Will Megaprojects Ever Rule the World?

 01

Ben Shapiro: The elitists who want to rule the world

Klaus Schwab is the head of the World Economic Forum; he founded the organization in 1971. Each year, the WEF hosts a massive conference in Davos, Switzerland, with thousands of world leaders, diplomats and experts on various topics gathering to trade ideas about how best to cooperatively run the world.

Lest this characterization be seen as overstating the case, Schwab himself said as much this year in opening the conference: "The future is not just happening. The future is built by us, by a powerful community as you here in this room. We have the means to improve the state of the world. But two conditions are necessary. The first one is that we act all as stakeholders of larger communities, that we serve not only self-interest but we serve the community. That's what we call stakeholder responsibility. And second, that we collaborate."

This is the call to action for elitists the world over. They appoint themselves the representatives of global interests -- without elections, without accountability -- and then create mechanisms of national and international order to control citizens over whom they claim to preside. Schwab himself has decoded his favorite term, "stakeholder capitalism."

He wrote in Time magazine in October 2020, "Free markets, trade and competition create so much wealth that in theory they could make everyone better off if there was the will to do so." To do so, however, would require taking hints from Greta Thunberg, #MeToo and Black Lives Matter; it would require "building ... a virtuous economic system" in which companies abandon their core mission of serving customers and shareholders and instead embrace answering questions like "What is the gender pay gap in company X? How many people of diverse backgrounds were hired and promoted? What progress has the company made toward reducing its!greenhouse-gas emissions?"

All of this extraordinary arrogance is predicated on a perverse view of how successful change works within decentralized systems. As Schwab himself acknowledges, free markets have generated more prosperity than any system in human history. But that's because free markets are not a top-down imposition, a system created by conspiratorial muckety-mucks in a back room somewhere. Free markets were the outgrowth of centuries of evolutionary societal progress: gradual recognition that private ownership was the greatest incentive toward work and innovation; incremental understanding that individual rights are the only alternative to endless conflict; step-by-step acceptance that decentralized sources of knowledge are both broader and deeper than centralized ones. The most powerful and durable institutions we have are traditional because, as F.A. Hayek wrote, they are "a product of cumulative growth without ever having been designed by any one mind."

For Schwab and his ilk, however, it's precisely such an evolutionary approach that must be ended. Instead, he and his rationalist buddies -- brilliant businessmen and ambitious politicians, striving bureaucrats and myopic experts -- will cure the world of its ills, so long as we grant them power. Or, more likely, so long as they seize power in the name of "stakeholders" to whom they are never answerable.

One of the great ironies of the past several years is the gap between the elitists' perception of themselves. To the elitists, their solutions failed because citizens of the world lacked the will to listen to them; to the citizens, the elitists failed because their prescriptions were ill-founded. Yet so long as the elitists retain their power, they will continue to push forward their utopian dreams at the expense of those they purport to serve.

Ben Shapiro is a nationally syndicated columnist whose work appears regularly in the Grand Forks Herald.

02

Why the Jews Rule the World

Saturday letter2

Yes, I admire the Jews. It has nothing to do with the unconfirmed Igbo Jewish link.

Can you imagine their foresightedness! They have always been thinking strategically ahead of the rest of world.

That is why they control the tech industry, the financial industry, the entertainment industry, agribusiness, the oil and gas, education (from MIT to Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Caltech, Oxford, Cambridge, London School of Economics, etc.). They also are the owners of the US, Russian and, European military industrial complexes. The healthcare, aircraft (Boeing and Airbus), real estate, high value chain manufacturing, stock markets around the world, etc., they quietly control them.

It will shock you my brother Dr. Armstrong to know that as high as 80% of all foreign investments around the world are either directly or indirectly controlled by the Jews.

That’s why they control over 60% of China’s manufacturing economy the same way they control India’s tech economy; and by quietly controlling Sandi’s Aramco (Arabian-American Company), they also control the Saudi oil economy too.

