Monthly Archives: September 2026

Artificial Intelligence, Science, Society, Technology

Tech bosses have hidden motives in slowing AI progress

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Intro: What’s the real reason tech bosses are warning us about their AI creations? It’s certainly nothing to do with believing we are on the verge of wiping out humanity

The terrifying message from Silicon Valley is that we’re all doomed as the developers of artificial intelligence foretell the apocalypse for which they will themselves be responsible.

A high-profile British employee of Anthropic announced he was leaving over fears his company and its main competitor, OpenAI, were “gambling with our lives” by rushing to create a digital “superintelligence” that could destroy humanity.

Some working in AI – known as “doomers” – have expressed similar fears, but the warning by Anthropic’s departing employee went viral with many others in the company swiftly echoing the stark warnings. A senior safety researcher at the same company estimated there was more than a 10 per cent chance that AI “could kill all humans” within a decade.

Anthropic boss Dario Amodei largely agrees with the sentiments, saying AI had been “advancing drastically faster” and also called his industry to “slow down” and accept external regulation.

OpenAI boss Sam Altman (creator of ChatGPT) and AI developer Elon Musk followed suit.

Amodei acknowledged that the US government recognises the West is racing to develop superintelligent AI before China and other “autocracies” and that pulling back amounted to a “significant national security risk”.

But he warned that after a notorious incident this summer – in which a “swarm” of AI agents belonging to OpenAI launched sophisticated cyberattacks on rival AI company Hugging Face – a more capable swarm might “take over the entire internet” within as little as six months.

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The media and Washington establishment have been listening agog to these apocalyptic pronouncements.

So, are we all genuinely doomed – or might there be another explanation for all this terrifying recent rhetoric?

Donald Trump certainly believes so, sticking to his firm beliefs on pushing ahead with AI. Critics insist that he is only thinking about himself: America has crucial midterm elections in November and Trump, they say, doesn’t want to do anything to harm the vast investment in AI that has pushed the US stock market to record highs and buoyed the country’s economy.

This may indeed be part of his thinking – but that doesn’t necessarily mean the President is wrong in wanting to pursue AI development.

Many experts claim that all those issuing dire warnings about AI being an imminent threat to the human race are wildly exaggerating. The doomers’ predictions, they argue, depend on AI achieving superintelligent, superhuman abilities – primarily by AI learning how to improve itself, a process known as “recursive self-improvement”.

We are, however, nowhere near such superintelligence, say critics in the tech world.

The doomers have also been accused of ignoring the essential truth that AI software and mathematical models aren’t innately malicious or rebellious but – as with the Hugging Face hacking scandal – are simply trying to meet objectives set for it by its human designers.

The risks of AI, they counter, are vastly outweighed by the potential benefits, from economic productivity to medicine, military gains, and much else.

These sceptics have dismissed previous warnings by Amodei and others as attempts to get free publicity – and they certainly might draw in investors and customers attracted by all the talk of how devastatingly powerful AI may be.

Critics believe there are other – rather more selfish – reasons behind the calls from Anthropic and OpenAI to slow down research and have their industry better regulated.

The pair may be the biggest players in AI but a multitude of rivals are trying to catch up.

Some industry observers have suggested that Anthropic and OpenAI may be trying to preserve their substantial lead by suddenly demanding a general moratorium on research and thus cementing their duopoly.

They may have additional financial motives, too. Both companies have shelled out vast sums on AI research and development but are struggling to find paying customers.

So when ChatGPT owner Sam Altman – an entrepreneur hardly famous for his ethical approach – announced a few days ago that he was pausing OpenAI’s stock market launch for another year, supposedly amid concerns over AI safety, some whispered that he had simply latched on to the controversy as an excuse to delay matters until his company is in a better shape.

David Sacks, a venture capitalist who served as Trump’s “AI Tsar” and now co-chairs the President’s council of science and technology advisers, has observed waspishly that AI leaders need to “stop pretending the motivation to ‘slow down’ is purely altruistic”.

Sacks, who like others in Trump’s administration believes that claims of an AI apocalypse are a thinly-veiled attempt to damage the Republicans in the mid-terms, has dismissed the gloomy predictions as scaremongering.

“We’ve seen this movie before,” he told Bloomberg. “We saw it with global warming: they’ve taken some legitimate concerns and blown it out of proportion.”

And there are further reasons why many are increasingly taking the doomsayers with such a hefty pinch of salt.

The most obvious question is: if these bosses genuinely believe there is a high risk that AI could imminently kill us all, why haven’t they stopped already?

Sceptics also point out the supposed scenarios for AI Armageddon are unconvincingly woolly. Ask doomers how AI will wipe us out and they become vague.

