Monthly Archives: June 2022

The truth about Canada’s Indian graves – UnHerd

Posted: June 30, 2022 at 9:09 pm

On 27 May 2021, the Chief of the Tkemlps te Secwepemc a First Nations government in British Columbia announced that ground penetrating radar (GPR) had located the remains of 215 missing children. These were allegedly undocumented deaths from the Kamloops Indian Residential School, which had closed 52 years ago.

The young anthropologist who conducted the GPR search later added a note of caution: only a forensic investigation could confirm that these were indeed burials. But a moral panic had already beenunleashed. Politicians and the media immediately seized on the first announcement, and burials of missing children was the storyline that ricocheted around Canada and much of the world. Meanwhile, several other First Nations that had at one time hosted residential schools hired their own anthropologists armed with GPR and announced similar discoveries. Weeks later, almost exactly a year ago, in June 2021, the Cowessess First Nation announced the discovery of 751 unmarked graves at the site of another former residential school in Saskatchewan.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau set the tone of the public response on 30 May by ordering Canadian flags to be flown at half-mast on all federal building to honour the 215 children whose lives were taken at the Kamloops residential school, thus elevating the possible burials to the status of murder victims and making Canada sound like a charnel house of murdered children. Unprecedented in Canadian history, flags remained at half-mast until Remembrance Day, 11 November, and were returned to normal height only after the Assembly of First Nations gave its OK.

In spite of this ostentatious virtue-signalling, Trudeau got into trouble when he skipped an event in Kamloops on 30 September to commemorate the missing children. Apparently, our surfer dude prime minister preferred to ride the waves at Tofino on the Pacific coast rather than attend a commemorative ceremony. To make up for his faux pas, he had to go to Kamloops on 18 October for another memorial ceremony, at which he was harangued for several hours.

But not all the events in the wake of the Kamloops announcement were so amusing. Sixty-eight Christian churches, mostly Roman Catholic, were vandalised or even burned to the ground. Many of these were historical church buildings still used and revered by native people. The pretext for arson and vandalism was that the Kamloops Indian Residential School had been run by a Catholic religious order, as had 43% of all residential schools. Imagine the outrage if 68 synagogues or mosques had been vandalised and burned. Yet the attacks on 68 Catholic churches passed with only mild criticism.

An article in the New York Times was typical of media commentary about the unmarked graves. It was first published under the headline Horrible History: Mass Grave of Indigenous Children Reported in Canada on 28 May and updated on 5 October under the same title. It asserted that: For decades, most Indigenous children in Canadawere taken from their families and forced into boarding schools. A large number never returned home, their families given only vague explanations, or none at all.

Because the corporate press take their cue from the New York Times, its perspective echoed widely. The discovery of the so-called unmarked graves was chosen by Canadian newspaper editors as the news story of the year. And the World Press Photo of the Year award went to a haunting image of red dresses hung on crosses along a roadside, with a rainbow in the background, commemorating children who died at a residential school created to assimilate Indigenous children in Canada.

But the award this news report should have won is for fake news of the year. All the major elements of the story are either false or highly exaggerated.

First, no unmarked graves have been discovered at Kamloops or elsewhere. GPR has located hundreds of soil disturbances, but none of these has been excavated, so it is not known whether they are burial sites, let alone childrens graves. At her original press conference, the Chief of the Kamloops Indian Band called these findings unmarked graves, and the media, politicians, and even Pope Francis ran with the story without waiting for proof.

Similar claims from the chiefs of other Indian reserves ran into grave difficulty (no pun intended) because the GPR research was conducted in whole or in part on community cemeteries located near the sites of residential schools. It would hardly be surprising to find burial sites in a cemetery! But again, since no excavations have been conducted, it is not known whether these unmarked graves contain the bodies of children.

North American Indians did not conduct burials; they usually exposed the bodies of the dead to be worn away by predators and the elements. Christian missionaries introduced the practice of burial. But Indian graves were usually marked by simple wooden crosses that could not long withstand the rigours of Canadian weather. Thus Indian reserves today contain probably tens of thousands of forgotten unmarked graves of both adults and children. To discover these with ground-penetrating radar proves nothing without excavation.

Second, there are no missing children. This concept was invented by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), whose members spoke at various times of 2,800 or 4,200 Indian children who were sent to residential schools but never returned to their parents. Indeed, some children died at residential schools of diseases such as tuberculosis, just as they did in their home communities. But the legend of missing students arose from a failure of TRC researchers to cross-reference the vast number of historical documents about residential schools and the children who attended them.

In the fake news stories, the unmarked graves are presumed to be populated by the missing children, who died at residential school. Lurid tales of torture and murder, of babies thrown into the furnace and hanging from meat hooks, make the stories more colourful. However, the notion of missing children cannot stand up to critical scrutiny. Indian parents, like other parents, loved their children and certainly would have noticed if they went away to school and never came back. But no inquiries about missing Indian children were ever filed with the police. Moreover, children were carefully tracked in the residential school system. Similar to boarding schools all over the world, each child received a number upon admission for keeping track of clothing and other possessions.

The federal Department of Indian Affairs also recorded students because it paid a per capita subsidy to the schools. It reviewed admission records meticulously because it didnt want to pay for the white and Mtis students who sometimes got into the residential schools, even though they were supposed to be only for Indians. On the other side, the residential schools were equally motivated to keep track of students because their income depended on the per capita subsidies. If students disappeared, their subsidy would have decreased.

Third, stories about Indian residential schools are almost always accompanied by the frightening claim that 150,000 students were forced to attend these schools, but the claim is misleading at best. Scholars generally agree that more students attended day schools on Indian reserves than went away to residential schools. Moreover, a large number didnt go to any school at all. It wasnt until 1920 that school attendance was made compulsory for Indian children, and enforcement was often lax. It was estimated in 1944 that upwards of 40% of Indian children were not in any kind of school.

For students who did attend residential school, there had to be an application form signed by a parent or other guardian. Many of these forms still exist and can be seen in online government archives. The simple truth is that, despite allegations of physical and sexual abuse, many Indian parents saw the residential schools as the best option available for their children. Cree artist Kent Monkmans famous painting The Scream, showing missionaries and mounted policemen snatching infants from the arms of their Indian mothers, is a fever dream of the imagination. It is not even close to an accurate depiction of historical reality, not even if taken metaphorically.

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How could the fake news story of unmarked graves, with its attendant legends of missing children ripped from the arms of their mothers, have gained such wide currency among political and media elites? The short answer is that it fits perfectly into the progressive narrative of white supremacy, of the white majority in Canada oppressing racial minorities. But there is also a specific etiology of the unmarked grave story.

Prior to 1990, residential schools enjoyed largely favourable coverage in the media, with many positive testimonials from students who had attended them. Indeed, alumni of the residential schools made up most of the emerging First Nations elite. Then Manitoba regional chief Phil Fontaine spoke on a popular Canadian Broadcasting Company radio show about how he had suffered sexual abuse at a residential school. After that things went south quickly. The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples wrote critically about the schools; two historians wrote influential books; and lawyers launched multiple class actions on behalf of residential school survivors, claiming damages for physical and sexual abuse, as well as loss of language and culture at the schools.

