A few months ago, at a time when it was still safe to have strange experiences in unusual places, I was handed a mysterious document. ALLIANCES AND TRAITORS WITHIN THE TRUTH & UFO COMMUNITIES, it read.

The document was a single, bright red sheet of paper, crowded with close-set black type. Different kinds of lines and arrows connected in wild formulations, linking George Soros with the Illuminati, various stars of the UFO community with their alleged handlers, the CIA with Alex Jones. The Pleidiansa race of tall, blue-eyed Nordic alien beingsconnected with both Tesla and the president in ways I couldnt quite parse.

This paper was created and handed to me by Dylan Louis Monroe, a player in the QAnon world and the creator of the Deep State Mapping Project, a one-man operation where Monroe creates dense visual maps of the supposed alliances he sees between various major players and world events. Monroe was at the New Age expo Conscious Life selling Q-branded t-shirts and promoting a YouTube show, I was there reporting, and both of us were thinking about the strange alliances and friendships that had begun to surface in various conspiracy communities.

BE CAREFUL WHO YOU FOLLOW, the document warned, in bold, at the bottom, just above a large black Q.

In the months that followed our chance meeting, the world buckled under the weight of the novel coronavirus pandemic, and the alliances got stranger still. Conspiracy communities that have previously only brushed past each other like schools of fish borne along on different currents are suddenly, abruptly, swimming in the same direction.

Take Larry Cook, whose evolving belief system has been playing out in a remarkable way on Facebook. Cook is the man behind the largest anti-vaccine group on the platform, Stop Mandatory Vaccination, which, along with his personal Facebook page, serves as a central clearinghouse for anti-vaccine misinformation.

In the months since the pandemic began, Cook has begun to claim that its a pretext for the mandatory testing, tracking, and vaccination that hes feared all along. (There is no evidence that the U.S. government will impose mandatory vaccination for the coronavirus, even though it should.) Hes also started to turn towards people who can provide some explanation for whats really going on, and some measure of hope: Cook is promoting QAnon ideas, sometimes dozens of times a day. (QAnon is an ur-conspiracy theory which, broadly, holds that Donald Trump and his allies are bravely fighting back on a number of fronts against a shadowy, Satanic Deep State.)

I AM A DIGITAL SOLDIER, Cook posted recently, along with two Q-related hashtags, part of an oath that the mysterious Q had recently requested that his followers post. (Disgraced former Trump advisor General Michael Flynn was among those who posted the oath.) Linking to a webpage that shares Qs missives, Cook added, in another post, Discover why we have a lockdown and mask requirements for the healthy. (Cook didnt respond to an email from VICE News.)

Cook isnt an outlier. As Mother Jones recently noted, coronavirus and the general uncertainty of the times were living in have aided the spread of QAnon specifically.

But its not just QAnon. The strain of living in this particular time, with a dragging, devastating pandemic and a global uprising against police brutality and racial injustice, crashing together at the highest speed, has accelerated something thats been going on for years. Call it the conspiracy singularity: the place where many conspiracy communities are suddenly meeting and merging, a melting pot of unimaginable density. UFO conspiracy theorists and QAnon fans are advocating for drinking a bleach solution promoted by anti-vaxxers. QAnon groups and Reopen America groups alike promoted Plandemic , a film clip jam-packed with conspiratorial claims about the causes and spread of COVID. The Freedom Angels, an anti-vaccine group based in California, are among the many such groups joining anti-lockdown protests, using language that feels heavily drawn from the Patriot movement: They're calling stay-at-home orders tyranny, addressing their followers as Patriots, and positioning themselves as a new civil rights movements. (They urged people to burn their facemasks on July 4th, adding, floridly: Join millions of Americans on Independence Day as we show all these BLUE STATE GOVERNORS, SWAMP DOCS, and DEEP STATE RATS how we feel about their latest ORDERS, DICTATES and MANDATES to wear our muzzles again.)

More mainstream internet stars, as several outlets have noted, have also been drawn in: Lifestyle influencers are promoting COVID conspiracy theories, while the virality-seeking teens of TikTok are discovering a new obsession with Pizzagate. Sex trafficking conspiracy theoriesall of which are tinged with Pizzagate and QAnon influencesseem to have an especially broad appeal: Recently, a pair of Arizona influencers promoted a baseless rumor that the furniture company Wayfair was trafficking children.