A lot of the theorising hasn’t gone much further than the notorious “paperclip maximiser” advanced by Oxford philosopher Nick Bostram in 2003.

He outlined how a superintelligent computer, asked to focus entirely on producing as many paperclips as possible, would take the instruction to a total extreme, co-opting the world’s entire resources and destroying humanity after deciding they were an obstacle to making more clips (having first harvested the iron in our blood to make more paperclips). Thought-provoking, perhaps – but surely fanciful.

Some have suggested that AI could detonate a nuclear bomb, launch a global drone war, create “misinformation” that could cause one country to attack another, or develop a lethal virus – though how it would physically do any of this is another matter entirely.

Alternatively, it could supposedly wipe us out by starving us of essential resources such as food and medicine. All these scenarios and more have been brandished by the doomers – though with few details on how it might actually happen.

Some experts complain that doomer predictions that the human race could be totally exterminated within years are unfeasible while an AI would find it very difficult to hack the entire internet. The real danger, they say, isn’t AI going rogue but humans misusing it.

Professor Gary Marcus, a renowned cognitive scientist at New York University, says the notion that AI will kill everyone within a few years is mostly “preposterous”.

Marcus believes AI could certainly be used to cripple infrastructure – perhaps hospitals or air or train networks, but that the total extinction of the human race is unfeasible.

He and other sceptics also insist that it would be vanishingly difficult for an AI to hack the entire internet, as Anthropic has now suggested.

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Sceptics also claim it is non-sensical for anyone to try to put a mathematical number on the likelihood of AI destroying us all and emphasise how the doomers hardly help themselves given that their estimates of how long such a catastrophe will take to occur vary so widely.

For instance, Jack Clark, Anthropic’s co-founder, estimates that AI won’t start “doing dangerous stuff” for about 20 years.

Oren Etzioni, a professor at the University of Washington and founder of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, insists we are “very far away” from AI polishing everyone off – and that the risk of a deadly virus escaping a lab, for example, is far higher.

Some claim that the AI Cassandras have essentially lost all perspective. Having devoted their careers to researching AI because they believe so strongly in its potential, they are more susceptible to over-emphasising its power – and by extension, perhaps, their own importance.

President Trump may be somewhat blasé in dismissing all safety concerns around AI as just a “hoax”.

But it seems premature to be counting the days before our robot overlords carry out the extinction of our species.

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Britain, Economic, Government, Iran, Politics, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Society, United States

A winter of global discontent beckons

GLOBAL ECONOMY

Intro: As energy and food prices soar, we face a winter of global discontent facilitated by the West being run by failures of truly historic proportions

Houthi rebel forces have swept down the western coast of Yemen, seizing the strategic Red Sea port of Mokha (long renowned for its global coffee trade) then Dhubab, another port, before taking Perim Island at the mouth of the narrow Bab al-Mandab Strait that connects the southern end of the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean.

Many will say these are far off places of which we know nothing and care even less.

Perhaps. But what has just happened there is about to hit us even harder at the petrol and diesel pumps, the supermarket checkout counter, in monthly mortgage payments, bank loans, and household food and energy bills. Bab al-Mandab is Arabic for “The Gate of Grief” – and grief is what the global economy is in for this winter.

Oil and gas prices have already soared since Donald Trump’s war on Iran resulting in Tehran seizing control of the Strait of Hormuz, a development the President managed somehow not to foresee.

Since then the US Navy has been deployed to wrestle back control, with mixed results.

Before Trump attacked Iran, around 25 per cent of global seaborne oil trade passed through the Strait of Hormuz and 20 per cent of global liquified natural gas (LNG). Oil flows are now less than half of that (perhaps no more than a third) and almost no LNG at all is getting out.

It’s hardly surprising, then, that oil and gas prices have soared. But nothing like the trebling and quadrupling of prices in previous energy crunches: that’s because several workarounds were instigated, none more important than the East-West pipeline from Saudi Arabia’s oil field heartlands to the oil port of Yanbu on the Red Sea.

The Saudis built this 750-mile pipeline in the 1980s, as the Iran-Iraq war was raging, precisely as a contingency for the Strait of Hormuz being shut. This year it became the most important piece of energy infrastructure in the world, its daily capacity of 7 million barrels doing its bit to mitigate the rise in oil prices.

No longer. Which brings us back to the Houthis.

Just as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) threatened all vessels trying to transit the Strait of Hormuz, so the Houthis, Shia insurgents funded and armed by the IRGC, now threaten all shipping attempting to pass through the southern exit of the Red Sea.

The two most crucial maritime chokepoints in the world are now under the thumb of a hardline Iranian regime and a proxy doing its bidding. It would be hard to think of a more disastrous outcome from Trump’s war on Iran. But there’s worse.