Rather than contest these lawsuits in court, the Liberal government of Paul Martin negotiated a settlement in 2005, which was accepted shortly afterwards by the newly elected Conservative government of Stephen Harper. Ultimately about $5 billion in compensation was paid to about 80,000 claimants, and Prime Minister Harper gave a public apology for the existence of residential schools in 2008.

Harper might have thought that the compensation payments and his apology would be the end of the story, but it was only the beginning. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission that he appointed took off in its own direction after the initial set of commissioners resigned and had to be replaced on fairly short notice. The TRC held emotional public hearings around the country at which survivors were invited to tell their stories without fact-checking or cross-examination. Most had already made claims for financial compensation in which the amount paid was proportional to the degree of sexual and physical abuse suffered, again without fact-checking or cross-examination. The TRC concluded that the residential schools amounted to cultural genocide.

While this was going on, lawyers were bringing more class actions for other forms of Indian education, such as day schools on reserves, or boarding in town to attend public schools. Harpers government offered some resistance in court, but the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau, elected in 2015, preferred to settle out of court. Billions of dollars more are being paid out as a result.

Against this background, the claims of unmarked graves are a new money-maker. In August 2021, the federal government announced $321 million in special grants to First Nations for research about unmarked graves, and Canadas 2022 budget pledged $275 million for addressing the shameful legacy of residential schools. Meanwhile indigenous leaders are pursuing claims for financial compensation from the Catholic Church.

Fake news does not arise and thrive in a political vacuum. While progressive ideology makes academia and the Liberal government a receptive audience, the indigenous industry has an obvious financial stake in driving the story. As long as the dollars flow, expect more stories about unmarked graves, yet no excavations to test the truth of the stories.

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Shatta Wale Admits To Spreading Falsehood, Charged With GHc 2,000 Fine – YEN.COM.GH – Yen.com.gh

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Charles Nii Armah Mensah, popularly known as Shatta Wale, has been slapped with a GHc 2000 fine after he retracted his initial 'not guilty' plea regarding his death hoax in 2021.

This judgment was made by a Circuit Court judge, Emmanuel Essandoh, on Wednesday, June 29, 2022, after the defendant, Shatta Wale, pleaded guilty to spreading fake news that he had been attacked by armed assailants in October 2021.

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Shatta initially pleaded not guilty to the charges against him in an earlier court session but changed the plea during Wednesday's sitting.

Should the dancehall king fail to pay the GHc 2000 fine, he would serve a three-month jail term.

On Monday, October 18, 2021, Shatta Wale's personal assistant confirm rumours that the 'Gringo' hitmaker had been shot several times by armed attackers and left in critical condition at an undisclosed health centre.

A thorough investigation by the Ghana police revealed that the entire reportage was a hoax by Shatta with the aim of drawing people's attention to a prophecy by Jesus Ahuofe that Shatta would be shot dead on the said date.

Shatta argued that the cybercrime department of the police service acted nonchalant towards the prophecy by the founder of New Life Kingdom Chapel International, thus the hoax to draw their attention to it.

Still on Shatta Wale, YEN.com.gh reported earlier that Nigerian singer Naira Marley had let slip that he and Shatta Wale worked on the 'Papi' song for the yet-to-be-released Gift of God (G.O.G) album two years ago.

Naira Marley said he and Wale got talking on Instagram and he received the song from Wale, listened to it, liked it and decided to hop on to it. He added that he had no idea why Shatta refused to release the song and suggested that the dancehall musician might have wanted to release it as a single but decided against that to add it to the G.O.G track list.

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Source: YEN.com.gh

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Metasurfaces Open the Door to Telekinesis and Telepathy With Technology – Singularity Hub

Posted: at 9:08 pm

Stranger Things fans will be familiar with this scene: Eleven, a girl with telekinetic powers, stares intently at a Coke can. Without physically touching the can, she completely crushes it using her mind alone.

Changing objects with the mind has long been a trope in science fiction. Now, thanks to metasurfaces, two studies just showed that its potentially possible.

Metamaterials are artificial composites with bizarre optical properties. Often arranged in tandem, they can interact with electromagnetic waves, including visible light, in ways that are impossible for natural materials. This gives them a superpower: they can readily adapt their propertiesfor example, bending light in different waysrather than relying on the properties of the materials theyre made of.

Why care? Our brains generate electromagnetic waves as they process information. Depending on the brains statefor example, if its relaxed versus concentratingdifferent frequencies of brain waves take over. So why not use the brain as a source to trigger changes in metamaterials?

In the first study, published in eLight, the team used a brainwave extraction module that allowed volunteers to control a metasurfacea 2D version of metamaterialswith their minds alone. The whole system is wireless and relies on Bluetooth. They extracted brainwaves from the volunteer as she relaxed or concentrated, and through a controller, changed how the linked metasurface scattered light. Not as dramatic as bending a Coke can, surebut a futuristic demonstration of using the mind to control physical material.

A second study took the idea a smidge further. Different metasurfaces can talk to each other based on electromagnetic properties. Here, the team hooked up two people to metasurfaces to text with their minds. One volunteer was the transmitter, the other the receiver. By concentrating, the transmitters brain waves changed the metasurfaces properties to encode different binary messages. Upon decoding, the receiver got the textall without lifting a single finger.

For now, the futuristic tech is still in its infancy. But scientists imagine theyll one day be able to use metamaterials for a myriad of purposes: monitoring the attention status of a driver, for example, or incorporating them into non-invasive brain-machine interfaces.

Combined with intelligent algorithms such as machine learning, the presented two works may further open up a new direction to advanced bio-intelligent metasurface systems, said Dr. Xiangang Luo at the Institute of Optics and Electronics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, who was not involved in either of the studies.

Metasurfaces are like a fever dream. Normally we expect our materials to behave consistently: glass bottles shatter under pressure; wood cracks; cotton is soft. Metamaterials change this paradigm. Often made up of an amalgamation of materialspiezoelectric materials are a favoritethey readily change their structural and light-bending properties under the effect of electromagnetic fields.

This has led to preliminary invisibility cloaks, dynamic camouflaging, superlenses, and 3D-printed millibots that could one day roam your body to intelligently deliver drugs when needed.

Metasurfaces are metamaterials 2D cousin. Here, the repeating structures in metamaterials weave into a sheet-like structure, maintaining their ability to control nearly all the characteristics of electromagnetic waves, said Dr. Shaobo Qu at Air Force Engineering University in China, who led the telekinesis trial. Programmable metasurfaces (PMs) are a step up, in that their functions can be controlled in a predictable manner by outside influences to switch operating modeslike a bathroom smart mirror with several light settings depending on your mood.

Normally, electromagnetic waves come from a generator. But our brains burst with different frequencies of these waves, which collectively represent electrical signals across large regions. Beta waves, for example, cycle roughly 15 to 40 times a second, and are associated with an engaged mind. Theta waves, in contrast, correlate with daydreaminga sort of mental relaxation. Scientists have found that it is possible to control your brain waves and actively shift them from one state to another through neurofeedback.

Brain waves can be readily picked up by a cap of embedded electrodes. This led the team to wonder: can we use these signals to control metasurfaces?

In one study, Qu proposed a simple design using a brainwave extraction module. Its got three parts: the sensor, controller, and actuator. The sensor collects brainwaves through electrodes placed on the scalp. Here, the team used a commercially available module, ThinkGear AM, an affordable chip popular with the DIY EEG brainwave-hacking community.

