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This document consists of 10 printed pages and 2 blank pages. DC (PQ) 173465 © UCLES 2018 [Turn over Cambridge International Examinations Cambridge International Advanced Subsidiary Level *4954985920* GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES 8030/03/PRE Component 3 Presentation October/November 2018 PRE-RELEASE MATERIAL To be given to candidates READ THESE INSTRUCTIONS FIRST Guidance for Teachers This Resource Booklet contains stimulus material to be used by candidates preparing their presentation for 8030/03. One copy should be given to each candidate. Presentations must be prepared in a four-week period. The Presentation is marked out of 30. Instructions to Candidates You should use the enclosed stimulus material to help you identify the subject for your presentation. Your presentation should attempt to answer a question. Your presentation must address alternative perspectives on the question you select and must engage directly with an issue, an assumption, evidence and/or a line of reasoning in one or more of the documents within this Booklet (i.e. you should not just pick an individual word or phrase which is not central to the reasoning of or the issues covered by the documents). Include in your presentation an explanation of how it relates to these pre-release materials. Your presentation should be designed for a non-specialist audience. Originality in interpretation is welcomed. Your presentation may be prepared in a variety of formats (e.g. PowerPoint, Weblog or web pages) and should normally include an oral commentary. The speaking or running time of your presentation should be a maximum of 10 minutes. Whether presented or not, the submission must include a verbatim transcript of the presentation.

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Page 1: Cambridge International Examinations Cambridge ...mes.intnet.mu/English/Documents/Examinations/Secondary/CIE Sylla… · sustainable. Cribb said a ‘food revolution’ would emerge

This document consists of 10 printed pages and 2 blank pages.

DC (PQ) 173465© UCLES 2018 [Turn over

Cambridge International ExaminationsCambridge International Advanced Subsidiary Level

*4954985920*

GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES 8030/03/PREComponent 3 Presentation October/November 2018PRE-RELEASE MATERIALTo be given to candidates

READ THESE INSTRUCTIONS FIRST

Guidance for Teachers

This Resource Booklet contains stimulus material to be used by candidates preparing their presentation for 8030/03. One copy should be given to each candidate.

Presentations must be prepared in a four-week period.

The Presentation is marked out of 30.

Instructions to Candidates

• You should use the enclosed stimulus material to help you identify the subject for your presentation.• Your presentation should attempt to answer a question.• Your presentation must address alternative perspectives on the question you select and must engage

directly with an issue, an assumption, evidence and/or a line of reasoning in one or more of the documents within this Booklet (i.e. you should not just pick an individual word or phrase which is not central to the reasoning of or the issues covered by the documents).

• Include in your presentation an explanation of how it relates to these pre-release materials.• Your presentation should be designed for a non-specialist audience.• Originality in interpretation is welcomed.• Your presentation may be prepared in a variety of formats (e.g. PowerPoint, Weblog or web pages) and

should normally include an oral commentary.• The speaking or running time of your presentation should be a maximum of 10 minutes.• Whether presented or not, the submission must include a verbatim transcript of the presentation.

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Document 1

Change needed in an ‘age of food’

Adapted from an article in Taranaki Daily News, a New Zealand newspaper, 25 September 2015.

Gerald Piddock is a New Zealand journalist specialising in farming issues.

A radical overhaul of the way food is produced is needed if the world is to overcome growing pressure on its resources.

Global food output had to double over the next 50 years to meet demand as the world population continues to grow, but the resources used in the traditional means of achieving that target were becoming more scarce, Australian science writer Julian Cribb said in his keynote address at Horticulture New Zealand’s annual conference in Rotorua.

‘It is the collision between the huge demands and the huge scarcities that makes food the challenge of our times.’

The current grain and grain-fed protein system was no longer economically or environmentally sustainable. Cribb said a ‘food revolution’ would emerge from the resource pressures the world faced along with new technologies and trends in farming.

Cribb is author of The Coming Famine: The Global Food Crisis and What We Can Do to Avoid It.

‘Following the age of music and the age of computing, the world is now entering the age of food.’

Water will become more scarce, 75 billion tonnes of topsoil was being lost every year, the world’s farmed area was shrinking and oil reserves were becoming depleted.

‘The solution to this is to change the way we produce food.’ He said people were devouring the planet to sustain themselves.