As the Houthis pushed south to take control of Bab al-Mandab, the Saudi East-West pipeline came under attack from drones dispatched by Iraqi Shia militia, yet more Iranian proxies.

Even the dim-witted can surely see a pattern here.

The drones took out pumping stations, forcing the Saudis to close the pipeline for at least six weeks for repairs. This has crippled Saudi oil exports in the process, a harbinger of the global spike in oil prices to come.

This week the benchmark Brent crude oil price hit almost $110, the highest since May, before falling back a bit. Aramco, the Saudi national oil giant, told European refineries there would be no deliveries next month. The prices of what’s refined from crude oil – jet fuel, petrol, diesel – are rising fast.

Tehran has, in effect, opened a second front in its war with America, with huge consequences for the global economy – and Trump, still struggling to escape from the first front (which he started), has no idea what to do about it.

The Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, has pleaded with the US President for military help to repel the Houthis. Washington will likely be reluctant to assist, mindful that the Houthis survived a massive US bombing campaign, lasting over 50 days and involving 1,000 airstrikes, in the spring of 2025.

The Saudis are certainly in no position to dislodge the Houthis on their own. The group already controls a big chunk of northern Yemen, including the capital, Sanaa, despite previous Saudi military interventions on behalf of the beleaguered Yemeni government.

Now that the Houthis have their foot on the Saudi oil-export windpipe, they are going nowhere fast.

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Sometimes it really doesn’t rain but it pours. The coming global energy crunch will be compounded by the fact that Ukrainian drones have taken out a third of Russian diesel-refining capacity. Russia is now having to import diesel from India, pushing up global prices even further.

Russia is retaliating by sending its drones to hit Ukrainian grain infrastructure and exports going through the Black Sea, seriously hindering the amount of grain getting out from one of the world’s great bread baskets.

It’s a prelude to the soaring food prices to come. Farm machinery is powered by diesel. So that cost is rising. So is the cost of fertiliser. Around 20 per cent of global supply used to come through the Strait of Hormuz. Not now. The upward pressure on food prices will become relentless.

Suddenly we’re looking at the prospect of soaring energy and food prices, as oil and grain markets buckle. A new broad-based inflationary surge is coming down the pike.

The Bloomberg commodity index has already risen by 48 per cent this year. That’s now working its way into consumer prices.

UK inflation is back over 3 per cent – with more rises to come. European gas reserves are at historic lows, with time running out to replenish them for winter. So, gas is about to become much more expensive, too.

OFGEM’s energy price cap is forecast to rise by as much as 25 per cent in January.

We are now moving into a world of higher interest rates. The European Central Bank increased its benchmark rate last week; the US Federal Reserve did the same just days ago. The Bank of England kept its rate on hold. But it’s only a matter of time before it starts raising rates too. Now that inflation is back, it will have no other choice.

We are looking at higher interest rates for as far as the eye can see. The chance of reviving the housing market is non-existent. While all this unfolds, politicians on both sides of the Atlantic debate and promise irrelevancies while ignoring what really matters.

Britain has been consumed by rows over political donations which in the grand scheme of things barely matter a jot, but allow politicians to posture at their hypocritical worst.

America has a President – who’s caused much of the global economy’s turmoil – trying to bribe voters with a $5,000-a-head “dividend”. France has a lame-duck President who talks a lot and does nothing as his country sinks into a fiscal morass.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz might not survive next week following a series of bad results in elections.

The markets, of course, know exactly what’s happening. Inflation is coming back with a vengeance, the war on Iran is being lost, and the global economy is at the mercy of Islamists bent on our destruction.

It should come as no surprise the bond vigilantes demand ever higher interest rates. A risky world means ever-rising risk premiums.

We face a winter of global discontent with a political leadership missing in action, obsessed with an agenda that means little and is of a self-serving discourse, wholly inadequate to the challenges about to confront us. When the IRGC and the Houthis hold the upper hand, nobody can be in any doubt we’re being run by failures of historic proportions.

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Africa, Culture, Education, Government, History, Politics, Society, United Nations

The Mercator map does not give a faithful representation

UNITED NATIONS: CORRECT THE MAP

Intro: In Mercator’s design, Earth’s curvature is accommodated by making the countries close to the Equator seem smaller than they are and those nearer the North Pole bigger

Down the generations, it has been a constant fixture on practically every classroom wall.

But the traditional world map may be about to get an entirely new look.

The potential change follows a United Nations vote in favour of substituting the map we were all introduced to in childhood with one that shows Africa occupying rather more space than it currently does.

It has sparked a wave of diplomatic disagreement over whether this is a genuine attempt to give a more accurate picture – or just the latest example of politically motivated wokery.

The roots of the row actually date back quite some way – as far back as 1569, in fact – to Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator’s original design aimed at helping European explorers to plot their way across the oceans. While Mercator’s blueprint proved to be an excellent navigational aid, it failed to fully reflect how the world looks.

