Blinken warns incoming Netanyahu govt against settlements, annexation

Agence France-Presse
December 05, 2022

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, seen in March 2021 during a visit to Alaska (AFP)

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken vowed Sunday to oppose Israeli settlements or annexation in the West Bank, but promised to judge Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's incoming government by actions and not personalities.

Netanyahu is expected to return to power after sealing a coalition deal with the extreme-right movements including Religious Zionism, which will be given a post in charge of settlements in the occupied West Bank.

Speaking to J Street, a progressive pro-Israel US advocacy group, Blinken offered congratulations to the veteran Israeli leader, who has clashed with previous Democratic administrations in Washington.

"We will gauge the government by the policies it pursues rather than individual personalities," Blinken said.

But he said President Joe Biden's administration would work "relentlessly" to preserve a "horizon of hope," however dim, for the creation of a Palestinian state.

"We will also continue to unequivocally oppose any acts that undermine the prospects of a two-state solution including but not limited to settlement expansion, moves toward annexation of the West Bank, disruption to the historic status quo of holy sites, demolitions and evictions, and incitement to violence," Blinken said.

Blinken said that the Biden administration will insist on "core democratic principles including respect to the rights of LGBTQ people and the equal administration of justice for all citizens of Israel."

The far-right groups in Netanyahu's coalition will include Noam, whose leader Avi Maoz is staunchly opposed to LGBTQ rights.

Netanyahu quickly said that Jerusalem's Pride march will continue, contradicting Maoz who has vowed to cancel it.

Religious Zionism's leader Itamar Ben-Gvir, who is expected to have a key role, is a staunch advocate of Jewish settlements and used to hang in his living room a portrait of Baruch Goldstein, who massacred 29 Palestinian worshippers at a Hebron mosque in 1994.

The November 1 election was Israel's fifth in less than four years and came after the collapse of a motley coalition that tried to keep out the scandal-plagued Netanyahu.

© Agence France-Presse

Florida Gov. DeSantis: West Bank ‘Not Occupied Territory’
by Andrew Bernard


Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis addresses a crowd at the US Embassy in Israel on May 28, 2019. 

Photo: Governor’s Press Office.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on Saturday told the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) leadership conference that the West Bank was “disputed,” not “occupied,” territory.

“I don’t care what the State Department says, they are not occupied territory, it is disputed territory,” DeSantis said of the West Bank, which he referred to as Judea and Samaria. “Because we understand history, we know those are thousands of years of connection to the Jewish people.”

The status of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza has been a point of contention in US foreign policy in recent years. For decades, the State Department referred to them collectively as “occupied” territories until the Trump administration removed that designation from annual human rights reports and other statements. The Biden administration resumed referring to the West Bank as occupied, citing longstanding bipartisan precedent. Israel disputes the characterization.

DeSantis’ keynote address to the RJC’s annual leadership conference in Las Vegas follows his nearly 20-point reelection in the Florida governor’s race and speculation that he will run for the Presidency in 2024. DeSantis touted policy successes that benefited Israel and the Jewish community in Florida including improved Holocaust education standards, legislation to combat antisemitism on college campuses, and recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights.

Other speakers at the conference included former US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley, incoming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and former President Donald Trump, who announced his 2024 candidacy last week. Speaking remotely on Saturday, Trump said if the 2020 election result had not been a “sham” and he had remained president, then Saudi Arabia and the Palestinians would have joined the Abraham Accords that normalized relations between Israel, the UAE, and Bahrain, and were later joined by Morocco. “We could have truly had peace in the Middle East,” Trump said.

CRIMINAL CRYPTO CAPITALI$M

Editorial: The FTX saga is hard to understand, but the greed behind it isn't

2022/12/05

CEO of FTX Sam Bankman-Fried testifies during a hearing before the House Financial Services Committee at Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill Dec. 8, 2021, in Washington, D.C.. - Alex Wong/Getty Images North America/TNS

Back in 2001, precious few Americans could have explained what Houston-based Enron did as a company and how it got so spectacularly wealthy. But when it filed for a record-breaking bankruptcy, Americans got schooled fast about not putting their trust and money behind swaggering, fast-talking con artists. But fools and their money regrouped over the years, and along came FTX, a $32 billion cryptocurrency exchange that repeated many of Enron’s mistakes and yielded the same abysmal results. We suspect that a lot of investors who lost their shirts in the FTX failure would have trouble explaining exactly what FTX did, and that’s largely because the entire cryptocurrency industry is built on fantasy.

Even the person in charge of the company, Sam Bankman-Fried, didn’t understand it completely. “I didn’t know exactly what was going on,” he told The New York Times last week in a DealBook video interview. A year ago, Bankman-Fried was worth an estimated $26.5 billion. Today, the 30-year-old might have around $100,000 in assets. “I’ve had a bad month,” he told The Times.