‘The bottom line at the moment is that every meal served on the planet every day costs 10 kg of topsoil ... 1.3 litres of oil and 800 litres of water and one-third of a gram of pesticide,’ he said.

Soil and non-soil nutrients, such as urban waste had to be recycled better.

Cribb predicted that by 2050, 7 billion people in the world will live in the world’s cities. Some of these cities would have 20 to 40 million living in them. These cities all had one terrible flaw – they could not feed themselves, he said.

Worldwide, food and agriculture research was among the lowest of scientific priorities funding-wise, and that needed to change, he said.

The effects of global warming would make future harvests in many countries very problematic. A 5 degrees celsius increase in temperature caused by global warming would prove to be a ‘nightmare’ for cropping farmers and will affect everyone. The solution was to move away from a diet of meat and grains to fish and vegetables.

The revolution required consumer buy-in and Cribb called for a year-long ‘food year’, to teach humanity a new-found respect for food. The food producers that would be successful would be those that engaged with consumers about how they wanted their food produced, in this new ‘age of food’. While the challenge of feeding the world was large, the opportunities were ‘boundless’. Around the world, farmers and entrepreneurs were re-inventing how food was being produced. Cribb cited examples that included urban horticulture, solar power systems that fuel desalination plants, a more diverse plant species, farmed for food, floating greenhouses, fish and algae farms and precision crop feeding with quality control that use a fraction of the land and water typically used by agriculture.

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Document 2

Feed the world? Bumper harvest shows we can. The eco-gloomsters who warned of a Malthusian disaster were wrong. A global food glut is more likely than famine.

Adapted from an article in The Times, a UK newspaper, 21 September 2015.

Matt Ridley is a British science journalist and Conservative member of the House of Lords.

Everywhere in Britain this autumn, at least where the August downpours did not flatten and rot the crops, yields have broken records.

In the Lincolnshire Wolds, Tim Lamyman smashed the world record for wheat yield per acre, held for the past five years by a New Zealander. He also set a new world record for oilseed rape yield – he did this last year too, but lost it over the winter to a New Zealander. (Britain and New Zealand have the right combination of day length and soil moisture that breeds big wheat and rape crops.) Unfortunately for farmers, this extraordinary harvest cannot make up for the steep fall in prices, and farm incomes will be down, not up. Bumper crops elsewhere are the main reason for those low prices.

Globally, the cereal harvest this year will be very close to last year’s huge record. The Food and Agriculture Organization’s food price index is now well below where it was throughout the 1960s and 1970s: that is to say, it’s proving cheaper and easier to feed seven billion today than it was to feed three billion in 1960.

This was not supposed to happen.

Food prices rose in 2008 and again sharply in 2011, encouraging those who foresaw a Malthusian breaking point, where population would outstrip food supply. The eco-gloomsters who had talked for decades about a coming food crisis, even while famines faded, thought their day had come at last.

Yet the 2008–13 hump in food prices, which hurt poor people but helped farmers, was largely caused by Europe’s and America’s barmy decision, at the behest of the eco-gloomsters, to feed 5 per cent of the world’s grain crop to motor cars instead of people, in the mistaken belief that this was somehow good for the environment. We are still doing that, but at least we’ve stopped increasing the amount, so each year’s harvest increase can now go into food.

The truly surprising thing about this bounty is that not only are yields going up and up, in Britain as in the rest of the world, but that the amount of land required to produce that food is going down; and so is the amount of pesticide and fertiliser. Not just in relative terms, but in absolute terms.

It is on track to do so and to release a huge area from growing food at the same time. That means more nature reserves, more golf courses, more horsey-culture and hobby farming, more forests and wild land.

Jesse Ausubel, of Rockefeller University in New York, has run the numbers. If we stop feeding wheat to cars and rape to lorries, restrain our diets and reduce waste, then an area the size of India could be released globally from agriculture over the next 50 years.

From the point of view of farmers’ incomes, this is not a happy picture. With population growth slowing all the time, and Africa rapidly joining Asia in using new machinery, better varieties and more fertiliser, the world may be glutted with food for the rest of the century, keeping prices low. Barring disasters, of course. Luddite greens are determined to prevent genetic and chemical innovations that are good for the planet as well as the harvest. A massive volcanic eruption could cause a global famine. But meanwhile, bountiful harvests mean more space for nature.