Essentially, it is all down to the Earth being round. Put simply, the laws of geometry make it impossible to give a faithful representation of a globe on a two-dimensional chart.

In Mercator’s design, the planet’s curvature is accommodated by making the countries close to the Equator seem smaller than they are and those nearer the North Pole bigger.

The upshot is that the entire African continent is shown as being roughly the same size as Greenland – despite actually being around 14 times larger.

Nonetheless, the geometric quirks of the Mercator map were warmly embraced in Victorian Britain. With major territories such as Canada lying far to the north and highlighted in vibrant red or pink on the map, the result was to make the Empire look even more far-reaching than it was.

The positioning of Britain at the centre of the world – originally because of its seafaring dominance, but later also due to the establishment of the Greenwich Prime Meridian – added to the effect.

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The doubts about Mercator’s work surfaced in the late 19th century, as maps and atlases became more widely available. At the same time, people were becoming more knowledgeable about global geography and the relative size of individual land masses.

The beginnings of a backlash emerged in the 1970s as critics warned that both the development needs and economic potential of Third World nations were being underestimated as a result of the map – which was even described as an act of “cartographic colonialism”.

Fast forward to the early days of this century and the subject began featuring in mainstream television drama. In a 2001 episode of The West Wing – the NBC series based on the US presidency – a representative of the fictional Organisation of Cartographers for Social Equality had a meeting with presidential press secretary CJ Cregg (played by Allison Janney). According to a West Wing fan site, the group “felt strongly that traditional Mercator maps gave undue focus on the nations and people of the northern hemisphere”.

Nor does the White House connection end there. Some observers say Donald Trump’s obsession with Greenland, understood to be largely based on its strategic military location, is at least partly inspired by his belief that it’s a much bigger country than it actually is. 

By 2018, a group of cartographers had produced a new map called the Equal Earth projection – which has since been used by NASA. It was adopted in February this year by the 54 member states of the African Union on the grounds that it “more accurately represents the sizes of all continents, particularly Africa”.

According to the Correct The Map campaign – set up by African lobby groups in favour of the Equal Earth model – it would be possible to “fit the United States, China, India, Japan, Mexico and much of Europe into Africa and still have land to spare”.

Yet while the campaign warns that “we have based our understanding of Africa, and the world, on a map that is wrong” for more than four centuries, there is also a strong political undertone. “The Mercator map isn’t just about misrepresenting the size of the global south, it’s about power and perception,” it says.

According to one of the groups involved, from Africa No Filter, the campaign is part of a drive to stop the “world’s longest misinformation and disinformation” about Africa.

The group told the BBC: “Africa’s misrepresentation on world maps is not just a cartographic error, it’s a narrative issue.”

Kenyan geographer Kioko Muendo agrees: “Maps are more than just guides for travellers; they shape how regions are perceived politically and economically.”

At a meeting of the UN General Assembly in New York on September 4, member nations debated whether to adopt a Correct The Map resolution which described dropping the Mercator design as an act of “cognitive justice and memorial reparation”. Togo’s foreign minister Robert Dussey was one of the diplomats who argued for the change.

“A fair world begins with a fair map,” he said. “A map is never neutral. It shapes perceptions, influences how the place of peoples and continents in the world is understood.”

But US representative Yaryna Ferencevych was having none of it. In a damning volley of remarks, she told the hearing: “Instead of focusing on genuine problems of international peace, prosperity or good relations, this body is debating map projects from the 16th century and their role in promoting reparations and ‘cognitive justice’”.

Describing it as part of “a much larger and more radical ideological project”, she said: “This resolution mocks the work and purpose of this institution.”

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Ms Ferencevych, a member of the US Senior Foreign Service, who has previously been posted to embassies in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the UK added: “Resolutions like this and the ideological agenda they promote are like barnacles on our work here.”

Despite her reservations, the motion was carried by a wide margin, with the UK among the 164 member states voting in support, while six abstained and one – America – voted against.

In a statement published on its website after the result was declared, the UN said: “The resolution does not ban the Mercator projection or impose a replacement. Instead, it encourages governments, schools, international organisations and technology companies to use the Equal Earth projection and other so-called equal-area maps when relative size matters, and teach the limitations of any flat map in representing a spherical planet.”

It added: “Behind that seemingly technical debate lies a larger argument about history and power: whether a map designed for European sailors in the 16th century has, over generations, distorted not only geography but perceptions of a whole, vast and complex continent.”

None of this will convince anyone at the Trump White House, of course. The maps on the wall of the Oval Office are unlikely to be changed any time soon.

And President Trump will presumably continue to believe that Greenland covers far more terrain than it actually does.

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