The trend towards a kind of disturbing unity is distilled in the hashtag #Covid911, backed by a lot of powerful players in both anti-vaccine and QAnon circles. It holds that what were living throughthe pandemic and the protests against police brutality alikeis all a massive hoax, designed to sway not just the 2020 elections but usher in the New World Order. Not long ago, Joe M., a major QAnon promoter, released a video, which is still up on multiple platforms even as its marked as false information, calling the pandemic, the protests, and, of course, the push for nationwide mail-in voting all part of a coordinated irregular warfare insurgency with multiple aims, perpetrated by the Deep State. The nine-minute clip throws in a dizzying cocktail of claims touching on virtually every conspiracy theory of the current moment, managing to claim that the murder of George Floyd was mysterious and not what it seemed, that social distancing was perhaps a pretext to halt grand juries so that President Obama couldnt be investigated for spying on the Trump campaign, and, of course, that violent paramilitary group Antifa had been given free rein by Democratic mayors to wreak havoc on city streets.

COVID-19 is being sold as a natural event, Joe M. intoned, over grim violin music and a shot of Nancy Pelosi taking a knee in kente cloth. But we see now it is an attempt by enemies of humanity to hold onto power. After November, they stand to lose it all. But they will do everything to keep the crisis alive, and the people in fear.

The last minute of the clip features shots of news reports about a feared second wave of coronavirus. The implication is that that, too, is part of the program to keep us afraid, and shouldnt be acknowledged or believed.

People contain multitudes, and our ability to believe in several conspiracy theories at once is nothing new. Weve seen hints of a conspiracy singularity before, most memorably in the worlds of Milton William Cooper, the author of the dense, chaotic, and totally unreadable conspiracy classic Behold a Pale Horse.

Cooperbefore he died in a shootout with sheriffs deputy trying to arrest him for aggravated assaultwas successful in assembling a broad coalition of anti-government zealots. Behold a Pale Horse claimed to draw on his military service in the Vietnam War to expose a variety of evil deeds perpetrated by those who wanted to bring about a New World Order.

But Cooper also successfully weaved in UFO conspiracy theoriesthat the U.S. military shot down mysterious craft to capture alien technology, for instanceas well as medical ones, including claims that both AIDS and Hepatitis B were bioweapons loosed on the public by the CDC. As Cooper biographer Marc Jacobson noted, some of these theories gained a lot of credence among Black Americans and in the hip-hop community.

Behold a Pale Horse became a surprising mainstay across a lot of different communities, one of the only things youd be just as likely to find in an Afrocentric bookshop in New York as at a militia rally merch table. It showed that UFO researchers and heavily armed self-proclaimed patriots had some kind of common language and view of the world, or at least places where their worlds overlapped. One devoted fan of Coopers radio show was Timothy McVeigh, who went on to bomb the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people. Author and political scientist Michael Barkun notes in his book 2003 A Culture of Conspiracy that McVeigh also developed a fascination with UFOs around the same time, visiting Area 51 a year before he perpetrated the bombing. On death row, Barkun writes, McVeigh obsessively watched the film Contact, about a brave government scientist chosen to make contact with extraterrestrials.

Conspiracy theories that the government is hiding what it knows about aliens, or the existence of a secret strawman bank account assigned to each U.S. citizen, live in the same place, theoretically speaking. In his book, Barkun referred to these realms as the domain of stigmatized knowledge.

That domain, as we have seen, he wrote, Is made up of rejected, outdated or ignored knowledge claims, regardless of subject matter. It contains material drawn from revisionist history, pseudoscience, alternative medicine, occultism, new and alternative religions and political sectarianism. Despite these differences of focus, all share certain overarching similarities: the disdain or disinterest of mainstream institutions, along with the common outsider status conferred by that disdain or disinterest, and a consequent suspicion of the institutions that have excluded them.

Barkuns book is broadly about the approaching conspiracy singularity, focused especially on the places where far-right, anti-government, and UFO circles had started to merge. And the same fusions Barkun observed in the late 80s and early 90s, between far-right conspiracy theorists and UFO believers, could also be seen within the 9/11 truth movement. Conspiracy theories about 9/11 brought together the military-industrial complex-critical left and the Alex Jones-tinged right, as well as what Barkun called the prophecies of Nostradmus, UFOs and conspiracy theories about the Illuminati. The bedfellows were strange indeed: As a profile of Alex Jones from 2011 observed, It turns out that the world of paranoia is round, and 9/11, with its billowing smoke and miles of video and a cast of thousands, is the terra incognita where left and right meet, fusing sixties countercultural distrust with the dont-tread-on-me variety.