Recorded data is then transmitted to the controller through Bluetooth. The controller is also made from a low-cost component, with Arduino at its heart. Brain wave signals are converted into a measure for attention, and fed into the actuator. Depending on the persons level of attention, the actuator bins the data into four groups and outputs different voltages.

The four threshold intervals correspond to distracted, neutral, concentrated, and extremely concentrated attention intensity, respectively, the team explained.

The high or low voltage corresponds to a 1 or 0 coding sequence. These sequences then map to different material properties for the metasurface, which in turn controls how it scatters light.

The end result? In a proof of concept, a volunteer sat in an anechoic chambera room designed to block out surrounding sound or electromagnetic waves. With dry electrodes on her head, she closed her eyes as she cycled through different concentration states. By measuring the light-scattering properties of the metasurface, the team found a strong correspondence between her attention intensity and the material properties.

The study doesnt show that its possible to physically move materials with your mind. But it does show that its possible to remotely control a material based on thought alone. For now, the technology is mostly a cool proof of evidence that paves the road for mind-controlled materials for health monitoring or smart sensors. A major roadblock is how to deal with outside electromagnetic noise, which could occlude neural control signals.

Telekinesis already blows my mind. But what about telepathy?

A separate study used metasurfaces as a telephone of sorts to help two people text simple messages, all without lifting a finger.

Direct brain-to-brain communication isnt new. Previous studies using non-invasive setups had participants playing 20 questions with their brain waves. Another study built a BrainNet for three volunteers, allowing them to play a Tetris-like game using brainwaves alone. The conduit for those mindmelds relied on cables and the internet. One new study asked if metasurfaces could do the same.

Led by Dr. Tie Jun Cui at the Institute of Electromagnetic Space, Southeast University in China, the study linked a well-known brainwave signal, P300, to the properties of a metasurface. Their setup, electromagnetic brain-computer-metasurface (EBCM), used brainwaves to control a particular type of metasurface known as an information metasurface, which can code 0s and 1s like an electronic circuit board.

The experiment had two volunteers: a transmitter and a receiver. The transmitter had his brain waves monitored with EEG, with a specific focus on the P300 signal. The signals were then decoded into binary code, which was then used to control the transmitters metasurface properties. These changes wirelessly changed the receivers metasurface, which was then decoded and translated back into text information for the receiver to read.

The setup successfully transmitted four text sequences: hello world, Hi, Sue, Hi, Scut and BCI metasurface. Its a slow process, averaging roughly five seconds for each character, but could be improved with some quick-spelling paradigms, the team said.

We are still far from tech-based telekinesis and telepathy. But those superpowers may not be as far-fetched as once thought. For now, the teams are eager to adopt their setups for bettering health.

Our work may further open up a new direction to explore the deep integration of metasurface, human brain intelligence, and artificial intelligence, so as to build up new generations of bio-intelligent metasurface systems, said Cui.

Image Credit: Gerd Altmann/Pixabay

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Bragar Eagel & Squire, PC Is Investigating Cognyte, Singularity Future, Medallion, and RBB and Encourages Investors to Contact the Firm -…

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NEW YORK, June 29, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Bragar Eagel & Squire, P.C., a nationally recognized shareholder rights law firm, is investigating potential claims against Cognyte Software Ltd. ( CGNT), Singularity Future Technology, Inc. ( SGLY), Medallion Financial Corp. ( MFIN), and RBB Bancorp ( RBB). Our investigations concern whether these companies have violated the federal securities laws and/or engaged in other unlawful business practices. Additional information about each case can be found at the link provided.

Cognyte Software Ltd. ( CGNT)

On April 5, 2022, Cognyte reported its fourth quarter 2021 financial results, including revenue of $125 million, which was about $3.5 million below the midpoint of the Company's own guidance. Cognyte cited "lower conversions within its product pipeline," along with supply chain issues. During the related conference call, Cognyte's Chief Executive Officer stated that "a longer sales cycle [resulted] in the lower-than-expected bookings in Q4" and acknowledged that management "didn't execute well."

On this news, Cognyte's stock fell $3.63, or 31.1%, to close at $8.03 per share on April 5, 2022, thereby injuring investors.

For more information on the Cognyte investigation go to: https://bespc.com/cases/CGNT

Singularity Future Technology, Inc. ( SGLY)

On May 5, 2022, Hindenburg Research (Hindenburg) published a report entitled Singularity Future Technology: This Nasdaq-Listed Companys CEO Is a fugitive, on the Run for Allegedly Operating a Massive Ponzi Scheme. The Hindenburg report alleged, among other things, that singularitys CEO, Yang Jie, is a fugitive on the run from Chinese authorities for running an alleged $300 million Ponzi scheme that lured in over 20,000 victims and fled to the U.S. while at least 28 other individuals involved in the case were sentenced to prison terms ranging from 6 months to 15 years. The Hindenburg report further alleged that Singularitys massive [cryptocurrency] mining rig deal appears to be a brazen undisclosed related party deal and that [w]e see little evidence that Singularitys proprietary crypto mining rigs ever existed in the first place. The photos and descriptions of Singularitys miners match precisely with another brand called KOI Miner.

On this news, Singularitys stock price fell $1.95 per share, or 28.89%, to close at $4.80 per share on May 5, 2022.

For more information on the Singularity Future investigation go to: https://bespc.com/cases/SGLY

Medallion Financial Corp. ( MFIN)

On December 29, 2021, the SEC charged Medallion and its President and Chief Operating Officer, Andrew Murstein, with illegally engaging in two schemes in an effort to reverse the companys plummeting stock price. Specifically, the two had engaged in illegal touting by paying Ichabods Cranium and others to place positive stories about the company on various websites, including Huffington Post, Seeking Alpha, and TheStreet.com.

On this news, Medallions stock fell up to 27% during intraday trading on December 29, 2021, thereby injuring investors.

For more information on the Medallion investigation go to: https://bespc.com/cases/MFIN

RBB Bancorp ( RBB)

On February 18, 2022, RBB Bancorp announced the abrupt departure of Tammy Song, the EVP and Chief Lending Officer of RBB Bancorps wholly owned subsidiary Royal Business Bank.

Four days later, on February 22, 2022, RBB Bancorp announced its President and CEO (Alan Thian) would take a leave of absence, effective immediately, pending an internal investigation being conducted by a special committee of the Companys board of directors.

On this news, RBB Bancorps stock price declined by $2.69 per share, or approximately 10.45%, from $25.75 to $23.06 over two trading days.

For more information on the RBB Bancorp investigation go to: https://bespc.com/cases/RBB

About Bragar Eagel & Squire, P.C.:

Bragar Eagel & Squire, P.C. is a nationally recognized law firm with offices in New York, California, and South Carolina. The firm represents individual and institutional investors in commercial, securities, derivative, and other complex litigation in state and federal courts across the country. For more information about the firm, please visit http://www.bespc.com. Attorney advertising. Prior results do not guarantee similar outcomes.

Contact Information:

Bragar Eagel & Squire, P.C.Brandon Walker, Esq. Melissa Fortunato, Esq.(212) 355-4648[emailprotected]www.bespc.com

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Bragar Eagel & Squire, PC Is Investigating Cognyte, Singularity Future, Medallion, and RBB and Encourages Investors to Contact the Firm -...