The losses he and his investors suffered are far more complex to explain than what happened at Enron. That company actually dealt in a tangible asset — energy — but was guilty of creating fake companies and shuffling money-losing accounts among them to hide its financial losses. In the case of FTX, it was an exchange where people bought and sold imaginary cryptocurrency, whose value was based on nothing that anyone could see or touch. And yet millions of people around the world poured billions of real dollars into it.

When the imaginary world of cryptocurrency and FTX came crashing down, investors demanded their real, tangible money back. But it was gone. That prompted the equivalent of a bank run that exposed the myth behind everything Bankman-Fried was doing. He invented currency. When that wasn’t enough, he invented an exchange for other invented currencies. As long as everyone believed in the myth, the money poured in.

Company officers apparently used FTX assets to take out real loans to make investments in real, money-based enterprises. When the run on the bank began, they apparently began using customers’ money to pay off other customers — a Ponzi scheme, in other words. Former President Bill Clinton was among the prominent personalities who got burned by associating themselves with FTX.

To his credit, though, Clinton gave a talk at the FTX headquarters in the Bahamas reportedly warning all involved to “do right by it in the regulatory space,” meaning to make sure FTX operations abided by U.S. securities and banking regulations. Because the industry took off way before U.S. regulators could catch up, it’s not clear what they can do now to hold FTX officials legally accountable.

That shouldn’t stop Congress from trying. The internet isn’t going away anytime soon, nor will its imaginary currency market.

US Justice Dept. requests independent review of FTX collapse


The Justice Dept. has requested an independent investigation into the collapse of FTX, formerly the second-largest cryptocurrency trading platform in the world. Miami-Dade county is seeking a new naming partner for the FTX Arena, shown here. Photo by B137/Wikimedia Commons

Dec. 2 (UPI) -- The Department of Justice has requested an independent review of the circumstances leading to the implosion of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, which filed for bankruptcy in November after failing to maintain adequate liquidity to match investments.

"The questions at stake here are simply too large and too important to be left to an internal investigation," U.S. Trustee Andrew Vara said in a filing in Delaware federal bankruptcy court Thursday.

John Ray III, who replaced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried as CEO in November, is conducting an internal investigation into the company's collapse. Ray previously oversaw the return of some investor assets during the liquidation of Enron.

FTX was the worlds second-largest cryptocurrency trading platform until it was reveled that it lacked the funds to match investments.

"Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here," Ray wrote in FTX's bankruptcy filing in November.

While the Department of Justice said it did not dispute Ray's "qualifications, competence or good faith," it believes his role in the company may prevent him from representing the interests of all investors.

"An examiner could -- and should -- investigate the substantial and serious allegations of fraud, dishonesty, incompetence, misconduct and mismanagement," Vera wrote in Thursday's filing.

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for FTX 

Commentary: Making the case for a stronger US commitment to human rights

2022/12/05

US President Joe Biden attends the Jeddah Security and Development Summit at a hotel in Saudi Arabia's Red Sea coastal city of Jeddah on July 16, 2022. - Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images North America/TNS

On Dec. 10, 1948, the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in what is considered a groundbreaking moment for rights around the world. It recognized that everyone has the same basic inalienable rights, regardless of national origin, language, race, religion or sex.

It isn’t legally binding but serves as a goal for governments worldwide and a baseline against which states’ actions can be assessed. Like our own Declaration of Independence, it didn’t reflect the world as it was at the time, but rather the world we hoped to make.

The seven decades since have seen much progress in human rights, with the end of colonialism, the U.S. civil rights movement, the dramatic expansion of both democracy and health care access across the globe and mass reduction of poverty in China, to name a few.

However, in the past 20 years, the global trend toward greater rights has reversed, with authoritarianism and illiberalism on the rise.

This matters to us here at home. The United States isn’t immune to these trends, as the Jan. 6 attack on our election demonstrated. Our institutions prevented a constitutional crisis, but it is a reminder that we must continue to preserve and defend what we have.

Backsliding around the globe can affect our security and prosperity too. As the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, if people don’t enjoy basic dignity and rights protected by the rule of law, they will ultimately be compelled to rebel against oppression.

That instability can drive insurgencies that spill over into other countries, impede trade and travel and create ungoverned spaces prone to exploitation by terrorist and criminal organizations alike. The declaration isn’t simply altruistic — it’s a recognition that rights, security and prosperity are deeply connected, both within a country and across them all.

Our government has recognized and acted on this reality for decades, passing laws designed to ensure that our foreign policy doesn’t undermine human rights elsewhere either. This architecture was launched on President Jimmy Carter’s watch. He believed in the close connection between America’s strength and our human rights record, and after the Nixon years and the Vietnam War era, he had much to clean up.

New laws in the 1970s institutionalized human rights in U.S. foreign policy for the first time, creating the State Department’s human rights bureau, mandating annual human rights reports on every country receiving U.S. assistance, and making some foreign assistance contingent on the recipient’s human rights record.

