Thirty books to help us understand the world in 2020 – The Guardian

Michael E Mann on the environment

A distinguished climatologist and geophysicist, Michael Mann is director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of more than 200 peer-reviewed and edited publications tagias well as four books, including 2012s The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars and his forthcoming The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet, due out in January 2021 (Public Affairs Books).

For Small Creatures Such as WeSasha Sagan (Murdoch Books, 2019)

Carl Sagan was arguably the greatest science communicator of our time. He inspired many including me to enter the world of science. He is sadly no longer with us. But his daughter, Sasha Sagan, honours his legacy in her wonderful new book. Drawing its title from a line taken from Carls novel Contact ( adapted into the 1997 feature film of the same name), Sasha invites us to appreciate the everyday wonders of life through the eyes of science, sharing a worldview instilled by her unique upbringing, which she delightfully recounts for us. Read this book and feel a bit better about our world, our universe, and our place in it.

The Ministry for the FutureKim Stanley Robinson (Orbit, 2020)

Doomist framing can be disabling, and it is all too common these days in popular climate change-themed narratives. A refreshing counterbalance to the glut of apocalyptic visions of climate catastrophe is this latest novel from sci-fi novelist Kim Stanley Robinson (with whom I recently spoke about the effort). In The Ministry for the Future, Stan uses the accounts of fictional future eyewitnesses to convey the stark threat of climate change. But that future, by some measure, is already here. Rather than suggesting our doom is destined, he shows how we can rise to this extraordinary challenge. A dystopian future is possible if we fail to act. But a utopian future is not out of reach if we succeed in doing so.

All We Can SaveEdited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K Wilkinson (Penguin Random House, 2020)

Climate change is a powerful threat multiplier, taking existing vulnerabilities and injustices and making them worse. Women and girls face greater risk of displacement or death from extreme weather disasters, and there is a link between climate change and gender-based violence. Tasks core to survival, such as collecting water and wood or growing food, fall largely on female shoulders in many cultures. These are already challenging activities; climate change can increase the burden, and with it struggles for health, education, and financial security. All We Can Save is a welcome collection of provocative and illuminating essays from more than 60 women, many of them friends and colleagues of mine, who are at the forefront of the climate movement.

The Great DerangementAmitav Ghosh (University of Chicago Press, 2016)

Are we deranged? The acclaimed Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh argues that future generations may well think so. How else do we explain our imaginative failure in the face of global warming? In his first major book of nonfiction since In an Antique Land (1992), Ghosh examines our inability at the level of literature, history, and politics to grasp the scale and violence of climate change. And he calls for collective action and transformative change as we rise to tackle the defining challenge of our time.

Resetting Our Future: What If Solving the Climate Crisis Is Simple?Tom Bowman (Changemakers, 2020)

Too often we encounter efforts to dismiss climate change as a wicked that is, essentially unsolvable problem. But nothing could be more wicked than such unhelpful framing. Tom Bowman is a communication expert who has helped create museum experiences that engage and educate the public about climate change. In this breezy, concise primer on climate action, he explains why the only obstacles that remain are societal and political will. And we have the ability to surmount those obstacles, if we simply make the commitment, to paraphrase the great Yoda, to not just try, but do.

A Polish-American journalist and historian, Anne Applebaum is a staff writer at the Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University. In 2004, she won a Pulitzer prize for Gulag: A History. Her latest book is Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism.

What Is Populism?Jan-Werner Mller (Penguin, 2017)

The movements that we have come to call populist are defined by one central idea: they reject pluralism. Thats the argument Jan-Werner Mller makes in What Is Populism?, the definitive account of contemporary authoritarian populism. Populists, Mller explains, claim that they alone represent the people, or the nation; that their opponents are traitors, foreigners or unpatriotic elites; that there can be no neutral political institutions and symbols. If they obtain power, authoritarian populists invariably argue that they need to change the rules of the system, undermining democratic norms and institutions so that they can remain in power. If they can convince people that these norms and institutions are worthless, they can succeed.

The People vs Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save ItYascha Mounk (Harvard University Press, 2018)

Authoritarian populism, which he calls democracy without rights is also an important focus of Yascha Mounks The People vs Democracy. But Mounk also identifies another phenomenon, that of rights without democracy the rise of technocratic elites who effectively take what should be political issues out of public contestation. Mounk argues that to combat both of these dangerous trends, a broader rejuvenation of democracy is needed: deep economic and cultural changes that can give people agency and control over their lives as well as the conviction that they are truly represented by their political leaders.

How Democracies DieSteven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (Viking, 2018)

In How Democracies Die, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, scholars of democratic breakdown, concentrate their formidable historical and political knowledge on the United States. They pick up some of the warning signs that Mller describes: the breakdown of mutual toleration respect for election results, respect for media as well as the rising number of political actors who are no longer convinced that their political opponents are legitimate. Using their study of other countries, they also offer some solutions. Everyone, on all sides, should learn how to speak to their political opponents; everyone, on all sides, should treat opposition parties and platforms as legitimate. As the US election gets closer the lessons of this bestselling book seem to become more pertinent every day.

Ruling the Void: The Hollowing-out of Western DemocracyPeter Mair (Verso, 2013)

The late Peter Mairs Ruling the Void was a kind of canary in the coalmine, a book that pointed to the real dangers of democratic decline before they were widely acknowledged, and before the populist movements in Europe and the US were fully visible. Mair, a keen observer of political parties, noted that political participation was falling, that the public was less interested in democratic debate; like Mounk, he also identified the dangerous emergence of a separate class of professional politicians, cut off from the trade unions and church groups that had produced grassroots political leaders in the past. He explained why they were losing support, and why this was dangerous, before they knew it themselves.

Post-Communist Mafia State: The Case of HungaryBlint Magyar (Central European University Press, 2016)

Authoritarian populism is usually associated with a rise in corruption. This is no accident, argues Blint Magyar. Once government inspectors, courts and media are all politicised, run by people with links to the ruling party, there is no accountability and a mafia-like oligarchy will inevitably emerge. Magyar explains how this worked in Hungary, a country where cynicism and greed have led not only to the end of democracy but to the end of fair markets. Instead, Hungary has a rigged system, one in which the top layer of the economy is dominated by the prime ministers friends. Required reading for anyone who wants to understand not just how populism begins, but where it ends.

A writer and teacher from south London, now living in Yorkshire, Jeffrey Boakye is the author of Hold Tight: Black Masculinity, Millennials, and the Meaning of Grime, and Black, Listed: Black British Culture Explored. His forthcoming book, I Heard What You Said, examines racism in British schools.

Think Like a White ManDr Boul Whytelaw III: As told by Nels Abbey (Canongate, 2019)

Powerful exploration of race politics is one thing, searing social commentary is another, and razor-sharp satire is a third entirely. But put them all together? This is a book like no other, taking you on a thrill ride/thrill guide through the world of default white dominance. Nels Abbey has created a work of the blackest humour (pun intended) and it is unrepentantly rewarding. Think Like a White Man is a reminder that while the race debate doesnt come with a safety net, a sense of humour will soften the blow. Or make it hit harder, Im not sure. Im still recovering. Wicked in every sense of the word.

Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and BelongingAfua Hirsch (Jonathan Cape, 2018)

Afua Hirsch takes a journalistic lens to her life, her times and her own thoughts on race and identity, and the outcome is compelling. Brit(ish) operates as a beautifully written, poignantly honest memoir while also scrutinising modern history and popular culture. The breadth of Hirschs focus is impressive, throwing the spotlight on everything from sport, arts and the media to politics, education and capital H history. Her insights are numerous and profound, big and small, woven into the details of a personal life we can all learn from.

The Good Immigrant USAVarious, edited by Chimene Suleyman and Nikesh Shukla (Dialogue, 2019)

Twenty-six writers reflect on America might sound straightforward enough, but this collection of essays on the experiences of being othered in the United States today quickly reveals itself to be a complex and varied tapestry of marginalised perspectives from numerous fascinating angles. White, mainstream Americas relationship with minority groups is always worthy of serious attention, with space needing to be given to hear narratives, plural, lived by first and second-generation immigrants. This is a book that lays bare the fissures, cracks and cavernous ravines that ripple through American identity politics, offering sensitive, generous debate and genuine insight.

I Am Not Your Baby MotherCandice Brathwaite (Quercus, 2020)

When you start with the sobering fact that black British women are five times more likely than their white peers to die during childbirth, you know that this is going to be an essential exploration of the realities of black motherhood in the UK. Candice Brathwaite does the difficult job of packing deep treatise and social commentary into a seriously readable memoir. Not only does this book lift the lid on the biases and racial prejudices entrenched in our various institutions; it also invites you to make a new friend one who has something important to teach you about being a) black, b) a mum and c) British, at the same time.

Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of EmpireAkala (Two Roads, 2018)

Akala has aimed to carve a fairly narrow niche for himself as a (deep breath) rapper producer recording artist theatre producer novelist essayist entrepreneur historian, but he pulls it off with impressive confidence. Natives is a vital interrogation of the myths of empire, namely the British empire, zooming in on the intersections of race and class, while exposing the realities of growing up black and British in imperial shadows. Without sensationalism, Akala draws back the curtain on parts of the empire that it would rather not see, with insights that throw our current position into sharp relief. Illuminating.

Formerly deputy editor of the New Statesman, Helen Lewis is a staff writer for the Atlantic and a regular host of BBC Radio 4s The Week in Westminster. Her first book, Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights, was published earlier this year.

Men Who Hate WomenLaura Bates (Simon & Schuster, 2020)

Women have very little idea of how much men hate them, wrote Germaine Greer in The Female Eunuch. Well, the internet certainly fixed that. At first, it seems surprising that Laura Bates perhaps the nicest woman in British feminism would choose to immerse herself in the worst sewers of online misogyny. But Bates has spent eight years giving talks to schools, and in that time she has watched boys become angry, resistant to the very idea of a conversation about sexism. The book uncovers the incels, pickup artists and trolls whose sense of victimisation can bleed into threats and violence.

In the DarkroomSusan Faludi (William Collins, 2016)

The life of Susan Faludis father born Istvan, became Steven, died as Stefnie would be unbelievable if it werent true. In 1930s Hungary, the young Istvan Friedman escaped Nazi death squads who pulled down mens trousers to see if they were circumcised. After the war, he reincarnated himself as all-American Steven Faludi. And at 76, Faludi went to Thailand to become Stefnie, before returning to a homeland once again succumbing to authoritarianism in the early 2000s. Today, the farright in eastern Europe rails against LGBT ideology; Hungary recently banned citizens from changing their legal gender. Istvan Friedmans generation of assimilated Jews found it hard to believe that acceptance can go backwards; before she died, Stefnie Faludi might have wondered if the same was happening with gender nonconformity.

Invisible WomenCaroline Criado Perez (Chatto, 2019) Shameless nepotism Caroline is a friend but for a good cause. Simone de Beauvoirs book The Second Sex was a feminist landmark, untangling how cultural codes designated women as the other. Here, Criado Perez updates that observation for an age where algorithmic bias matters just as much as human prejudice. The pandemic has made her message even more relevant: men are more likely to die from Covid-19, while many women have struggled with poorly fitting protective equipment designed for male bodies. It will help women and men if medical trials and industrial design take biological sex and cultural gender into account.

Loud Black GirlsYomi Adegoke and Elizabeth Uviebinen (Fourth Estate, 2020)

Not every essay in this collection of young black British female writers is a knockout it is heavy on undigested slabs of biography but it is full of gems. My favourite contributions are from financial journalist Fiona Rutherford, on her struggle to get out of debt; writer Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff on conquering shyness; and influencer Candice Brathwaite on the moment her father-in-law expected her daughter to wait on him at the dinner table. (But Grandpa, why? the six-year-old asked him, innocently. There is nothing wrong with your legs.) Read it to understand the fears, obsessions and cherished beliefs of a generation of writers who are determined to be heard.

How Not to Be a BoyRobert Webb (Canongate, 2017)

Men are often the forgotten half of the gender conversation perhaps because they are less likely to buy books telling them what theyre doing wrong. Like Caitlin Morans feminist blockbuster How to Be A Woman, this book is a bittersweet memoir about growing up in the Midlands, reckoning with gender roles, and the challenges of adolescence. Webb is honest about his struggle with alcohol, his flirtation with bisexuality, and the importance of male friendship. Also like Moran, his success created a mini-industry: this years masculinity-themed memoirs include Alan Daviess Just Ignore Him and Charlie Gilmours Fatherhood.

A British science journalist based in Paris, Laura Spinney is the author of Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World. She has written for Nature, National Geographic, New Scientist and the Guardian, and has also published two novels.

The Black Death 1346-1353Ole Benedictow (Boydell Press, 2004)

Some excellent books have been written about possibly the worst pandemic of all time. Im thinking of Philip Zieglers The Black Death (1969) and Barbara Tuchmans A Distant Mirror (1978), in particular. Unfortunately, theyre out of date. If you want the latest facts on a calamity so terrible that the poet Petrarch lamented nobody in the future would ever believe it had happened, pick up Ole Benedictows complete history of the Black Death. A historian at the University of Oslo, Benedictow has revised the death toll up dramatically, arguing that the plague wiped out 60% of Europes population. His revision is based on painstaking analysis of mortality data, rather than estimates, and he continues to strengthen his case. A new, expanded edition is due early next year.

28: Stories of Aids in AfricaStephanie Nolen (Walker & Company, 2007)

Likewise, some memorable books have been written about Aids including David Frances How to Survive a Plague (2016) but relatively few nonfiction accounts of one of the other great pandemics of our time have addressed its impact beyond the United States of America. Stephanie Nolens 28 does just that, through 28 stories of Africans whose lives were affected by Aids. One thing her book brings home is how powerfully politics, society and culture shape a pandemic and hence, how it assumes different forms depending on where it strikes.

The Pull of the Stars Emma Donoghue (Picador, 2020)

The other big one, sometimes referred to as the mother of all pandemics, is the 1918 Spanish flu. Contemporary writers of fiction mostly ignored it, training their gaze on the first world war instead, but lately their modern counterparts have been playing catch-up. Emma Donoghues novel is set in a flu-ridden maternity ward in Dublin. Pregnant women were extremely vulnerable to that flu, as were their unborn babies, and Donoghue does something clever: she shows that their struggle was no less dramatic, or heroic, than the one unfolding on the western front.