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Document 3

Can our global food system keep up with rapid urbanisation?

Adapted from an article in The Guardian, a UK newspaper, 9 October 2015.

Marc Van Ameringen was the Executive Director of the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN), an international organisation driven by the vision of a world without malnutrition.

Between 2010 and 2025 one billion people earning more than $10 a day will move from rural areas into a city. These new city-dwellers will be introduced to more diverse foods, and while this has the potential to reduce malnutrition numbers it’s unclear how the global food system will meet the demand sustainably.

While global food production needs to increase by 40% by 2030 and 70% by 2050, it’s been estimated that 30% of global production is lost or wasted annually. This means nearly half the food gap could be met by reducing food loss.

In high income countries most of the waste is taking place at the retail/consumer end of the supply chain, often foods thrown out from the kitchen. However, in low and middle income countries this is taking place more at the production and distribution end of the supply chain.

One mechanism to reduce post-harvest loss is to implement cold chains (a temperature controlled supply chain), which is often lacking or inefficient in low and middle income countries. Cold chains could contribute significantly to ensuring less food is wasted and more consumers, including low income households, are able to access diverse and nutritious foods.

Annually, 200 million tonnes of perishable foods could be saved if low income countries had the same level of cold chain technology and capacity as in high income countries. The catch is that cold chains are often reliant on diesel fuels, a big contributor to climate change.

According to Toby Peters, visiting Professor at the University of Birmingham, ‘we don’t need cold chains but we need clean cold chains’ to ensure urbanising emerging markets don’t lose nutritious foods.

Speaking at the House of Lords on sustainably meeting the global food crisis, ‘why we need to “green” cold chains’, Peters further highlighted increasing cold chains does not just mean access to the market for rural emerging market farmers, but can mean moving up the value chain and earning more.

He finds ‘what is needed is a paradigm shift to zero-emission, clean and cold technologies to transport food, while retaining its nutritional and economic value. We have to keep food-moving but we must not create an environmental disaster to prevent a social crisis’.

Scaling up innovative green cold chain technologies will be a key component in the paradigm shift that must occur in the urban food system. Global and national policies should incentivise companies to invest in these technologies in emerging market economies where the urban middle class is rapidly rising and thus multiplying consumer demand.

The 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference will be a key component in driving these policies forward. We need to build alliances among the different actors across and within supply chains to ensure less food is wasted and more nutrients are captured to ensure the most vulnerable people gain access to the essential vitamins and minerals to help them become healthier, stronger and more productive.

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Opinion: How tasty forest foods can help solve the global hunger crisis

Adapted from a press release by the University of Cambridge, 30 November 2015.

Bhaskar Vira, Reader in Political Economy at the Department of Geography and Fellow of Fitzwilliam College; Director, University of Cambridge Conservation Research Institute.

About one in nine people globally still suffer from hunger, with the majority living in Africa and Asia. The world’s forests have great potential to improve their nutrition and ensure their livelihoods. In fact, forests could be essential to global food security, particularly when considering the importance of diverse, nutritionally-balanced diets.

Forests are key to protecting biodiversity, and for mitigating the effects of climate change. This is well known. However their contribution to alleviating hunger and improving nutrition has been somewhat neglected. A recent study by the Global Forest Expert Panel on Forests and Food Security, which I chaired, shows how forests and trees can complement agricultural production and give an economic boost to some of the world’s most vulnerable regions.

Four ways forests benefit food security

Tree foods are often rich in vitamins, proteins, and other nutrients and are associated with more diverse diets. For example, the iron content of dried seeds of the African locust bean and raw cashew nut are comparable with, or even higher than that of chicken meat. Trees in home gardens, widespread in Africa and Asia, increase fruit and vegetable consumption.

Wild meat, fish, and insects are also important forest food sources. Insects are an especially cheap, abundant source of protein and fat. Caterpillars are great for vitamins and minerals. Particularly in South-East Asia, many forests and agroforests (tree-based farms) are managed by local communities specifically to enhance edible insect supply, such as the management of sago palms in Papua New Guinea and eastern Indonesia to support grub production.