In other words, alliances and overlaps are common, and not new. Theres always been cross-pollination, Michael Wood told VICE News. Wood has a PhD from the University of Kent and is an expert in conspiracy psychology. Along with his co-authors Karen Douglas and Robbie Sutton, he published a 2012 paper exploring the phenomenon of people who simultaneously believe in conflicting conspiracy theories: that Princess Diana is alive and was killed by MI6, for example, or that Osama Bin Laden both died before the U.S. military raided his compound and is still alive after those same military forces supposedly killed him.

The ability to believe two things at onceeven completely contradictory thingsis based on an underlying level of "higher order thinking, the paper argued, an overriding belief that can make even conflicting ideas make sense. Simply put, it's the centralized belief that conspiracies and hidden deceptions underpin the world and guide human events.

The idea that authorities are engaged in motivated deception of the public would be a cornerstone of conspiracist thinking due to its centrality in conspiracy theories, the authors wrote. Someone who believes in a significant number of conspiracy theories would naturally begin to see authorities as fundamentally deceptive, and new conspiracy theories would seem more plausible in light of that belief.

This being so, it's still true that conspiracy communities used to have some degree of separation. Their conventions were held in different hotel ballrooms, and targeted different audiences geographically and socially. Conspiracy theories were spread in newsletters and in-person meetings; they were narrowly targeted and often somewhat underground, part of a legitimately fringe and countercultural narrative.

But now the internet is the largest hotel ballroom of them all, and the novel coronavirus pandemic has forced a lot of people into a set of universalizing life circumstances. Were all trying to make sense of the same massive global event, which seems to drive an urge towards a grand unified theory of suspicion. And with everyone using the same global platforms, conspiracy communities seem to influence and inflect each other far more rapidly. What we have today is more of a mass, a merge of conspiracy theories combining in ways that make their individual contours harder to make out.

For some people invested in multiple conspiratorial beliefs or communities, Wood said, the evidence youve based your beliefs on is more like a negative argument, what you believe didnt happen. The actual conspiracy theories themselves arent that important, he added; they are really just manifestations of this underlying suspicion and mistrust.

That can take on some odd forms. In a 1954 study cited by Wood, Theodor Adorno found that German anti-Semites tended to believe that Jews were both too withdrawn from mainstream society and overly eager to participate in it. The higher order thinking at work was anti-Semitism and every negative belief derived from that, even when they didnt logically cohere.

Similarly, Wood wrote, in more modern conspiracy theories, distrust of official narratives may be so strong that many alternative theories are simultaneously endorsed in spite of any contractions between them.

Today, alternative theories abound: that the coronavirus pandemic is both a hoax and a dangerous bioweapon unleashed by China; that Tom Hanks is deadexecuted for being part of the pedophile Deep Stateand alive in witness protection; that he is dead and replaced by a body double. All these theories have been promoted by the same guy, a QAnon fan named Tommy G.

At the same time that the conspiracy singularity starts to take shape, were seeing a distinct collapse between the fringe and the center. Nowhere is that more visible than in the increasing prominence of QAnon in relatively mainstream Republican politics. As of July, the left-leaning organization Media Matters has found 63 current and former Congressional candidates who are open and enthusiastic Q fans, some of whom, like Mary Joe Rae Perkins in Oregon and Marjorie Taylor Greene in Georgia, have already won their primaries. (To make it to Congress, Greene still has to defeat the second-place winner, John Cowan, in an August 11 runoff election, and is facing significant condemnation from the state GOP.)

Another useful idea referred to by Barkun, the author of Culture of Conspiracy, is the cultic milieu, a term coined in the 1970s by the British sociologist Colin Campbell, a sort of cultural underground, Barkun wrote, thats made up of a variety of rejected knowledge disdained by the mainstream. The cultic milieu, Barkun wrote, is wary of all claims to authoritative judgment, and receptive to all forms of revisionism, whether in history, religion, science or politics.