The Rules of ContagionAdam Kucharski (Wellcome Collection, 2020)

If youve seen one pandemic, youve seen one pandemic, is a saying dear to disease modellers. Covid-19 behaves differently from flu which behaves differently from every other disease that has ever caused a global outbreak, and yet they all obey a basic set of rules. Epidemiologist Adam Kucharskis timely book explains those rules along with such by-now celebrity concepts as the R (reproduction) number and herd immunity. One intriguing idea he explores is that a fake news pandemic such as were witnessing obeys the same internal logic as the disease it feeds off. Kucharskis is an accessible account of the science that is guiding our governments, when they choose to listen.

Sulphuric UtopiasLukas Engelmann and Christos Lynteris (MIT Press, 2020)

Lest we forget what a pain in the arse infectious diseases are, and how much effort our forebears invested in keeping them at bay, the magnificently titled Sulphuric Utopias exists to remind us. A pleasure to read and also available via open access, its the story of how early 20th-century fumigation technologies transformed maritime quarantine practices and inspired utopian visions of disease-free global trade. Remember that?

The Observers technology columnist, John Naughton is emeritus professor of the public understanding of technology at the Open University and a senior research fellow at the University of Cambridges Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities. His most recent book is From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg: What You Really Need to Know About the Internet.

Steve JobsWalter Isaacson (Little, Brown, 2011)

Steve Jobs revolutionised five industries personal computers, animated movies, music, phones and tablet computing so if you want to understand how our digital world evolved, this sprawling, 630-page biography by a man who knew him well is a good place to start. Although Jobs cooperated with the author, he asked for no control over what was written and put nothing off limits. Reading it, you wouldnt want to work for Jobs. On the other hand, youre glad that people like him exist.

The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It EvolvesW Brian Arthur (Simon & Schuster, 2009)

Brian Arthur is a brilliant economist who one day started to wonder what this force that we call technology is. What is its nature, its essence? And how does it evolve? This remarkable book was the outcome of his search for an answer to these questions. It comes in the form of a theory about technologys origins and evolution. In a way, Arthur did for our understanding of technological progress what Thomas Kuhn did for our understanding of how science advances. In his account, technology doesnt advance by the lightbulb moments of popular imagination but at points where a number of other apparently unrelated developments suddenly come together to enable something entirely new. Which, of course, is also why tech often catches us unawares.

Re-engineering HumanityBrett Frischmann and Evan Selinger (Cambridge University Press, 2018)

We like to think that technology is there to serve humanity. But this sobering book by a legal scholar (Frischmann) and a philosopher (Selinger) suggests a darker possibility, which is that we have been building a world in which humans are being subtly re-engineered to make them more receptive to machine-driven logics. Our looming problem, they argue, isnt so much the rise of smart machines as the dumbing down of humanity. Implausible? Maybe. And then you remember that the only response option offered to its users by Facebook is to Like something: the entire spectrum of possible human responses is forced through a single, narrow aperture. If that isnt dumbing down, I dont know what is.

Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of ControlStuart Russell (Allen Lane, 2019)

Stuart Russell is one of the leading experts on artificial intelligence and this book is a real tour de force that outlines the risks of increasingly powerful AI in an authoritative and readable way. Russell believes that our current approach to designing intelligent machines is fundamentally misguided and would indeed lead to dystopian outcomes if the visions of its evangelists ever came to fruition. Hes very good at explaining how we got to where we are now, but is also able to make a persuasive case for how we can escape catastrophic superintelligence and ensure that machines augment human capabilities rather than make them redundant.

The Age of Surveillance CapitalismShoshana Zuboff (Profile Books, 2019)

A big book in every sense of the term. Its the first account of how capitalism morphed to exploit the conditions of the digital age. Its a new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction and sales. Whats most interesting about the book is the way it provides a historical context that makes the business models of Facebook and Google more intelligible. In a way, capitalism hasnt really mutated. Its merely adapted to new opportunities and found new kinds of resources to pillage. Except that now its not the Earths resources that are being appropriated, but our minds and behaviour.

To order books mentioned in this feature for a special price go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

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Thirty books to help us understand the world in 2020 - The Guardian

Can Apocalypse Be Dealt With? The Diplomat – The Diplomat

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In a lecture at the Australian National Universitys National Security College on October 13, Australias Department of Home Affairs Secretary Mike Pezzullo enumerated a long and frightening list of security risks the country and the world would have to reckon with over the next hundred years. Pezzullo, who became the first head of the Home Affairs ministry in 2017, took a refreshingly expansive view of the notion of security itself in his speech, interrogating traditional conceptions, with a veritable whos who of Australias national security establishment in the audience.

Indeed, his was the only speech by a serving senior security official I have heard so far that included a reference to the French post-structuralist Jacques Derrida. Pezzullos repeated invocation of another French philosopher, Michel Foucault, was marginally less unexpected given Foucaults work on surveillance and biopolitics topics painfully relevant to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

The pandemic in many ways provided the senior-most bureaucrat responsible for internal security in Australia a perfect entry point for the inclusion of a wide variety of threats, beyond traditional ones, which do not emanate from human actors and therefore cant be deterred or met with through the use of force. (Noting that overarming the state is as bad as underarming it, at one point Pezzullo suggested, quite correctly, that when it came to Australias security right now, handwashing is more important than every weapon system in the arsenal of the Australian Defense Forces.)

Pezzullos self-described apocalyptic list of risks included catastrophic ones, defined loosely as those with the potential to inflict serious harm to humanity on a global scale, perhaps even spanning generations. Pandemics clearly are catastrophic risks; but so are many others he named, ranging from geomagnetic storms from unusual solar activity and permanent loss of natural diversity to manmade risks, including those posed by advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and synthetic biology.

Get briefed on the story of the week, and developing stories to watch across the Asia-Pacific.

Three fundamental questions arise when it comes to catastrophic risks, none of which are easy to answer: To what extent can probabilities be assigned to these risks within a fixed time horizon and such risks compared; how much resources should a state a priori allocate to mitigating their impact; and what is the role of the national security bureaucracy in managing them?

Lets start with the issue of estimating probabilities of catastrophic risks. Many natural ones, from the risk of direct hit from an asteroid to the existential risk posed by a supernova explosion, can be easily calculated. In a new book, Oxford scholar Toby Ord computes them: It turns out that the probability of an asteroid bigger than 10 kilometers hitting the earth over the next century is less than one out of 150 million. The chance of a supernova depleting the earths ozone layer by more than 30 percent over the next century is less than 1 in 50 million. However, when it came to significant mortal risks from pandemics, probabilists Pasquale Cirillo and Nassim Nicholas Taleb have mathematically established they are higher than widely assumed.

That said, when it comes to human-generated anthropogenic risks, odds become harder to calculate: Consider Pezzullos Terminator example or, dressed in academese, the problem of an artificial superintelligence of the kind studied by Ords colleague Nick Bostrom. (In Bostroms theorizing, it is entirely possible that such an AI could wipe out humanity leaving no possibility of regeneration in the future a truly existential risk.) Such an intelligence could naturally arise out of exponential progress in machine learning within the next 10 years or not in a 100; much depends on how you see certain technological trends projecting into the future. Absent precise, objectively reliable, ways to quantify many anthropogenic risks, pooled expert predictions are often used to arrive at a number. (One such, in 2008, put the chances of human extinction this century at 19 percent.)

This naturally leads to a very practical question: How much of government resources should be allocated to meet catastrophic risks, especially when there is a plethora of them competing for money with on-the-horizon plausible national security challenges, such defense spending in the face of great power rivals, and there is no obvious way to rank all of the risks side by side? Furthermore, planners like armies often tend to prep for the last contingency they faced. With COVID-19 very much still here, it is likely that it would animate debates around government spending priorities for some time to come. (However, this is not to say that the possibility another pandemic after COVID-19 is remote; if anything, systematic destruction of animal habitats and climate change very much makes it possible that another deadly virus will reappear in the foreseeable future. The point here is that to focus on that possibility alone, at the expense of other risks, would be foolish.)

But fundamentally, theres a conceptual issue at hand. A catastrophic risk is almost by definition something with significant second and higher-order effects. (The ongoing global economic decimation from COVID-19 and attendant possibility of political chaos are cases in point.) Given that many such risks are distributed, networked and interconnected, as Pezzullo described them, estimating the cost of their impact (that is, pricing the risk) is extremely hard though not impossible. Add to this the fact that different potential catastrophic risks will play out differently: For example, while the ongoing pandemic has spared the earths environment, that may not be the case with a supervolcanic eruption.

When it comes to mitigation strategies too, there are no silver bullets. Take the issue of machine superintelligence, as an example. Beyond repeated calls for responsible, ethical AI research and hysteria around killer robots, the fact of the matter is that a large part of the cutting-edge research in this direction is taking place in the private sector, whose compliance with a voluntary set of regulations should they be put in place by governments is uncertain. While it is common in some circles to note, as Pezzullo did in his lecture, that risks acquire added lethality when they transmit themselves through networks the very reason why social distancing holds the key to beating the coronavirus, as Taleb and collaborators prophetically argued in January a uniform strategy of shutting networks down in face of an incipient threat could also backfire in unexpected ways. Think of the economic costs of a large-scale internet shutdown, for example.

Finally comes the role of the national security bureaucracy in managing catastrophic non-traditional threats. Here too are two sides of the same coin. As some security studies scholars have long argued, declaring a threat (such as a pandemic) to be a national security one, to securitize it, has obvious downsides. For one, such a move restricts the flow of information which, as we saw with Chinas initial reaction to the coronavirus, is singularly detrimental. At the same time, denoting something as a security threat also stands to attract significant resources to meet it and centralize response authority. And while Pezzullo, in his lecture, rightly argued that the definition of national security should not be broadened to include all policy discourse, the fact of the matter is that the national security apparatus, especially intelligence agencies, have resources (for example, intel collectors at global hotspots) that stand to significantly help mitigate emerging threats.

At the end, the answer to many of these questions may indeed lie with a proposal of the Australian Home Affairs secretary: of an extended state a network of governmental organizations, businesses, civil society and others that rises to meet security challenges rather than leaving that task to the state alone. Fleshing that idea out fully to incorporate a range of catastrophic risks their mitigation or dealing with them when they manifest remains an interesting exercise.

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Can Apocalypse Be Dealt With? The Diplomat - The Diplomat

These Are The 10 Highest-Paid Actresses Of 2020 – Marie Claire

Based out the outlet's annual list, television actresses were amongst the highest earners this year, with the vast majority of stars in the ranking having reaped most of their financial rewards from appearing in hit TV shows, includingThe Handmaid's Tale, Grey's AnatomyandModern Family.

The actress who placed 'second' last year officially surged ahead in 2020, thanks to her role as a reality TV show host, a hit sit-com and a number of endorsements, earning USD $43 million (AUD $60 million) this year alone.

This year also saw the inimitable Viola Davis make her debut on the list, thanks to her role in the hit showHow To Get Away With Murder.

That said, there are a few other surprise entrants on theand it must be said, overwhelmingly whitelist. Scroll on to see the complete list of the 10 highest-paid actresses in Hollywood for 2020.

Appearing on the list for the first time (although we'd argue, based on her talent, she should have been here a long time ago), Viola Davis takes out the 10th spot, thanks to her roles as Annalise Keating inblockbuster seriesHow To Get Away With Murder and Ma Rainey in Netflix's filmfilm adaption of the August Wilson play,Ma Raineys Black Bottom.

Blessed be the fruit! For her role in the dystopian TV seriesHandmaid's Tale,Moss is paid USD $1 million per episode (AUD $1.4 million).Forbes also revealed that her role in the surprise hit filmInvisible Man also accounted for a large, undisclosed portion of her earnings in 2020.

Following a contract regnotiation in 2017, Pompeo earns about USD $550,000 (AUD $767,800) for her role in the iconic TV seriesGrey's Anatomy. PerForbes, she also pockets around USD $6 million per year (AUD $8.38 million) from her share of the show's syndication profits.

According toForbes, Nicole Kidman will be joining herBig Little Lies co-star Meryl Streep in Ryan Murphy'sThe Prom on Netflix (due for release in December 2020) which will pay her an eight-figure upfront salary. She will also earn approximately USD $1 million (AUD $1.4 million) per episode for her role in the psychological thriller seriesThe Undoing.

The first film in Emily Blunt'sA Quiet Place series grossed AUD $477 million on an AUD $23.73 million budget. Blunt has negotiated an upfront eight-figure salary for the sequel, to be released next year. Her part in the film Disney's upcoming filmThe Jungle Cruisewill also earn her a check in the high seven figures.

Meryl Streep reportedly made USD $5 million (AUD $6.98 million) between 2019 and 2020 from her HBO comedy filmLet Them All Talk.The rest of her earnings came from her roles in the hit filmsLittle WomenandThe Prom, alongside Kidman.

The comedy star maintains a regular income as the host of TV showLittle Big Shots, but also bolstered her earnings by appearing in two films:Thunderforce and Superintelligence. Forbes also factored in her upcoming role asUrsula in the live-action version ofThe Little Mermaid to place her fourth on the list.

Although filming forWonder Woman 1984 may be on hiatus, Gal Gadot's partnership with Netflix proved to be rather fruitful, with the actress raking in over USD $20 million (AUD $27.9 million) for her role in the filmRed Notice.

One of the few actresses to make almost all of her earnings from traditional films, Angelina Jolie's biggest money-maker for 2020 comes from her starring role inThe Eternals,slated for release in November 2021.

And the top spot goes to: Sofia Vergara! Following the series finale of her internationally beloved showModern Family in April 2020, the actress began her run as a judge onAmerica's Got Talent, with the vast majority of her earnings come from the reality TV show.Forbes also reports that Vergara padded out her pockets with a number of endorsements and licensing deals, including a line of jeans and furniture at US retailers Walmart and Rooms To Go, respectively.

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These Are The 10 Highest-Paid Actresses Of 2020 - Marie Claire

Forbes 10 highest-paid actresses of 2020 have been revealed – The Independent

Forbes has released its annual list naming the highest-paid actresses of the year.

The list for 2020 has been affected by the Covid-19 pandemic after several high-profile film releases have been delayed.

It's because of this that the list is largely dominated by stars of television and titles released on streaming platforms, including Netflix.

Modern Family star Sofia Vergara who is a judge on America's Got Talent topped the list with total earnings of ($43m/33.2m).

