CTRL-ALT-DEL: Escape from oblivion: How the brain reboots after deep anesthesis - psychopaths Nail Brown shorty river
INSTA-CO-BLOGGER GAIL HERIOT’S NEW BOOK SOUNDS LIKE IT’S GOING TO ANNOY ALL THE RIGHT PEOPLE. Our government and institutions think that treating people differently based solely on their skin color is way, way more popular than it actually is.
Life as depicted in George Orwell’s 1984 “could come to pass in 2024” if lawmakers don’t protect the public against artificial intelligence, Microsoft’s president has warned.
Speaking to BBC's Panorama, Brad Smith said it will be "difficult to catch up” with the rapidly advancing technology.
The programme explores China’s increasing use of AI to monitor its citizens.
Critics fear the state's dominance in the area could threaten democracy.
“If we don’t enact the laws that will protect the public in the future, we are going to find the technology racing ahead, and it’s going to be very difficult to catch up,” Mr Smith said.
China's AI
In certain parts of the world, reality is increasingly catching up with that view of science fiction, he added.
China’s ambition is to become the world leader in AI by 2030, and many consider its capabilities to be far beyond the EU.
- In 2019, China beat the US at the number of patents secured by academic institutions for innovation in AI technologies.
- 54% of the world’s 770 million CCTV cameras are in China, according to research by Comparitech.
Eric Schmidt, former Google chief executive who is now chair of the US National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, has warned that beating China in AI is imperative.
“We’re in a geo-political strategic conflict with China,” he said. “The way to win is to marshal our resources together to have national and global strategies for the democracies to win in AI.
“If we don’t, we’ll be looking at a future where other values will be imposed on us.”
Watch Panorama's Are you Scared Yet, Human? on BBC iPlayer (UK only)
Microsoft president: Orwell’s 1984 could happen in 2024
Exactly ninety years ago, in 1931, Joseph Stalin announced, ‘We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must catch up in ten years. Either we do it, or they will crush us’.1 These words began a race to close the
yawning technology gap between the Soviet Union and the leading capitalist countries. The prize at stake was nothing less than the survival of the USSR. Believing that fleets of enemy bombers spraying poison gas would soon appear in the undefended skies over Russia’s cities, and amid predictions that millions would die from inhaling the deadly toxins, Stalin sent two intelligence officers – an aviation expert and a chemical weapons specialist – on a mission to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He ordered them to gather the secrets of this centre of aeronautics and chemical weapon research and bring them back to the Soviet Union, along with the means to defend his population against the new terror weapons of modern warfare.
The results of this mission would change the tide of history and lead the KGB to acknowledge that after this first operation ‘the West was a constant and irreplaceable source of acquiring new technologies’ for the USSR.2 After 1931, the Soviets would use scientific and technological intelligence, particularly in the field of aviation, to protect itself against its enemies, culminating in the defeat of Nazi Germany and, thanks to later espionage, helping tilt the global balance of power into an uneasy equilibrium. While both sides possessed weapons of equally massive destructive power, the Cold War did not become a hot war.
Ironically, America was the source of both sides’ nuclear armouries. US agencies later termed the haemorrhage of sophisticated technology to the USSR as ‘piracy’ and tried unsuccessfully to staunch the flow of secrets. In the Soviet Union, the savings resulting from this technical espionage would eventually total hundreds of millions of dollars and be included in official state defence and economic planning.
The experts in the 1930s were half right in their predictions about the future of warfare. By 1945 a nation’s power was determined by the strength of its strategic bombing capability. But the invulnerable high-altitude aircraft were not armed with poison gas. They carried a weapon of far greater destructive power: the atomic bomb. Undreamed of in 1931, this terrifying new device would prove devastatingly more potent a killer than poison gas. In 1945 a single bomb dropped from one plane killed over a hundred thousand people, and one country held a monopoly on this power: the United States.
Yet within four years the Soviets had built their own bomb, joining the US as one of the world’s two superpowers. This pre-eminence would have been unimaginable a quarter of a century previously, when Stalin and Felix Dzerzhinsky sat down to plan the reconstruction of a fragile, illiterate nation reeling from war and successive revolutions. It would be achieved through the sacrifice of millions of lives, lost during the terrible famines that attended collectivisation and on the blood-soaked battlefields of the Eastern Front.
