Society

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Back in the early 1990s Cyril Ramaphosa, South Africa’s president, outlined the new ANC government’s strategy to deal with the whites: 'it would be like boiling a frog alive, which is done by raising the temperature very slowly. Being cold-blooded, the frog does not notice the slow temperature increase, but if the temperature is raised suddenly, the frog will jump out of the water.' As Dr Oriani-Ambrosini put it, 'He meant that the black majority would pass laws transferring wealth, land, and economic power from white to black slowly and incrementally, until the whites lost all they had gained in South Africa, but without taking too much from them at any given time to cause them to rebel or fight.

‘They hate my views on Donald Trump,’ Alan Dershowitz says of the New Yorker. ‘They hate my views on Benjamin Netanyahu, and they hate my views on Israel.’ This week, the New Yorker ran a long-awaited hit piece on Dershowitz by Connie Bruck. Dershowitz wrote an article anticipating the attack here. It’s not clear why Bruck took a year to write her story. Its most damaging claim has circulated for several years: that Dershowitz, the erstwhile friend and lawyer of convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, had sex with Virginia Roberts, a teenager procured by Epstein. This story failed to get to court, despite Roberts, now known as Virginia Giuffre, engaging David Boies as her lawyer.

America is at war in cyberspace and is losing badly. The US has some of the world’s most advanced cyber weapons, but no political will or a coherent national strategy. As a result, America’s enemies see a fatal weakness, and are exploiting it every day. In July, the Senate Intelligence Committee reported that Russia hacked into the electoral systems of all 50 US states. The committee did not find that the Russians directly interfered with the voting, but is clear that they have developed that capability. 'While the Committee does not know with confidence what Moscow’s intentions were, Russia may have been probing vulnerabilities in voting systems to exploit later,’ the report said.

In Mother Jones, Zohar Lazar posits that the recent spate of pedophilia conspiracies are merely a reactionary response to a changing social order. As progressive policies take hold in America, the conservative fringe, Zohar claims, is freaking out by inventing false conspiracies about secret pedophilia rings. But it’s not all fantasy. A decades-long progressive policy push for the loosening of sexual taboos and legal constraints has drastic implications for children’s rights and safety.

The decision by Microsoft to invest $1 billion in OpenAI, a company jointly founded by Elon Musk, brings closer the time when machines threaten to replace humans in any tasks that humans do today. OpenAI, which was founded just four years ago, has pioneered a range of technologies which have pushed the frontiers of massive data processing in defiance of the physical and computer capabilities that governed such developments for generations. Now, with the investment from Microsoft, the pace of technological change is likely to accelerate rapidly. Today, Artificial Intelligence is at a level of what is known as 'weak AI’ and relies on humans to create the algorithms which allow for the crunching of massive amounts of data to produce new and often predictive results.

If you do ever find yourself in Moscow with a spare morning or afternoon to discharge, might I recommend a visit to the Museum of Cosmonautics? Roosting below the grandly named ‘Monument to the Conquerors of Space’, the frigid, rather shabby rooms of this museum contain exhibits that are as moving as anything that’s ever been placed in a glass box for tourists to gawp at. When you consider that Soviet Cosmonauts ‘touched the face of God’ using crude, dangerous technology that contained less processing power than the average contemporary fridge – when you consider the sheer bravery of men like Gagarin, Belyayev and Komarov – the major response is (and ought to be) pride. Pride on a human level, that is to say, a species-level pride.

The election of Donald Trump has pulled American debate away from objectivity and turned publications into actors in a political battle. After Donald Trump’s election, the New Yorker magazine lost no time nailing its colors to the anti-Trump mast. David Remnick, its editor, lamented that Obama – a 'man of integrity, dignity, and generous spirit' – was being supplanted by 'vulgarity unbounded, a knowledge-free national leader' who would 'set markets tumbling', 'strike fear into the hearts of the vulnerable, the weak' etc. This set the tone for the magazine’s subsequent reporting. Those sympathetic to Trump are treated in the same way – as I have found out.

When Elon Musk took to the stage at the California Academy of Sciences on Tuesday, he gave the world the first insight into his vision for mapping and ultimately controlling the brain. Three years ago, Musk formed Neuralink which was specifically created to respond to the threat that Musk’ believes is posed by the imminent threat of thinking machines powered by AI. Musk believes that phase of the information revolution could mark the end of humanity as robots outpace humans in intelligence and pace of evolution. His answer is to fully understand exactly how the brain works and, in the process, he believes that the new science will find the cure for many of humanity’s most deadly illnesses such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and PTSD.

I’ve never met Dale Peck, but I know him. That is to say, I’m familiar with the type, a generation of gay, downtown New York City artist I came to know well during my formative years in the city. When I arrived about 15 years ago, New York’s transformation into a globalist monoculture was well under way. The counterculture was nouveau hipsterdom, the first youth movement defined by consumerism – trucker hats, PBR, silkscreening and iPods. Peck’s generation, these scrappy gay men, 20 years older than me, had lived through more interesting and dangerous times and I gravitated toward them. Many never had money but were rich in grit and bawdy tales and remained the same low-rent bon vivants they had been in the 1990s.

As a young journalist in the mid-2000s, there was the occasional circumstance where I was asked to ‘prove it’: upon showing up to a news event I was covering, whoever ran check-in insisted that I show some press credentials. You know, those badges you see on episodes of Law & Order to denote that someone’s a reporter. (More often than not, the guest star probably holds it up and indignantly yells ‘Press!’ in order to enter a crime scene.) Working for a digital-first outlet – CNET Networks, later acquired by CBS – I never had anything like it except maybe business cards. To me, it seemed like an antiquated request; to the people checking my legitimacy, it was an obvious question.

Yesterday Twitter announced it was making some big changes, promising us a ‘whole new Twitter’. They put out the following statement on everyone’s timeline:'New features and a new look are launching soon. Bookmarks, account switching, dark mode, and so much more — before long, you’ll be able to see what’s happening even faster.'I must say after reading their proposed ‘changes’, I’m not terribly excited by this rather moribund list of ‘new features’ and so I have taken the liberty of proposing some changes that will actually benefit its user base.

Imagine this: One day in the near future, you innocently upload a picture to Facebook that shows you enjoying a summer picnic. A former friend with a grudge, or perhaps an ex-lover, copies the image, and uploads it to a software solution called DeepNude. The program strips the clothes from your fully clothed picture, and creates a new picture of you, naked. The picture of you in your birthday suit gets uploaded to social media, and then distributed to friends and family, as well as enemies and complete strangers. Your life is now one of instant humiliation, embarrassment and shame. The recently released app DeepNude is the latest shot against privacy from the digital Wild West.