Its not a stretch to see how that domain of stigmatized knowledge extends to how people process current and ongoing events, how groups of people with seemingly nothing to bind them together on the surface might find themselves seeking explanation, order and meaning in the same places.

In fact, theres been language for this phenomenon for a long time. People deeply embedded in the overlapping worlds of conspiracy theory tend to refer to themselves as being part of the truth community. And as its members come to a new and mutually reinforcing view of just what that truth is, the rest of us would do well to pay attention to just what it is.

Follow Anna Merlan on Twitter.

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The Conspiracy Singularity Has Arrived - VICE

The sequencing of the human genome was one of the greatest scientific feats of the past century, but its a little-known fact that its still a work in progress with considerable gaps. New research suggests we could be just months away from finally finishing the job.

Nearly two decades after the Human Genome Project released the first map of our DNA, there are still large sections that are a mystery to us. Scientists have been slowly filling in the gaps, but certain portions that feature repetitive sequences going on for millions of base pairs have long been seen as intractable.

Thats because most common gene sequencing technologies create short snippets of DNA that then have to be stitched together. When applied to these highly repetitive sections it becomes almost impossible to distinguish the pieces, so putting them back together in the right order is extremely difficult.

Imagine having to reconstruct a jigsaw puzzle, senior author Adam Phillippy, from the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), said in a press release. If you are working with smaller pieces, each contains less context for figuring out where it came from, especially in parts of the puzzle without any unique clues, like a blue sky. The same is true for sequencing the human genome. Until now, the pieces were too small, and there was no way to put the hardest parts of the genome puzzle together.

But that is now changing. In a paper published last week in Nature, the researchers describe how they used a cutting-edge approach known as nanopore sequencing to tackle some of the previously inscrutable sections of the genome and produce the first-ever gapless sequence of the X chromosome.

Nanopore sequencing works by passing DNA molecules through a tiny hole and measuring the change in an electric current running across the holes surface to work out the sequence of base pairs in the molecules. Unlike previous approaches, its able to create ultra-long DNA sequences.

That was enough to fill many of the gaps in the genome, but a region known as the centromere that encompasses roughly 3.1 million base pairs of highly repetitive sequences still presented a problem. Fortunately, the team was able to find idiosyncratic sequences that could act as markers to link together multiple long reads to span the entire centromere.

To ensure that the X chromosome was as accurate as possible, the researchers combined nanopore sequencing with results from a further two gold-standard sequencing technologies and approaches for mapping the genome. The result is more than 99.9 percent accurate, which is considered enough to call the sequence finished.

Filling the gaps in the human genome could prove invaluable for biomedical research. Were starting to find that some of these regions where there were gaps in the reference sequence are actually among the richest for variation in human populations, so weve been missing a lot of information that could be important to understanding human biology and disease, lead author Karen Miga, from the UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute, said in a press release.

And while the complete X chromosome is the pice de resistance of this paper, the team reports that they have applied their approach to the full genome and theyve managed to reconstruct several other chromosomes. They are aiming to produce a complete human genome by the end of this year.

What secrets lie in store in these hidden parts of the human genome remains to be seen, but uncovering them will be a major step towards humankind truly mastering our own biology.

Image Credit: vrx/Shutterstock.com

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For the First Time, Scientists Fully Sequenced the Human X Chromosome - Singularity Hub

Chris Cowart, the longtime IDEO product designer, Singularity University faculty member and consultant to a variety of venture firms and tech projects, is joining the food preservation technology developer Treasure8 as its new chief innovation and strategy officer, according to a post on LinkedIn.

In the last three years food has come to the fore as a theme, said Cowart in an interview with TechCrunch. Cowart, who previously spent the majority of his time consulting on healthcare companies, became interested in food through a year spent as an advisor to X, the Alphabet subsidiary that develops technologies and companies focused on sustainability, connectivity and new computing paradigms.

At X, Cowart was looking at projects that would use artificial intelligence to accelerate circular economy projects and it was there that he began to focus on food waste. The gravity of the situation around Americas food waste and food insecurity in the country was driven home through Cowarts research, he said. We overproduce by double and we throw away 30% of our food, said Cowart. And in Santa Clara county one-in-six families are food insecure.

After completing his project at X, Cowart went to Treasure8 and was immediately pulled into strategy conversations, which led to him coming on board in June.

