Daily Archives: February 7, 2022

Why Big Tech Wants You To Think There’s A Patent Crisis – International Business Times

Posted: February 7, 2022 at 7:14 am

Big Tech has long felt free to help itself to the good ideas of smaller companies. It's bad enough that these giants fiercely contest the efforts of inventors to receive fair compensation -- a courtroom mismatch between small startup firms with a good idea but little money on one side versus behemoths valued into the trillion-plus dollars on the other.

Now, however, Big Tech is taking the process one step further by launching a subterranean counterattack on the little guys -- claiming to be the real victim here.

For years now, Big Tech has been promoting the myth of "patent trolls." This army of creatures of courtroom legend supposedly files bogus patent infringement lawsuits by the truckload in order to grab "please go away" cash settlements from the tech giants. Now, the latter have added the new wrinkle of claiming that the United States is facing a crisis of "bad patents" -- in other words, that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has been failing on a mass scale by issuing patents that are too vague, too conventional, or so poorly written that it's impossible to know what invention or technology the patent encompasses.

Time and time again, when tech giants get called out for stealing intellectual property, they've made the same argument: they can't have committed theft because the smaller firms' patents were invalid in the first place.

"The claims of the Patent-in-Suit are invalid and unenforceable," pronounced Google in a recent lawsuit with smaller firm VideoShare LLC over video-streaming technology. Google huffed that VideoShare's patent was too abstract and "lacked novelty." Fortunately, the jury saw through the ruse, and the court ordered Google to pay $26 million for its infringement.

Likewise, when startup cybersecurity firm Centripetal accused Cisco of patent infringement, Cisco retaliated by trying to invalidate Centripetal's patents through a review process within the USPTO. In the end, though, a federal court in 2020 sided with Centripetal, ordering Cisco to pay nearly $2 billion in damages for infringement.

Now comes the High Tech Inventors Alliance -- an advocacy group formed to promote a "balanced patent system" by Google, Amazon, Cisco, and the like -- to allege that over a quarter of all patents granted in the United States are invalid.

If true, that would be shocking -- a damning indictment of the USPTO and its work. But a "balanced patent system" in this case means one in which Big Tech can help itself with impunity to the discoveries represented by 25 percent of all patents -- because if they are indeed invalid, there's nothing to infringe upon.

In fact, this claim is every bit as bogus and self-serving as the proposition that Big Tech is beset by patent trolls. As it turns out, the figure derives from a single, decade-old study that examined just 980 patents issued from 2000 to 2010. To put that in perspective, the PTO granted about 2 million patents in that period.

The truth is that, after many years of consistent and effective efforts to improve examination practices and tools at the USPTO, poor quality applications rarely get through the system. And 25% of U.S. patents certainly are not bad." Indeed, the United States is quite judicious in issuing patents. A 2019 study from the World Intellectual Property Organization found that USPTO grants patents in fewer than 35% of applications processed, one of the smallest percentages of leading patent offices worldwide.

In addition, the number of patent lawsuits and legal disputes in the United States has remained steady for decades. If a "patent crisis" did in fact exist, there would likely be far more than just two disputes per 1,000 patents issued -- a rate that has not budged in this country for nearly a century.

Ironically, our largest and most aggressive competitors dont think the U.S. is awash with bad patents. Indeed, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative continues to estimate that China is responsible for between $200-$600 billion in theft of American IP every year.

If Big Tech succeeds in its continued efforts to weaken intellectual property protection, the consequences will be dire, encouraging foreign theft and jeopardizing America's global economic standing.

Our policymakers shouldn't fall for Big Tech's "patent crisis" hoax. There's too much at stake.

Chris Israel is the executive director of the U.S. Alliance of Startups and Inventors for Jobs and a formerU.S. Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator.

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Digital Finance: EU Watchdogs Call for Rapid Action to Catch Up Big Tech – Gadgets 360

Posted: at 7:14 am

Rapid action is needed to update how cross-border financial services are scrutinised and consumers protected as the sector becomes digitalised with "Big Tech" playing an increased role, European Union regulators said on Monday.

People are turning to social media and using smartphones to buy and sell shares, move money around bank accounts and make payments, a trend accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, leaving regulators playing catch-up.

"Digital finance has unlocked new synergies between financial and non-financial activities that potentially introduce systemic risk into the market for financial services," a joint report from the EU's banking, insurance and markets watchdogs said.

Cloud computing, or banks and other financial firms using outsourced providers for services, is booming, the report said.

It is sometimes unclear how to categorise some digital financial services under existing rules, creating uncertainty over data privacy, anti-money laundering safeguards, and how much capital they should be holding, the report said.

It called on the bloc's executive European Commission, which has opened a public consultation on digital finance, to take a "holistic" view of supervising financial services.

New "supervision structures" may be needed to capture transactions spread across "mixed activity" groups or MAGs, such as Amazon, Google, Meta's Facebook, Apple, and other Big Tech firms offering financial and non-financial services.

The crash of German payments company Wirecard demonstrated that complex arrangements within a group providing both financial and non-financial services create specific challenges for supervisors, the report said.