Vergara earned $500,000 (386,000) per episode of the hit ABC sitcom, which drew to a close earlier this year. For America's Got Talent, she earns $10m (7.7m) per season.

Following in second place is Angelina Jolie with takings of $35.5m (27.5m) thanks to her role in forthcoming Marvel film Eternals.

Wonder Woman star Gal Gadot is in third place having earned the bulk of her $31.5m (24.3m) for Netflix film Red Notice for which she earned $20m (15.5m).

Both Meryl Streep and Nicole Kidman earned big paychecks for Ryan Murphy's Netflix film The Prom, with Melissa McCarthy also featuring thanks to roles in HBO Max's Superintelligence and Netflix film Thunder Force.

Joining Jolie as the other star to make the top 10 thanks to theatrical films is Emily Blunt the only British star on the list. She earned big payouts for A Quiet Place II and Jungle Cruise, both of which have been delayed.

Find the full top 10 below:

1. Sofia Vergara $43m (33.2m)

2. Angelina Jolie $35.5m (27.5m)

3. Gal Gadot $31.5m (24.3m)

4. Melissa McCarthy $25m (19.3m)

5. Meryl Streep $24m (18.5m)

6. Emily Blunt $22.5m (17.4m)

7. Nicole Kidman $22m (17m)

8. Ellen Pompeo $19m (14.7m)

9. Elisabeth Moss $16m (12.3m)

10. Viola Davis $15.5m (12m)

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Forbes 10 highest-paid actresses of 2020 have been revealed - The Independent

Hulk Just Exploded Into Bits and Pieces in The Immortal Hulk #35 – Screen Rant

Hulk just overloaded with green energy and exploded in The Immortal Hulk #35. Is the 'Immortal Hulk' more mortal than readers have believed?

Warning! Spoilers for Immortal Hulk #35 below

The Hulk is known for his body's extreme resilience. His body is so durable because of his ability to increase his strength through anger. Hulk is so close to immortal that he is often pitted against Marvel's strongest heroes and villains. Hulk has survivedcountless destructive events and deadly foes, but in The Immortal Hulk #35,his body was just completely obliterated by an explosion from within.

The Hulk is a hero so powerful that some of his fellow heroes once tricked him into leaving the earth because of his capacity for destruction. While he appears immortal (and become seemingly immortal in the current run) he has momentarily died in several comics only to be saved or revived by a miraculous event. His death in The Immortal Hulk #35was one of the most complete and brutal because his entire body was reduced to shreds of skin and bone in the final panel.

Related:Hulk's Strong Enough To Wear TWO Infinity Gauntlets (in Comics)

The Immortal Hulk #35by Al Ewing, Mike Hawthorne, Mark Morales, Paul Mounts, Cory Petit, and Alex Ross ends with Bruce Banner's body left in tatters after he internally combusts. This issue finds Hulk helping build a house as part of his quest to do good and control his extreme emotions. His actions turn into a big press scene for the local mayor. Little does Bruce know, one of his greatest foes, The Leader is mere feet away from him, disguised as Bruce's close friend Rick Jones. Just as Hulk calms himself down from a close call with losing his temper, The Leader strolls up to him in Rick's body and lays a hand on his shoulder. The Leader charges Hulk's body with a green light that might be gamma radiation.

The green light energy fills The Hulk's body first escaping his eyes and mouth until it eventually explodes obliterating Hulk's body and killing two bystanders. The Leader is one of the most capable Hulk villains due to the superintelligence at his disposal. He, like The Hulk, was a product of gamma radiation. Fans have seen Hulk's body endure all kinds of punishment including getting his neck snapped in comics or his body scorched in Avengers: Endgame.Despite getting extremely close to dying many times, Hulk has rarely had his entire body destroyed such as in The Immortal Hulk #35.

The Leader has historically been one of The Hulk's fiercest opponents in the comics so has he finally done what seemed impossible? It is difficult to fathom what writer Al Ewing has in store for Marvel's big green powerhouse. This suspenseful story poses a question that Hulk fans have been pondering since his inception. Is the 'Immortal Hulk' truly immortal?

Next:How Powerful The Hulk Really Is In Each MCU Movie

Source: The Immortal Hulk #35

Star Wars: The REAL Reason Luke Escaped Darth Vader

Charles Singh is a reader, writer, and huge geek. He is based in The Bronx, New York. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English literature in 2019 from Lehman College. He has worked for several non-profit organizations including The Harlem Children's Zone, MMCC, and The GO Project, assisting New York City's youth and spreading a love for literature.

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Hulk Just Exploded Into Bits and Pieces in The Immortal Hulk #35 - Screen Rant

Should You Get Down (And Occasionally Dirty) With Star Trek: Lower Decks? – PRIMETIMER

Star Trek: Lower Decks (CBS)

Media companies know you have a choice when it comes to streaming platforms, so they must differentiate themselves from one another. That's easy for Netflix, which was first in the game; or Disney+, which leverages content catalog and a brand identity that's been nearly a century in the making.Beyond that, it gets a little more difficult for a streamer to stand out. From the start, CBS All Access has defined itself as the destination for new series in theStar Trekfranchise: it launched in 2017 withStar Trek: Discovery, a new space adventure.Star Trek: Picard, which picks back up with the belovedNext Generationcaptain after his retirement,followed in January of this year. This week sees the premiere ofStar Trek: Lower Decks, which... is a bit of a departure.

Up to now, the exploits chronicled in theStar Trekfranchise (including both seasons ofStar Trek: The Animated Series)have tended toward thrilling heroics. This animated series goes another way.For starters, Lower Decksis set on a Starfleet vessel the U.S.S. Cerritos which is tasked with handling secondcontact with new civilizations; Cerritosofficersvisit for utilitarianfollow-ups after other crews have already swept in and out to collect first-contactglory. But the series doesn't even focus on the second-contactCerritosofficers: its main characters are the ensigns who live and work in the ship's titular bowels, doing tasks of commensurate crappiness.

Ensign Tendi (voice of Nol Wells), newly arrived medical trainee, is eager and geeky. Ensign Rutherford (Eugene Cordero), still getting used to his new cybernetic upgrades, is nearly as dedicated as Tendi, and her likeliest love interest; he's a superstar in Engineering. Ensign Boimler (Jack Quaid) is a teacher's pet, focused on moving up in the ranks, possibly to the exclusion of any wonderment he might be experiencing at, you know, his job as a space traveler. Constantly needling him is Ensign Mariner (Tawny Newsome, remaining in the cosmos after her stint in Netflix's Space Forcethis spring), a former officer who's been demoted; rather than being concerned about her career trajectory, sheloves her low-pressure lower-decks life. The series was created by Mike McMahan (Rick and Morty;Solar Opposites); other writers include Katie Krentz (Over The Garden Wall) andChris Kula (Close Enough), with Alex Kurtzman and Rod "Gene's Son" Roddenberry both keepers of theTrekflame across all the new series among its executive producers.

Boimler and Mariner, at the center of the story, are a classic sitcom odd couple:intense overachiever and cheerful slacker. Even if we didn't know anything about theStar Trekfranchise (and, nearly 60 years in, evenTrekabstainers are somewhat conversant with the basics just by osmosis), the pilot makes it clear early on which ensign's attitude Starfleet endorses: Captain Freeman (Dawnn Lewis) tells Boimler she knows Mariner is a goldbricker, ordering him to spy on her and report back on any incidents of Mariner failing to follow protocol. Almost immediately, while visiting an alien planet, Mariner departs from her orders. Boimler thinks she's selling residents Starfleet tech to enrich herself, but it turns out to be farm equipment they would get from Starfleetif they went through channels; it would just take much longer. Mariner's ways may not be Boimler's, but he decides not to snitch on her (after which we find out why Captain Freeman is taking such a personal interest in Mariner's performance).

Portraying Starfleet as a behemoth bogged down by pointless bureaucracies is actually kind of a subversive take on what is generally portrayed as an inter-galactic United Nations for a post-politics utopia. The first season ofPicardchallengedStarfleet orthodoxy too specifically, on a late-in-the-Next-Generation-film-franchise plot point involving androids whose superintelligence may have threatened humanity. But after two seasons of DCU's animated seriesHarley Quinn,a spectacularly violent, sexually adventurous, routinely profane, gleefully meta thrill ride (a side character appears in a "Release The Snyder Cut" t-shirt, for example),Lower Deckscan't help seeming tame by comparison. (The writers clearly know their Treklore, and there's ajoke in the second episode about a viral video of a "Vice-Admiral Gibson" falling off a stage that I bet was "Capt. Morgan Bateson," the character Kelsey Grammer played in a 1992 episode ofTNG, before a higher-up nixed it for being too mean.) It's not entirely fair to compare the two shows Lower Decksseems aimed at older kids and tweens, whereasHarley Quinnisabsolutely not for children but even in spirit,Lower Decksfeels, at least in these early episodes, a little too reverential toward the franchise.

That said, even over the first four episodes that were released to critics, the show did give the sense of unfolding into greater playfulness, and I was reminded that the first few episodes of another fine animatedsci-fi show,Futurama, were also a little tentative before the show's characters started to settle into what would be their ultimate forms. The more I saw of Lower Decks, the more I wanted to see. Congratulations, CBS All Access; you've managed to filch another couple of months' worth of subscription fees out of me.

Star Trek: Lower Decks drops on CBS All Access on August 6th.

People are talking about Star Trek: Lower Decks in our forums. Join the conversation.

Writer, editor, and snack enthusiast Tara Ariano is the co-founder of Television Without Pity and Fametracker (RIP). She co-hosts the podcasts Extra Hot Great and Again With This (a compulsively detailed episode-by-episode breakdown of Beverly Hills, 90210), and has contributed to New York, the New York Times magazine, Vulture, Decider, Salon, and Slate, among many others. She lives in Austin.

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Should You Get Down (And Occasionally Dirty) With Star Trek: Lower Decks? - PRIMETIMER

The Era Of Autonomous Army Bots is Here – Forbes

When the average person thinks about AI and robots what often comes to mind are post-apocalyptic visions of scary, super-intelligent machines taking over the world, or even the universe. The Terminator movie series is a good reflection of this fear of AI, with the core technology behind the intelligent machines powered by Skynet, referred to as an artificial neural network-based conscious group mind and artificial general superintelligence system. However, the AI of today looks nothing like the worrisome science fiction representation. Rather, AI is performing many tedious and manual tasks and providing value from recognition and conversation systems to predictive analytics pattern matching and autonomous systems.

In that context, the fact that governments and military organizations are investing heavily in AI shouldnt be as much concerning as it is intriguing. The ways that machine learning and AI are being implemented are both mundane from the perspective of enabling humans to do their existing tasks better, and very interesting seeing how machines are being made more intelligent to give humans better understanding and control of the environment around them.

John Fossaceca, APM for AI & ML for Maneuver & Mobility at US Army Research Laboratory (ARL), who spoke at a recent AI in Government event shares some insights as to how AI is being applied on a day-to-day basis as well as where things are heading with autonomous bots and other machines in the US Army.

How is the Army currently leveraging AI?

John Fossaceca: The Army is leveraging AI in many ways, for example in predictive maintenance. AI techniques can help predict when vehicle parts need to be replaced or serviced before the vehicle breaks down. If this can be done well it will save money and increase operational safety. This is being implemented with the Bradley Fighting Vehicle as well as others.

The Army has a vast amount of data and many AI and Machine Learning (AI/ML) techniques require large amounts of data. Some programs that leverage data include Project Maven that consumes data from drones and helps to automate some of the work that analysts do. Project Maven leverages some standard AI tools such as Googles TensorFlow as well as customized tools built internally.

The Army has active ongoing research using AI to enhance autonomous vehicles, electronic warfare and signal intelligence, sensor fusion and augmented reality. AI will improve situational awareness in the battlefield and improve decision-making with programs such as the Joint All-Domain Command & Control (JAD-C2) initiative.

Another area where AI plays a role for the Army is in talent management. The Armys AI Task Force (AITF) has an initiative to use AI

Army Futures Command AI Task Force

to identify the competencies and attributes that lead to successful performance that can then be used to find potential candidates for positions in the Army.

At the Combat Capabilities Development Commands Army Research Laboratory (ARL), Artificial Intelligence is considered to be a primary research area. ARL is the Armys corporate research laboratory and has many initiatives that leverage Artificial Intelligence. For example the essential research program entitled, Artificial Intelligence for Maneuver and Mobility (AIMM) is leading the way for how the Army will imbue the Next Generation Combat Vehicles (NGCV) with the ability to operate off road without the need for being supervised by a soldier with a remote control radio. These next generation intelligent vehicles will be able to reason about specific situations, environmental conditions and make decisions about the best action to take while keeping soldier teammates informed and improving overall situational awareness. There are many other essential research programs (ERPs) at ARL that also leverage AI methods and all of these ERPs are producing innovations that will greatly benefit army operations in the future.

In the near term, the Army is using AI to leverage inputs from multiple sensors in order to build an accurate picture of battlefield threats and speed up the targeting and decision making process in Project Convergence, an initiative led by the Army Futures Command.

What are some challenges in the Army when it comes to AI/ML adoption?

John Fossaceca: Commercial AI relies on vast computing resources and large amount of data including cloud computing reach back when necessary. Battlefield AI, on the other hand, must operate within the constraints of edge devices: Computer processors must be relatively light and small with potentially constrained communication bandwidth under adversarial conditions.

In Army applications often there is either not enough training data or the data is corrupted or noisy. Operational environments tend to be dynamically changing and sometimes unstructured with damaged roads, buildings and infrastructure. There is heterogeneous data from many sources, sometimes this data is deceptive or influenced by adversaries.

Todays AI techniques tend to be brittle and can break down even under ideal operating conditions. These methods are very limited in their ability to reason, especially in real-time. There are some deployed systems that tout AI capabilities that are limited to hard-coded rules and lack the ability to reason and infer from inputs from sensors and other systems and do not provide enhanced situational assessment.

Many of the AI approaches depend on supervised learning (e.g. deep learning) and these techniques create massive models, often with 10 to 100 million parameters learned in a batch-basedmode on powerful computing infrastructures. The Army needs alternatives to these offline and time consuming training methods.

Ultimately, current systems are not able to operate autonomously, and require constanthuman attention, intervention and manual control. Back in 2018 we were looking at learning from feedback where a human observer would simply provide a positive or negative signal to the intelligent agent and we demonstrated that we could drastically reduce the learning time by orders of magnitude. We are extending this research to Learning from Demonstration which Ill discuss soon.