Since that period, Congress has passed additional laws to ensure U.S. assistance doesn’t prop up bad actors and illiberal governments by mandating aid cuts for everything from the use of child soldiers to human trafficking to overthrowing a government by coup.

This approach wasn’t interventionist. It didn’t call on America to force democracy and human rights on countries around the world. It was premised instead on transparency — calling out human rights violations where they occurred — and ensuring that U.S. taxpayer dollars weren’t complicit in their commission and the long-term instability that oppression fuels.

But even this has been too much to fulfill. Strongly worded statements have been the flagship of our human rights engagement, while these legal tools have typically been waived or ignored but for selective occasions for the most extreme acts. Rarely have human rights violations driven real change in U.S. foreign policy.

President Joe Biden has promised to change this and repeatedly declared that human rights would be the center of his administration’s foreign policy. This promise, however, has led to little action.

The United States continues to provide military support and weapons sales to Saudi Arabia, even as Saudi Arabia’s crippling blockade on Yemen continues, as does its widespread oppression at home.

Israel also remains immune from consequence. After Israeli forces shot and killed Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in May, the administration was determined to avoid criticizing Israel, though this month the Justice Department has finally opened an investigation.

The administration has been quick to applaud Ethiopia’s recent peace deal but has been hesitant for two years of war to call out the Ethiopian government, a close security partner of the United States, for its use of starvation as a tactic of war and to recognize that Ethiopia continues to impede critical humanitarian access today.

These are a few examples of foreign policy challenges where a higher priority for human rights would demand a different approach, one where the United States sets a better example and does not allow our assistance and support to facilitate the destabilizing bad acts of others. U.S. action will not always be able to change the behavior of others, but human rights have a better chance of success if we don’t put our thumb on the scale for oppression. This approach strengthens our credibility and effectiveness as an advocate for human rights, too.

The Biden administration aspires to be a champion of human rights and has the tools to follow through. The 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights next year is a good time to start delivering on that promise.

____

ABOUT THE WRITER

Elizabeth Shackelford is a senior fellow on U.S. foreign policy with the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. She was previously a U.S. diplomat and is the author of “The Dissent Channel: American Diplomacy in a Dishonest Age.”

Australia starts building 'momentous' radio telescope

Agence France-Presse
December 05, 2022

When complete, the antennas in Australia and a network of dishes in South Africa will form the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), a massive radio telescope © Handout / Australia's Department of Industry, Science and Resources/AFP/File

Australia on Monday started building a vast network of antennas in the Outback, its section of what planners say will eventually become one of the most powerful radio telescopes in the world.

When complete, the antennas in Australia and a network of dishes in South Africa will form the Square Kilometer Array (SKA), a massive instrument that will aim to untangle mysteries about the creation of stars, galaxies and extraterrestrial life.

The idea for the telescope was first conceived in the early 1990s, but the project was plagued by delays, funding issues and diplomatic jockeying.

The SKA Observatory's Director-General Philip Diamond described the beginning of its construction as "momentous".

The telescope "will be one of humanity's biggest-ever scientific endeavors", he said.

Its name is based on the planners' original aim, a telescope that could observe a one-square-kilometer surface, but the current South African and Australian sections will have a combined collecting area of just under half that, according to the observatory.

Both countries have huge expanses of land in remote areas with little radio disturbance -- ideal for such telescopes.

More than 130,000 Christmas tree-shaped antennas are planned in Western Australia, to be built on the traditional lands of the Wajarri Aboriginal people.

They have dubbed the site "Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara", or "sharing sky and stars".

"We honor their willingness to share their skies and stars with us as we seek to find answers to some of the most fundamental science questions we face," said Diamond.

The South African site will feature nearly 200 dishes in the remote Karoo region, according to the organization.

Comparison between radio telescopes is difficult as they operate in different frequencies, according to SKA's planners.

But they have said that the two sites will give SKA higher sensitivity over single-dish
The project will help in "charting the birth and death of galaxies, searching for new types of gravitational waves and expanding the boundaries of what we know about the universe", said telescope director Sarah Pearce.

Danny Price from the Curtin Institute of Radio Astronomy said the telescope would be extremely powerful.

"To put the sensitivity of the SKA into perspective, the SKA could detect a mobile phone in the pocket of an astronaut on Mars, 225 million kilometers away," he said.


The SKA Observatory, headquartered at Jodrell Bank in Britain, has said the telescope should start making scientific observations by the late 2020s.

The organization has 14 members: Britain, Australia, South Africa, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, New Zealand, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and The Netherlands.

© 2022 AFP

Study on LSD microdosing uncovers neuropsychological mechanisms that could underlie anti-depressant effects

A single, low dose of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) can increase reward-related brain activity, according to new research published in Neuropsychopharmacology. The study indicates that the psychedelic drug alters neuropsychological processes that tend to be blunted in patients with depression.

The findings could have important implications for understanding the relationship between microdosing and mental health.