"The growing digitalisation and datafication of financial services necessitate closer cooperation between financial and relevant non-financial authorities," the report said.

The report said that regulatory action may be warranted given that some posting on social media are effectively advertisements.

"In securities markets in particular, the growth of digital trading platforms has coincided with new trends, such as social trading', or investment advice shared over social mediawhich brings new opportunities but risks as well."

Thomson Reuters 2022

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Beyond privacy: there are wider issues at stake over Big Tech in medicine – Open Democracy

Posted: at 7:14 am

Big Techs role in facilitating a host of digital harms in recent years has become painfully clear: political polarization, consumer manipulation, discrimination-by-algorithm, worker insecurity, to name just a few.

The European Union has taken on a leading role in safeguarding citizens from these harms, first and foremost with the implementation of privacy standards and data protection law. Indeed, privacy has taken on a dominant position in the marketplace of public values in the digital age.

There are good reasons for this. Privacy is undoubtedly a core value of democratic societies, to be championed and cherished. It is the breathing room we need to engage in the process of self-development. But at this stage in our digital evolution, our heightened sensitivity to privacy, our fixation on data protection, may act as an obstacle to a digital Europe fit for all.

In fact, our focus on privacy may be unwittingly enabling, rather than hindering, the continued expansion of Big Tech into new sectors. This is what weve found in an ongoing European Commission-funded research project I am leading at Radboud University in the Netherlands, which is investigating the risks raised by the increased involvement of Big Tech in health and medicine.

Since at least 2014, all major tech corporations, including Alphabet (Googles parent company), Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook and IBM have moved into health and medicine. They have done so either by setting up partnerships with public research institutions on medical projects or by developing health-related applications themselves, including software for carrying out remote clinical studies, wearables for medical research, devices for home medical surveillance, artificial intelligence (AI) systems for diagnostics and prediction, or funding schemes for biomedical research.

These companies were also quick to offer digital support in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, most famously with the Google-Apple application programming interface (API) for digital contact tracing, on which most contact tracing apps in Europe, as well as other parts of the world, run.

To anyone who had been paying attention to this Googlisation of health, privacy and data protection issues were, from the get-go, potential red flags. Indeed, it is not difficult to conjure up horror scenarios of these companies getting hold of our personal health data and feeding it into a metaverse of increasingly more precise data profiles that could be used to target, surveil and manipulate us.

In response, data protection watchdogs were unleashed (with more or less success), and digital security experts began designing state-of-the-art privacy-by-design data exchange techniques specifically for collaborations between Big Tech and hospitals.

These efforts may be good deterrents. To date, there have been relatively few privacy scandals around Big Techs involvement in health and medicine. And privacy now seems to be a shared concern of companies too regardless of what their motives might be.

Google and Apples COVID-19 digital contact tracing protocol, for example, conforms to the stringent privacy-protecting criteria defined by leading privacy and security experts. First and foremost amongst these, it only works with decentralised data storage systems that keep our data on our individual phones rather than sending them to a central repository, thereby pre-empting any surveillance creep. It is precisely for this reason that many privacy experts, the European Data Protection Supervisor and most European states applauded and adopted the initiative when it was launched in April 2020.

But privacy is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the risks that the increased involvement of Big Tech in health and medicine raise. And the near exclusive focus on privacy has prevented much broader questions from being asked.

For example, will these companies become the new gatekeepers of the very valuable datasets they are helping to compile? These may be open access in the future, but there is no such guarantee.

Another crucial question is what role these companies will play in asking research questions and setting research agendas in health and medicine? Sergey Brin, previously the president of Google, has been open about the fact that a rare form of Parkinsons disease runs in his family and that this is why Google has invested in Parkinsons research. In the future, will Silicon Valley tycoons get a say in which global diseases receive attention and which wont?

And what kind of clash of expertise will we witness between medical experts and these tech companies, and whose expertise will prevail? The Google-Apple contact tracing API is a case in point. Some public health experts were unhappy with the API: decentralised storage is good for privacy, but not for the type of oversight of infections you want in a pandemic.

Ultimately, we need to ask how the health and medical sector will be reshaped by the growing presence of these actors. But also, and perhaps most importantly, as these companies move into virtually all sectors of society, from education and city planning to news provision, transport and even space exploration, we need to ask how society, as an aggregation of sectors, is being transformed.

These are questions that are concerned with health and medicine as a public good, who is involved in the development and distribution of this public good, and new configurations of power in a society that is increasingly digitised. These are questions that remain even if privacy and data protection are properly addressed.

This has to do with the fact that Big Techs business models are evolving. In health and medicine at least, the initiatives and partnerships that companies are launching are not about capturing as much data as possible and using it to target us with advertisements. To be successful, many of these initiatives do not require using data in ways that are privacy unfriendly. Actually, some of them do not require the use of data at all.

Take Apples ResearchKit software for example, which allows researchers to use iPhones as a means of collecting data for clinical studies. Apple does not need to see, control, analyse or in any way handle the data collected in order for the ResearchKit and the iPhone to become a new tool for remote clinical studies. No privacy issues at stake here.