As our research progressed we realized that we need a way to interactand communicate withintelligent agents in a natural way. Beyond just natural dialog and grounding, a lot of issues crop up due to a lack of shared understanding of the world and commonsense reasoning. These shortcomings are being addressed through several research programs in AIMMs second line of effort Context Aware Decision Making.

How is the Army working towards getting their data in a usable state for AI/ML?

John Fossaceca: There are many data collection and labelling initiatives being worked on by the Army and across the DoD preparing data for use by AI algorithms. For example, Project Maven has a lot of videos from military drones. Sometimes labelling is done through crowdsourcing techniques depending on the level of classification. Other initiatives include ARLs work to internally collect data from various locations and with research partners to curate and label data from a variety of terrains. ARL has a Robotics Research Collaboration Campus (R2C2) in Maryland where data is collected and autonomous experiments are conducted.

In addition to project Maven, there are several efforts across the DoD for intelligence analysis using state of the art tools. Many of these projects focus on detecting specific objects in images using deep learning methods and each of these programs requires large amounts of data be cleaned, curated and labelled in order to be useful. These efforts also require an AI pipeline that consists of storage, algorithmic toolkits, computing resources, testing and deployment tools. Often data format standards are developed to ensure consistency between experiments and tests and provide users with a familiar environment. These data repositories need to be cataloged and be accessible to users as well as have useful descriptions of the data contained within them. There are some efforts to standardize this access information across several databases to make it easier for the intelligence community to use.

How is the Army leveraging AI-enabled autonomous vehicles for Maneuver and Mobility?

John Fossaceca: In the Armys Robotic and Autonomous Systems (RAS) strategy, General Daniel B. Allyn, Vice Chief of Staff states, The integration of RAS will help future Army forces, operating as part of Joint teams, to defeat enemy organizations, control terrain, secure populations, and consolidate gains. RAS capabilities will also allow future Army forces to conduct operations consistent with the concept of multi-domain battle, projecting power outward from land into maritime, space, and cyberspace domains to preserve Joint Force freedom of movement and action.

According to the RAS strategy Effective integration of RAS improves U.S. forces ability to maintain overmatch and renders an enemy unable to respond effectively. The Army must pursue RAS capabilities with urgency because adversaries are developing and employing a broad range of advanced RAS technologies as well as employing new tactics to disrupt U.S. military strengths and exploit perceived weaknesses

In order to accomplish the vision laid out in the RAS strategy, autonomous vehicles will need to ensure freedom of maneuver while decreasing risks to soldiers. This will require collaboration between humans and machines that is autonomous. Vehicles will be teammates for soldiers in the battlefield rather than just another piece of equipment. These integrated human-machine teams will allow forces to learn, adapt, fight and win under uncertain situations.

AI is one of the key enablers for these intelligent autonomous systems. These systems will be able to deal with near peer or peer adversaries who can operate at fast speeds by allowing our forces to make decisions more quickly. The Army will also have to contend with the fact that our adversaries will also be using their own autonomous systems. With more autonomy, robotic autonomous systems will be less dependent on communication links that are often unreliable in battlefield conditions due to jamming or capacity issues.

In terms of priorities, the RAS strategy calls for near term improvements in situational awareness and helping to reduce the physical load on soldiers. In the midterm, automated convoy operations will not only help with sustainment but will protect soldiers. In the longer term, autonomous vehicles will execute advanced tactical maneuvers and will increase capabilities within brigade combat teams.

What are some unique environmental challenges that impact the research that goes into autonomous vehicles and equipment?

John Fossaceca: In addition to complex terrain and unstructured environments where the Army operates, the environment often consists of adversaries and these adversaries may be unpredictable. The Army has research that focuses specifically on so-called tactical behaviors, that is, what are the specific formations that the autonomous vehicles should utilize? How can an autonomous vehicle achieve a position of advantage over an adversary? How can an autonomous vehicle operate without being detected by an enemy force? The Army has done research in autonomous subterranean exploration as well as and in order to operationalize autonomy, next generation combat vehicles will need to be able to reason about the possibility of all potential routes, even water crossings.

How does the ARLs research in autonomous vehicles differ from what industry is doing?

John Fossaceca: Often, in Army contexts because large amounts of militarily relevant, labeled data are not available so a very important research area ARL is pursuing are AI algorithms than can learn with far fewer examples than traditional supervised approaches. In concert with these the Army has developed some unsupervised approaches for things like scene segmentation which can use self-labeling methods. However, such methods still require a lot of computing power and it is challenging to do in real-time on the autonomous vehicle. To help address this problem, the Army has several computer scientists who specialize in computer architecture and algorithms to take advanced state of the art methods and make them work within the processor size and power constraints of Army autonomous vehicles.

The Army has unique technical challenges that the commercial sector is not addressing. Autonomous vehicles generally do not operate in an environment that is contested in all domains. Certainly there are people, obstacles and sometimes unexpected events, however, military operations occur in very uncertain environments, complex and dangerous terrains which may be filled with adversaries and other dangers.

The first instantiation of this will be tele-operated and as the Army operates these vehicles, we will learn how to employ robots in the battlefield. This will inform the autonomous behaviors that we need to develop. Ultimately, Next Generation Combat vehicles will have the capability to learn in the field, adapt to the current situation, reason and act effectively in support of the Multi-domain Operations mission.

What is a unique insight into your AI challenges that others might be interested to learn?

John Fossaceca: Recent Army research has found success with deep reinforcement learning techniques that leverage human demonstration and feedback. Newer methods have been successful in greatly reducing the time it takes to train a system on new tasks. Other research that involves learning from human demonstration is showing early promise and utility for battlefield retraining with the potential for real-time learning using limited examples. These techniques appear to allow for transfer learning, that is, learning under one set of conditions and operating under a new set of conditions without the need to for training from scratch.

How does the Army envision the warfighter and battlefield of the future?

John Fossaceca: The Armys vision of the future battlefield will have an unmanned formation several kilometers in advance of a manned formation. One goal is to have the autonomous systems do area and route reconnaissance to find or make contact with the enemy while providing stand off for soldiers.

How important is AI to the Armys vision of the future?

John Fossaceca: AI will be a critical enabler for future success in Multi-domain Operations. According to the former Secretary of the Army and current Secretary of Defense, Mr. Mark Esper, if we can master AI then I think it will just really position us better to make sure we protect the American people. Winning on the future battlefield requires us to act faster than our enemies while placing our troops and resources at a lower risk.Whoever gets there first will maintain a decisive edge on the battlefield for years to come.

The current Secretary of the Army, Mr. Ryan McCarthy has stated that cloud based technologies and capabilities are key in order to maximize AI. Mr. McCarthy wants to see the cloud infrastructure put into place as a driver for AI progress. According to Mr. McCarthy, this will be critical for decision-making in the battlefield.

What is the Armys perspective on ethics and responsible use of AI?

John Fossaceca: The Army and DoD as a whole is concerned with AI Ethics and last October a draft of Recommendations on the Ethical Use of Artificial Intelligence. These rules will apply across the U.S. military. The U.S. military will have humans that will be in control of all AI enabled systems.

The Armys AI Task Force has an ethics officer who helps to inform AI ethics policies. Per Secretary of the Army, Mr. Ryan McCarthy, A system can crunch the data very quickly and give you an answer, but it doesnt have context, he said. Only a human being can bring the context to a decision.

What are you doing to get an AI ready workforce and war fighter? Are you providing training and education around AI?

John Fossaceca: ARL and the Army offers many opportunities for students to do internships as well as SMART Scholarships that help students pay for education and in exchange the student will work for the Army for a period of time. ARL also hires new doctoral graduates as PostDocs and brings them in to do cutting edge research. Eventually some of the PostDocs will become employees. Because Artificial Intelligence is key competency area, the Army is increasingly hiring scientists and engineers with this expertise.

What are you doing now to train soldiers to make them more comfortable working alongside autonomous systems and robots?

John Fossaceca: Since the types of autonomous systems we are talking about are still under development, we use simulation in our training environments to help soldiers get comfortable operating with autonomous systems. The Army is early in process but there are some ongoing initiatives such as the Reconfigurable Virtual Collective Trainer (RVCT) including both ground and air platforms that provides the ability to rehearse missions with simulated data.

Many of the training efforts focus on realistic simulations of intelligent semi-autonomous and autonomous systems providing soldiers an immersive training experience. Soldiers train against virtual opponents in this Synthetic Training Environment(STE). These virtual opponents are imbued with intelligent behaviors that have a certain unpredictability to simulate adversaries as well as a reasonable level of cognition based on also leveraging state-of-the-art artificial intelligence with realistic environments.

At the foundational research level, ARL has used soldiers to interact with autonomous prototypes to learn how soldiers speak and what commands they tend to use. This has also help some soldiers learn how autonomous systems behave. In fact, as soldiers train with autonomous systems, they tend to adapt their language over time to more effectively communicate and control such systems.

What AI technologies are you most looking forward to in the coming years?

John Fossaceca: We are making advances in using artificial intelligence for reasoning about the environment and being able to recommend specific courses of action to soldier teammates. This will represent moving beyond narrow AI, where autonomous agents can do very specific tasks well, to being able to adapt to new, never before seen situations. They will determine what actions are possible and the probability of success for each of these actions. This is not general AI, that is, AI that can reason at a level close to human beings. What we envision in the future, is the ability for autonomous systems to do sophisticated reasoning about a given situation, make complex decisions and anticipate what the outcomes might be to ensure mission success.

More:

The Era Of Autonomous Army Bots is Here - Forbes

AI Could Overtake Humans in 5 Years, Says Elon Musk, Whose ‘Top Concern’ is Google-Owned DeepMind – International Business Times, Singapore Edition

Elon Musk tweeted that Teslas self-driving cars would cost more after July

Artificial Intelligence is the future of this world and a perfect example of technological development. But the tech billionaire Elon Musk warns the world about the dark side of it as there is a strong possibility that AI will take over humans within the next five years.

The CEO of SpaceX and the co-founder of the AI research lab OpemAI has been sounding the alarm bells against the rising threat of advanced AI over the past few years.

As reported by The New York Times, Musk said: "My assessment about why AI is overlooked by very smart people is that very smart people do not think a computer can ever be as smart as they are. And this is hubris and obviously false."

The billionaire technology entrepreneur claimed that the experience he gathered while working with different types of AI at Tesla, has given him the confidence to claim that the world is heading toward a situation where AI is "vastly smarter than humans." Musk said that the time frame is probably less than five years now, but it doesn't mean that "everything goes to hell in five years. It just means that things get unstable or weird."

'Top Concern'

Almost four years ago the Tesla CEO sounded an alarm saying that humans could become the equivalent of "house cats" considering the rise of the AI rulers. Now it looks like his point of view about AI has not changed at all, as recently he said that the highly secretive London research lab DeepMindrun by Demis Hassabisis Musk's "top concern" when it comes to AI technology. It was acquired by Google in 2014 for a reported $600 million.

"Just the nature of the AI that they're building is one that crushes all humans at all games," Musk said adding that "I mean, it's basically the plotline in 'WarGames'"a 1983 movie, in which a teenager unintentionally connects to an AI-controlled government supercomputer that used to run war simulations. Going with the background of the movie, after starting a game called "Global Thermonuclear War," the teen leads the computer to activate the country's nuclear arsenal in response to his simulated threat as the Soviet Union.

In 2017, at the Beneficial AI conference, Musk and Hassabis sat on a panel"Superintelligence: Science or Fiction?" -- along with Oxford professor and Superintelligence author Nick Bostrom, Skype cofounder Jaan Tallinn, Google engineering director Ray Kurzweil and many other experts from the tech industry. At the start of the panel, everyone agreed that some form of superintelligence is possible. When Musk was asked whether it will actually happen, he said 'yes.'

The 49-year-old South African tech billionaire is currently busy bringing out new advancements via Neuralinka startup founded in 2016 to develop "ultra-high bandwidth brain-machine interface." But his stand on AI remains the same.

Originally posted here:

AI Could Overtake Humans in 5 Years, Says Elon Musk, Whose 'Top Concern' is Google-Owned DeepMind - International Business Times, Singapore Edition

Artificial Intelligence – A Way To Superintelligence …

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Industrialization and Digitization has changed the wayhumans look at life. The world is moving at a technological pacewherein with every passing minute an invention is done, and a lotof these inventions are beyond human imagination. One suchtechnology is Artificial Intelligence or AI as it is popularlyknown. AI has brought extensive changes around the world. AI is aterm for simulated intelligence in machines.1

According to the father of Artificial Intelligence, JohnMcCarthy, it is 'The science and engineering of makingintelligent machines, especially intelligent computerprograms'.2 In simple words, it is anythingthat can learn and perform functions on its own without anyintervention by humans. AI is the ability of simulated machines tomimic human thoughts like problem solving and learning. Thesemachines also understand human languages, speech and are skilled instrategic thinking.

Artificial Intelligence is a part of our daily lives. Siri,Alexa, Google Maps, Uber, Turnitin and other machine learningapplications are all products of AI. AI is touted as the future ofmankind. AI has already started making its mark in plethora offields and industries like healthcare, education, transportation,agriculture and many more.

To embrace this new wave called AI, India has made a modestbeginning this year by devoting a huge amount of money. In hisBudget Presentation on February 1, finance minister Arun Jaitleyannounced a national programme on AI to be spearheaded by NitiAayog.3 Approximately USD 480 million dollars have beendedicated to artificial intelligence, machine learning and IoT thisyear.4 Many industries and institutions are taking aleap in the field of AI. One of the most robust inventions arecoming in the field of health care, which is utilizing AI incollecting, storing, normalizing, and tracing data. From smartphoneand health tracker revolutions, it has become possible for a userto analyze all relevant data or simply to be up-to-date abouthis/her health.

Currently, a low cost portable home-based rehabilitationsolution device is produced which helps patient exercise forflexion and extension of wrist and fingers. The device has beentested on 20 stroke patients in All India Institute of MedicalSciences (AIIMS), Delhi and can also be combined with the brainstimulation device.

Moreover, institutions like Indian Institute of Technology(IIT), Delhi have developed many innovations based on AI rangingfrom an "intelligent" prosthetic limb and anon-hazardous, longlasting "flow battery" to a new typeof loom and technology to convert agriculture waste into pulp thatsaves 40% water and energy than usual. Further, Centre forBiomedical Engineering has developed a new Intelligent ArtificialLeg for people who have lost their legs above the knee. Theseartificial devices are cheap and durable and uses smart sensingtechnology in the shoes to adapt to the movement of theindividual.