Microdosing is becoming increasingly popular as a means of improving productivity, creativity, or overall psychological wellbeing. The practice involves taking very small doses of LSD or other psychedelic substances on a regular basis. But there is little scientific evidence regarding the purported benefits of microdosing.

“After seeing the numerous media reports of the benefits of microdosing, I felt that there was a need for controlled studies,” explained lead researcher Harriet de Wit, a professor at the University of Chicago and director of the Behavioral Pharmacology Laboratory. “My laboratory is equipped to investigate whether very low doses of LSD produce changes in mood, behavior or, in this study, brain function.”

“The use of this drug under naturalistic conditions is influenced by strong expectancies of benefits by the users, and expectancies are known to affect responses to drugs. By studying the drug under double-blind, placebo controlled conditions we can determine what the drug itself does without the expectancies. In this particular study, we wanted to know whether low doses of LSD change the brain’s signature response to a rewarding stimulus.”

In the study, 18 healthy young adults participated in three five-hour laboratory sessions in which they received placebo, 13 μg of LSD, or 26 μg of LSD in randomized order. The sessions were separated by at least 7 days. Approximately 120 minutes after receiving placebo or LSD, the participants completed a monetary incentive delay task as the researchers recorded their brain activity using electroencephalography.

During the task, the participants responded as quickly as possible to target stimuli displayed on a computer screen, which signaled the potential opportunity to win small sums of money. They received positive or negative feedback after each attempt, based on their performance.

The researchers were particularly interested in three different patterns of electrical brain activity. Reward-Positivity reflects a hedonic effect that occurs after a person receives a reward, and it is thought to reflect the encoding of feedback about the success of reinforcement learning. Late-Positive Potential occurs after a person learns about an outcome, and it is thought to reflect the processing of emotional stimuli. Feedback-P3 occurs after a person receives feedback about their performance, and it is thought to reflect the updating of predictive models.

“In this study we showed that a low dose of LSD, in the range of doses that people use when they ‘microdose’ LSD, can increase the brain’s response to a rewarding stimulus,” de Wit told PsyPost. “Previous studies have shown that individuals with depression show a dampened brain response to reward. In our study, we found that a low dose of LSD increased the reward-related signal in a way that is consistent with possible anti-depressant effects. This may be related to the purported beneficial effects of microdosing.”

Compared to placebo, De Wit and her colleagues found that both doses of LSD increased Feedback-P3 amplitudes, but only 13 μg of LSD increased Reward-Positivity and Late-Positive Potential amplitudes when the participants were presented with a potential reward.

“One surprising finding was that the effects of the drug were not simply, or linearly, related to dose of the drug,” de Wit said. “Some of the effects were greater at the lower dose. This suggests that the pharmacology of the drug is somewhat complex, and we cannot assume that higher doses will produce similar, but greater, effects.”

Whether microdosing has any positive benefits remains unclear. In a previous study, de Wit and her colleagues failed to find evidence that taking low doses in LSD resulted in improvements to mood or cognition. The researchers said that more research is needed to determine the long-term effects of microdosing, and whether it holds promise as a safe and effective way to improve mental health.

“Many questions remain unanswered,” de Wit explained. “First, can this finding be replicated by others? Does the effect hold true in other subject populations, such as individuals who report low mood states? What happens if the drug is administered repeatedly – do the effects increase or decrease? And, does the drug improve psychiatric symptoms, and if so, how are these brain changes related to the possible clinical benefits?”

The study, “Low doses of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) increase reward-related brain activity“, was authored by James Glazer, Conor H. Murray, Robin Nusslock, Royce Lee, and Harriet de Wit.

© PsyPost

2022/12/03

As chatbot sophistication grows, AI debate intensifies
AFP
December 04, 2022

The start-up OpenAI designs sophisticated artificial intelligence software capable of generating images (DALL-E) or text (GPT-3, ChatGPT)

The start-up OpenAI designs sophisticated artificial intelligence software capable of generating images (DALL-E) or text (GPT-3, ChatGPT)

San Francisco (AFP) - California start-up OpenAI has released a chatbot capable of answering a variety of questions, but its impressive performance has reopened the debate on the risks linked to artificial intelligence (AI) technologies.

The conversations with ChatGPT, posted on Twitter by fascinated users, show a kind of omniscient machine, capable of explaining scientific concepts and writing scenes for a play, university dissertations or even functional lines of computer code.

"Its answer to the question 'what to do if someone has a heart attack' was incredibly clear and relevant," Claude de Loupy, head of Syllabs, a French company specialized in automatic text generation, told AFP.

"When you start asking very specific questions, ChatGPT's response can be off the mark," but its overall performance remains "really impressive," with a "high linguistic level," he said.

OpenAI, cofounded in 2015 in San Francisco by billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk, who left the business in 2018, received $1 billion from Microsoft in 2019.

The start-up is best known for its automated creation software: GPT-3 for text generation and DALL- E for image generation.