Similarly, Verilys involvement in Parkinsons research seeks to develop new digital biomarkers for Parkinsons disease. These efforts will be successful if these biomarkers are accurate, in which case they may become integral to future Parkinsons research. There is no need to share data with third parties to achieve this, and so here, too, privacy is a non-issue.

In both these examples, what the companies seek to do is to become indispensable players in the future of biomedicine, and to accomplish this they do not need to breach any privacy or data protection rules.

In this context, conceptual approaches which focus almost exclusively on data privacy, such as surveillance capitalism and data colonialism, just as regulatory frameworks such as the EUs GDPR and privacy-by-design techniques, are insufficient, if not counterproductive. They risk only scratching the surface, and worse, facilitating the entrance of Big Tech via privacy friendly solutions into ever more sectors of society. The over-emphasis on privacy in our discussions and regulation of Big Tech draws our critical attention away from bigger questions about agenda setting, infrastructural power and new dependencies on a handful of companies across sectors of society,

What we need are approaches that reach beyond privacy risks and data protection. To do this, and drawing on political theorist Michael Walzers seminal work Spheres of Justice, my group at Radboud University has developed a conceptual framework that understands Big Techs push into ever more sectors as sphere transgressions.

Walzer argues that a just society is one where advantages or inequalities that exist in one sphere, such as having more money (market sphere), should not be translated into advantages in other spheres, such as access to better education (sphere of education).

Yet, what we are witnessing with the growing influence of Big Tech across sectors of society is the conversion of advantages these companies have acquired in the sphere of digital production (expertise in the development of digital infrastructure), into advantages in all spheres that undergo digitalisation be this health, education, public administration, transportation, etc. Such sphere transgressions are illegitimate, insofar as these companies do not have domain expertise proportional to their new level of influence in these different spheres, and because they are not accountable in a way that public sector actors are.

This framework moves beyond a narrow focus on privacy, to identify the risks of sphere transgressions on two levels. First, at the sectoral level, it enables us to ask how Big Tech is contributing to a reshaping of individual sectors. How do the values, norms and expertise that these companies bring with them, which typically promote technological efficiency and standardization, crowd out the traditional values and expertise that underpin a sector such as health or education values such as care and access based on need, or public health expertise which prefers centralised over decentralised oversight in a pandemic?

Second, it enables us to ask how Big Tech is reshaping society, as an aggregation of spheres. In what new ways are we becoming dependent on tech companies for the provision of public goods, and what kind of decision-making power does this confer them across society?

At Radboud, we have translated this framework into an open-data digital tool Sphere Transgressions Watch which allows users to track the presence of Big Tech in different sectors over time, and to contribute data on instances of sphere transgressions themselves. Our hope is that this tool will both raise awareness about this phenomenon among policy makers, the media and civil society, and that it will be used by other scholars to ask their own research questions. We hope that it will contribute to developing more robust governance frameworks for the digital age that move beyond a narrow focus on privacy and data protection.

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Luxury Cruise Tourism Market Expected to reach USD 10.2 Billion by 2028 Key Players , Royal Caribbean International, Azamara, Oceania Cruises S. de…

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According to XYZResearch study, over the next 5 years the Luxury Cruise Tourism market will register a xx% CAGR in terms of revenue, the global market size will reach xx Million USD by 2026, from xx Million USD in 2020. In particular, It should be noted that the impact of the epidemic has accelerated the trend of localization, regionalization and decentralization of the global industrial chain and supply chain, so it is inevitable to reconstruct the global industrial chain. Faced with the global industrial change in the post epidemic era, enterprises in various countries must take precautions. This report presents revenue, market share and growth rate for each key company. In this analysis report, we will find below details:

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Royal Caribbean International

Azamara

Oceania Cruises S. de R.L.

Viking Ocean Cruises

Seabourn

Crystal Cruises

Regent Seven Seas Cruises

Silversea Cruises

Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings Ltd.

American Cruise Lines

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China

EU

USA

Japan

India

Southeast Asia

South America

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Expedition cruises

River cruises

Sea cruises

Theme cruises

Mini cruises

World cruises

Transit cruises

Turnaround cruises

Others

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Millennial

Generation X

Baby Boomers

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Mexico Is Ramping Up Its Efforts to Repatriate Its Lost Pre-Columbian HeritageSpelling Trouble for the Market and Museums – artnet News

Posted: at 7:13 am

News last month that Citibanamex, Citigroups Mexican retail banking arm, would sell its art collection along with the bank prompted the countrys highest official to speak out.

While for some nations art and cultural objects might not be a primary concern upon the sale of a major national bank, the 2,000 artworks whose fates hang in the balance constitute a significant survey of Mexican art history, and for Mexico, preserving cultural heritage is a national priority. SinceMexicos president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador took office in 2018, his administration has been vocal about its desire to repatriate ancient cultural heritage and nearly 6,000 pieces have been returned to Mexico so far.

This policy has been making headlines in the art world as officials have intervened to attempt to block sales of ancient cultural objects from Mexico abroad.The discovery and collection of these items came after Columbuss arrival in South America in the fifteenth centuryhence the widely used term Pre-Columbian.