Unlike Apeel Sciences or Hazel Technologies, which have developed new preservative technologies to keep food fresh on store shelves (and raised several hundred million dollars), Treasure8s technology is a new spin on freeze-drying, which lets perishable foods hold their nutritional value while theyre used as ingredients, supplements or powders.

Brands can reform it with rehydration, or put it into their products or reuse pieces of the vegetables and fruits in their products. There are byproducts that you can break down and start to use to pull out their nutrients into probiotics and nutraceuticals, said Cowart.

He also thinks that Treasure8 could use its process to become a provider of biochar that can be applied in more sustainable agriculture techniques.

Treasure8 initially launched with a focus on food preservation, but quickly pivoted into working with hemp companies that wanted to work with the company to use more parts of the hemp plant in products. For now, Treasure8 is operating off of its pilot facility on Treasure Island, the man-made island in the San Francisco Bay which is currently the site of a multi-billion-dollar development project.

With its new innovation officer in tow, Treasure8 is now heading to market to raise a new round of financing, Cowart said. Targeting less than $50 million, the new round could help the company as Cowart starts to think longer term about ways that Treasure8s treatment process could contribute to the development of more functional foods.

Taking food waste streams to make products and ingredients and letting it be something useful rather than something that harms the environment, thats the interesting part, Cowart said of his role at the company. [And] if youre able to go from food security to nutritional security If you can powder vegetables, and make them into bits and food that are stable and affordable All of this nutrition feeds into the food as medicine and functional food. Were going to want to fight immunity and recover from viruses and were going to have to rebuild our food supply.

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Treasure8 adds Chris Cowart to its executive team as it renews pushing its tech to reduce food waste - TechCrunch

This is a guest blogpost by Jason Kingdon, Chairman & CEO of Blue Prism

And its raining RPA[Robotic Process Automation] IBMs announcement that they are acquiring a Brazilian Robotic Process Automation company comes just months after Microsofts acquisition of a Greek RPA vendor, and a period on from SAP acquiring a French RPA capability. If you have not spotted the pattern, you will.

Every single platform provider will need to offer automation out-of-the-box alongside their core offerings, for the simple reason that the product class offers the highest ROI of any business technology ever created. Now, that is not me from Blue Prism saying this, it is the London School of Economics and MIT.

The robotics revolution in manufacturing was said to have increased productivity in the 20th century by something like 50-fold; that is, by the year 2000 one person in manufacturing was achieving the work of 50 people.

Imagine employing 50 people for every one person you currently employ? How does that change your world? How do you think differently about what you do? Could you even imagine assigning that amount of work?

A new way of working

The same automation revolution is well under way in white-collar jobs and the service industry. It will have the same impact as the invention of the Internet; if you dont see that youre already out-of-date. It changes every aspect of the way work will take place in the service industry, the types of services that are offered, and the way technology is consumed. Work life will probably change more in the next 10 years than it has for the last 100 years. What does this look like?

The clich would be that all jobs are wiped out and there is nothing left for humans to do; in other words, Apocalypse Now (and then Brexit).

But, it wont be like that. For the businesses that have made the strategic commitment to Blue Prisms enterprise class automation platform, you see a similar pattern as to the one that occurred in manufacturing: expansion of services, higher rates of service quality, greater flexibility in working (effortless coping with Covid-19 lock-down and remote working) and most of all speed and scalability

The arrival of digital workers

Our Blue Prism Digital Worker is software that attempts to get as close to a human worker as we can. In other words it is a software robot an autonomous processing unit. It is not a script or a bot in fact the digital worker runs multiple scripts or bots marshalling these kinds of capabilities in large scale so as to automate any business processes (which may or may not include routine mundane tasks, and equally, may include sophisticated diagnostics that humans struggle with; like spotting money laundering, KYC [know your customer], or early signs of diabetes in a retina scan).

Like a human worker, the Blue Prism version of this concept is trained by a business user; and so the digital worker makes use of any tools and third-party technologies as it needs.

People ask is this intelligent systems or AI? Of course it is. In a very direct way. Just like a human, this technology aims at versatility at its core, and the abilities to use all technologies as they become available is crucial to its design. And by choice, necessity, or taste, the digital worker makes use of any novel, routine or classic machine learning or AI algorithm as is required for the task in hand. The whole point is that all of these technologies can be clipped together (with no code) according to what they are being trained to do.