ChatGPT is able to ask its interlocutor for details, and has fewer strange responses than GPT-3, which, in spite of its prowess, sometimes spits out absurd results, said De Loupy.
Cicero

"A few years ago chatbots had the vocabulary of a dictionary and the memory of a goldfish," said Sean McGregor, a researcher who runs a database of AI-related incidents.

"Chatbots are getting much better at the 'history problem' where they act in a manner consistent with the history of queries and responses. The chatbots have graduated from goldfish status."

Like other programs relying on deep learning, mimicking neural activity, ChatGPT has one major weakness: "it does not have access to meaning," says De Loupy.

The software cannot justify its choices, such as explain why its picked the words that make up its responses.

AI technologies able to communicate are, nevertheless, increasingly able to give an impression of thought.

Researchers at Facebook-parent Meta recently developed a computer program dubbed Cicero, after the Roman statesman.

The software has proven proficient at the board game Diplomacy, which requires negotiation skills.

"If it doesn't talk like a real person -- showing empathy, building relationships, and speaking knowledgeably about the game -- it won't find other players willing to work with it," Meta said in research findings.

In October, Character.ai, a start-up founded by former Google engineers, put an experimental chatbot online that can adopt any personality.

Users create characters based on a brief description and can then "chat" with a fake Sherlock Holmes, Socrates or Donald Trump.
'Just a machine'

This level of sophistication both fascinates and worries some observers, who voice concern these technologies could be misused to trick people, by spreading false information or by creating increasingly credible scams.

What does ChatGPT think of these hazards?

"There are potential dangers in building highly sophisticated chatbots, particularly if they are designed to be indistinguishable from humans in their language and behavior," the chatbot told AFP.

Some businesses are putting safeguards in place to avoid abuse of their technologies.

On its welcome page, OpenAI lays out disclaimers, saying the chatbot "may occasionally generate incorrect information" or "produce harmful instructions or biased content."

And ChatGPT refuses to take sides.

"OpenAI made it incredibly difficult to get the model to express opinions on things," McGregor said.

Once, McGregor asked the chatbot to write a poem about an ethical issue.

"I am just a machine, A tool for you to use, I do not have the power to choose, or to refuse. I cannot weigh the options, I cannot judge what's right, I cannot make a decision On this fateful night," it replied.

On Saturday, OpenAI cofounder and CEO Sam Altman took to Twitter, musing on the debates surrounding AI.

"Interesting watching people start to debate whether powerful AI systems should behave in the way users want or their creators intend," he wrote.

"The question of whose values we align these systems to will be one of the most important debates society ever has."

Cyborgs v ‘holdout humans’: what the world might be like if our species survives for a million years
The Conversation
December 03, 2022

Three skulls in a row showing humans evolution (Shutterstock)

Most species are transitory. They go extinct, branch into new species or change over time due to random mutations and environmental shifts. A typical mammalian species can be expected to exist for a million years. Modern humans, Homo sapiens, have been around for roughly 300,000 years. So what will happen if we make it to a million years?

Science fiction author H.G. Wells was the first to realize that humans could evolve into something very alien. In his 1883 essay, Man in the year million, he envisioned what’s now become a cliche: big-brained, tiny-bodied creatures. Later, he speculated that humans could also split into two or more new species.

While Wells’s evolutionary models have not stood the test of time, the three basic options he considered still hold true. We could go extinct, turn into several species or change.

An added ingredient is that we have biotechnology that could greatly increase the probability of each of them. Foreseeable future technologies such as human enhancement (making ourselves smarter, stronger or in other ways better using drugs, microchips, genetics or other technology), brain emulation (uploading our brains to computers) or artificial intelligence (AI) may produce technological forms of new species not seen in biology.

Software intelligence and AI

It is impossible to predict the future perfectly. It depends on fundamentally random factors: ideas and actions as well as currently unknown technological and biological limits. But it is my job to explore the possibilities, and I think the most likely case is vast “speciation” – when a species splits into several others.

There are many among us who want to improve the human condition – slowing and abolishing aging, enhancing intelligence and mood, and changing bodies – potentially leading to new species.

These visions, however, leave many cold. It is plausible that even if these technologies become as cheap and ubiquitous as mobile phones, some people will refuse them on principle and build their self-image of being “normal” humans. In the long run, we should expect the most enhanced people, generation by generation (or upgrade after upgrade), to become one or more fundamentally different “posthuman” species – and a species of holdouts declaring themselves the “real humans”.

Through brain emulation, a speculative technology where one scans a brain at a cellular level and then reconstructs an equivalent neural network in a computer to create a “software intelligence”, we could go even further. This is no mere speciation, it is leaving the animal kingdom for the mineral, or rather, software kingdom.

There are many reasons some might want to do this, such as boosting chances of immortality (by creating copies and backups) or easy travel by internet or radio in space.

Software intelligence has other advantages, too. It can be very resource efficient – a virtual being only needs energy from sunlight and some rock material to make microchips. It can also think and change on the timescales set by computation, probably millions of times faster than biological minds. It can evolve in new ways – it just needs a software update.