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A New Carbon Capture Plant Will Pull 36,000 Tons of CO2 From the Air Each Year – Singularity Hub

Posted: at 9:08 pm

A little under a year ago, the worlds biggest direct air capture (DAC) plant got up and running in Iceland. Christened Orca after the Icelandic word for energy, the plant was built by Swiss company Climeworks in partnership with Icelandic carbon storage firm Carbfix. Orca can capture about 4,000 tons of carbon per year (for scale, thats equal to the annual emissions of 790 cars).

Now Climeworks is building another facility that makes Orca seem tiny by comparison. The company broke ground on its Mammoth plant this week. With a CO capture capacity of 36,000 tons per year, Mammoth will be almost 10 times larger than Orca.

While Orca has 8 collector containers each about the size and shape of a standard shipping container, Mammoth will have 80. The containers are blocks of fans and filters that suck in air and extract its CO2, which Carbfix mixes with water and injects underground, where a chemical reaction converts it to rock.

The vast amount of energy required for this process will come from Hellisheii Power Station in south-western Iceland. Sitting on a lava plateau, the facility is the third-largest geothermal plant in the world, with an output of 303 megawatts of electricity and 400 megawatts of thermal energy.

DACs energy usage, particularly when its considered in conjunction with the (relatively minuscule) amount of CO2 its capturing, is its biggest drawback. Sourcing the energy from renewable sources helps, but its still not unlimited nor free.

Orca and Mammoth both employ solid DAC technology, which uses sorbent filters that chemically bind with CO2 (as opposed to liquid systems, which pass air through chemical solutions to remove the CO2). The filters need to be heated and placed under a vacuum to release and capture the concentrated CO2, which must then be compressed under extremely high pressure.

According to the International Energy Agency, there are 19DAC plants operating worldwide today. They capture more than 0.01megatons (10,000 tons) of carbon dioxide a year. Along with Mammoth, another plant that will reportedly capture one million metric tons per year of CO2 is slated to start construction in Texas by this December.

Climeworks was launched by Jan Wurzbacher and Christoph Gebald in 2009 out of ETH Zrich, the main technical university in Switzerland. Since then, Wurzbacher told CNBC, DAC technology has improved by leaps and bounds. We started with milligrams of carbon dioxide captured from the air, he said. Then we went from milligrams to grams, from grams to kilograms to tons to 1,000 tons. That sort of leveling up over the course of 13 years is no small feat.

To meet its future goals, though, the company will have its work cut out for it; theyre aiming to remove millions of tons of CO2 per year by 2030 and a billion per year by 2050.

Meanwhile, global emissions topped 36 billion tons last year. 36,000 tons (the quantity of CO2 that will be captured by the Mammoth facility) is a negligible fraction of that total. Is it even worth the energy usage, construction and maintenance costs, and frankly, the effort? Or would the geothermally-generated electricity go to better use powering electric cars?

There will be all sorts of trade-offs and tough decisions to make as we continue to grapple with the climate crisis. Even if automation and increases in energy efficiency drive down the cost of direct air capture, its unclear whether it will be a viable solution. Climeworks CEO Gebald is optimistic; Nobody has ever built what we are building in DAC, and we are both humble and realistic that the most certain way to be successful is to run the technology in the real world as fast as possible, he said. Construction of the Mammoth plant is expected to be complete in 18 to 24 months.

Image Credit: Climeworks

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Blake Lemoine, Google, and searching for souls in the algorithm – Vox.com

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It wasnt science that convinced Google engineer Blake Lemoine that one of the companys AIs is sentient. Lemoine, who is also an ordained Christian mystic priest, says it was the AIs comments about religion, as well as his personal, spiritual beliefs, that helped persuade him the technology had thoughts, feelings, and a soul.

Im a priest. When LaMDA claimed to have a soul and then was able to eloquently explain what it meant by that, I was inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt, Lemoine said in a recent tweet. Who am I to tell God where he can and cant put souls?

Lemoine is probably wrong at least from a scientific perspective. Prominent AI researchers as well as Google say that LaMDA, the conversational language model that Lemoine was studying at the company, is very powerful, and is advanced enough that it can provide extremely convincing answers to probing questions without actually understanding what its saying. Google suspended Lemoine after the engineer, among other things, hired a lawyer for LaMDA, and started talking to the House Judiciary Committee about the companys practices. Lemoine alleges that Google is discriminating against him because of his religion.

Still, Lemoines beliefs have sparked significant debate, and serve as a stark reminder that as AI gets more advanced, people will come up with all sorts of far-out ideas about what the technology is doing, and what it signifies to them.

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Because its a machine, we dont tend to say, Its natural for this to happen, Scott Midson, a University of Manchester liberal arts professor who studies theology and posthumanism, told Recode. We almost skip and go to the supernatural, the magical, and the religious.

Its worth pointing out that Lemoine is hardly the first Silicon Valley figure to make claims about artificial intelligence that, at least on the surface, sound religious. Ray Kurzweil, a prominent computer scientist and futurist, has long promoted the Singularity, which is the notion that AI will eventually outsmart humanity, and that humans could ultimately merge with the tech. Anthony Levandowski, who cofounded Googles self-driving car startup, Waymo, started the Way of the Future, a church devoted entirely to artificial intelligence in 2015 (the church was dissolved in 2020). Even some practitioners of more traditional faiths have begun incorporating AI, including robots that dole out blessings and advice.

Optimistically, its possible that some people could find real comfort and wisdom in the answers provided by artificial intelligence. Religious ideas could also guide the development of AI, and perhaps, make the technology ethical. But at the same time, there are real concerns that come with thinking about AI as anything more than technology created by humans.

I recently spoke to Midson about these concerns. We not only run the risk of glamorizing AI, and losing sight of its very real flaws, he told me, but also of enabling Silicon Valleys effort to hype up a technology thats still far less sophisticated than it appears. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Lets start with the big story that came out of Google a few weeks ago. How common is it that someone with religious views believes that AI or technology has a soul, or that its something more than just technology?

While this story sounds really surprising the idea of religion and technology coming together the early history of these machines and religion actually makes this idea of religious motives in computers and machines a lot more common.

If we go back into the Middle Ages, the medieval period, there were automata, which were basically self-moving devices. Theres one particular automata, a mechanical monk, that was particularly designed to encourage people to reflect on the intricacies of Gods creation. Its movement was designed to call upon that religious reverence. At the time, the world was seen as an intricate mechanism, and God as the big clockwork designer.

Jumping from the mechanical monk to a different type of mechanical monk: Very recently, a German church in Hesse and Nassau made BlessU-2 to commemorate the 500-year anniversary of the Reformation. BlessU-2 was basically a glorified cash machine that would dispense blessings and move its arms and have this big, religious, ritualized kind of thing. There were a lot of mixed reactions to it. One in particular, was an old woman who was saying that, actually, a blessing that she got from this robot was really meaningful. It was a particular one that had significance to her, and she was saying, Well, actually, somethings going on here, something that I cant explain.

In the world of Silicon Valley and tech spaces, what kinds of other similar claims have popped up?