Culture minister Alejandra Frausto Guerrero has been outspoken about her stance that the nations heritage is not for sale, and has stepped in on four auctions over the last three years in New York, Paris, Munich, and Rome. The minister last year told AFP ahead of two auctions in France of pre-Hispanic pieces that Mexican law decrees that any piece of national heritage that is permanently outside the country, not temporarily for an exhibition or cultural cooperation, comes from an illegal act. Her efforts finally paid off when a sale in Rome was successfully halted last September, taking 17 Mesoamerican artifacts off the market, in line with Italys policy on looted artifacts.

Pre-Columbian sculpture, Museo Amparo in Puebla, Mexico in 2011. Photo by Veronique DURRUTY/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images.

The roots of these moves at an international level lie in both activism and academia. Elizabeth Baquedano of University College Londons Institute of Archaeology told Artnet News that she believes the sale of these objects at auction should be stopped altogether. For archaeologists, these ancient objects break the chain of history when physically removed from their context. For those concerned with the cultural heritage of Mesoamerica, some sacred items lose their meaning when placed in certain museum contexts.

Some masks are considered to be part of the ancestors; you wouldnt be selling the bones of your ancestors so why would you be selling the masks of your ancestors? Baquedano said. It lacks respect for the unnamed ancestors who produced them. The academicbelieves that replica objects often sold as souvenirs or fakes masquerading as the real thing can be produced to such a high standard that there is no need for private individuals to own the originals as art objects.

Luckily, I think were all moving towards a more just situation, Baquedano said. In the sense of respecting cultures, the heritage of a people, and the individuals themselves that produced them; people who had a very different take on the meaning of these objects than the auction houses are giving them.

As the profile of the conversation about repatriating Mesoamerican heritage rises, the marketplace for these objects is finding difficulty. Christies Pre-Columbian Art & Tano Masterworks auction last November was preceded by an in-person protest, noise in the press, and a petition signed by 57,691 supporters trying to halt the sale. Official representatives from several countries in Central America published a joint statement expressing concern about the commercialization of cultural property and a strong rejection of the sale due to the devastation of the history and identity of the peoples involved in the illicit trade of cultural property. The auction went ahead but a third of the lots went unsold.

Some collectors have begun voluntarily surrendering objects of cultural significance. French collectors Manichak and Jean Aurance returned a Maya stone carving they had planned to sell at auction to Guatemala in October last year after they discovered it had been looted.

While the attitude surrounding sacred ancient objects and their cultures of origin is changing, desire for these unique items remains strong. Auctions of these items and antiques from Africa and Oceana take place regularly at the major auction houses; Bonhams New York recently sent out an open invitation for a two-day complimentary valuation and consignment session, advertising the high prices these items can fetch.

According to Fredric Backlar, director ofAfrican, Oceanic and Pre-Columbian art at Bonhams, strong provenance is more important than ever. The market for top quality works has grown due to the limited supply of the material, crossover collectors from other collecting categories, as well as the legal parameters associated with ownership, he said. Artworks which have iron-clad documentation and provenance are highly regarded and command higher prices than those lacking documentation.

Mask, (300600). Photo Dumbarton Oaks, Pre-Columbian Collection, Washington, DC. Image courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

Mexico has been making efforts to reclaim lost heritage since the fall of the dictator Porfirio Daz in 1911. Mexico embraced its Indigenous heritage post-revolution and the government celebrated the countrys pre-colonial history by commissioning art, most famously Diego Riveras world-famous mural Carnival of Mexican Life. Dictatorship (1936). Rivera collected Mesoamerican and Pre-Columbian artifacts himself, and Riveras collection is now housed in the Anahuacalli Museum in Mexico City which the artist designed and was fully realized in 2021.

In recent years, the conversation has grown in tandem with international awareness of Indigenous cultures thanks to activist groups putting pressure on public institutions to return heritage taken during the colonial erawith the most attention focused on African nationsand calls to increase scholarship on pre-colonial histories more generally. This includes drawing attention to the fact that while some Indigenous peoples are considered to have been wiped out this is not always the case.

There has been a myth that we need to rectify, the disappearance narrative for Indigenous Caribbeans, Laura Osorio Sunnucks, the British Museums head of the Santo Domingo Centre of Excellence for Latin American Research Africa, Oceania and the Americas, told Artnet News.

Im talking here about Mesoamerica but all of these boundaries have been contested, because boundaries in the sense of the nation state and the way we understand it didnt exist when these objects were made, Osorio Sunnucks explained, adding that although the Caribbean is not considered Mesoamerica, the Tano people have a connection to the people of the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico which is both Mesoamerican and Caribbean.Its complicated, and the conversation around the heritage of these ancient artifacts is in flux as a result.

As auction houses continue toactively source these artifacts for regular sales, some believe thatthe trade in such objects is so entrenched in Western culture that to stop it entirely seems a long way off. But the progress in conversations surrounding the restitution of African heritage in recent years has been encouraging, and as Mexico joins forces with countries across Central, South America and the Caribbean, all looking educate people about their Indigenous heritage and populations, it could be on the cusp of reversing the tide of objects that are a part of that history from leaving the country.

