Apocalypse Now – Historians on the Future, Will Computers ever be Smart, Alien Civilizations next door, and the Funniest Tweet you’ll see this week

Grüezi! I’m Adrian Monck, welcome to this World Economic Forum newsletter.

This week... this newsletter is taking a much-needed summer break, back in second week of August, so here’s a bumper brain box edition of links and food for thought to keep you going.

Remember newsletters are for sharing!

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1?? Apocalypse Now

The world risks falling back into the Dark Ages warns a leading historian.

Oxford Professor Peter Frankopan wrote one of the best history books of recent times. Now he turns his attention to today:

• “[I]t is not hard to see how the pandemic may herald a new era of feudalism, where more and more assets are concentrated in the hands of the few. Last year, Oxfam estimated that twenty six people owned more than half of the world’s population – and the rise in fortunes will now extend this imbalance further, creating the same processes that have held back social, economic and political development in places with long and recurring experiences of disease.
• This is shown by a report by Forbes in May 2020: despite unprecedented state borrowing, extraordinary pressures on jobs and growing concern about the implications of a very major contraction, the wealth of America’s six hundred billionaires had gone up by more than $400bn since the start of the pandemic. That provides considerable food for thought – or should do – for governments in developed countries where democracy and social mobility have long been cornerstones of progress and enlightenment.”

But doesn’t everyone love democracy? How does authoritarianism get a grip?

To get an answer, you have to go back to the history books. Palpatine in Star Wars was thinly based on Roman emperor, Augustus, who ended Rome’s republic. Here is how one Roman described that:

• “ Augustus ... brought a world exhausted from civil war under his authority, with the title of ‘First Citizen’ … by seducing the military with bribes, the masses with bread, and everybody with the promise of peace. He gradually increased his powers, taking on the functions of the Senate, the magistrates and the laws.
• No resistance came. The bravest had fallen in battle or been outlawed; and the elites who remained rose to riches and high office in proportion to their enthusiasm for servitude. Having benefited from the revolution, they preferred the security of the new regime to the dangers of the old.”

Maybe there are lessons in history. If you want some dystopian summer reading, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is free here, and Tacitus’ Histories here.

For a bang up to date and more encouraging read on democracy and its future, there’s David Stasavage’s The Decline and Rise of Democracy.

? “Normal isn’t working” – Why we need a Great Reset.

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2?? Policing the Police, Using Science.

Also, are there lessons on changing police behaviour from Northern Ireland?

• “[T]here may be fruitful parallels to draw between Northern Ireland and the US when it comes to the question of police reform or disbandment. In the late 1990s, Catholics made up roughly 40 per cent of the population of Northern Ireland, but fewer than 10 per cent of RUC members. The rubber bullets that US police officers have been firing so freely were initially designed for use by the British security forces in Northern Ireland, where they killed 17 people. RUC patrols carried weapons, wore flak jackets and drove around in armour-plated vehicles, foreshadowing the militarisation of US policing.
• There’s one obvious difference: while American police departments like to talk as if they’re fighting a war on the streets, the RUC actually was engaged in a conflict with a heavily armed guerrilla force. The IRA killed 190 RUC officers during the Troubles, and another 83 members of its reserve. Adjusted for population, that would be the equivalent of more than 50,000 US police officers shot or blown up since the mid-1990s by African-American insurgents.
• According to the Washington Post, US police officers killed 328 unarmed people between 2015 and 2019. The RUC killed a total of 29 civilians – 26 Catholics and three Protestants – during the Troubles, which would be the equivalent of more than 5000 deaths in the US over 25 years.”

? What companies are doing to fight systemic racism.

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3?? Will Artificial intelligence Ever Happen?

In sci-fi classic 2001: A Space Odyssey, HAL the computer decides to stop playing nice...

Could computers ever become sentient? It’s not just sci-fi, there are plenty of people in tech who are banking on electronic boxes with brains.

Norwegian philosopher Ragnar Fjelland thinks they are wrong for one important reason. They’re not people.

• “[W]e are bodily and social beings, living in a material and social world. To understand another person is not to look into the chemistry of that person’s brain, not even into that person’s “soul”, but is rather to be in that person’s “shoes”. It is to understand the person’s lifeworld ... we cannot fully understand people in situations that are very different from what we have ourselves experienced. But to some degree we can understand, and we can understand because we are also in the world.
• Computers are not in our world. [N]eural networks need not be programmed, and therefore can handle tacit knowledge. However, it is simply not true, as some of the advocates of Big Data argue, that the data “speak for themselves”. Normally, the data used are related to one or more models, they are selected by humans, and in the end they consist of numbers.
• If we think ... that the world is “at the bottom” governed by algorithms, then we will have a tendency to overestimate the power of AI and underestimate human accomplishments.
• My conclusion is very simple: ...arguments against general AI are still valid.”

? Dig deeper on artificial intelligence.

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4?? China and America

Doomed not to get on? There’s a reason.

China didn’t play along as globalization’s economic underdog, says Michael Lind.

• “The ... implicit promise made by the cheerful advocates of deep Sino-American economic integration ... was that China would accept a neocolonial division of labor in which the United States and Europe and the advanced capitalist states of East Asia would specialize in high-end, high-wage “knowledge work,” while offshoring low-value-added manufacturing to unfree and poorly paid Chinese workers...
• But the leaders of China, not unreasonably, are not content for their country to be the low-wage sweatshop of the world, the unstated role assigned to it by Western policymakers in the 1990s. China’s rulers want China to compete in high-value-added industries and technological innovation as well. These are not inherently sinister ambitions.”

? Can there be a winner in the US-China tech war?

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5?? It’s so Hot in Vietnam, Farmers are Harvesting at Night

? Learn more about how climate change is hitting agriculture.

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6?? Are There Really 36 Alien Civilizations in our Galaxy?

And do they just want to be friends?

This study says there’s three dozen. But it doesn’t say anything about how cuddly they might be. In case you were getting excited, there’s always another scientist with a bucket of cold water.

• [W]e are truly, quantifiably ignorant about life’s most probable trajectory, and ... our Earth-based data points have very limited discriminatory power.
• The other rebuttal, that is in many ways far more interesting, is to do with our impressive ignorance about the very nature of life itself, and the nature of the phenomenon we blithely call “intelligence.” Because of that ignorance, charting the development of civilizations as a simple function of the age of life on a planet seems positively ludicrous.

Talking of aliens, I’m spending my break reading sci-fi series The Remembrance of Earth’s Past by Chinese author Liu Cixin.

? Octopuses are the nearest thing to alien life on planet Earth. Don’t eat them!

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7?? The Best Tweet You’ll See This Week

? There’s no joking with Robin, Linda, Max and the team at World vs Virus – plus it’s Apple recommended!

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Hope you’ve enjoyed this artisan crafted content, enjoy your summer in peace and tranquillity,

Adrian

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