As they say every coin has two sides. With AI benefits comescertain challenges that can be a major threat to the mankind. Forexample, the security of the large amounts of data that AI wouldstore. Another major issue that stands is the privacy of thepersonal data that AI would gather.

No doubt that artificial intelligence has unimaginablepotential. The next few decades would definitely mark a shift frommachine intelligence to artificial superintelligence and set fortha new era in which a computer's cognitive ability will besuperior to human's. Nevertheless, along with the new AIinventions, we as a country also need to invest in strong step tofight the challenges that this necessary devil would bring alongit.

Footnotes

1https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/artificial-intelligence-ai.asp

2https://www.tutorialspoint.com/artificial_intelligence/artificial_intelligence_overview.htm

3 Economic Times report available here

4https://analyticsindiamag.com/where-artificial-intelligence-research-in-india-is-heading/

For further information please contact at S.S Rana &Co. email: info@ssrana.in orcall at (+91- 11 4012 3000). Our website can be accessed at http://www.ssrana.in

The content of this article is intended to provide a generalguide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be soughtabout your specific circumstances.

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Artificial Intelligence - A Way To Superintelligence ...

AI governance and the future of humanity with the Rockefeller Foundations senior VP of innovation – The Sociable

As the progenitors of artificial intelligence, how we care for and nurture this paradigm-shifting technology will determine how it grows up alongside humanity.

There are many paths ahead for AI and society, and depending on which ones we follow, we may find ourselves on a road to peace and prosperity or one towards a dark dystopia, with several gray areas in-between.

We need to now create a new institution that can continue being the gardener for AI because AI is going to leave home soon, and we hope it becomes a productive member of society Zia Khan

Zia Khan, Senior VP of Innovation at the Rockefeller Foundation, tells The Sociablethat AI will be deeply integrated in the entire human experience and how we choose to govern it is how we will determine our future alongside it.

Whilethe Bretton Woods agreements gave birth to the rule-making institutions of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, the Rockefeller Foundation is looking to develop a practical rule-making Bretton Woods-inspired framework to govern AI.

In October, the Foundation brought together some of the brightest technologists, economists, philosophers, and thinkers who would come away inspired to create a collection of ideas and calls to action in single report: AI+1: Shaping Our Integrated Future, based on their discussions.

The conversation wasnt always easy, said Khan, but at the core, it was a fantastic conversation, and the area we landed on was the need for governance for AI.

If left unchecked, AI could be governed by a select few elitists with their own agendas, or the AI itself could assume more autonomy towards artificial superintelligence, so who governs AI, how they govern, and on whose authority they do so are all serious issues facing humanitys future with this game-changing technology.

AI is a teenager who is about to leave home [] The teenager is starting to express its personality now Zia Khan

I put the question to Khan that if he could personify AI as a child and humans as its parents, what stage of life would AI be in right now? He indulged.

If I were to guess, I would say AI is a teenager who is about to leave home, he said.

When it was in the lab, the scientists were more or less providing for AI, feeding it and caring for it.

The teenager is starting to express its personality now its a little rebellious. We saw some applications that werent great. Some issues are coming like facial recognition that we know we need to deal with but its about to leave home, in my view.

I think its about to have this explosive proliferation into society, the Rockefeller senior VP added.

AI may be likened to a teenager right now, but unlike humans, its growth will be exponential and at lightning speed.

Whats really interesting about technology is that we learn more about humans as we understand technology Zia Khan

Continuing with the parenting metaphor, do we want to care for our artificial offspring like carpenters defining all the rules early on and following the plan or do we want to be like gardeners, allowing the algorithms to flourish within a set framework while trying to nurture them and maintain boundaries?

My view of it is that we need to now create a new institution that can continue being the gardener for AI because AI is going to leave home soon, and we hope it becomes a productive member of society, but theres a lot of ways people can go when they leave home, said Khan.

For the Rockefeller Foundation senior VP, a new institution should be created to govern AI, but what would that look like?

Should the future of AI governance be held to a democratic vote of the people, or should it be placed under the stewardship of philanthropists, technologists, or other organizations with deep pockets and agendas?

We need some political mechanism to decide what are the goals that we want as a society when AI is incorporated Zia Khan

While Khan admits that he doesnt have all the answers on who should be behind the institutions to govern AI, he is certain that they do need to exist.

Going back to the teenager metaphor, he says, When someone leaves home, theres lots of things they can do. They can go to university. They can nod-off. They can be an entrepreneur [] but we still expect them to follow some basic laws around goals that we see as a society.

We need some political mechanism to decide what are the goals that we want as a society when AI is incorporated in that, and then, how do we ensure that the technology meets those goals?

And that is one of the biggest debates going around artificial intelligence circles right now and highlighted in the AI+1 report: rules-based governance or outcome-based?

Focus too much on the rules, then you can have unexpected outcomes. A few years back, Microsoft had to kill its AI chatbot Tay after itturned into a foul-mouthed racist in less than 24 hours, and more recently OpenAI created a virtual game of hide and seek, but the AI unexpectedly broke the programs simulated laws of physics to win.

By focusing on outcomes, the rules can bend and flex within a specific framework governed and guided by what the Rockefeller Foundation senior VP sees as a need for a new institution.

I think that AI is overestimated in some cases and underestimated in other cases Zia Khan

At present, there are a lot of misconceptions about what AI can and cannot do, but as Khan points out, the more we study AI, the more we find out about ourselves.

Whats really interesting about technology is that we learn more about humans as we understand technology, he said.

For example, you still dont have a robot that can really open a door. Someone said once that when the killer robots come, all you have to do is close the door. You see all these crazy videos of robots doing flips and gymnastics its a pretty simple problem relatively speaking but friction?! they cant handle it.

He added that its in studying robots that we learned our sense of touch is about a thousand times more sensitive than we thought before similarly with our hearing and similarly with our smell.

But when it comes do decision making, right now AI is really good at the intuitive tasks that we dont think much about like recognizing languages, images, and counting things.

Human consciousness, on the other hand, keeps our minds occupied on many thoughts while juggling a plethora of emotions simultaneously in any given moment.

As we understand AI better, were actually understanding human consciousness Zia Khan

Thats something, according to Khan, that AI cant do right now, and being able to manage multiple thought processes is like an executive function that only people possess at present.

As we understand AI better, were actually understanding human consciousness, and were understanding the role of emotion in helping with our cognition, he said.

These are the interesting frontiers were learning about the human mind and human body as AI progresses.

The more we understand machines, the more we understand ourselves, and many companies working with AI are applying what theyve learned and developed to directly benefit society in truly unique ways.

And there are some groups that have figured out that their AI solutions for one industry could prove beneficial in another.

For example, the Rockefeller Foundation works with a group called DataKind a fantastic organization that has an army of volunteer data scientists who want to apply their skills to social problems, says Khan.

They identify some social problems, and they get volunteer teams to help develop tools and applications.

The Rockefeller senior VP cited DataKinds work in Haiti as an example where the team was able to optimize routes for waste disposal while maximizing pickups using AI, which in turncould be applied to community health workers in Africa who can better optimize their routes between communities.

Anytime we can find something where one solution can be applied to another problem, it just really increases the efficiency of how we can solve all the challenges that were trying to solve, said Khan.

All of these AI systems have a problem around bias, and thats something were really starting to worry about Zia Khan

While algorithms can be redistributed to serve multiple purposes, problems arise when they pass along inherent biases in the code.

All of these AI systems have a problem around bias, says Khan, adding, thats something were really starting to worry about. In many ways, these tools can just reproduce and amplify the human biases that we have.

The Rockefeller Foundation recently launched the $4 million Lacuna Fund aimed specifically at correcting the gaps and biases in data for AI solutions in order to mobilize labeled datasets that solve urgent problems in low-and-middle-income contexts globally.

The Lacuna Fund is meant to identify where are there opportunities where we can fund labeled datasets that round-out the training data available to algorithms, so that those algorithms can train themselves and remove the bias, said Khan.

COVID has laid bare a lot of the really deep and important problems Zia Khan

As AI permeates every industry and facet of society, bias will be a main issue to tackle, but moving beyond biases, this technology has the power to help make sure every human on earth is fed, clothed, and sheltered, depending on how its used and governed.

The arrival of the coronavirus pandemic has accelerated the discussion on how AI can best serve humanity and society at large.

For Khan, Something like the COVID crisis gives us the opportunity to rethink big paradigm shifts.

In some way, COVID has laid bare a lot of the really deep and important problems, and I think it has heightened the urgency to think about new solutions, he said.

The current urgency of this crisis is demanding new thinking, and I think there are opportunities to deploy and apply AI to help in those cases.

Thats going to help us learn about what AI can do, and hopefully well keep an eye on the risks and manage those risks, he added.

The disruption thats been created by COVID on so many different fronts gives us the opportunity rethink really major paradigms Zia Khan

AI will be a technology that cuts across society, and the Rockefeller senior VP believes that AI governance will be directly linked to economics.

I think theres a linkage between how we think about regulating AI and a lot of the thinking thats going on with people in economics, he said.

I think people are realizing that we need a new form of economics. The neo-liberal economic paradigm of maximizing shareholder value, not accounting for the cost and nature, etc., just isnt working.

I think we have to do some hard thinking around what is the value of data, how are we accounting for the value of data, and I think that will lead to how we think about regulating and managing AI, but also the broader economic rules, and market rules, and the role of government. I think these will be more tightly coupled going forward, he added.

How we think about managing AI will be coupled with how we think about economic models Zia Khan

For Khan, The disruption thats been created by COVID on so many different fronts gives us the opportunity rethink really major paradigms, and how we think about managing AI will be coupled with how we think about economic models.

The AI teenager is about to leave home. Will it go off and learn to do what is best for society, or will its own experiences shape it into a rebellious force of destruction?

The way forward, according to the Rockefeller Foundations senior VP of innovation, is to create a framework for governance that guides AI towards a prosperous future for humanity.

Tech arms race will give corporations, governments the ability to hack human beings: Yuval Harari at WEF

Digital Immortality and the Book of the Dead

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AI governance and the future of humanity with the Rockefeller Foundations senior VP of innovation - The Sociable

neXt Trailer: It’s Not Paranoia If The Threat Is Real – Bleeding Cool News

Viewers are hoping that good things come to those who wait, with FOX releasing the official trailer and premiere date for its upcoming sci-fi/tech thriller neXt.From creator and executive producer Manny Coto (24: Legacy) and executive producers and directors John Requa and Glenn Ficarra (This Is Us), neXt is a fact-based thriller starring John Slattery (Mad Men) that looks at what would happen if a deadly, rogue Artificial Intelligence found its way into every aspect of our everyday lives. Have we become so bonded with our technology that we're losing our humanity?

Silicon Valley pioneer PAUL LEBLANC (Emmy Award nominee John Slattery, "Mad Men," "Veep") built a fortune and legacy on the world-changing innovations he dreamed up, while ignoring and alienating the people around him, including his own daughter, ABBY (Elizabeth Cappucino, "Jessica Jones," "Deception"), and his short-sighted younger brother, TED (Jason Butler Harner, "Ozark," "Ray Donovan"), who now runs Paul's company. After discovering that one of his own creations a powerful artificial intelligence called neXt might spell doom for humankind, Paul tried to shutter the project, only to be kicked out of the company by his own brother, leaving him with nothing but mounting dread about the fate of the world.

When a series of unsettling tech mishaps points to a potential worldwide crisis, LeBlanc joins forces with Special Agent SHEA SALAZAR (Fernanda Andrade, "The First," "Here and Now"). Having escaped crime, poverty and a deadly criminal father to remake herself as a force for good, Salazar's strict moral code and sense of duty have earned her the respect of her team a talented but contentious group held together by her faith in their ability to defy expectations and transcend their differences, including GINA (Eve Harlow, "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.," "Heroes Reborn"), a high-strung cybercrime agent; BEN (Aaron Moten, "Disjointed," "Mozart in the Jungle"), a straight-laced, buttoned-up hard worker, who is boring to the point of being interesting; and CM (Michael Mosley, "Ozark," "Seven Seconds"), an ex-con hacker with a genius IQ. But the demands of Shea's challenging job have taken their toll on her home life, where Salazar's young son, OWEN (Evan Whitten, THE RESIDENT, "Mr. Robot"), has been raised primarily by his father, TY (Gerardo Celasco, "How to Get Away with Murder," "The Haves and the Have Nots"), a recovering alcoholic.

Now, LeBlanc and Salazar are the only ones standing in the way of a potential global catastrophe, fighting an emergent superintelligence that, instead of launching missiles, will deploy the immense knowledge it has gleaned from the data all around us to recruit allies, turn people against each other and eliminate obstacles to its own survival and growth.

neXt stars John Slattery (Paul LeBlanc), Fernanda Andrade (Shea Salazar), Michael Mosley (CM), Jason Butler Harner (Ted LeBlanc), Eve Harlowe (Gina), Aaron Moten (Ben), Gerardo Celasco (Ty Salazar), Elizabeth Cappucino (Abby), and Evan Whitten (Owen Salazar). Written by Manny Coto, the series' pilot episode was directed by John Requa and Glenn Ficarra, and executive produced by Coto, Requa, Ficarra, and Charlie Gogolak. From 20th Century Fox Television/Zaftig Films and FOX Entertainment.

Serving as Television Editor since 2018, Ray began five years earlier as a contributing writer/photographer before being brought on board as staff in 2017.

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neXt Trailer: It's Not Paranoia If The Threat Is Real - Bleeding Cool News

The Famous AI Turing Test Put In Reverse And Upside-Down, Plus Implications For Self-Driving Cars – Forbes

AI and the Turing Test, turned round and round.

How will we know when the world has arrived at AI?

To clarify, there are lots of claims these days about computers that embody AI, implying that the machine is the equivalent of human intelligence, but you need to be wary of those rather brash and outright disingenuous assertions.

The goal of those that develop AI consists of one day being able to have a computer-based system that can exhibit human intelligence, doing so in the widest and deepest of ways that human intelligence exists and showcases itself.

There is not any such AI as yet devised.