For some people, particularly in Silicon Valley, theres a lot of hype and money that can get attached to grandiose claims like, My AI is conscious. It brings a lot of attention. It activates a lot of peoples imaginations precisely because religion tends to go beyond what we can explain. Its that supernatural attachment.

Theres a lot of people that will willingly fan the flames of these conversations in order to sustain the hype. I think one of the things that can be quite dangerous is where that hype isnt kept in check.

Every so often, Ill be talking with Alexa or Siri and ask some big life questions. For instance, if you ask Siri if God is real, the bot will respond: Its all a mystery to me. There was also this recent example of a journalist asking GPT-3, the language model created by the AI research lab OpenAI, about Judaism and seeing how good its answers could be. Sometimes the answers from these machines seem really inane, but other times they seem really wise. Why is that?

Joseph Weizenbaum designed Eliza, the worlds first chatbot. Weizenbaum did some experiments with Eliza, which was just a rudimentary chatbot, a language processing software. Eliza was designed to emulate a Rogerian psychotherapist, so your average counselor, basically. Weizenbaum didnt tell participants that they were going to be talking to a machine, but they were told, youre going to be interacting through a computer with a therapist. People would say, Im feeling quite sad about my family and then Eliza would pick up on the word family. It would pick up on certain parts of the sentence, and then almost throw it back as a question. Because thats what we expect from a therapist; theres no meaning that we expect from them. It is that reflective screen, where a computer doesnt need to understand what its saying to convince us that its doing its job as a therapist.

Weve got a lot more complex AI software, software that can contextualize words in sentences. Googles LaMDA technology has a lot of sophistication. Its not just looking for a simple word in the sentence. It can contextually locate words in different kinds of structures and settings. So it gives you the impression that it knows what its talking about. One of the key sticking points around conversations around chatbots is, how much does the interlocutor the machine that were talking to genuinely understand what is being said?

Are there examples of bots that dont provide particularly good answers?

Theres a lot of caution about what these machines do and dont do. Its all about how they convince you that they understand and those kinds of things. Noel Sharkey is a prominent theorist in this field. He really does not like these robots that convince you that they can do more than they actually can do. He calls them show bots. One of the main examples that he uses of the show bots is Sophia, the robot which has been given honorary citizenship status in Saudi Arabia. This is more than a basic chatbot because it is in a robot body. You can clearly tell that Sophia is a robot, for no other reason than the fact that the back of its head is a transparent casing, and you can see all the wires and things.

For Sharkey, all of this is just an illusion. This is just smoke and mirrors. Sophia doesnt actually warrant personhood status by any stretch of the imagination. It doesnt understand what its saying. It doesnt have hopes, dreams, feelings, or anything that would make it as human as it might appear. The fact is, duping people is problematic. It has a lot of swing-and-miss phrases. It sometimes malfunctions, or says questionable, eyebrow-raising things. But even where it is at its most transparent, we are still going along with some level of illusion.

Theres a lot of times when robots have that Its a puppet on a string thing. Its not doing as many independent things as we think it is. Weve also had robots going to testimonials. Pepper the robot went to a government testimonial about AI. It was a House of Lords evidence hearing session, and it sounded like Pepper was speaking for himself, saying all the things. It was all pre-programmed, and that wasnt entirely transparent to everyone. And again, its that misapprehension. Its managing the hype that I think is the big concern.

It kind of reminds me of that scene from The Wizard of Oz where the real wizard is finally revealed. How does the conversation around whether or not AI is sentient relate to the other important discussions happening about AI right now?

Microsoft Tay was another chatbot that was sent out into Twitter and had a machine algorithm where it would learn from its interaction with people in the Twittersphere. Trouble is, Tay was trolled and within 16 hours had to be pulled from Twitter because it was misogynistic, homophobic, and racist.

How these robots whether sentient or not are made very much in our image is another huge set of ethical issues. A lot of algorithms will be trained on datasets that are entirely human. They speak of our history, of our interactions, and theyre inherently biased. There are demonstrations of algorithms that are biased on the basis of race.

The question of sentience? I can see it as a bit of a red herring, but actually, its also tied into how we make machines in our image and what we do with that image.

Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell, two prominent AI ethics researchers, raised this concern before they were both fired by Google: by thinking about the sentience discussion and the AI as a freestanding thing, we might miss the fact that the AI is created by humans.

We almost see the machine in a certain way, as detached, or even kind of God-like, in some ways. Going back to that black box: Theres this thing that we dont understand, its kind of religious-like, its amazing, its got incredible potential. If we watch all these adverts about these technologies, its going to save us. But if we see it in that kind of detached way, if we see it as kind of God-like, what does that encourage for us?

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Jacinda Ardern at Nato: The glitz and glamour of PM’s time in Madrid – New Zealand Herald

Posted: at 9:08 pm

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern meets French President Emmanuel Macron before a Nato summit in Madrid, Spain. Photo / AP

OPINION:

This week's Nato summit was the first major gathering of world leaders attended in person by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern since the pandemic began more than two years ago.

Ardern is in demand overseas, and while she attended plenty of virtual summits while borders were closed, there's something about meeting people in person, particularly when you want to twist their arms about things like a trade deal.

Nato was a particularly efficient way to do this, with most leaders from Europe and North America in attendance.

For reporters, these meetings are an opportunity to witness some of the more unusual and human habits of often larger-than-life politicians.

French President Emmanuel Macron is, well, very French.

Greeting Ardern with typically Gallic bisous, his kisses on both of Ardern's cheeks were so energetic their bright peal, like the sound of peeling velcro, was clearly audible on radio reporters' relatively distant microphones.

Though it's fair to say Europe has very much "moved on" from Covid-19, with Europeans displaying as much enthusiasm for masking as they do for appropriate beach attire, this is not so for Macron, whose germophobic zeal was on full display in his bilateral meeting with Ardern.

Before the meeting, Macron's staff each held open their hands for him to eagerly spray hand sanitiser on their expectant palms, like a post-pandemic Maundy Thursday.

The meeting concluded, reporters witnessed a waiter at the hotel the French delegation had commandeered rushing towards Macron's group at great speed, carrying a tray with almost a dozen cups of espresso. How French.

Ardern secured a meeting with Macron's only equal on the European stage, new German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. Recent New Zealand Prime Ministers enjoyed strong relations with his predecessor, long-serving chancellor Angela Merkel.

New Zealand media would love to have glimpsed the beginnings of a new relationship forming between Ardern and Shulz, but they were barred from the meeting - Shulz is apparently camera-shy (an official photograph was released later).

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was once (briefly) considered something of an Ardern bestie, but the pair have appeared to drift apart since those early years.

That was, at least, until this summit, at which Trudeau seemed especially keen to have some facetime with Ardern, greeting her with a big hug.

Meanwhile, there was some debate between the Prime Minister and the NZ Herald about the NZ Herald's description of her dinner with King Fillipe VI of Spain as "ritzy".

Speaking to media ahead of the dinner, Ardern looked in the direction of the Herald and said it was not, in fact, going to be a flash dinner an obvious reference to the Herald's description.

The Herald argued that any meal hosted by a king in a palace was "ritzy" almost by definition.

"Even a breakfast?" Ardern countered.