Yet humanity is perhaps unlikely to remain the sole intelligent species on the planet. Artificial intelligence is advancing rapidly right now. While there are profound uncertainties and disagreements about when or if it becomes conscious, artificial general intelligence (meaning it can understand or learn any intellectual problems like a human, rather than specializing on niche tasks) will arrive, a sizeable fraction of experts think it is possible within this century or sooner.

If it can happen, it probably will. At some point, we are likely to have a planet where humans have largely been replaced by software intelligence or AI – or some combination of the two.

Utopia or dystopia?

Eventually, it seems plausible that most minds will become software. Research suggests that computers will soon become much more energy efficient than they are now. Software minds also won’t need to eat or drink, which are inefficient ways of obtaining energy, and they can save power by running slower parts of the day. This means we should be able to get many more artificial minds per kilogram of matter and watts of solar power than human minds in the far future. And since they can evolve fast, we should expect them to change tremendously over time from our current style of mind.

Physical beings have a distinct disadvantage compared with software beings, moving in the sluggish, quaint world of matter. Still, they are self-contained, unlike the flitting software that will evaporate if their data centre is ever disrupted.


Amish farm. Wikipedia, CC BY-SA

“Natural” humans may remain in traditional societies very unlike those of software people. This is not unlike the Amish people today, whose humble lifestyle is still made possible (and protected) by the surrounding United States. It is not given that surrounding societies have to squash small and primitive societies: we have established human rights and legal protections and something similar could continue for normal humans.

Is this a good future? Much depends on your values. A good life may involve having meaningful relations with other people and living in a peaceful and prosperous environment sustainably. From that perspective, weird posthumans are not needed; we just need to ensure that the quiet little village can function (perhaps protected by unseen automation).

Some may value “the human project”, an unbroken chain from our paleolithic ancestors to our future selves, but be open to progress. They would probably regard software people and AI as going too far, but be fine with humans evolving into strange new forms.

Others would argue what matters is freedom of self-expression and following your life goals. They may think we should explore the posthuman world widely and see what it has to offer.

Others may value happiness, thinking or other qualities that different entities hold and want futures that maximize these. Some may be uncertain, arguing we should hedge our bets by going down all paths to some extent.

Dyson sphere?

Here’s a prediction for the year one million. Some humans look more or less like us – but they are less numerous than they are now. Much of the surface is wilderness, having turned into a rewilding zone since there is far less need for agriculture and cities.


The future may be wild.

Teo Tarras/Shutterstock

Here and there, cultural sites with vastly different ecosystems pop up, carefully preserved by robots for historical or aesthetic reasons.

Under silicon canopies in the Sahara, trillions of artificial minds teem. The vast and hot data centers which power these minds once threatened to overheat the planet. Now, most orbit the Sun, forming a growing structure – a Dyson sphere – where each watt of energy powers thought, consciousness, complexity and other strange things we do not have words for yet.

If biological humans go extinct, the most likely reason (apart from the obvious and immediate threats right now) is a lack of respect, tolerance and binding contracts with other post-human species. Maybe a reason for us to start treating our own minorities betters.

Anders Sandberg, James Martin Research Fellow, Future of Humanity Institute & Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Revealed: Trump paid off secret debt to North Korea-linked company while in office

David Edwards
December 04, 2022

Donald Trump AFP Photo

There is a "chance" Donald Trump didn't break the law by hiding debt from his 2016 presidential campaign's financial disclosure reports, according to Forbes.

Documents obtained by the outlet show that the then-candidate failed to disclose $19.8 million in debt to Daewoo, a South Korean company with a history of ties to North Korea.

"There is a chance that Trump's omission may have been legal," the report said, noting that Trump may have used a loophole in the law.

"Although officials have to list personal loans on their financial disclosures, the law does not require them to include loans to their companies, unless they are personally liable for the loans. The Trump Organization documents do not specify whether the former president, who owned 100% of the entities responsible for the debt, personally guaranteed the liability, leaving it unclear whether he broke the law or merely took advantage of a loophole."

Forbes also pointed out that Trump may have hidden the debt because Daewoo, at one time, "was the only South Korean company permitted to operate a business inside [North Korea]."

The documents, which were disclosed after being obtained by New York Attorney General Letitia James, said that Trump quickly eliminated the debt after taking office.

"Daewoo was bought out of its position on July 5, 2017," one document explained.

Trump Had Hidden $19.8 Million Loan From North Korea-Linked Company As President: Report

Mary Papenfuss

Mon, December 5, 2022 

Donald Trump failed to disclose a $19.8 million loan from a company with ties to North Korea while he was president, Forbes reported Sunday, citing documents uncovered by the New York attorney general’s office.

Trump owed the money to L/P Daewoo while he was campaigning in 2016 and into his presidency, according to records. He didn’t list the debt in financial disclosure filings, as candidates and presidents are expected to do, Forbes reported.