Basil Odilim Enwegbara, basil_enwegbara@yahoo.com

03

New book co-written by UB philosopher claims AI will “never” rule the world

Elon Musk in 2020 said that artificial intelligence (AI) within five years would surpass human intelligence on its way to becoming “an immortal dictator” over humanity. But a new book co-written by a UB philosophy professor argues that won’t happen – not by 2025, not ever!

Barry Smith, SUNY Distinguished Professor in the Department of Philosophy in UB’s College of Arts and Sciences, and Jobst Landgrebe, founder of Cognotekt, a German AI company, have co-authored “Why Machines Will Never Rule the World: Artificial Intelligence without Fear.”

Their book presents a powerful argument against the possibility of engineering machines that can surpass human intelligence.

Machine learning and all other working software applications − the proud accomplishments of those involved in AI research − are for Smith and Landgrebe far from anything resembling the capacity of humans. Further, they argue that any incremental progress that’s unfolding in the field of AI research will in practical terms bring it no closer to the full functioning possibility of the human brain.

Smith and Landgrebe offer a critical examination of AI’s unjustifiable projections, such as machines detaching themselves from humanity, self-replicating, and becoming “full ethical agents.” There cannot be a machine will, they say. Every single AI application rests on the intentions of human beings – including intentions to produce random outputs.

This means the Singularity, a point when AI becomes uncontrollable and irreversible (like a Skynet moment from the “Terminator” movie franchise) is not going to occur. Wild claims to the contrary serve only to inflate AI’s potential and distort public understanding of the technology’s nature, possibilities and limits.

Reaching across the borders of several scientific disciplines, Smith and Landgrebe argue that the idea of a general artificial intelligence (AGI) − the ability of computers to emulate and go beyond the general intelligence of humans − rests on fundamental mathematical impossibilities that are analogous in physics to the impossibility of building a perpetual motion machine.

AI that would match the general intelligence of humans is impossible because of the mathematical limits on what can be modelled and is “computable.” These limits are accepted by practically everyone working in the field; yet they have thus far failed to appreciate their consequences for what an AI can achieve.

“To overcome these barriers would require a revolution in mathematics that would be of greater significance than the invention of the calculus by Newton and Leibniz more than 350 years ago,” says Smith, one of the world’s most cited contemporary philosophers. “We are not holding our breath.”

Landgrebe points out that, “As can be verified by talking to mathematicians and physicists working at the limits of their respective disciplines, there is nothing even on the horizon which would suggest that a revolution of this sort might one day be achievable. Mathematics cannot fully model the behaviors of complex systems like the human organism,” he says.

AI has many highly impressive success stories, and considerable funding has been dedicated toward advancing its frontier beyond the achievements in narrow, well-defined fields such as text translation and image recognition. Much of the investment to push the technology forward into areas requiring the machine counterpart of general intelligence may, the authors say, be money down the drain.

“The text generator GPT-3 has shown itself capable of producing different sorts of convincing outputs across many divergent fields,” says Smith. “Unfortunately, its users soon recognize that mixed in with these outputs there are also embarrassing errors, so that the convincing outputs themselves began to appear as nothing more than clever parlor tricks.”

AI’s role in sequencing the human genome led to suggestions for how it might help find cures for many human diseases; yet, after 20 years of additional research (in which both Smith and Landgrebe have participated), little has been produced to support optimism of this sort.

“In certain completely rule-determined confined settings, machine learning can be used to create algorithms that outperform humans,” says Smith. “But this does not mean that they can ‘discover’ the rules governing just any activity taking place in an open environment, which is what the human brain achieves every day.”

Technology skeptics do not, of course, have a perfect record. They’ve been wrong in regard to breakthroughs ranging from space flight to nanotechnology. But Smith and Landgrebe say their arguments are based on the mathematical implications of the theory of complex systems. For mathematical reasons, AI cannot mimic the way the human brain functions. In fact, the authors say that it’s impossible to engineer a machine that would rival the cognitive performance of a crow.

“An AGI is impossible,” says Smith. “As our book shows, there can be no general artificial intelligence because it is beyond the boundary of what is even in principle achievable by means of a machine.”