Forests are also essential for firewood and charcoal. In developing countries, 2.4 billion people still use wood-fuel for cooking and heating. In India and Nepal, even better-off rural households depend on it. The volatile and often high prices for other energy sources suggest this situation is unlikely to change for some time. Access to cooking fuel provides people with more flexibility in what they can eat, including more nutritious foods that require more energy to cook.

Trees offer a multitude of ecological services. For instance, they support bees and other pollinators, which are essential for crop production including on farmland. They also provide animal fodder that enables communities to produce meat and milk, and protect streams and watersheds as habitat for fish.

In the lead up to the UN’s finalisation of the Sustainable Development Goals later this year, the contribution of forests and tree-based systems to the ‘Zero Hunger Challenge’ needs to be emphasised. They can be managed to provide better and more nutritionally-balanced diets, greater control over food inputs – particularly during lean seasons and periods of vulnerability (especially for marginalised groups) – and deliver ecosystem services for crop production. It will be a critical element of the responses to global hunger.

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Document 5

Reliance on trade makes food systems vulnerable

Adapted from an article on SciDev.Net, an international science and technology news network, 21 May 2015.

Jan Piotrowski was São Paulo bureau chief for The Economist.

Boosting international trade may not be the best way to improve food security, as it makes many countries vulnerable to food shortages caused by market fluctuations, according to new research.

A study published on 11 May in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that countries heavily reliant on importing their food – including many in the Arab world and Latin America – are more exposed to environmental and market shocks than those where at least half of all food is home-grown.

As the global population grows and agricultural production reaches the planet’s maximum capacity, food trade systems can destabilise more easily as small shocks in food supply will impact more people, the study warns.

‘It challenges the idea that all trade is good,’ says Paolo D’Odorico, environmental scientist at the University of Virginia in the United States, and one of the study’s authors. ‘We depend on trade but at the same time we need to be aware that it makes the whole food system vulnerable to crisis.’

D’Odorico and his team analysed trade and food production data from 140 countries between 1986-2010. They used computer modelling to simulate how small changes in population affect the quantity of food that is available through a combination of local production and trade.

Countries that rely on imports are much more vulnerable to food pressures caused by population growth and they find it harder to secure their food supply than exporting countries or those where imports and exports are roughly equal, the researchers found. Much of North Africa, the Middle East and Latin America fall into this vulnerable category, they say.

Also, the number of countries deemed at risk of food shortages has ballooned during the last 25 years – whilst at the same time the planet witnessed an explosion in international trade, the paper states.

This increase in global food trade was caused in part by innovations in agriculture that allow for more food production and preservation.

David Debucquet, a senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, United States, says trade can be a help, not a hindrance, to food security, as it triggers the development of technology.

The potential for companies to recoup the cost of developing innovations through global expansion helps drive their research and attracts foreign investment in national food systems, he says.

D’Odorico, on the other hand, believes that creating sufficient stockpiles of food in import countries is the most effective safeguard against shocks in food availability, such as natural disasters and bad harvests. Global grain stocks have fallen by ten per cent since 1990 as a result of easier access through trade, and are now only able to fulfil a fifth of annual demand, according to the paper. Rebuilding these stocks must be a top priority for governments to safeguard against food shortages, says D’Odorico.

However, existing food stocks around the world are not well monitored, the paper states, and it is uncertain if these reserves would be maintained through trade.

But Debucquet says that, despite such misgivings, trade has an overall positive effect on stabilising food prices and mitigating extreme weather events.

‘From time to time you have a big accident that is often linked to bad policies but there is nothing wrong with trade itself,’ he says.

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Document 6

We cannot tackle hunger without transforming gender inequalities

Adapted from an article in the journal of the Institute of Development Studies, 29 June 2015.

Alexandra Spieldoch was Executive Director, Compatible Technology International (CTI). Alyson Brody was Senior Gender Convenor at the Institute of Development Studies.

Today, at least 795 million people are experiencing extreme, chronic malnourishment and that number jumps to two billion if micronutrient deficiency or ‘hidden hunger’ is factored in. Nearly 60 percent of the nearly one billion people who go hungry every day are women and girls. They are the poorest of the poor, and they are most vulnerable in the global food system.

A look at the evidence makes it clear that gender inequalities are a key cause of this reality. For example, against a backdrop of rapid economic growth, women and girls in India remain among the most food insecure in the world, mainly because of entrenched gender biases that erode their rights. These deep gender inequalities in food security exist even though women constitute the majority of food producers in the world and are often managing their families’ nutritional needs.