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Mexico Is Ramping Up Its Efforts to Repatriate Its Lost Pre-Columbian HeritageSpelling Trouble for the Market and Museums - artnet News

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Royal Challengers Bangalore have been declared most popular sports team in Asia in the digital space: Study – Free Press Journal

Posted: at 7:13 am

Royal Challengers Bangalore have been declared most popular sports team in Asia in the digital space. According to Deportes & Finanzas, one of the biggest global data analytics firms, the Bangalore Indian Premier League (IPL) franchise is the only cricket team in the list. The rest are football clubs.

Manchester United takes the corresponding position in Europe. The other continents are topped by Flamengo (in America), Al Ahly SC (Africa) and Collingwood (Oceania).

We decided to explore long form content and with the podcast trends going up significantly, we decided to start The RCB Podcast with a strong theme for season 1: How the IPL changed my life. Two people sitting in a room with mics in front of them do not make a podcast, so we knew that it has to be well researched, packaged and produced. We partnered with ATS Studio who have the expertise in producing popular podcasts such as Misson Isro, to come on board and help bring this vision to life, Rajesh Menon, vice-president and head, RCB, said.

With Virat Kohli in the side, the teams programmes seem to have got acceptance from the fans. For instance, Bold Diaries provide all behind the scenes content and interviews, The 12th Man TV is a show for the fans, giving them a voice and The Game Day show provides dressing room content that even broadcasters do not have access to. Bold is Fit is a fitness content series.

RCBs content strategy focuses on key verticals such as 1) understanding the audience, the cricket fans and RCB fans in particular, 2) creating IPs and building affiliation and desirability for those properties, 3) Futuristic, benchmarking global trends, new technologies and 4) brand and business objectives, converting a two-month season to a 12-month content library, said Menon.

RCB says it successfully monetised all the content properties in 2021 and delivered staggering numbers to our brand partners. RCB was the most popular IPL team on social media for 2021 (engagement) and among the Top 10 global sporting teams in the world (alongside Manchester united and Barcelona who have a much larger following than RCB.

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Giving an AI control of nuclear weapons: What could possibly go wrong? – Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Posted: at 7:13 am

The "nuclear football" follows the president on trips. It allows the president to authorize a nuclear launch.

If artificial intelligences controlled nuclear weapons, all of us could be dead.

That is no exaggeration. In 1983, Soviet Air Defense Forces Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov was monitoring nuclear early warning systems, when the computer concluded with the highest confidence that the United States had launched a nuclear war. But Petrov was doubtful: The computer estimated only a handful of nuclear weapons were incoming, when such a surprise attack would more plausibly entail an overwhelming first strike. He also didnt trust the new launch detection system, and the radar system didnt have corroborative evidence. Petrov decided the message was a false positive and did nothing. The computer was wrong; Petrov was right. The false signals came from the early warning system mistaking the suns reflection off the clouds for missiles. But if Petrov had been a machine, programmed to respond automatically when confidence was sufficiently high, that error would have started a nuclear war.

Militaries are increasingly incorporating autonomous functions into weapons systems, though as far as is publicly known, they havent yet turned the nuclear launch codes over to an AI system. Russia has developed a nuclear-armed, nuclear-powered torpedo that is autonomous in some not publicly known manner, and defense thinkers in the United States have proposed automating the launch decision for nuclear weapons.

There is no guarantee that some military wont put AI in charge of nuclear launches; International law doesnt specify that there should always be a Petrov guarding the button. Thats something that should change, soon.

How autonomous nuclear weapons could go wrong. The huge problem with autonomous nuclear weapons, and really all autonomous weapons, is error. Machine learning-based artificial intelligencesthe current AI voguerely on large amounts of data to perform a task. Googles AlphaGo program beat the worlds greatest human go players, experts at the ancient Chinese game thats even more complex than chess, by playing millions of games against itself to learn the game. For a constrained game like Go, that worked well. But in the real world, data may be biased or incomplete in all sorts of ways. For example, one hiring algorithm concluded being named Jared and playing high school lacrosse was the most reliable indicator of job performance, probably because it picked up on human biases in the data.

In a nuclear weapons context, a government may have little data about adversary military platforms; existing data may be structurally biased, by, for example, relying on satellite imagery; or data may not account for obvious, expected variations such as imagery in taken during foggy, rainy, or overcast weather.

The nature of nuclear conflict compounds the problem of error.

How would a nuclear weapons AI even be trained? Nuclear weapons have only been used twice in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and serious nuclear crises are (thankfully) infrequent. Perhaps inferences can be drawn from adversary nuclear doctrine, plans, acquisition patterns, and operational activity, but the lack of actual examples of nuclear conflict means judging the quality of those inferences is impossible. While a lack of examples hinders humans too, humans have the capacity for higher-order reasoning. Humans can create theories and identify generalities from limited information or information that is analogous, but not equivalent. Machines cannot.