The loan was paid off just over five months into his presidency. Forbes said the documents don’t specify who satisfied it.

Daewoo is a South Korean conglomerate that partnered with Trump on a development project near the United Nations headquarters in New York City and on several other projects over the years. The company has ties to North Korea, Forbes reported, and was the only South Korean company allowed to operate a business in North Korea in the mid-1990s.

Trump may have skirted disclosure laws and not committed an outright violation because the loan was on the books of his company, the Trump Organization, and not identified as a personal loan, Forbes noted.

The debt would have sparked conflict of interest concerns over an American president’s indebtedness to a foreign operation vulnerable to influence by North Korea’s rogue government. Trump often gushed about his close relationship with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

Such loans are largely reported on an honor system because the U.S. Office of Government Ethics has neither the resources nor the power to delve into a president’s assets.

“If someone does not disclose a loan, OGE has no way to know,” said Walter Shaub, who ran that agency when Trump took office.

Don Fox, who once also headed the office, told Forbes:“The system is kind of predicated upon people actually following a law because they want to follow the law.”

Trump hasn't condemned antisemitism because he says anti-Semitic stuff all the time: Mehdi Hasan

Sarah K. Burris
December 04, 2022

In this file photo, US President Donald Trump meets with rapper Kanye West in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, Oct. 11, 2018. - Sebastian Smith/AFP/Getty Images North America/TNS


MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan doesn't understand why people are confused that Donald Trump hasn't apologized for hanging out with Nazis and white supremacists at Mar-a-Lago.

Speaking to authoritarianism expert, Ruth Ben-Ghait began her conversation with Hasan by saying that it's the latest example of the "pivot myth," which came from Republicans who claimed Trump would "pivot" to being reasonable and rational in the general election. Then it became Trump would "pivot" after taking office. Then it changed to he would pivot after being impeached. Trump is never going to be normal.

"And among the GOP doing this, this is their very bad faith attempt to pretend that they didn't know that their white nationalist Bannon and Miller and the administration -- and also, that this is very important, just a week after they all took over after the inauguration in 2017, they issued a statement for Holocaust remembrance day that did not include Jews," she recalled. "It left out Jews. Which was a gift to Holocaust deniers, right? And then, when the chief of staff, Reince Priebus, explained this, he refused to, you know, he refused to denounce it, and he said, oh, well everyone's suffering is important. So, he was both sides-ing the Holocaust. Another gift to neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers. So, they have a long history of taking positions that are sympathetic to white nationalists and neo-Nazis."
Hasan noted that he was old enough to remember when Sean Spicer falsely claimed Hitler didn't use chemical weapons against his own people.

Historian Eric Alterman noted the long history of Trump and his allies pushing pro-Nazi rhetoric and violent antisemitism.

"Yet, the mainstream media and also American Jewish organizations and pro-Israel organizations consistently are trying, well, those both sides. There's Trump, and there is Ye, and there are these horrible antisemitic advertisements that Republicans run, but Ilham Omar once said something that we find objectionable. Or some kid and some college says something that we don't like. They're addicted to this both-sided ideology. But also, it's true: people just can't believe how awful Donald Trump is. This is one aspect of it. It's a very important aspect, and as a Jew, I take it quite seriously. But there's just -- it's been a consistent refusal to own up to who Donald Trump really is. He's an antisemite, He's a racist, I could go on for 15 minutes."

See the comments from the panel discussion below or at the link here:

Essay
Is America angry enough for Trump?
The media has set a trap for the Republicans

BY JUSTIN WEBB

Justin Webb was the BBC's North America Editor

 and presents the Americast podcast and Today on Radio Four.


Elizabeth Warren will never be president. The senior senator from Massachusetts is in many ways hugely qualified for the job. She has a list of legislative achievements to her name, and on subjects like cryptocurrency reform she is still on the case and in the news. She ran a decent campaign for the Democratic party nomination in 2020. She is still young (compared to the President, anyway…) and if Joe Biden steps down she could in theory be the fall-back choice for 2024.

Except she couldn’t. Because of one man, one word.

For many years, political opponents had complained about the fact that Warren, while a professor at Harvard Law School, had been counted as a native American. It simmered, this row, but never really reached boiling point.

Until Donald Trump. The word: Pocahontas. He used it repeatedly to describe Warren in 2016, when she was stumping for Hillary Clinton. (Warren might have been Hillary’s vice-presidential pick!) A typical example from a rally that summer:

“Pocahontas is not happy, she’s not happy. She’s the worst. You know, Pocahontas — I’m doing such a disservice to Pocahontas, it’s so unfair to Pocahontas — but this Elizabeth Warren, I call her ‘goofy’, Elizabeth Warren, she’s one of the worst senators in the entire United States Senate.”