The confusion over this matter has gotten so out-of-hand that the field of AI has been forced into coming up with a new moniker to express the outsized revered goal of AI, proclaiming now that the goal is to arrive at Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

This is being done in hopes of emphasizing to laymen and the public-at-large that the vaunted and desired AI would include common-sense reasoning and a slew of other intelligence-like capacities that humans have (for details about the notion of Strong AI versus Weak AI, along with Narrow AI too, see my explanation at this link here).

Since there is quite some muddling going on about what constitutes AI and what does not, you might wonder how we will ultimately be able to ascertain whether AI has been unequivocally attained.

We rightfully should insist on having something more than a mere provocateur proclamation and we ought to remain skeptical about anyone that holds forth an AI system that they declare is the real deal.

Looks alone would be insufficient to attest to the arrival.

There are plenty of parlor stunts in the AI bag-of-tricks that can readily fool many into believing that they are witnessing an AI of amazing human-like qualities (see my coverage of such trickery at this link here).

No, just taking someones word for AI having been accomplished or simply kicking the tires of the AI to feebly gauge its merits is insufficient and inarguably will not do.

There must be a better way.

Those within the AI field have tended to consider a type of test known as the Turing Test to be the gold standard for seeking to certify AI as being the venerated AI or semantically the AGI.

As named after its author, Alan Turing, the well-known mathematician and early pioneer in the computer sciences, the Turing Test was devised in 1950 and remains pertinent still today (heres a link to the original paper).

Parsimoniously, the Turing Test is relatively easy to describe and indubitably straightforward to envision (for my deeper analysis on this, see the link here).

Heres a quick rundown about the nature of the Turing Test.

Imagine that we had a human hidden behind a curtain, and a computer hidden behind a second curtain, such that you could not by sight alone discern what or who is residing behind the two curtains.

The human and the computer are considered contestants in a contest that will be used to try and figure out whether AI has been reached.

Some prefer to call them subjects rather than contestants, due to the notion that this is perhaps more of an experiment than it is a game show, but the point is that they are participants in a form of challenge or contest involving wits and intelligence.

No arm wrestling is involved, and nor any other physical acts.

The testing process is entirely about intellectual acumen.

A moderator serves as an interrogator (also referred to as a judge because of the designated deciding role in this matter) and proceeds to ask questions of the two participants that are hidden behind the curtains.

Based on the answers provided to the questions, the moderator will attempt to indicate which curtain hides the human and which curtain hides the computer. This is a crucial judging aspect. Simply stated, if the moderator is unable to distinguish between the two contestants as to which is the human and which is the computer, presumably the computer has sufficiently proven that it is the equivalent of human intelligence.

Turing originally coined this the imitation game since it involves the AI trying to imitate the intelligence of humans. Note that the AI does not necessarily have to be crafted in the same manner as humans, and thus there is no requirement that the AI has a brain or uses neurons and such. Thus, those devising AI are welcome to use Legos and duct tape if that will do the job to achieve the equivalence of human intelligence.

To successfully pass the Turing Test, the computer embodying AI will have had to answer the posed questions with the same semblance of intelligence as a human. An unsuccessful passing of the Turing Test would occur if the moderator was able to announce which curtain housed the computer, thus implying that there was some kind of telltale clue that gave away the AI.

Overall, this seems to be a rather helpful and effective way to ferret out AI that is the aspirational AGI versus AI that is something less so.

Of course, like most things in life, there are some potential gotchas and twists to this matter.

Imagine we have set up a stage with two curtains and a podium for the moderator. The contestants are completely hidden from view.

The moderator steps up to the podium and asks one of the contestants how to make a bean burrito, and then asks the other contestant how to make a bologna sandwich. Lets assume that the answers are apt and properly describe the effort involved in making a bean burrito and in making a bologna sandwich, respectively so.

The moderator decides to stop asking any further questions.

Voila, the moderator announces, the AI is indistinguishable from human intelligence and therefore this AI is declared forthwith as having reached the pinnacle of AI, the long sought after AGI.

Should we accept this decree?

I dont think so.

This highlights an important element of the Turing Test, namely that the moderator needs to ask a sufficient range and depth of questions that will help root out the embodiment of intelligence. When the questions are shallow or insufficient, any conclusion reached is spurious at best.

Please know too that there is not a specified set of questions that have been vetted and agreed upon as the right ones to be asked during a Turing Test. Sure, some researchers have tried to propose the types of questions that ought to be asked, but this is an ongoing debate and to some extent illuminates that we are still not even quite sure of what intelligence per se consists of (it is hard to identify metrics and measures for that which is relatively ill-defined and ontologically squishy).

Another issue exists about the contestants and their behavior.

For example, suppose the moderator asks each of the contestants whether they are human.

The human can presumably answer yes, doing so honestly. The AI could say that it is not a human, opting to be honest, but then this decidedly ruins the test and seemingly undermines the spirit of the Turing Test.

Perhaps the AI should lie and say that it is the human. There are ethicists though that would decry such a response and argue that we do not want AI to be a liar, therefore no AI should ever be allowed to lie.

Of course, the human might lie, and deny that they are the human in this contest. If we are seeking to make AI that is the equivalent of human intelligence, and if humans lie, which we all know that humans certainly do lie from time-to-time, shouldnt the AI also be allowed to lie?

Anyway, the point is that the contestants can either strive to aid the Turing Test or can try to undermine or distort the Turing Test, which some say is fine, and that it is up the moderator to figure out what to do.

Alls fair in love and war, as they say.

How tricky do we want the moderator to be?

Suppose the moderator asks each of the contestants to calculate the answer to a complex mathematical equation. The AI can speedily arrive at a precise answer of 8.27689459, while the human struggles to do the math by hand and come up with an incorrect answer of 9.

Aha, the moderator has fooled the AI into revealing itself, and likewise the human into revealing that they are a human, doing so by asking a question that the computer-based AI readily could answer and that a human would have a difficult time answering.

Believe it or not, for this very reason, AI researchers have proposed the introduction of what some describe as Artificial Stupidity (for detailed facets of this topic, see my coverage here). The idea is that the AI will purposely attempt to be stupid by sharing answers as though they were prepared by a human. In this instance, the AI might report that the answer is 8, thus the response is a lot like the one by the human.

You can imagine that having AI purposely try to make mistakes or falter (this is coined as the Dimwit ploy by AI, see my explanation at this link here), seems distasteful, disturbing, and not something that everyone necessarily agrees is a good thing.

We do allow for humans to make guffaws, but having AI that does so, especially when it knows better would seem like a dangerous and undesirable slippery slope.

The Reverse Turing Test Rears Its Head

Ive now described for you the overall semblance of the Turing Test.

Next, lets consider a variation that some like to call a Reverse Turing Test.

Heres how that works.

The human contestant decides they are going to pretend that they are the AI. As such, they will attempt to provide answers that are indistinguishable from the AIs type of answers.

Recall that the AI in the conventional Turing Test is trying to seem indistinguishable from a human. In the Reverse Turing Test, the human contestant is trying to reverse the notion and act as though they were the AI and therefore indistinguishable from the AI.

Well, that seems mildly interesting, but why would the human do this?

This might be done for fun, kind of laughs for people that enjoy developing AI systems. It could also be done as a challenge, trying to mimic or imitate an AI system, and betting whether you can do so successfully or not.

Another reason and one that seems to have more chops or merit consists of doing what is known as a Wizard of Oz.

When a programmer is developing software, they will sometimes pretend that they are the program and use a facade front-end or interface to have people interact with the budding system, though those users do not know that the programmer is watching their interaction and ready to interact too (doing so secretively from behind the screen and without revealing their presence).

Doing this type of development can reveal how the end-users are having difficulties using the software, and meanwhile, they remain within the flow of the software by the fact that the programmer intervened, quietly, to overcome any of the computer system deficiencies that might have disrupted the effort.

Perhaps this makes clear why it is often referred to as a Wizard of Oz, involving the human staying in-the-loop and secretly playing the role of Oz.

Getting back to the Reverse Turing Test, the human contestant might be pretending to be the AI to figure out where the AI is lacking, and thus be better able to enhance the AI and continue on the quest toward AGI.

In that manner, a Reverse Turing Test can be used for perhaps both fun and profit.

Turing Test Upside-Down And Right Side Up

Some believe that we might ultimately be headed toward what is sometimes called the Upside-Down Turing Test.

Yes, thats right, this is yet another variant.

In the Upside-Down Turing Test, replace the moderator with AI.

Say what?

This less discussed variant involves having AI be the judge or interrogator, rather than a human doing so. The AI asks questions of the two contestants, still consisting of an AI and a human, and then renders an opinion about which is which.

Your first concern might be that the AI seems to have two seats in this game, and as such, it is either cheating or simply a nonsensical arrangement. Those that postulate this variant are quick to point out that the original Turing Test has a human as a moderator and a human as a contestant, thus, why not allow the AI to do the same.

The instant retort is that humans are different from each other, while AI is presumably the same thing and not differentiable.

Thats where those interested in the Upside-Down Turing Test would say you are wrong in that assumption. They contend that we are going to have multitudes of AI, each of which will be its own differentiable instance, and be akin to how humans are each distinctive instances (in brief, the argument is that AI will be polylithic and heterogeneous, rather than monolithic or homogeneous).

The counterargument is that the AI is presumably going to be merely some kind of software and a machine, all of which can be readily combined into other software and machines, but that you cannot readily combine humans and their brains. We each have a brain intact within our skulls, and there are no known means to directly combine them or mesh them with others.

Anyway, this back-and-forth continues, each proffering a rejoinder, and it is not readily apparent that the Upside-Down variant can be readily discarded as a worthwhile possibility.

As you might imagine, there is an Upside-Down Turing Test and also an Upside-Down Reverse Turing Test, mirroring the aspect of the conventional Turing Test and its counterpart the Reverse Turing Test (some, by the way, do not like the use of Upside-Down and instead insist that this added variant is merely another offshoot of the Reverse Turing Test).

You might begrudgingly agree to let the AI be in two places at once, and have one AI as the interrogator and one as a contestant.

What good does that do anyway?

One thought is that it helps to potentially further showcase whether AI is intelligent, which might be evident as to the questioning and the nature of how the AI digests the answers being provided, illustrating the AIs capacity as the equivalent of a human judge or interrogator.

Thats the mundane or humdrum explanation.

Are you ready for the scary version?

It has to do with intelligence, as Ill describe next.

Some believe that AI will eventually exceed human intelligence, arriving at Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI).

The word super is not meant to imply superman or superwoman kinds of powers, and instead of that, the intelligence of the AI is beyond our human intelligence, though not necessarily able to leap tall buildings or move faster than a speeding bullet.

Nobody can say what this ASI or superintelligence might be able to think of, and perhaps we as humans are so limited in our intelligence that we cannot see beyond our limits. As such, the ASI might be intelligent in ways that we cannot foresee.

Thats why some are considering AI or AGI to potentially be an existential threat to humanity (this is something that for example Elon Musk has continued to evoke, see my coverage at this link here), and the ASI presumed to be even more so a potential menace.

If you are interested in this existential threat argument, as Ive pointed out repeatedly (see the link here), there are just as many ways to conjure that the AI or AGI or ASI will help mankind and aid us in flourishing as there are the doomsday scenarios of our being squashed like a bug. Also, there is a rising tide of interest in AI Ethics, fortunately, which might aid in coping with, avoiding, or mitigating the coming AI calamities (for more on AI Ethics, see my discussion at this link here).

That being said, it certainly makes sense to be prepared for the doom-and-gloom scenario, due to the rather obvious discomfort and sad result that would accrue going down that path. I presume that none of us want to be summarily crushed out of existence like some annoying and readily dispatched pests.

Returning to the Upside-Down Turing Test, it could be that an ASI would sit in the moderator's seat and be judging whether conventional AI has yet reached the aspirational level of AI that renders it able to pass the Turing Test and be considered indistinguishable from human intelligence.

Depending on how far down the rabbit hole you want to go on this, at some point the Turing Test might have two seats for the ASI, and one seat for AI. This means that the moderator would be an ASI, while there is conventional AI as a contestant and another ASI as the other contestant.

Notice that there is not a human involved at all.

Maybe we ought to call this the Takeover Turing Test.

No humans needed; no humans allowed.

Conclusion

It is unlikely that AI is going to be crafted simply for the sake of making AI, and instead, there will be a purpose-driven rationale for why humans opt to create AI.

One such purpose involves the desire to have self-driving cars.

A true self-driving car is one that has AI driving the car and there is no need for a human driver. The only role of a human would be as a passenger, but not at all as a driver.

A vexing question right now is what level or degree of AI is needed to achieve self-driving cars.

Some believe that until AI has arrived at the aspirational AGI, we will not have true self-driving cars. Indeed, those with such an opinion would likely say that the AI has to achieve sentience, perhaps doing so in a moment of switchover from automation into a spark of being that is called the moment of singularity (for more on this, see my analysis at this link here).

Hogwash, some counter, and insist that we can get AI that is not necessarily Turing Test worthy but that can nonetheless safely and properly drive cars.

To be clear, right now there is not any kind of AI self-driving car that approaches anything like AGI, and so for the moment, we are faced with trying to decide if plain vanilla AI can be sufficient to drive a car. Quick aside, for those interested in AI, some refer to any symbolic approach to AI as GOFAI or Good Old-Fashioned Artificial Intelligence, which is both endearing and to some degree a backhanded slight, all at the same time (see more at my explanation here).