We know that women have little to no access to land and property rights. They often lack access to basic information and basic decision-making power. They can’t get credit, financing and technologies that would drastically improve their productivity, reduce their time and effort, and improve their access to markets. They receive less training and education than men in agriculture. In fact, two thirds of the illiterate rural poor are women, affecting their chances to improve their lives.

Women also receive less pay for what they do, compared to men, and work in more precarious conditions. And, though women are known custodians of local knowledge, including seeds and medicines, their knowledge is vastly ignored. These factors not only reduce women’s productivity; they also reduce their capacity, their self-esteem, and undermine their basic rights. Compounding this is the fact that so much of the unpaid work that they do such as collecting water, fuel and caring for their families, is totally ignored in formal data collection and in policies and programmes.

In addition, women’s own nutritional needs – and often those of their daughters – are often being neglected because they are considered of lower status and less of a priority than men and boys in many cultures. Women regularly eat after men and they receive less food than men and boys, particularly in time of crisis when food is scarce. As a result women and girls are more malnourished than men and boys.

When it comes to food stability, enough food to feed everyone, as reported by the UN Food Agencies, has not yet translated into everyone getting enough food to eat. Policies focused on food security need to recognise that food production, processing, distribution, consumption and utilisation are part of often inequitable value chains.

The global food economy, riddled with price volatility and scarcity of resources, has negatively affected the stability of food supply, and women have been left as the shock absorbers of food insecurity. Climate change patterns and scarce resources continue this pattern with women and children struggling disproportionately more than men to provide nutritious food for their families. Every day, women are putting themselves at risk of violence and sexual assault to find food in areas where food is scarce.

The report argues that a commitment to transforming gender inequalities is a non-negotiable condition for reducing hunger and malnutrition. As part of this process there is a vital need for comprehensive, gender-aware strategies that are grounded in an evidence-based understanding of the complex gendered causes and impacts of hunger and malnutrition, and are coherent across a range of policies and actions. This means both women and men need to work together to realise positive change.

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Good work is already being done to strengthen rights-based approaches. For example, some governments, such as India and Brazil, have passed right to food legislation to support smallholder farmers and families living below the poverty line. In many African countries, civil society groups are working with their governments to promote awareness and action on women’s land rights. New practices on agro-ecology to promote women’s knowledge and training in sustainable agriculture are being piloted in Central America. New research on making women’s unpaid work count is emerging. But far more investment is needed into further developing, adapting and scaling up these types of innovations, and gathering evidence that can ensure funds are targeted effectively in ways that promote the interlinked goals of gender equality and food and nutrition security.

In these ways we can begin to make small steps towards realising a vision of gender-just food and nutrition security where the gender inequalities that perpetuate and exacerbate experiences of food insecurity are confronted and transformed; and that is grounded in the recognition that everyone has the right to decent, nutritious food produced in environmentally sustainable ways.

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Document 7

Artificial intelligence: don’t fear AI. It’s already on your phone – and useful.

Adapted from an article in The Guardian, a UK newspaper, 15 June 2015.

Charles Arthur is a technology journalist.

When Joe Weizenbaum found his secretary using a computer program he had created, he was so upset he devoted the rest of his life to warning people not to use its technology. The program was ‘Eliza’, which gives a passable imitation of a nondirectional psychiatrist; you type sentences such as: ‘I wonder what I should write,’ and it replies: ‘What answer would please you the most?’

Weizenbaum’s distress came because he had written Eliza as an experiment, to see whether he could simulate ‘artificial intelligence’ in a question-and-answer system by parsing sentences and throwing relevant bits back at the questioner. But his secretary saw it as real, and asked him not to intrude on ‘sessions’; Weizenbaum saw this as an omen that we would be too easily fooled into trusting machines.