The deeper challenge is high false positive rates in predicting rare events. There have thankfully been only two nuclear attacks in history. An autonomous system designed to detect and retaliate against an incoming nuclear weapon, even if highly accurate, will frequently exhibit false positives. Around the world, in North Korea, Iran, and elsewhere, test missiles are fired into the sea and rockets are launched into the atmosphere. And there have been many false alarms of nuclear attacks, vastly more than actual attacks. An AI thats right almost all the time still has a lot of opportunity to get it wrong. Similarly, with a test that accurately diagnosed cases of a rare disease 99 percent of the time, a positive diagnosis may meanjusta5 percent likelihood of actually having the disease, depending on assumptions about the diseases prevalence and false positive rates. This is because with rare diseases, the number of false positives could vastlyoutweighthe number of true positives.So, if an autonomous nuclear weapon concluded with 99 percent confidence a nuclear war is about to begin, should it fire?

In the extremely unlikely event those problems can all be solved, autonomous nuclear weapons introduce new risks of error and opportunities for bad actors to manipulate systems. Current AI is not only brittle; its easy to fool. A single pixel change is enough to convince an AI a stealth bomber is a dog. This creates two problems. If a country actually sought a nuclear war, they could fool the AI system first, rendering it useless. Or a well-resourced, apocalyptic terrorist organization like the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo might attempt to trick an adversarys system into starting a catalytic nuclear war. Both approaches can be done in quite subtle, difficult-to-detect ways: data poisoning may manipulate the training data that feeds the AI system, or unmanned systems or emitters could be used to trick an AI into believing a nuclear strike is incoming.

The risk of error can confound well-laid nuclear strategies and plans. If a military had to start a nuclear war, targeting an enemys own nuclear systems with gigantic force would be a good way to go to limit retaliation. However, if an AI launched a nuclear weapon in error, the decisive opening salvo may be a pittancea single nuclear weapon aimed at a less than ideal target. Accidentally nuking a major city might provoke an overwhelming nuclear retaliation because the adversary would still have all its missile silos, just not its city.

Some have nonetheless argued that autonomous weapons (not necessarily autonomous nuclear weapons) will eventually reduce the risk of error. Machines do not need to protect themselves and can be more conservative in making decisions to use force. They do not have emotions that cloud their judgement and do not exhibit confirmation biasa type of bias in which people interpret data in a way that conforms to their desires or beliefs.

While these arguments have potential merit in conventional warfare, depending on how technology evolves, they do not in nuclear warfare. As strategic deterrents, countries have strong incentives to protect their nuclear weapons platforms, because they literally safeguard their existence. Instead of being risk avoidant, countries have an incentive to preemptively launch under attack, because otherwise they may lose their nuclear weapons. Some emotion should also be a part of nuclear decision-making: the prospect of catastrophic nuclear war should be terrifying, and the decision made extremely cautiously.

Finally, while autonomous nuclear weapons may not exhibit confirmation biases, the lack of training data and real-world test environments mean an autonomous nuclear weapon may experience numerous biases, which may never be discovered until after a nuclear war has started.

The decision to unleash nuclear force is the single most significant decision a leader can make. It commits a state to an existential conflict with millionsif not billionsof lives in the balance. Such a consequential, deeply human decision should never be made by a computer.

Activists against autonomous weapons have been hesitant to focus on autonomous nuclear weapons. For example, the International Committee of the Red Cross makes no mention of autonomous nuclear weapons in its position statement on autonomous weapons. (In fairness, the International Committee for Robot Arms Controls 2009 statement references autonomous nuclear weapons, though it represents more of the intellectual wing of the so-called stop killer robots movement.) Perhaps activists see nuclear weapons as already broadly banned or do not wish to legitimize nuclear weapons generally, but the lack of attention is a mistake. Nuclear weapons already have broad established norms against their use and proliferation, with numerous treaties supporting them. Banning autonomous nuclear weapons should be an easy win to establish norms against autonomous weapons. Plus, autonomous nuclear weapons represent perhaps the highest-risk manifestation of autonomous weapons (an artificial superintelligence is the only potential higher risk). Which is worse: an autonomous gun turret accidently killing a civilian, or an autonomous nuclear weapon igniting a nuclear war that leads to catastrophic destruction and possibly the extinction of all humanity? Hint: catastrophic destruction is vastly worse.

Where autonomous nuclear weapons stand. Some autonomy in nuclear weapons is already here, but its complicated and unclear how worried we should be.

Russias Poseidon is an Intercontinental Nuclear-Powered Nuclear-Armed Autonomous Torpedo according to US Navy documents, while the Congressional Research Service has also described it as an autonomous undersea vehicle. The weapon is intended to be a second-strike weapon used in the event of a nuclear conflict. That is, a weapon intended to ensure a state can always retaliate against a nuclear strike, even an unexpected, so-called bolt from the blue. An unanswered question is: what can the Poseidon do autonomously? Perhaps the torpedo just has some autonomous maneuvering ability to better reach its targetbasically, an underwater cruise missile. Thats probably not a big deal, though there may be some risk of error in misdirecting the attack.