A digital singularity

At the heart of this automation revolution is the fact that all systems can be made to interoperate through digital workers. It means that ancient systems from the birth of computing, to technologies just born, are now in scope. This imposes a post-legacy reality; everything that exists is legacy; or in our terms, a component or tool to be made use of.

This offers a form of digital singularity as an echo of technology singularity (the point at which humans can make a machine as smart as a human). The digital singularity refers to the point where all technology can be combined, as through a prism (if you will).

If all software becomes interoperable think how this changes the R&D landscape? And how business will start to consume technology. And the implied pace of change we are about to hit. The acceleration will be rapid and mind altering; propelling winners, in many cases companies you have never heard of, to fame and fortune, because the whole consumption profile is flexing and re-ordering.

Look at technology service businesses (like IBM), and they are akin to a giant form of human middleware, or mechanical Turk. It is like a digital sedan chair, a business carried by humans as it plods its progress this, in the age of the self-driving automobile. These are the areas that will change the fastest, as IBM has noted. The large human powered business service companies also look old fashioned in this new context, and these have only just been invented. They will need to pivot, as do all the main service providers, and this new revolution will make them better. Covid-19 and the current economic crisis will likely accelerate all these changes.

I should say, I already claim that any business processes worthy of the name (i.e. you want it to be repeatable and predictable) can be automated. So, buckle up.

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The automation revolution is happening now - ComputerWeekly.com

Tempo Automation, the leading manufacturer for quick-turn prototyping and low-volume production of printed circuit board assemblies (PCBA), today announces the addition of Jeff Kowalski to its Board of Directors.

"We are pleased to add Jeff to Tempo's Board of Directors. His legacy in creating breakthrough products that directly impact customer and business value precisely aligns with Tempo's vision for software-driven PCB manufacturing in 2020 and beyond," said Joy Weiss, President and CEO of Tempo Automation. "Jeff's knack for critical thinking and problem-solving, and his unique ability to identify and incubate novel ideas, will add to Tempo's impressive momentum in reinventing electronics manufacturing."

Jeff Kowalski most recently served as Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Autodesk, a global leader in design, construction, manufacturing, and entertainment software, with over 200 million customers. Kowalski's work has included pioneering real-time graphics, cloud-computing, 3D scanning, additive manufacturing, and generative design. In his most recent 12 years as CTO at Autodesk, he led a global team responsible for next-generation research and development for complex design challenges and corporate strategy, shaping Autodesk's long-term technology vision and driving innovation across the company. Kowalski also held board positions at Singularity University and Genome Compiler.

"Jeff Kowalski is a valuable addition to Tempo' Automation's Board of Directors," said Matthew Granade, Tempo Board Member and Managing Partner of Point72 Ventures. "With his long-standing position as both a seasoned entrepreneur and an innovative leader in the engineering community, Tempo's board and the entire team will benefit from his contributions."

To learn more, please visit http://www.tempoautomation.com

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Tempo Automation Welcomes Jeff Kowalski to Board of Directors - Embedded Computing Design

-Analysis-

PARIS Is the longest European summit in history also historic? The answer is yes.

Indeed, the European Union is now a state. Not a so-called superstate replacing the 27 member states that make it up, but a state that includes them. We could say that the EU is now 28 states: the 27 separately plus the 27 together as one. Finally, the European state represents Alexandre Dumas' famous saying from The Three Musketeers: "One for all, all for one." The novelty that allows us to recognize Europe as a state comes from the fact that the EU will issue treasury bonds to finance a brand new part of its budget, which it calls the "recovery plan," amounting to 750 billion euros.

This historic development of issuing European debt corresponds to a social demand with weak signals that have existed for several years. Even though European power and its leaders are the subject of mistrust as national powers and leaders have also been for the past 15 years Eurobarometer surveys indicate that Europeans want a European solution to the economic and geopolitical challenges that threaten us. And while the euro is the subject of permanent and legitimate debate, Europeans are now particularly attached to their common currency: In just 20 years, the euro has won the confidence of citizens and investors large and small and has established itself as the world's second reserve currency. In fact, the national recovery plans adopted in response to COVID-19, the colossal sum of which amounts to 2.3 trillion euros, are only possible because of the guarantee of the European Central Bank and its worldwide credibility.