Seeking to settle matters, the Herald hastily acquired accreditation for the pre-dinner photograph, and entered the palace with a bevy of Spanish-speaking photographers.

It took nearly 15 minutes of wandering through endless stairways and gilt-dripping antechambers of the Palacio Real, Europe's largest working palace, to find the room in which the photograph would be taken.

One room was decked with a chandelier the size of Russian President Vladimir Putin's meetings table.

Ardern was possibly a bit sensitive about scenes of extravagance overseas while the cost of living bites at home. But in terms of the argument in question, the Herald declares itself the winner.

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Shane Jones: Just where is PM Jacinda Ardern positioning New Zealand? – New Zealand Herald

Posted: at 9:08 pm

From New Zealand to the moon, another step closer to a competitive grocery market and Jacinda Ardern announces a new agreement in Spain in the latest New Zealand Herald headlines. Video / NZ Herald

OPINION:

The Prime Minister is busy on the international travel circuit - a necessary part of governing for a small trading nation like ourselves.

After imposing hermit-like status on her fellow citizens, she is now engaging with the world. It is a very different and dynamic environment.

The major powers are in flux. Global inflation is rampant; substantial food shortages loom; missiles rain down in Europe; and all this before President Xi is installed as eternal leader in Beijing. The formula that John Key and Helen Clark previously used for China no longer seems to hold water.

So what is the Prime Minister's foreign policy recipe or do we learn about it as she is on the road? The US visit would have revealed to her there are deep and powerful currents at crossed purposes in the world's most powerful nation. No doubt this will be revealed in the mid-term elections. Such internal discord should make us all nervous as it can make Uncle Sam very capricious on the global stage.

While in Washington, she ended up in the middle of a gun ownership debate. Thankfully she was not present during the recent Supreme Court decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion. After all, her primary role overseas is to advance our economic and sovereign interests.

Much was made of the White House visit and predictable platitudes followed. Affirmation of the importance of Western alliances, the need to safeguard democracy and other such matters. This gives the impression that the Beehive and the White House stand together. Not necessarily. Hopefully, she told her hosts that, in the absence of a trade deal enabling us to diversify our export flows, such symbolism needs to be tempered with hard economic reality.

As with all visits the Prime Minister takes, much of the focus was on her star power. Below her personality, however, it was evident she is shifting our independent foreign policy heritage.

Now she is in Europe meeting with Nato countries and seeking support for a positive trade deal between ourselves and the EU. Nato commitments are of dubious value to our essential interests. Quality trade deals, however, are crucial as our economic eggs are progressively in the Beijing basket. However, that should not be taken for granted.

Herein lies the rub: how to navigate between our Chinese economic dependence and our ties with Western allies. Why has the Prime Minister shifted the dial from the independent foreign policy stance of the past 30 years to a much closer alignment with the Nato/US crew?

Presumably, she sees enlarged threats to our national wellbeing. If so, it's time for show and tell, preferably not on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

Have the Prime Minister and her advisers become giddy and lost their bearings as they sign New Zealand up to the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, IPEF? An initiative promoted by the US, an addition to the alphabet soup which is the staple of international diplomacy. What value does this yield to us?

This is not a trade agreement. Apparently, it is designed to maintain a free and open region including an accent on supply chain resilience. The US pivot to Asia has been achieved, according to their Defence Secretary, Lloyd Austin. What will be expected of NZ through this agreement as Washington counters Chinese influence in this region?

The natural instincts of the Prime Minister are not economic, her strong suit is talking about human rights, climate, fairness, and other liberal causes. She has a slick formula where she glides and assures everyone there's nothing to see here. Such artifice may have worked during Covid but it is extremely dangerous in matters of international affairs.

She hasn't laid out a lucid, long-term plan or strategic narrative justifying why she is changing our stance of non-alignment and independent foreign policy - a framework hard fought for by generations above the current Government. She may deny she is changing these credentials but, in diplomatic matters, it is less about what you say and more what is heard and seen.

Since 2020, domestic socio-cultural settings have been reset by her Government. It would appear our Prime Minister has decided to take this playbook on her overseas forays. She needs to be wary about being seen to be encouraging a Nato expansion into the Pacific.

She owes the public an explanation, a comprehensive account of her foreign affairs priorities. How do we disassociate her personal brand from our nation's sovereign interests? Her post-White House press conference with President Biden showed the goalposts have shifted. Her advisers need to school her up. The calculus is basic, unless the EU or US provides robust trade agreements to protect our international revenue their expectations of us should be tempered.

In the event she delivers such an account, it must be less about herself, short on liberal virtue signalling, and hard-nosed on our economic situation. No more glib gestures, no more gloss.

Much of our diplomacy in the various outposts is humdrum, occasionally there are the big calls.

The Prime Minister should address whether she now believes that our foreign policy should be driven by Nato/US security priorities. Will they look after our export receipts? Given the phase of Chinese hide-and-bide is over, what is her plan to ensure that our most important export lifeline is not compromised?

Nato-plus notions in our neighbourhood are wacky without a massive increase in our military spend-up. Such money has to be earned and to date, neither the EU or Uncle Sam seem to be interested in decreasing our reliance on China.

Perhaps her strange European diversion is designed to improve the prospects of EU trade negotiations. Be warned: diversification is a work in progress, it is underdeveloped and won't pay our immediate Covid bills. We are experts in food production and China consumes almost 40 per cent of our primary exports. The appetite continues to grow and the export revenue is absolutely necessary to our Crown coffers.

There was a time when diplomats and US presidents believed in the notion the West could change the Chinese Communist Party through WTO inclusion and further integration into the international order. The latter remains relevant, but the former is a pipe dream.

The economic rise of China over the past 30 years is now being followed by its political and military reach. Ongoing engagement from us with China remains crucial. We are not Canberra, we are not Washington, we need to be focused on our critical interests. No one owes us a living.

Naturally, there will be debates as to which values our Government should give precedence to. Presumably, they have been addressed by ministers. But who would know?

Currently, there is no clear statement as to what values the Prime Minister is elevating - and what is being repositioned in her foreign policy rejig.

Shane Jones is a former Labour MP and NZ First MP, and was Ambassador for Pacific Economic Development from 2014-17.

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What New Zealand music should Jacinda Ardern give to Boris Johnson? – Stuff

Posted: at 9:08 pm

This story is from the team at thespinoff.co.nz.

If gifting fellow prime ministers a stack of local LPs is the new tradition, here are 10 suggestions to take to No 10.

When Jacinda Ardern popped across the Tasman a few weeks ago for her first official meeting with Anthony Albanese, prime minister, she presented her friend and counterpart with a clutch of New Zealand vinyl.

Grant Robertson had gone shopping and picked out records by Aldous Harding, The Clean and Reb Fountain. Albanese responded in kind, giving Ardern an album by Midnight Oil and a pile of other Australian muck.

READ MORE:* Putin: Western leaders would look 'disgusting' topless* What's at stake as PM Jacinda Ardern arrives in Europe* Claims British PM Boris Johnson tried to hire wife as chief of staff ripe for investigation* British PM Boris Johnson's ethics adviser quits

Tonight, with Nato and the EU out of the way, the New Zealand prime minister engages with another storied European institution: Boris Johnson. And what better way to rock up to No 10 Downing Street than with a bag of records under your arm?