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The Famous AI Turing Test Put In Reverse And Upside-Down, Plus Implications For Self-Driving Cars - Forbes

Scoop: Coming Up on a Rebroadcast of MATCH GAME on ABC – Sunday, July 26, 2020 – Broadway World

"Sam Richardson, Jane Krakowski, Ben Schwartz, Caroline Rhea, James Van Der Beek, Vivica A. Fox" - There is something for everyone on this week's "Match Game." We've got singing, a world record-holding strongman and host Alec Baldwin battling celebrity panelist Caroline Rhea for the title of "America's Sweetheart," airing SUNDAY, JULY 26 (10:00-11:00 p.m. EDT), on ABC. (TV-14, DL) Produced by Fremantle, "Match Game" features four contestants each week vying for the chance to win $25,000, as they attempt to match the answers of six celebrities in a game of fill-in-the-blank. Episodes can also be viewed on demand and Hulu. (Rebroadcast. OAD: 6/7/20)Celebrity panelists include the following:Sam Richardson ("The Tomorrow War"; "Superintelligence")Jane Krakowski (Tony winner; "30 Rock"; "Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt"; "Dickinson")Ben Schwartz ("Space Force"; "Middleditch & Schwartz")Caroline Rhea("Women of a Certain Age"; "The COMEDY CENTRAL ROAST of Alec Baldwin")James Van Der Beek ("Varsity Blues"; "What Would Diplo Do")Vivica A. FOX ("Empire"; "Arkansas"; podcast "Hustling with Vivica A. Fox")Joining the celebrity panelists are contestants Marisa Aull (hometown: Lexington, Kentucky), Adam Burnes (hometown: Sacramento, California), Shirene Warner (hometown: Stafford, Virginia) and Vincent Panico (hometown: Whitehouse Station, New Jersey)."Match Game" isexecutive produced by Scott St. John, Alec Baldwin, Mallory Schwartz and Fremantle's Jennifer Mullin.From This AuthorTV Scoop

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Scoop: Coming Up on a Rebroadcast of MATCH GAME on ABC - Sunday, July 26, 2020 - Broadway World

Consciousness Existing Beyond Matter, Or in the Central Nervous System as an Afterthought of Nature? – The Daily Galaxy –Great Discoveries Channel

Posted on Jul 11, 2020 in Science

Does human consciousness exist separate from matter, or is it embodied in the body a critical player in anything that has to do with mind? We are not thinking machines that feel; rather, we are feeling machines that think. answers neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, who pioneered the field of embodied consciousness the bodily origins of our sense of self. We may smile and the dog may wag the tail, but in essence, he says. we have a set program and those programs are similar across individuals in the species. There is no such thing as a disembodied mind.

Consciousness is considered by leading scientists as the central unsolved mystery of the 21st Century: I have a much easier time imagining how we understand the Big Bang than I have imagining how we can understand consciousness, says Edward Witten, theoretical physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey who has been compared to Isaac Newton and Einstein about the phenomena that has been described as assuming the role spacetime did before Einstein invented his theory of relativity.

Some scientists have asked how can we be sure that the source of consciousness lies within our bodies at all? One popular, if mystical, idea, writes astrophysicist Paul Davies in The Demon in the Machine, is that flashes of mathematical inspiration can occur by the mathematicians mind somehow breaking through into a Platonic realm of mathematical forms and relationships that not only lies beyond the brain but beyond space and time altogether.

The English astronomer, Fred Hoyle, infamous for his rejection of the Big Bang theory, suggested an even more radical hypothesis: that quantum effects in the human brain leave open the possibility of a superintelligence in the cosmic future using a subtle but well-known backwards-in-time property of quantum mechanics in order to steer scientific progress.

Four billion years ago, writes Damasio, in The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of the Cultural Mind, the first primitive organisms monitored changes in their bodily state equivalent to hunger, thirst, pain and so on and had feedback mechanisms to maintain equilibrium. The relic of those primitive mechanisms is our autonomic nervous system, which controls bodily functions such as heartbeat and digestion, and of which we are largely unconscious.

Consciousness is Like Spacetime Before Einsteins Relativity

Then, about half a billion years ago, the central nervous system, featuring a brain, evolved an afterthought of nature, says Damasio who a proposes three layered theory of consciousness based on a hierarchy of stages, with each stage building upon the last. The most basic representation of the organism is referred to as the Protoself, next is Core Consciousness, and finally, Extended Consciousness.

Damasio, who is an internationally recognized leader in neuroscience, was educated at the University of Lisbon and currently directs the University of Southern California Brain and Creativity Institute. The human brain, he argues, became the anchor of what had once been a more distributed mind. Changes in bodily state were projected onto the brain and experienced as emotions or drives the emotion of fear, say, or the drive to eat. Subjectivity evolved later again, he argues. It was imposed by the musculoskeletal system, which evolved as a physical framework for the central nervous system and, in so doing, also provided a stable frame of reference: the unified I of conscious experience.

Ultimate Mystery of the Universe Human Consciousness: Were Like Neanderthals Trying to Understand Astronomy

Life was regulated at first without feelings of any sort; here was no mind and no consciousness. There was, Damasio writes, a set of homeostatic mechanisms blindly making the choices that would turn out to be more conducive to survival. The arrival of nervous systems, capable of mapping and image making, opened the way for simple minds to enter the scene. During the Cambrian explosion, after numerous mutations, certain creatures with nervous systems would have generated not just images of the world around them but also an imagetic counterpart to the busy process of life regulation that was going on underneath. This would have been the ground for a corresponding mental state, the thematic content of which would have been valenced in tune with the condition of life, at that moment, in that body. The quality of the ongoing life state would have been felt.

Enter Sarah Garfinkel, at the University of Sussex, UK, who joins Damasio in arguing that our thoughts, feelings and behaviors are shaped in part by the internal signals that arise from our body. But, she reports in New Scientist: it goes beyond that. It is leading her and others to a surprising conclusion: that the body helps to generate our sense of self and is a key part of consciousness. This idea has practical implications in assessing people who show little sign of consciousness. It may also force us to reconsider where we draw the line between life and death, and provide a new insight into how consciousness evolved.

Since 2000, concludes Damasio, I have been defending the idea that the body is a critical player in anything that has to do with mind.

The Daily Galaxy, Max Goldberg, via New Scientist and Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes Error and the Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of the Cultural Mind and Paul Davies, The Demon in the Machine All Kindle editions

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Consciousness Existing Beyond Matter, Or in the Central Nervous System as an Afterthought of Nature? - The Daily Galaxy --Great Discoveries Channel

If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em Elon Musk tweets out the mission statement for his AI-brain-chip Neuralink – Business Insider India

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The announcement of Neuralinks mission statement comes after Musk claimed that AI-brain-chip could potentially be ready to be put into a human patient within a year in May.

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Think of humanity as a biological boot loader for digital superintelligence, Musk told Alibabas Jack Ma during the World AI Conference in Shanghai. A boot loader is a tiny piece of code without which a computer cant load a necessary feature for a computer to start up.

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If you can't beat 'em, join 'em Elon Musk tweets out the mission statement for his AI-brain-chip Neuralink - Business Insider India

The Shadow of Progress – Merion West

In a worldview that prizes purity above progress, the flawed and erroneous are stains to be expunged. Their remembrance is not only deplorable but damning by association.

Indeed, history is nothing more than a tableau of crimes and misfortunes. History is nothing but a pack of tricks that we play upon the dead.

~Voltaire

We are at war with the past. What began as a stand against state-sponsored violence has metastasized; it has spread to every facet of politics and culture and has spiraled to the brink of complete moral frenzy. The anti-racism Leftstill well in the throes of George Floyds deathhas moved away from the police, politicians, and partisan prejudice towards a new (or, rather, not-so-new) nemesis: the pages of history themselves.

In its crusade against racial and social injustice, Black Lives Matter and its ideological peers are making no exceptions for neither the ancient nor the antiquated. They make no distinctions among those who lived 50, 100, or even 1,000 years ago. Indeed, from the indignant throngs of recent weeks, we have stood witness to a second wave of statue removalsranging from democratic campaigns to criminal defenestrationsacross the United States and beyond, in what can only be described as some desperate attempt at historical redaction. In a worldview that prizes purity above progress, the flawed and erroneous are stains to be expunged. Their remembrance is not only deplorable but damning by association.

It is this latter sentiment that should have us most concerned. While it is the nature of cynical traditions to deny progress and its many achievements, it is an entirely new form of pessimism to deplore its very existence. If ones worldview is a mixture of mistrust and misanthropy, it should come as no surprise that ones past appears populated by villains and reprobates. It should come as no surprise in principleas we shall seebut it is a novel and enfeebling mistake to bear such wickedness as ones own. In reaching so deep into the gutters of the past, we are finding ourselves sullied with regard to the present. We find ourselves sickened by the legacies of evil. In merely perceiving the long-since departed, we find ourselves shackledand, in many cases, sentencedby the sins of our fathers.

Such is the nature of our new, historical masochism. It is a fallacy that owes, in large part, to presentism: the tendency to judge the past by todays morality. It is a mistake that centers on days gone by, but it threatens everything that we have achieved and stand for in the future. This is not hyperbole: The war against history is a philosophical mistake bordering on existential threat not because those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat itbut because it was never really about history in the first place. It is about progress. The presentism paradox is all about how we can only perceive past evils from a position of virtue. Its mistake is to conflate the two. The result is a war not against those historical failures we deplorebut against their corrections. We are at war with our achievements.

As a society, we stand at a unique perspective throughout history. We exist at the pinnacle of all scientific, technological, and moral understanding after a long and distinguished career of misery. Fans of Steven Pinkers 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature will be familiar with this position, as well as his trademark brand of quantitative optimism. Those who are not may think it perverse to even suggest. How could a society racked with injustice, plagued with war, and all but enthralled by the specter of power be anything but detestable? How could a civilization poised to destroy itself be anything other than falling apart?

The answers are, in part, factual and, in part, philosophical. The short version is: It is not true. It is not true that we have reached new heights of death and despair. It is not true that our destruction is imminent. Indeed, Pinkers work remains as our greatest rebuke of such despondency. He shows us how the opposite is true; he shows us all the ways in which we are healthier, happier, more wealthy, more peaceful, more compassionate, and more loving than ever before. By every metric, material and meaning-filled, we are leading the way to a better tomorrow. We have known this for some time nowever since the Enlightenment and its exceptional achievements, heretical visionaries have dared to honor an unprecedented success. Pinker is just the latest in a long line of heroic optimists, building upon the sentiments of such Enlightenment figures as William Godwin, Anthony Ashley-Cooper and, some centuries later, the philosopher Karl Popper. In his 1963 book Conjectures and Refutations, it was Popper who wrote:

In spite of our great and serious troubles, and in spite of the fact that ours is surely not the best possible society, I assert that our own free world is by far the best society which has come into existence during the course of human history.

Not quite convinced? That is okay. In any other argument of this type, contemporary optimism would require further defense. There is more to be said about destitution, climate change, existential risk, Our Final Hour, and Superintelligence; there is more to be discussed if one hopes to dispel an adored desperation. But it is the miraculous irony of our newest afflictionstanding in the face of such a robust and wistful gloomthat the fight against history is itself optimistic. In order to admonish with righteous authority, one must first assume some measure of moral advantage. One must first contend some basis by which abolition supplants enslavement.

Concealed within the logic of our new-found presentism is a commitment to moral realism. After all, crimes are only so much if we are correct in our convictions. This stands in stark contrast to the moral and epistemological relativism so treasured by the Left: a relativism from which many derive contempt towards a uniquely Western hubris. However, as we have seen, it is a hubris shared across oceans of time if not water, against those less fortunate in wisdom. I am sure that the relativist-Left, alerted to their spatial and temporal hypocrisy, shall be quick to renounce such bigotry: one they so selectively despise.

But probably notit is foundational to their cherished masochism. They have arrived at a contemporary optimism by accident; they subvert it to pessimistic ends. This is the error I am referring to: a bizarre new form of moral and historical inversion that holds solutions accountable for their problems, progress accountable for its obstacles, and the present accountable for its past. In their view, our superior vantage is merely a window into damnation. In 2020, hindsight is blinding.

But there is another way! Despite its seductive nature, historical pessimism is a surprisingly easy mistake to correct forif you know how. The answer is gratitude. The correct response to fortune is thanks and compassion to those with lessnot guilt and hatred of those with more. And if history is the shadow cast by progress, then we should feel grateful that it is cast behind usnot forward, or downwardsand be careful not to heed its familiar call. As Pinker urges us to recall:

If the past is a foreign country, it is a shockingly violent one. It is easy to forget how dangerous life used to be, how deeply brutality was once woven into the fabric of daily existence. Cultural memory pacifies the past, leaving us with pale souvenirs whose bloody origins have been bleached away.

It is easy to forget just how far we have come. It is easy to forget just how mistaken we can be, and have been, and are; and we should be thankful. We should be thankful that in place of past monsters we have only their monuments, that in place of old slavers we have only their memory. The shadow of progress is an illusion cast by self-doubt. It is a mistake. When we do look towards the past, towards those figures less privileged than ourselves, we should do so with compassion, and forgiveness, for the right to condemn is, itself, a sign of good fortune. We should embrace our privileges as giftsnot sins. And we must understand thatmore than any otherour greatest privilege is the time in which we find ourselves. Our greatest privilege is today. We should be quick to salute it.

Tom Hyde is a graduate of University College London and a freelance writer. He is primarily interested in how science and philosophy influence cultural trends.

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The Shadow of Progress - Merion West

Josiah Henson: the forgotten story in the history of slavery – The Guardian

From its very first moments, Harriet Beecher Stowes debut novel Uncle Toms Cabin was a smashing success. It sold out its 5,000-copy print run in four days in 1852, with one newspaper declaring that everybody has read it, is reading, or is about to read it. Soon, 17 printing presses were running around the clock to keep up with demand. By the end of its first year in print, the book had sold more than 300,000 copies in the US alone, and another million in Great Britain. It went on to become the bestselling novel of the 19th century.

Before reading Uncle Toms Cabin, I only knew that Stowes novel had been credited with influencing the debate at the heart of the American civil war. I had an expensive education, but sadly I learned very little about black history at school; by my early 20s, only names such as Frederick Douglass or Harriet Tubman still rang a bell. All that changed when I discovered that Stowes novel was based on the life of a real man, named Josiah Henson, whose cabin in Ontario was just a few hours from my home.

As I walked the four-acre grounds and tiny museum, an astounding story unfolded. Henson was entertained at both Windsor Castle and the White House. He won a medal at the first Worlds Fair, the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park. The British prime minister Lord John Russell threw him a surprise banquet. The archbishop of Canterbury wept after hearing his story. Henson rescued 118 enslaved people, including his own brother, and helped build a 500-person freeman settlement, called Dawn, that was known as one of the final stops on the Underground Railroad. But before all this, he was brutally enslaved for more than 40 years.

And few people have heard of him. Henson has largely been lost to history. Every month, nearly 1.4 million people Google Abraham Lincoln, 228,000 look up Frederick Douglass, and 135,000 search for Confederate general Robert E Lee. Around 3,400 seek out Henson. But after I visited his cabin, I had to know more so I set off on a 3,000-mile journey to retrace his footsteps from birth to freedom.