It is more worrisome if the torpedo is given permission to attack autonomously under specific conditions. For example, what if, in a crisis scenario where Russian leadership fears a possible nuclear attack, Poseidon torpedoes are launched under a loiter mode? It could be that if the Poseidon loses communications with its host submarine, it launches an attack. Most worrisome: The torpedo has the ability to attack on its own, but this possibility is quite unlikely. This would require an independent means for the Poseidon to assess whether a nuclear attack had taken place, while sitting far beneath the ocean. Of course, given how little is known about the Poseidon, this is all speculation. But thats part of the point: understanding how another countrys autonomous systems operate is really hard.

Countries are also interested in so-called dead hand systems. Dead hand systems are meant to provide a back-up, in case a states nuclear command authority is disrupted, or killed. A relatively simple system like Russias Perimeter might delegate launch authority to a lower-level commander in the event of a crisis and specific conditions like a loss of communication with command authorities. But as deterrence experts Adam Lowther and Curtis McGuffin argued in a 2019 article in War on the Rocks, the United States should consider an automated strategic response system based on artificial intelligence.

The authors reason the decision-making time to launch nuclear weapons has become so constrained, that an artificial intelligence-based dead hand should be considered, despite, as the authors acknowledge, the potential for numerous errors and problems the system would create. Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan, former leader of the Department of Defenses Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, shot the proposal down immediately: You will find no stronger proponent of integration of AI capabilities writ large into the Department of Defense, but there is one area where I pause, and it has to do withnuclear command and control. But Shanahan retired in 2020, and there is no reason to believe the proposal will not come up again. Perhaps next time, no one will shoot it down.

What needs to happen. As allowed under Article VIII of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, a member state should propose an amendment to the treaty requiring all nuclear weapons states to always include humans within decision-making chains on the use of nuclear weapons. This could require diplomacy and might take a while. In the near term, countries should raise the issue when the member states next meet to review the treaty in August 2022 and establish a side-event focused on autonomous nuclear weapons issues during the 2025 conference. Even if a consensus cannot be established at the 2022 conference, countries can begin the process of working through any barriers in support of a future amendment. Countries can also build consensus outside the review conference process: Bans on autonomous nuclear weapons could be discussed as part of broader multilateral discussions on a new autonomous weapons ban.

The United States should be a leader in this effort. The congressionally-appointed National Security Commission on AI recommended humans maintain control over nuclear weapons. Page 12 notes, The United States should (1) clearly and publicly affirm existing US policy that only human beings can authorize employment of nuclear weapons and seek similar commitments from Russia and China. Formalizing this requirement in international law would make it far more robust.

Unfortunately, requiring humans to make decisions on firing nuclear weapons is not the end of the story. An obvious challenge is how to ensure the commitments to human control are trustworthy. After all, it is quite tough to tell whether a weapon is truly autonomous. But there might be options to at least reassure: Countries could pass laws requiring humans to approve decisions on the use of nuclear weapons; provide minimum transparency into nuclear command and control processes to demonstrate meaningful human control; or issue blanket bans on any research and development aimed at making nuclear weapons autonomous.

Now, none of this should suggest that any fusion of artificial intelligence and nuclear weapons is terrifying. Or, more precisely, any more terrifying than nuclear weapons on their own. Artificial intelligence also has applications in situational awareness, intelligence collection, information processing, and improving weapons accuracy. Artificial intelligence may aid decision support and communication reliability, which may help nuclear stability. In fact, artificial intelligence has already been incorporated in various aspects of nuclear command, control, and communication systems, such as early warning systems. But that should never extend to complete machine control over the decision to use nuclear weapons.

The challenge of autonomous nuclear weapons is a serious one that has gotten little attention. Making changes to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to require nuclear weapons states to maintain human control over nuclear weapons is just the start. At the very least, if a nuclear war breaks out, well know who to blame.

The author would like to thank Philipp C. Bleek, James Johnson, and Josh Pollack for providing invaluable input on this article.

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Look up to spot International Space Station over Muscat – Times of Oman

Posted: at 7:12 am

The ISS has been passing over Oman since the evening of Friday, 4 February, and will continue to be visible for a few minutes every day through telescopes until about 7pm on Tuesday, 8 February.

Muscat: People in Oman who are fascinated by engineering, astronomy and space have a great opportunity to spot the International Space Station (ISS) over the next few days, as it passes over Muscat.

The ISS has been passing over Oman since the evening of Friday, 4 February, and will continue to be visible for a few minutes every day through telescopes until about 7pm on Tuesday, 8 February.

On Tuesday evening, the ISS will appear over Muscat for a full five minutes, from 7:07pm. According to NASA, the station will appear 10 degrees above west-north-west and disappear 10 degrees above the southeast.

The station will return to the skies above Muscat at 6:07am on Monday, 14 February, for another five minutes. It will be positioned to the south, ten degrees above the horizon, before exiting the skies over the Omani capital, travelling in an east-northeast direction.

It will return again for a very brief period just a minute on Tuesday, at 5:21am, arriving 10 degrees above southeast, and depart ten degrees above east-northeast.

