The damage done by the unsustainable global food system. Putin’s preparation for a war that never ends. How long can China go on defying economic orthodoxy? Movers and shakers of the global tech community call for a six month pause on AI training to enable governance and protocols to catch up. Friendship in all its forms is fundamental for our health and wellbeing.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
ARTICLE OF THE WEEK
Henry Dimbleby, Britain’s diet is more deadly than Covid
(The Times, 24 March 2023)
In “Ravenous”, Dimbleby provides the incontrovertible evidence that the damage done by our current food system will soon become politically and economically unsustainable. In the UK, ultra-processed food (a packaged and industrially processed product high in calories and low in nutrients) makes up 57% of the population diet. As a result, 60% of adults are overweight or obese, and by 2060 that proportion is expected to reach 80%. The problem is global. Pretty much everywhere, the food system is creating a huge health crisis, “yet politicians are too worried about nannying and too in thrall to business to act.” Think of this: in 1950 under 1% of the UK population was clinically obese, vs. 28% today. “Are we to believe that, in the intervening years, the population has suffered a massive collapse of willpower? Of course not. Humans have not changed. The food system has.” Only government intervention can fix this (metered paywall – reads in 6-8 min).
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Pjotr Sauer and Andrew Roth, Putin prepares Russia for ‘forever war’ with west as Ukraine invasion stalls
(The Guardian, 28 March 2023)
After having thought that the war would end in just a few days or weeks (with a victory), Putin is now preparing for a conflict “that never ends”. In so doing, he has managed to rally people around the flag with talk of a fight for national survival. In private, some of Putin’s closest advisers have recognized that: “Things will get much harder. This will take a very, very long time.” As a Russian political analyst puts it: “Putin has practically stopped talking about any concrete aims of the war. He proposes no vision of what a future victory might look like either. The war has no clearcut beginning nor a foreseeable end” (metered paywall – reads in 5-7 min).
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Zhiwu Chen, How China Keeps Putting Off Its Lehman Moment
(The New York Times, 26 March 2023)
China faces an unprecedented array of economic challenges with a combination of over-leverage, ageing, economic slowdown, and rising unemployment (all these against the backdrop of decoupling with the West). Yet, Chinese doomsayers have been wrong again and again. Why? Because Western analysts “make the fundamental mistake of applying pure market logic to China’s economy, and it just doesn’t work that way”. The authorities have unlimited power to head off crises by directing resources (and distributing pain) as they see fit, and financial institutions must do what the government tells them. All that said, China cannot indefinitely defy economic orthodoxy, and its biggest test may yet lie ahead (gifted article – reads in 6-8 min).
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Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter
(Future of Life Institute, 28 March 2023)
Like all technologies, AI offers both opportunities and risks; but with one notable difference: it does so on a gigantic, and possibly existential, scale. In this open letter, more than a thousand signatories (senior execs from tech companies and prominent scientists in the field, including Elon Musk, the co-founders of Apple, Pinterest, Skype, and AI start-up Stability AI) are calling on AI labs to immediately pause for at least six months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4. They argue that such developments pose significant risks to society and humanity in the absence of shared safety protocols, and of a robust AI governance system (free access – reads in 3-4 min).
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Christine Ro, Why friendship makes us healthier
(BBC, 31 March 2023)
A good, science-based, reminder of why friendship (like love) improves our health. We know that social connections bolster our immune system because socially integrated people tend to have longer and healthier lives. By contrast, social isolation causes our blood cells to change their behaviour, leading to more inflammation and a weakened immune response. As we get older, the quality and diversity of our friendships matters more and more, but even casual friendships are helpful across the lifespan. (free access – reads in about 10 min).
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