Henson was born near Port Tobacco, Maryland, around 1789. His first memory was of his father being whipped to the bone, having his ear cut off and being sold south all as punishment for striking a white man who had attempted to rape his wife. He never saw his father again. Several years later, Henson was separated from his mother and sold to a child trafficker, but soon fell dangerously ill. The slave trader offered the boy to Hensons mothers owner, an alcoholic blacksmith named Isaac Riley, at a price he couldnt refuse: free of charge if the boy died, some horseshoeing work if he survived.

Henson not only survived but rose to the position of farm overseer and Rileys market man in the nations capital. There he rubbed shoulders with lawyers, businessmen and Methodist ministers, one of whom taught him how to preach and helped him fundraise to buy his freedom.

After receiving a $350 down payment on his emancipation about three years wages for a white farm labourer Riley swindled Henson by sending him to Kentucky to visit his brother Amos, who attempted to sell him south to New Orleans. Henson narrowly avoided that harsh fate through a highly providential twist of events: Rileys nephew Amos Junior, the young man tasked with selling Henson, contracted malaria. Rather than letting the teenager die, Henson honourably loaded him on a steamship, then returned north.

In 1830, Henson escaped Kentucky by water on a moonless night. Travelling by night and sleeping by day, Henson, his wife and four children made the 600-mile journey to the Canadian border on foot, assisted in part by Quakers and Native Americans, but mostly by their own pluck. Upon reaching the Niagara River, a kindly Scottish captain paid to send the Henson family across. According to one edition of Hensons autobiography, the captain asked if Henson would be a good man in his new land.

Yes, Henson replied. Ill use my freedom well.

And indeed, the overarching theme of Hensons story is the stewardship of freedom. Rather than using his prodigious business and oratory skills to simply build a comfortable life for himself, he agitated for equality of opportunity, smuggled friends and family to safety, planted churches, and defended himself against imprisonment after supporting families who sent sons to fight in the civil war. He embarked on a nearly 100-stop British speaking tour to raise funds for the cause. With the help of US American supporters and British Christian philanthropists, he constructed a settlement for African American refugees, fundraised for black social enterprises including a sawmill and brickworks, and even built a desegregated school, nearly a century before the end of Jim Crow in the 1960s.

Inspired in part by Hensons story, Stowe penned her novel. The backlash came rapidly and rabidly; authors and columnists rushed to defend their romantic and chivalric southern ideals from this Yankee onslaught, arguing that Stowes writing was nothing more than sectarian propaganda.

In response, Stowe published A Key to Uncle Toms Cabin. In it, she named all the real people who inspired Mr Haley, George Harris, Eliza, Simon Legree, and the rest. As for Uncle Tom, Stowe wrote: The character of Uncle Tom has been objected to as improbable; and yet the writer has received more confirmations of that character, and from a great variety of sources, than of any other in the book. Laying out the inspiration for various scenes in Uncle Toms story, she declared: A last instance parallel with that of Uncle Tom is to be found in the published memoirs of the venerable Josiah Henson now pastor of the missionary settlement at Dawn, in Canada.

Among all the readers of Stowes Key, there was one whose influence could not be overstated. According to the Library of Congresss circulation records, Lincoln borrowed The Key to Uncle Toms Cabin on 16 June 1862, and returned it 43 days later, on 29 July. The dates correspond exactly to the time during which he drafted the Emancipation Proclamation. We may never know the degree to which Stowe influenced Lincoln, but it is clear that during the critical time, he had Hensons story near at hand.

Hensons story played a major role in Lincolns election as well. His Republican party distributed 100,000 copies of Uncle Toms Cabin during the presidential campaign of 1860, as a way to stir up anti-slavery support. Without the abolitionist press and Stowes book, its possible that Lincoln would not have garnered enough support to win. As fellow Republican US senator Charles Sumner declared: Had there been no Uncle Toms Cabin, there would have been no Lincoln in the White House.

Despite the fact that Henson played a pivotal role in world history, entrenched values are not easily uprooted. After Stowe published the Key and identified Henson, his supporters rebranded him the real Uncle Tom. It was a good thing, at the time. Today Uncle Tom has a very derogatory meaning, due to its bastardisation at the hands of racist blackface playwrights in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The man who sacrificed himself to win freedom for others was turned into a subservient and cowardly slave who curries favour with the white man. In a cruel disfigurement of a fictional hero, humility became baboonery, martyrdom became traitorhood. For more than 40 years after his death, blackface Tom shows played within a half-mile of Hensons grave. And within a generation, his story was nearly lost.

This is perhaps the greatest travesty of the white-centric narratives we are taught about our nations pasts, that a bona fide international hero can be erased because of the colour of his skin. Black history has been intentionally lost and destroyed, on a huge scale. There are certainly many more figures like Henson, but we dont even know what we dont know. Harpers Magazine once estimated that the US owes more than $100 trillion in reparations for forced labour between 1619 and 1865. After slavery was abolished in the US, it continued overseas there may be more people enslaved today than at any point in history while other means of repression were quickly institutionalised to deal with the black problem in the US. Jim Crow tactics eventually failed, as will manufactured inequality, mass incarceration, and violence-based policing. But who knows what the future holds, in the age of AI superintelligence, algorithmic blockchains, and surveillance corporatism.

Henson died at 93 in Ontario, in 1883. Today, he has been consigned to obscurity. There are no riverfront statues of him, nor are there any parks, schools, or universities named in his honour. He is little-taught in British, American or Canadian history classrooms, nor has his story been portrayed on the big or small screen. But thankfully, Hensons legacy continues through his descendants, who include Arctic explorer Matthew Henson, Oscar-nominated actor Taraji P Henson, and the hundreds-strong family reunion that takes place every summer, rotating between Michigan, Ontario, and Maryland. So long as the Henson family lives, there will be torchbearers to keep his story alive. It may take another 100 years before school children know the name Henson as readily as they do Lincoln and Washington but as monuments to racism topple around the globe, they leave space for worthier replacements.

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Josiah Henson: the forgotten story in the history of slavery - The Guardian

The world’s best virology lab isn’t where you think – Spectator.co.uk

If you ever doubt how clever evolution can be, remember that it may take a year or morefor the brightest minds on the planet to find and approve a vaccine for the coronavirus. Yet 99 per cent of otherwise healthy people seem to have an immune system that can crack the problem in under a week.

When I posted this on Twitter, I got a little abuse from a few strange people who thought I was calling scientists dumb. Quite the reverse. 99 per cent may be too high a figure, but it is surely evidence of some bizarre superintelligence within the human body that many of us can do unconsciously something that the combined brains of the worlds pharmaceutical industries so far cannot match. In a matter of days, it can spot, target, test and devise an antibody to eliminate a hostile pathogen that it has never encountered before. Each of us is walking around every day without realising that we are home to the worlds best virology lab.

True, the immune system does not have to wait for FDA approval. But it does have to do something similar ensure that the cure does not do more harm than the disease. (Diseases such as Lupus, Multiple Sclerosis and Rheumatoid Arthritis are examples of what happens when the system goes rogue.) And its also worth noting that a human vaccine does not, in fact, cure the disease it simply hacks the immune system to create its own cure.

A few dissident thinkers including me and theeconomist Robin Hanson - have wondered aloud whether, in the time before a vaccine is available, there might be a role for an earlier practice called 'variolation'. This was introduced to Britain from the Ottoman Empire by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in the early eighteenth century as a treatment against smallpox. Montagu controversially infected her own children with a small initial dose of smallpox, the assumption being that the body was better able to cope when presented with a small initial dose of the virus than with a larger one. She gained a PR coup for the procedure when the then Princess of Wales adopted the procedure for her two daughters. Seven prisoners awaiting hanging at Newgate prison had been offered their freedom in exchange for undergoing the procedure all seven survived. (Horrible to say it, but one small advantage of the death penalty is that it does solve certain problems in medical ethics). Once EdwardJenner (and, earlier, Benjamin Jesty) came up with a cowpox vaccine, variolation sensibly fell out of favour.

We dont yet know whether the scale of the initial dose affects the course or outcome of the disease and it would be heinous to act without this information. So far, strangely, most models of the disease assume infection is just a binary question you are either infected or you are not. Is this a safe assumption, or are there gains to be had from also ensuring that if you are infected, you arent infected very much?

Im not taking any chances, While everyone else was stockpiling toilet paper, I invested in one of these.

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The world's best virology lab isn't where you think - Spectator.co.uk

Is Artificial Intelligence (AI) A Threat To Humans? – Forbes

Are artificial intelligence (AI) and superintelligent machines the best or worst thing that could ever happen to humankind? This has been a question in existence since the 1940s when computer scientist Alan Turing wondered and began to believe that there would be a time when machines could have an unlimited impact on humanity through a process that mimicked evolution.

Is Artificial Intelligence (AI) A Threat To Humans?

When Oxford University Professor Nick Bostroms New York Times best-seller, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies was first published in 2014, it struck a nerve at the heart of this debate with its focus on all the things that could go wrong. However, in my recent conversation with Bostrom, he also acknowledged theres an enormous upside to artificial intelligence technology.

You can see the full video of our conversation here:

Since the writing of Bostrom's book in 2014, progress has been very rapid in artificial intelligence and machine and deep learning. Artificial intelligence is in the public discourse, and most governments have some sort of strategy or road map to address AI. In his book, he talked about AI being a little bit like children playing with a bomb that could go off at any time.

Bostrom explained, "There's a mismatch between our level of maturity in terms of our wisdom, our ability to cooperate as a species on the one hand and on the other hand our instrumental ability to use technology to make big changes in the world. It seems like we've grown stronger faster than we've grown wiser."

There are all kinds of exciting AI tools and applications that are beginning to affect the economy in many ways. These shouldnt be overshadowed by the overhype on the hypothetical future point where you get AIs with the same general learning and planning abilities that humans have as well as superintelligent machines.These are two different contexts that require attention.

Today, the more imminent threat isn't from a superintelligence, but the usefulyet potentially dangerousapplications AI is used for presently.

How is AI dangerous?

If we focus on whats possible today with AI, here are some of the potential negative impacts of artificial intelligence that we should consider and plan for:

Change the jobs humans do/job automation: AI will change the workplace and the jobs that humans do. Some jobs will be lost to AI technology, so humans will need to embrace the change and find new activities that will provide them the social and mental benefits their job provided.

Political, legal, and social ramifications: As Bostrom advises, rather than avoid pursuing AI innovation, "Our focus should be on putting ourselves in the best possible position so that when all the pieces fall into place, we've done our homework. We've developed scalable AI control methods, we've thought hard about the ethics and the governments, etc. And then proceed further and then hopefully have an extremely good outcome from that." If our governments and business institutions don't spend time now formulating rules, regulations, and responsibilities, there could be significant negative ramifications as AI continues to mature.

AI-enabled terrorism: Artificial intelligence will change the way conflicts are fought from autonomous drones, robotic swarms, and remote and nanorobot attacks. In addition to being concerned with a nuclear arms race, we'll need to monitor the global autonomous weapons race.

Social manipulation and AI bias: So far, AI is still at risk for being biased by the humans that build it. If there is bias in the data sets the AI is trained from, that bias will affect AI action. In the wrong hands, AI can be used, as it was in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, for social manipulation and to amplify misinformation.

AI surveillance: AIs face recognition capabilities give us conveniences such as being able to unlock phones and gain access to a building without keys, but it also launched what many civil liberties groups believe is alarming surveillance of the public. In China and other countries, the police and government are invading public privacy by using face recognition technology. Bostrom explains that AI's ability to monitor the global information systems from surveillance data, cameras, and mining social network communication has great potential for good and for bad.

Deepfakes: AI technology makes it very easy to create "fake" videos of real people. These can be used without an individual's permission to spread fake news, create porn in a person's likeness who actually isn't acting in it, and more to not only damage an individual's reputation but livelihood. The technology is getting so good the possibility for people to be duped by it is high.

As Nick Bostrom explained, The biggest threat is the longer-term problem introducing something radical thats super intelligent and failing to align it with human values and intentions. This is a big technical problem. Wed succeed at solving the capability problem before we succeed at solving the safety and alignment problem.

Today, Nick describes himself as a frightful optimist that is very excited about what AI can do if we get it right. He said, The near-term effects are just overwhelmingly positive. The longer-term effect is more of an open question and is very hard to predict. If we do our homework and the more we get our act together as a world and a species in whatever time we have available, the better we are prepared for this, the better the odds for a favorable outcome. In that case, it could be extremely favorable.

For more on AI and other technology trends, see Bernard Marrs new book Tech Trends in Practice: The 25 Technologies That Are Driving The 4Th Industrial Revolution, which is available to pre-order now.

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Is Artificial Intelligence (AI) A Threat To Humans? - Forbes

Elon Musk dings Bill Gates and says their conversations were underwhelming, after the Microsoft billionaire buys an electric Porsche – Pulse Nigeria

No-one is safe from Elon Musk's barbs, it seems not even Bill Gates.

Elon Musk dissed the Microsoft billionaire in a tweet sent Tuesday, claiming his conversations with the Microsoft founder had been "underwhelming."

Musk made the remark after an unofficial Tesla news account expressed disappointment with Gates' recent decision to buy a Porsche Taycan instead of a Tesla.

The Porsche Taycan is the German automaker's first all-electric vehicle and represents a direct rival to many of Tesla's models. Its starting price is $103,800 .

Gates said he'd ordered the "very, very cool" vehicle during an interview with YouTuber Marques Brownlee , published Friday.

"That's my first electric car, and I'm enjoying it a lot," he said.

During the interview, the 64-year-old tech grandee discussed the state of electric cars in general, noting that their range still falls below that of traditional gasoline vehicles. Consumers may experience "anxiety" about this when buying one, he said.

Still, Gates and Musk have more insights in common than the Tesla CEO might like to admit.

They have both, for example, spoken about the dangers posed by artificial intelligence.

Both men have endorsed a book by Oxford philosophy professor Nick Bostrom, "Superintelligence," which warns of the risks to human life posed by AI.

Musk said the book was "worth reading" in a 2014 tweet , while Gates endorsed the book in a 2015 interview with Baidu CEO Robin Li .

NOW WATCH: 62 new emoji and emoji variations were just finalized, including a bubble tea emoji and a transgender flag. Here's how everyday people submit their own emoji.

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SEE ALSO: AI is a greater threat to human existence than climate change, says the Oxford professor endorsed by Bill Gates

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Elon Musk dings Bill Gates and says their conversations were underwhelming, after the Microsoft billionaire buys an electric Porsche - Pulse Nigeria