The ISS can be viewed for a longer period on Wednesday, 16 February, when it stays above Oman for a full seven minutes, starting at 6:06am.

It will enter the skies above Muscat 10 degrees above southwest, before departing the skies 10 degrees above northeast. The International Space Station can also be viewed from Thursday, 17 February to Saturday the 19th for varying periods.

On Thursday, space enthusiasts have full six minutes to spot the ISS above Oman, as it enters Muscats airspace at 5:19am, 15 degrees above south-southwest, before exiting 10 degrees above northeast. On Friday, its only going to be present for two minutes, starting at 4:34am.

It will, however, be back in the skies at 6:07am for another five minutes, entering 10 degrees above the west and departing 10 degrees above the northern direction of the horizon.

The ISS will also be over Oman for three minutes on Saturday at 5:22am. It will enter Muscats airspace 36 degrees above north-northwest, before leaving 10 degrees above north-northeast.

All sightings will occur within a few hours before or after sunrise or sunset, explained NASA. This is the optimum viewing period as the sun reflects off the space station and contrasts against the darker sky.

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Look up to spot International Space Station over Muscat - Times of Oman

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Astronaut Hits 300 Days in Space, On Way to Break NASA Record – NASA

Posted: at 7:12 am

NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei studies cotton genetics for the Plant Habitat-5 space agriculture experiment.

NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei has lived in space continuously for 300 days since launching and docking to the orbiting lab on April 9, 2021. He is on his way to surpassing Christina Kochs 328-day mission on March 3 and Scott Kellys 340 days on March 15. Vande Hei will return to Earth on March 30 with a NASA astronaut record-breaking 355 consecutive days in Earth orbit.

CAPCOM Woody Hobaugh from Mission Control in Houston congratulated both Vande Hei and Flight Engineer Pyotr Dubrov on reaching their 300-day milestone today. Listen to the audio downlink.

Vande Hei arrived at the station aboard the Soyuz MS-18 crew ship with Dubrov and Soyuz Commander Oleg Novitskiy. Novitskiy returned to Earth on Oct. 17, 2021, with spaceflight participants Yulia Peresild and Klim Shipenko. Dubrov will remain onboard the station with Vande Hei and parachute to a landing with station Commander Anton Shkaplerov in Kazakhstan aboard the Soyuz MS-19 crew ship at the end of March.

Meanwhile, aboard the International Space Station today the Expedition 66 crew continued its space biology and human research activities. Scientists will use the data to learn how to improve health in space and Earth.

Flight Engineers Raja Chari of NASA and Matthias Maurer of ESA (European Space Agency) joined each other Wednesday afternoon for a visual function study inside the Kibo laboratory module. The investigation explores how microgravity affects the vascular function and tissue remodeling in the eye. NASA Flight Engineer Kayla Barron participated in another vision study exploring how an astronaut visually interprets motion, orientation, and distance in space.

Chari then examined the eyes of NASA Flight Engineer Thomas Marshburn using medical imaging gear, or optical coherence tomography. Maurer assisted the pair in the afternoon, but started his day setting up virtual reality gear for a training session in the Columbus laboratory module.

Shkaplerov spent Thursday servicing video gear, transferring cargo from inside the Prichal docking module, and setting up Earth observation hardware. Dubrov and Vande Hei partnered together and installed internal wireless gear in the stations Russian segment during the afternoon.

Learn more about station activities by following thespace station blog,@space_stationand@ISS_Researchon Twitter, as well as theISS FacebookandISS Instagramaccounts.

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The Loop: Jakara Anthony wins gold, Prince Charles responds to Queen honour, and the ISS is going down – ABC News

Posted: at 7:12 am

Good morning, it's Monday, February 7. Here's what you need to get going today.

It'sAustralia's *first ever* gold medal in the women's moguls. Here's the lowdown:

I really just tried to stay focused on what I needed to do.That was all I could control in the moment

We don't want people in that area to drink any of the water from tanks, to eat any produce from gardens in that area and also not to touch any dust on any play equipment or outside equipment

Let's get you up to speed.

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It's the most expensive object ever built (its final cost will be over $US100 billion) but the ISS will meet its end in the ocean in 2031, NASA has announced.

That day will mark the end of 32 years of space station construction, experiments, photography and since November 2000 continuous human habitation,all whilehurtling around the planet once every 90 minutes or so.

And why does it have to go? It's gunking up and wearing out there's bacteria, fungi and other microbesthat surviveand thrivethere too.

It's also flying around in about 96 per cent oxygen atoms which is actually corroding the outside.

So what will NASA do next?

With its sights set further afield to deep space, the US space agency is funding commercial partners and outsourcing its low-Earth orbit activities to companies such as Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin and Lockheed Martin.

It's already given Axiom Space permission to attach modules to the space station, which will eventually detach to become their own low-Earth orbit facility.

We'll be back later on with more of the good stuff.

ABC/wires

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The Loop: Jakara Anthony wins gold, Prince Charles responds to Queen honour, and the ISS is going down - ABC News

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