, Executive Director, Research ICT Africa and University of Cape TownMultiple economic resilience challenges for Africa in a rapidly digitalizing global economy

Accelerating digitalization and automation have also helped to facilitate and underpin this Schumpeterian process of “creative destruction”.

The pandemic has also shown that digital trade offers numerous solutions for a faster and more inclusive recovery.

“Ignoring the income of US factoryless manufacturers from their PRC sales not only greatly understates the benefits of US trading with the PRC but also surely distorts calculations of the bilateral trade balance,” the report says.

Today’s hyper-connected global economy, characterised by deep trade links, has made the world more vulnerable to shocks, but also more resilient to them when they strike.

If, in 2019, the decline in the rate of births was around 8%, then in 2020, that figure is already down to 3%,” she revealed. The number of women having abortions, she said, had declined by around 40%, and more mothers were carrying their babies to term.

In January, Rosstat, the official government statistics service, disclosed that the number of people living in the country dropped by 510,000 in just 12 months amid the Covid-19 pandemic, falling birth rate, and less immigration.

“From both a humanitarian and geopolitical perspective, bearing in mind the people of the country – 146 million for such a vast territory is absolutely insufficient,” the head of state said.

In October 2021, the Center organized its first event – the roundtable discussion “AI Ethics: Searching for Consensus.” In December, it hosted the conference “AI Global Dimension: From Discussion to Practice.” The Center works in both Russian and English languages. It is also tasked with publishing research results in specialized media outlets.

Moscow State Institute of International Relations. In October, it inaugurated its AI Center, which is aimed at researching ethical problems and foreign economic relations surrounding the technology, as well as boosting scientific collaboration with investigative centers from Russia and abroad.

Do future diplomats need AI?

‘Will AI and robots make people useless?’ has a clear answer: People will always be needed, it’s just that their skills will have to be modified.

the ‘Priority 2030’ academic leadership program

‘‘With one 30-second interaction, we defused the tension.’’

‘‘I got an email back from a team member that said, ‘Ouch,’ ’’ she recalled. ‘‘It was like a punch to the gut. I was already upset about making this mistake, and this note totally played on my insecurities.’’

‘‘Don’t underestimate the power of giving people a common platform and operating language.’’

in its race to build the perfect team, has perhaps unintentionally demonstrated the usefulness of imperfection and done what Silicon Valley does best: figure out how to create psychological safety faster, better and in more productive ways.

In the best teams, members listen to one another and show sensitivity to feelings and needs.

Everything is different now, data reigns supreme, today’s winners deserve to triumph because they are cleareyed enough to discard yesterday’s conventional wisdoms and search out the disruptive and the new.

it is also increasingly the world’s dominant commercial culture.

is recognizing how fulfilling work can be.

‘‘By putting things like empathy and sensitivity into charts and data reports, it makes them easier to talk about,’’ Sakaguchi told me. ‘‘It’s easier to talk about our feelings when we can point to a number.’’

we want to know that those people really hear us.

We can’t be focused just on efficiency.

to have hard conversations with colleagues who are driving us crazy.

‘‘But the thing is, my work is my life. I spend the majority of my time working. Most of my friends I know through work. If I can’t be open and honest at work, then I’m not really living, am I?’’

The behaviors that create psychological safety — conversational turn-taking and empathy — are part of the same unwritten rules we often turn to, as individuals, when we need to establish a bond.

‘‘There was one senior engineer who would just talk and talk, and everyone was scared to disagree with him,’’

But the kinds of people who work at Google are often the ones who became software engineers because they wanted to avoid talking about feelings in the first place.

clear goals and creating a culture of dependability

the fights over leadership, the tendency to critique — put her on guard.

some teams that left me feeling totally exhausted and others where I got so much energy from the group.

‘‘He panics over small issues and keeps trying to grab control. I would hate to be driving with him being in the passenger seat, because he would keep trying to grab the steering wheel and crash the car.’’

is ‘‘a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up,

the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.

They are sensitive to one another’s moods and share personal stories and emotions. While Team B might not contain as many individual stars, the sum will be greater than its parts.

people may speak over one another, go on tangents and socialize instead of remaining focused on the agenda.

‘‘average social sensitivity’’

an exam known as the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test

‘As long as everyone got a chance to talk, the team did well

‘‘equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.’’

‘‘Other groups had pretty average members, but they came up with ways to take advantage of everyone’s relative strengths.

The researchers eventually concluded that what distinguished the ‘‘good’’ teams from the dysfunctional groups was how teammates treated one another.

the researchers wanted to know if there is a collective I. Q. that emerges within a team that is distinct from the smarts of any single member.