The earnest fact checkers at the New York Times would tell you that Senator Warren was eventually goaded into taking a DNA test, which suggested that somewhere in her past there was probably some Native American blood. But nothing that justified her signing an ethnic cookbook, “Elizabeth Warren, Cherokee”. Not that the facts matter, terribly. Pocahontas hangs round her neck. It was the unspoken issue in 2020 and would be very much spoken were she to become the nominee in 2024.

I don’t mean to diminish her. She is a serious woman with a policy programme that could excite her party. But presidentially, she is toast. The genius of Donald Trump is the damage he can do with a word or a phrase. Pocahontas. Crooked Hillary. Low Energy Jeb. He finds something you might feel about a person, something you might even be ashamed of thinking, something you might not say publicly, and brings it to the fore. Makes it public, and unavoidable: visible from space. As Adam Serwer of The Atlantic put it: “The cruelty is the point.”

The Low Energy barb was aimed, of course, at a fellow Republican, dear old Jeb Bush, which brings us to the question at hand. Is Donald Trump — despite his obvious stumble in the midterms, the failure of some of his endorsed candidates, the anger of some party bigwigs towards him — still such a vicious political brawler that no one, man or beast, could withstand the impact of his vitriol? Once he gets going, on Fox News, in debates on all the US networks, perhaps back on Twitter, can he prevent any candidate from garnering the support of serious numbers of Republicans?

Let us assume that Trump supporters, the really hard core, make up 30% of the modern Republican party. Support for the other candidates at the Republican primary is going to be split among the remaining 70%. To succeed, one of them is going to have to become the anointed anti-Trump. Can Trump stop them?

As a recent headline in Politico put it: “Can Trump Do to DeSantis What He Did to Bush?” The smart money is on no. The early effort at bashing Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has itself been low energy. Trump rambling about knowing stuff only his wife would know felt crucially out of kilter with the public perception of the DeSantis marriage, as did a trial run of the phrase “Ron DeSanctimonious” at a rally during the election campaign.

The thing is: Ron is not sanctimonious. At least not noticeably. His enemies say he’s un-charming and emotionally tin-eared but not sanctimonious. The phrase felt lame, untethered. It lacked the galvanising impact on the hypothalamus, the amygdala, the limbic cortex.

Ah, but wait. He’s only getting going. Perhaps these are what is known in the world of artillery as bracketing shots. They are establishing the target and warming the trigger finger. As Michael Kruse of Politico — the author of the Trump-DeSantis piece — heard from some serious players, the 2024 Republican primary is going to be HUGE and, whatever you might think now about the strength of the players, supremely unpredictable:

“DeSantis’s team is full of smart people,” anti-Trump Republican strategist and Lincoln Project co-founder Reed Galen told Kruse, “but they’ve never faced a face-eating dragon before.”

“Folks forget,” another close Trump adviser said, (we assume with a shudder,) “what DJT can do to somebody.”

To which the anti-Trump crowd respond with what they think is their trump card. Folks are over this stuff. Over Trump because they are over the whole appeal to the limbic cortex malarkey. They are keen on having their children catch up on the learning lost in the pandemic; finding a cure for inflation; working out a plan to end the war in Ukraine.

In fact, whisper it, they are not quite as angry as some of America’s liberal-dominated media might suggest and fear. The Intercept reported in late October a fascinating fact: the net worth of the poorer 50% of Americans has doubled since the first quarter of 2020 and is now far higher than it has ever been in American history. America is still hugely unequal, and poor people are still desperately poor, but assumptions about a class of hard-pressed folk at the ends of their tethers may be wide of the mark.

What I picked up following the State Senate candidate Greg Rothman round streets in suburban Pennsylvania for the Today Programme in the week before the election was a disinclination among Trump supporters to be as angry as their man. The personable Mr Rothman (who won his seat and has always supported the former president) was happy to acknowledge that Trump’s ill-discipline, his vitriol, was tiring and potentially off-putting.

But here’s the trap for Republicans tempted to agree. What if the anger drains away? What if the language of the party becomes more temperate again? What if they become… normal again? Having morphed into a firmly anti-establishment, tell it like it is, un-PC party, how do they keep the voters they have attracted to the polls when the message is more subtle. The many Americans who liked Trump because he stuck it to the elites and their ability to dominate the culture (Pocahontas, etc.) might be less energised by a DeSantis who had the same attitude (he does) but not the same bite.

“The biggest complaint you hear about DeSantis is that he never says thank you,” a veteran GOP strategist told Vanity Fair. DeSantis’s personality has been described as a mix of extreme arrogance and painful awkwardness. “He’s missing the sociability gene,” a prominent Republican said.

So is DeSantis likeable enough to be elected president? Trump was not likeable but had this other secret sauce: his extraordinary ability to connect with the dislikeable aspects of all our personalities. DeSantis might only prove dislikeable.

In those circumstances, where does the party turn?

Back to Trump. The face-eating dragon. Roaring again by 2024. Probably losing the general election but that may well be the party’s fate: they rode the dragon and are in the process of discovering: dismounting was never part of the deal.