The story dates from the 1960s (Weizenbaum died in March 2008), but is relevant today. Machine intelligence and machine learning – the new synonyms for ‘artificial intelligence’ – are on the rise and are going to be pervasive. To some extent, anyone using a smartphone is already using some sort of machine intelligence with Google Now’s suggestions or Apple Maps’s determination of what counts as your ‘home’ and ‘work’, or Windows Phone’s Cortana. We don’t call these ‘artificial intelligence’, because the moniker earned ridicule down the years. But it doesn’t matter what you call it; the ability to get computers to infer information that they aren’t directly supplied with, and to act on that, is already here. Take Google Photos, which can figure out that you were taking photos of a zombie parade, or find pictures of canoes, or – well, pretty much anything. It’s not limited to human faces (though it can do those, and distinguish between children and babies). If you don’t want to know about deep-learning neural networks, then it satisfies Arthur C Clarke’s dictum: ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’

Part of the magic behind Google Photos comes from a British company, DeepMind Technologies, which built what it calls ‘artificial generalised intelligence’. They trained it on video games such as Space Invaders and Breakout; it got amazingly good at them after a few hundred games, without any special training. DeepMind isn’t the only machine learning company Google has acquired; last August it bought Jetpac, which used neural networks to figure out what was in your holiday photos.

The promise of such machine learning is hugely exciting and not limited to Google. There is a fun app called Deep Belief which you can download for iOS.

Eliza used to require a mainframe; modern machines can run it as an applet without breaking sweat. Deep Belief shows that neural networks can run on modern smartphones. Give it a few years, and your smartphone’s AI will have power enough to understand the context of what you’re doing, figure out how it should help (call or text people to say you’re late? Understand whose emails you do and don’t want to receive at particular times? Find the right people for you to link up with on social media?) and act on it. You’ll be able to choose whether you want that done by an ‘assistant’ on your phone, or in the cloud. The cloud-based one will be smarter, because it will have access to much more data; the phone-based one will be much more personal, and function even without a network connection.

Weizenbaum feared that AI couldn’t be trusted with decisions because it wouldn’t have empathy or compassion. But that’s fine. It’s the everyday grind that AI can smooth. I, for one, welcome our new robot underlings.

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Document 8

Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history. Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks, says a group of leading scientists.

Adapted from an article in The Independent, a UK newspaper, 1 May 2014.

Stephen Hawking was the director of research at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge and a 2012 Fundamental Physics Prize laureate for his work on quantum gravity. Stuart Russell was a computer-science professor at the University of California, Berkeley and a co-author of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. Max Tegmark was a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the author of Our Mathematical Universe. Frank Wilczek was a physics professor at the MIT and a 2004 Nobel laureate for his work on the strong nuclear force.

It is tempting to dismiss the notion of highly intelligent machines as mere science fiction. But this would be a mistake, and potentially our worst mistake in history.

Artificial-intelligence (AI) research is now progressing rapidly. Recent landmarks such as self-driving cars, a computer winning at Jeopardy! and the digital personal assistants Siri, Google Now and Cortana are merely symptoms of an IT arms race fuelled by unprecedented investments and building on an increasingly mature theoretical foundation. Such achievements will probably pale against what the coming decades will bring.

The potential benefits are huge; everything that civilisation has to offer is a product of human intelligence; we cannot predict what we might achieve when this intelligence is magnified by the tools that AI may provide, but the eradication of war, disease, and poverty would be high on anyone’s list. Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history.

Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks. In the near term, world militaries are considering autonomous-weapon systems that can choose and eliminate targets; the UN and Human Rights Watch have advocated a treaty banning such weapons. In the medium term, as emphasised by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee in The Second Machine Age, AI may transform our economy to bring both great wealth and great dislocation.

Looking further ahead, there are no fundamental limits to what can be achieved: there is no physical law precluding particles from being organised in ways that perform even more advanced computations than the arrangements of particles in human brains. An explosive transition is possible. One can imagine such technology outsmarting financial markets, out-inventing human researchers, out-manipulating human leaders, and developing weapons we cannot even understand. Whereas the short-term impact of AI depends on who controls it, the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all.

So, facing possible futures of incalculable benefits and risks, the experts are surely doing everything possible to ensure the best outcome, right? Wrong. If a superior alien civilisation sent us a message saying, ‘We’ll arrive in a few decades,’ would we just reply, ‘OK, call us when you get here – we’ll leave the lights on’? Probably not – but this is more or less what is happening with AI. Although we are facing potentially the best or worst thing to happen to humanity in history, little serious research is devoted to these issues outside non-profit institutes such as the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, the Future of Humanity Institute, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, and the Future of Life Institute. All of us should ask ourselves what we can do now to improve the chances of reaping the benefits and avoiding the risks.

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