Minister for the Dunedin Sound Grant Robertson has come down with Covid, so weve gallantly stepped into the breach, and humbly present some homegrown New Zealand music that might carpe the Boris diem.

Ardo gave Albo Aldo, or more precisely she gave him Aldous Hardings eponymous debut album. For Bojo, a better bet is her second, Party.

If such a thing is available, the perfect format would be a Party gatefold edition, a cheerful nod to the numerous lockdown-breaching parties attended by Johnson, which landed him a fine from police.

Among the tunes on Party: Im So Sorry and, of course, What if Birds Arent Singing Theyre Screaming, a title which captures as well as anything the essence of post-Brexit Britain.

Chuck in a VHS of this, too: the entertaining yarn about a desperate man who will stop at nothing to stay in the game, desperately gripping the steering wheel as the country yellow Mini swerves wildly in horror.

Mostly, though, this is a reassuring title for Boris to prop by the gramophone, as he faces the re-emergence of the pork pie plotters so named because one of the MPs involved represents Melton Mowbray, birthplace of the pork pie.

Theyre determined to find another way to roll him, despite the no-confidence vote a few weeks back failing by 211 members to 148.

The glorious first single by the Flying Nun giants might be 44 years old, but the lyrics read just like Boris Johnson answering questions at a hastily arranged press conference after another yet another cabinet ministers resignation in protest at inept, amoral leadership.

Now, you said it was yesterday, yesterdays another day, said the prime minister, gesticulating furiously at the assembled media.

Had a lot of make believe, I dont know if its you or if its me. Oh, I dont know, I dont know. Tally ho! Tally ho!

(Johnson once encouraged defiance of a ban on fox-hunting, by the way, and wrote about how part of his love for hunting with dogs was the semi-sexual relation with the horse.)

A no-brainer. Because its Dobbo, obviously. Because its about a dog, and Boris has dubbed himself The Big Dog. And because it includes various pigs, and David Cameron has dubbed Boris The Greased Piglet.

In case you doubted whether Murray Ball could see the future, one of the pigs in Footrot Flats was in fact called Boris.

The breakout Royals is very relatable for any graduate of Eton and Oxford. Bloodstains. Ball gowns. Trashing the hotel room. Jet planes. Island. Tigers on a gold leash. It reads like a shopping list for the Bullingdon Club AGM.

In 1970, country singer Maria Dallas topped the charts for six weeks with Pinocchio. Thats a name that has been flung a number of times at Johnson, for the simple reason that he does lie rather a lot.

Fellow old Etonian and former Conservative MP Rory Stewart described him as perhaps the best liar ever to serve as prime minister, going on to say:

He has mastered the use of error, omission, exaggeration, diminution, equivocation and flat denial.

He has perfected casuistry, circumlocution, false equivalence and false analogy.

He is equally adept at the ironic jest, the fib and the grand lie; the weasel word and half-truth; the hyperbolic lie, the obvious lie and the bullshit lie.

This goes in chiefly for the track Done, given Johnsons most vaunted achievement, in the words hes uttered innumerable times: he got Brexit done, despite, as he might like to sing, red lights flashing madly and a stop sign saying no more road to go.

The prime ministers will tonight celebrate the freshly inked NZ-UK free trade agreement, a deal the British PM welcomed last October with a bit of sporty banter.

Were absolutely thrilled that we seem to have driven for the line, weve scrummed down, weve packed tight and together weve got the ball over the line, and we have a deal, said Johnson, whose prowess at the game of rugger is legend.

In acknowledgement of that expertise, why not chuck on a USB stick the greatest New Zealand rugby song of all, sung in stadiums around the country: the Air New Zealand Men In Black safety video. (Maybe add the Sean Fitzpatrick giant fist car thing, too.)

What better than the first album from the groundbreaking band that named themselves both for a Dunedin street address and to deeply confuse foreigners unfamiliar with the New Zealand accent.

Among the tunes that will resonate for a man with a complicated past is the triple-platinum Dont Forget Your Roots.

Pretty obvious why this one goes in.

Not for the cri de coeur of the award-winning One Day (All I can offer you is me / Im all I can offer you right now / Im all I am / All I am, yeah), but because Jason Kerrison, the apocalypticist bunker builder and OpShop lead singer, recently won The Masked Singer dressed as a massive tuatara, and as you know during Boris Johnsons last trip to Aotearoa he had a lovely time at Zealandia with a tuatara.

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PM on why she’s going to Nato, and what she would say to Putin – New Zealand Herald

Posted: at 9:08 pm

Defence is firmly on the agenda of Jacinda Ardern's trip to Europe this week. Photo / NZDF

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern doesn't remember the last conversation she had with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The pair have crossed paths a number of times, at various international forums with impenetrable acronyms. Putin's "not one for engagement", in Ardern's recollection - even in more private settings in which leaders tend to relax a bit, free from the prying eyes of the public.

"I've had the odd opportunity [to meet Putin] in the margins of meetings where it's just leaders in the room, and that has been one of my observations," Ardern said.

She doesn't know what she'll say to Putin when or if she ever sees him again, should he drag himself out of the international doghouse and back onto the global leaders' circuit. Indeed, the question of what she'd say to Putin if she ever saw him again has Ardern (who, like most politicians, has an answer for almost everything) stumped.

There'll be no "shirt-fronting" of Putin as former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott once said he would do.

Ardern sat down with the Herald last week to discuss her trip to Europe which begins on Sunday night, New Zealand time. The first stop is Madrid, for a Nato leaders' summit, and a visit with Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, who is fast-becoming one of Ardern's closes international friends (Sanchez came through for Ardern last year when he helped save the vaccine rollout by offering up Spanish vaccines).

Though not a member of Nato, a northern-hemisphere security pact, Ardern has been invited to the conference with the leaders of other Indo-Pacific nations, Australia, South Korea, and Japan. The meeting is likely to focus on Ukraine and the question of a rising China, which will be included in Nato's new "Strategic Concept", a once-in-a-decade document that sets out how Nato looks at the world.

Ardern then heads to Brussels, where negotiators are in the final stages of talks on a free trade agreement with the EU.

She will then head to London, where she will meet Prime Minister Boris Johnson, with whom New Zealand has just concluded trade talks and inked a widely applauded trade deal.

Putin hangs over the trip. Nato is the vehicle through which New Zealand has sent much of its aid to Ukraine. Its president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, will appear (via video-link) at the conference, addressing the leaders who have done so much to help his war effort. It will be the first time Ardern and Zelenskyy have appeared at the same forum since war broke out.

Putin hangs over trade talks in Brussels too.

Primary industry leaders are understood to be concerned any trade deal with the EU will not deliver concessions on market access for their goods, particularly dairy and beef. It's hoped that rampant food price inflation, triggered by the war, might help twist the EU's arm with the promise of cheaper food imports from New Zealand.

The difficulty here is twofold: New Zealand is seeking larger quotas for its goods to enter the EU at lower tariffs, however just winning a larger quota is not enough. Within that quota, goods will still be subject to tariffs.

If those tariffs are too high, then securing a larger quota is meaningless because the cost of sending those goods to the EU makes them uncompetitive when they arrive there.

This can be seen this in some goods sold in Europe, where New Zealand already has market access quotas, but the tariffs applied to goods within those quotas are so high New Zealand only uses a portion of its total quota access.