The advent of the European state is part of the evolution of the state in Europe. This history is often reduced to the rise of European nation-states following the French Revolution. However, this story spans more than 10 centuries. It includes many forms of statehood, and a plurality of states, each with its own singularity, as specific and different as, for example, the Holy Roman Empire, the Republic of Venice, the Polish-Lithuanian Kingdom, Portugal or the United Provinces.

During the EU summit in Brussels Photo: Xinhua/ZUMA

The still-young EU could be described as a "baroque state." Baroque, the great European artistic movement, is set in opposition to classicism through its circumvention of rules and subverting of forms, mixing genres and resorting to the exception. This is the case of the EU, which escapes the traditional classification of political systems as territorial state entities and is distinguished by its novel singularity. Based on state cultures inherited from a long history and a fragmented political geography, contemporary Europeans are inventing the "mutuality" of sovereignty.

Europeans can now shelve the ideological debate on whether the existence of the EU is relevant.

Negotiations on the terms and conditions of the plan are thus not limited to discussions between heads of government at the European Council. The agreement will then have to be voted on by the 27 national parliaments, themselves networked with the European Parliament and the parliaments of local states, such as the Belgian or Spanish communities and the German Lnder. This "mutualization," or exchange of reciprocity of sovereignty, is democratic: It is deliberate, voluntary and negotiated, in contrast to the empires and conquests by kings and then nations of the past two millennia. Europeans do not form a nation but a society. For the past few decades they have been building a state that corresponds to this one: pluralist, unprecedented and forward-looking.

By this metric, the four-day, four-night series of debates are the manifestation of national governments becoming tremendously civilized in building this European state. They have become, together with the European Parliament, which is the direct expression of European society, actors of a deliberative democracy with its majority, its opposition (the so-called 'frugal' countries) and its compromises. From now on, Europeans can shelve the ideological debate on whether the existence of the EU is relevant, and focus on the citizen's debate that confronts the real issue: Are we satisfied with the political choices and public policies made by the European "government?"

*Sylvain Kahn is a historian, geographer and professor at Sciences Po. He is the author of Histoire de la construction de l'Europe depuis 1945 (PUF, 2018), winner of the Mieux comprendre l'Europe book prize.

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Why The European Union Has Changed Forever - Worldcrunch

It is increasingly apparent in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic that we are living in the digital era, as we enter the age of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and the Singularity. The digitized world is using social media, augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) to reimagine the future of communication and work.

Automation of transportation such as drones and electric vehicles are becoming much more necessary given the accelerated rate of innovation. Quantum Computing is the next generation of supercomputers that will change everything, and will accelerate how we use data to make the decisions that once seemed impossible possible.

As we move into a post-Covid world, can these technological innovations help save humanity and the planet?

Heres how these exponential technologies can help humankind identify, measure, track, and sustain the natural balance of non-renewable resources on our planet.

1. Life-saving drones: Drones that were once used to take lives by the military, can now be used to save lives while protecting the world's wildlife and forests.

By delivering medication in hard to reach places affected by natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods, and saving wildlife by monitoring poachers that hunt and kill elephants, drones can track illegal activities.

Forest conservationists can monitor wildfires and retard the collateral damage these fires cause, and even replant trees to help negate the negative effects of climate change.

2. Remote sensors: Remote sensing tech can help a great deal in arranging, observing, and assessing the environmental impact on the ground with extraordinary accuracy.

For example, sensors have given WWF access to the development of extractive industries in environmentally delicate territories, including some of the world heritage sites to help protect such monuments as the Taj Mahal.

3. Thermal imaging and LIDAR: Thermal imaging cameras can give you virtual control to let officers for example get hold of poachers that hunt endangered species at record rates and dissuade a lot more from even entering the territory given they have a way to capture them in the act.

4. Blockchain for commodity markets: The advances in blockchain innovation have the potential to be game changers given the ledger technology and transparency of tracking every moment of the source of a transaction. For instance, it can inform buyers about the sourcing journey of their fish and other horticultural produce.

5. Quantum computing: This is probably the most disruptive technology in the next decade as it has the potential to solve any problem with extraordinary solutions and revolutionize how computers operate with 10x ability to do anything from find solutions to seemingly impossible diseases to creating a whole new way in which humanity experiences civilization.