Even within the quotas, the EU's high tariffs make New Zealand's goods uncompetitive on European shelves. Kiwifruit, honey, and dairy from New Zealand have tariffs applied to them at a higher rate than other EU trading partners like Chile.

Ardern acknowledged that "dairy and beef is very sensitive for the EU. Right now, we're negotiating with 25 plus economies and negotiating teams. It's very complex."

While she appeared to manage expectations around beef and diary, she appeared optimistic on other goods.

"It's always about what both parties can get," Ardern said.

"Horticulture and kiwifruit have a very, very uneven playing field, so that's what we're seeking," Ardern said.

She thinks what the EU gets out of New Zealand is a trading partner with values, particularly commitments to climate change (this is possibly a nudge to New Zealand's agricultural sector, which is squeamish about attempts to subject itself to emissions pricing, and outright resistant to attempts to make that pricing meaningful).

"They're looking for an ability to demonstrate that actually trade can have values within it. That is what we offer," Ardern said.

"Don't for a moment assume that the things we are trying to do domestically on climate change don't matter. It is becoming one of the core reasons we are in this negotiation in the first place because the EU sees that we are adding values and they want to use that as a demonstration of the way that trade can be used in the future," Ardern said.

Despite the long-term economic and strategic importance of the EU deal, it's the Nato leaders' summit that has Wellington buzzing, with some questioning whether it's a sign that New Zealand's hardening stance on China (a response, in part, to China's increasingly hardening stance on everyone else), and participation in the Ukraine invasion response, is a sign of a deterioration in New Zealand's independent foreign policy in favour of alignment with traditional, western allies.

New Zealand has pursued an independent foreign policy since the fourth Labour government's nuclear free legislation, effectively withdrawing New Zealand from the Anzus pact,

Unsurprisingly, Ardern disagreed with the idea that she is leading New Zealand away from that post-84 independence in world affairs. She said the independent foreign policy is more difficult to maintain now than it has been in the past, but she said it is becoming "increasingly important" that New Zealand makes the effort to maintain that independence nonetheless.

In terms of Nato, Ardern said the independent foreign policy, "doesn't restrict our ability to continue to build strong relationships and to play a strong role in multilateral institutions that we've historically relied on".

"This is something I've been thinking about a lot because the environment is rapidly changing around us, but New Zealand continues to be utterly consistent and that's regardless of the government that's in at any given time".

Ardern thinks that the rapidly-changing security environment means New Zealand needs to "firm up the values we use" to "determine our foreign policy decision-making".

She believes these values - the "pre-considered lens that you use for foreign policy", as Ardern described them - are particularly important when significant foreign policy decisions must be made quickly, as was the case when deciding where New Zealand's place was in the response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

"The need that was there and the requests that were being made of the international community meant that you had to move with relative haste if you're going to play a role that was meaningful at that time," Ardern said.

And what are these values?

"First and foremost, being able to stand up on the world stage in defence of the international rules-based order, and those norms and values and we will always stand very clearly in articulating where we see a breach of those.

"Secondly, the importance of those multilateral institutions [the United Nations, for example] in pursuing where there had been a breach and if we see those being threatened, undermined, or in need of strengthening, we will play a really strong role in that as well.

"So you saw us speaking really firmly around the UN needing to play a role in Ukraine in the same way we have for the WTO needing to play a role where trade is concerned," Ardern said.

The final value is, "if New Zealand is unable to see the rules-based order supported by those institutions", Ardern would seek to still impress the importance of those institutions. Here, she cited the example of the Russians sanctions legislation, where the Government made clear that it would have preferred to follow the UN route to sanction Russia, but because of Russia's veto powers neutering the powerful UN Security Council, this avenue was closed and bespoke legislation was used instead.

Ardern's foreign policy was tested early in her leadership when the Government was forced to respond to the Salisbury poisonings of 2018, which were widely pinned on Russia. Back then, the Government was thought to have responded more slowly and with less vigour than other western democracies to Russia's aggression.

Not so on Ukraine, where New Zealand's response was relatively forceful, and relatively quick.

She's currently contemplating laying out this foreign policy more clearly in a speech - not the speech she will deliver to London's Chatham House on this trip (fortunately, for those wanting to tune in to that speech, it will not be protected by Chatham House's eponymous rule).

Ardern agreed that the international security picture had become more unstable over her time in office. She put much of this down to changing technology.

"What I see is this ongoing evolution. We see these reasons why the way some countries engage with the world is changing because actually the methods of engaging with the world are changing.

"We're not just seeing, for instance, a war on the ground in Ukraine. We're also seeing a cyber-based war attached to it as well, so the threat landscape is changing - previously we might have thought about foreign interference through a quite simple lens, but now the ability to influence other nations has broadened vastly as technology has changed too," Ardern said.

One of the asks Nato might have of Ardern and New Zealand is that the Government lift defence spending to the target Nato asks of its own members: 2 per cent of GDP.

Ardern is non-committal on whether she would consider lifting spending, noting that New Zealand spends 1.59 per cent of GDP already, which is more than some Nato member countries.

But what if she is asked?

"Our independent foreign policy kicks in. We get asked for particular responses, we get asked for a particular resource and investment, and we will always make those decisions on our terms, based on our regional needs," Ardern said.

New Zealand has been a Nato partner for a decade. Ardern said the relationship means that in certain theatres, New Zealand has a partner it can co-operate with, but she said any decision on whether to get involved with Nato is based on whether its a "conflict or area of tension where we believe we have a role to play".

Ardern said Ukraine was the best example of this. New Zealand wanted to be involved in the response, and "the fastest way New Zealand could do that was through other partners and through the Nato trust fund".

Making friends at Nato is not without controversy. China, New Zealand's most important trading partner, is unlikely to be impressed by Ardern's attendance at an event where Nato will issue a new "Strategic Concept" which will likely carry an explicit warning about the implications of China's rise on global security.

Ardern said New Zealand would be "transparent" about what its attendance at Nato means, which is building relationships in an uncertain world, although she acknowledged that one reason New Zealand might be at a forum like Nato could be that other international institutions were not agile enough for New Zealand's needs.

"This is not particularly new. New Zealand has been a [Nato] partner for 10 years," she said.

"The world is in a hurry to connect and build relationships with each other. In some ways that might be a response to the growing threatscape, it might be a response to whether or not we have the same agility in the multilateral institutions we need.

"The way New Zealand approaches those is again with the same set of values: transparency, openness, and with a view that we want peace and stability in the region," she said.

"Regardless of whether it's the Quad or Aukus [two security deals in the Asia-Pacific region], we'll apply the same approach," Ardern said.

"When it comes to our relationship with China we are really consistent. What we say in a Nato forum will be exactly what we say publicly. Consistency is also key. No one will be surprised by our position on issues," Ardern said.

"What we share in private is what we share in public," she said.

She said there will "always be tension" in some relationships with countries that "have a different history, culture, political systems".

"For us, a sign of maturity in a relationship ... has the ability for you to talk about those things that you agree on and that are mutually beneficial, whilst being able to strongly disagree, and that is what we have always sought in our relationships".

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PM on why she's going to Nato, and what she would say to Putin - New Zealand Herald

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