While scientists and environmentalists are in search of new cutting-edge technologies to help save the planet, it is the next generation and youth that will make this new reality come to fruition.

Digital biology is growing enormously and so is the demand for professionals with knowledge in data science and disruptive technology.

The increasing importance of a career in the future of innovation and technology is witnessing billionaires like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett invest their money in companies generating employment related to science and the environment for the next 10 years while companies like Facebook, Microsoft, and Google invest in research and development around AI and AR/VR technology.

Several future professions that could help us protect and save the planet?

1. Conservation Scientist: Taking care of life on land including the quality of forests, national parks, ranges, and other natural resources will serve a vital role in society.

Securing the wild forests, improving natural surroundings for wildlife, promoting biodiversity, encouraging public recreation, and controlling wild-fires are all critical roles for the future of our world.

2. Geoscientist: This profession includes the study of the planets structure, history, and natural resources. Geoscientists work with environmental researchers and carry out their responsibilities both from the lab and in the field.

Travel can take these professionals to some wonders of the world like active volcanoes or the top of Mt. Everest.

3. Hydrologist: Water will be more valuable than oil in the future. Using their skill of water quality and accessibility, hydrologists study water development.

Their time is commonly spent between working in the field where they may wind up swimming into lakes and streams to gather water samples or observing the monitoring equipment, and research labs where they break down the information and model their discoveries to protect our water sources and life in the rivers and under the sea.

4. Environmental Scientist: Their expertise in physics, chemistry, and biology help them progress in the direction of understanding the planets ecological issues.

Research in the field to examine the contamination of the earth brought about by humans can promote measures to create a sustainable way of life for the future.

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Whether it is to save an endangered species or master a renewable resource or protect the planet from the adversities of production and supply, a career in these fields can rightfully use innovation and technology for the greater good in order to transform our world for a better future.

- Article by Kunal Sood, Founder of WeThePlanet and X Fellows

Read: 6 jobs every environment lover will enjoy

Read: How you can save the world with a career in sustainable design

Read: 5 ways to create an environment-friendly office to increase productivity

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5 technologies and 4 job roles that can help save humanity and the planet - India Today

John Boyega shared with fans on social media that he is putting the Star Wars franchise behind him and eager to move on from his character Finn. Responding to fan demand to see Finn pop up in the next Star Wars movie (via Variety), Boyega wrote, Lol no thank you. Ive moved on. The actor added to another fan, Im not into playing one role for too long. I have more to offer than that. Thats all. Boyega played Finn in three Star Wars films between 2015 and 2019.

While Boyega has been outspoken about his issues with the Star Wars franchise, he stressed the only reason hes disinterested in returning as Finn in the future is because hes played the character for so long. The actor said hes not against reprising characters as long as theres been enough time in between playing the role. One role hed be keen on returning to is Moses in Attack the Block. As Boyega told a fan, I havent played Moses in over a decade. Id love to revisit him. Now he is a badass.

With no more Star Wars being planned for his future, Boyegas work in last Decembers The Rise of Skywalker will be his final outing in the franchise. While critical reviews for the tentpole were largely negative, Boyega stood by the film on social media amid backlash. Writing to one fan who called The Rise of Skywalker an embarrassment, the actor responded,Embarrassing? LOL you wish. Very fulfilling, some disappointments but yet not that big of a deal. Everyone has moved on.

That Boyega found Rise of Skywalker to be a fulfilling experience suggested he liked the project more than his previous Star Wars movie, the Rian Johnson-directed The Last Jedi. In an interview with Hypebeastjust before the December 2019 release of Rise of Skywalker, Boyega said he disagreed with many of the choices Johnson made in The Last Jedi script.

The Force Awakens I think was the beginning of something quite solid, The Last Jedi if Im being honest Id say that was feeling a bit iffy for me, Boyega said. I didnt necessarily agree with a lot of the choices in that and thats something that I spoke to Mark [Hamill] a lot about, and we had conversations about it. And it was hard for all of us, because we were separated.

With Star Wars behind him, Boyega has several new projects lined up for the future. Not only does he have a role in Steve McQueens Small Axe anthology, but Boyega also has a leading role in the new film Naked Singularity.

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John Boyega Says No Thank You to More Star Wars Because Three Movies as Finn Is Enough - IndieWire