Sir John Bell: ‘We've seen spectacular growth in life sciences. The risk is we lose it'
Bell, 72, who has advised successive governments over the years and was regius professor of medicine at Oxford University for 22 years, remains a keen rower who enjoys coming downstream in his sculling boat from the pontoon at the foot of his garden in Wallingford as far as the pub at Moulsford.
For our lunch, Bell has driven the short distance and we sit in a window seat inside the pub overlooking the still river with a fresh breeze blowing in on a gloriously sunny day.
Bell doesn't 'do
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Telegraph
36 minutes ago
- Telegraph
We must lead AI revolution or be damned, says Muslim leader
Muslims must take charge of artificial intelligence or 'be damned' as a marginalised community, the head of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) has said in a leaked video. Dr Wajid Akhter, the general secretary of the MCB, said Muslims and their children risked missing the AI revolution in the same way as they had been left behind in the computer and social media revolutions. He added that while Muslims had historically been at the forefront of civilisation and were credited with some of the greatest scientific advances, they had ended up as the butt' of jokes in the modern world after failing to play a part in the latest technological revolutions. 'We already missed the industrial revolution. We missed the computer revolution. We missed the social media revolution. We will be damned and our children will damn us if we miss the AI revolution. We must take a lead,' said Dr Akther. Speaking at the MCB's AI and the Muslim Community conference on July 19, he added: 'AI needs Islam, it needs Muslims to step up.' Scientists 'made fun of' faith at computer launch Dr Akther recalled how at the launch of one of the world's earliest computers, the Mark II , US scientists brought out a prayer mat aligned towards Mecca. 'They were making fun of all religions because they felt that they had now achieved the age of reason and science and technology and we don't need that superstition any more,' he said. 'And so to show that they had achieved mastery over religion, they decided to make fun and they chose our faith. 'How did we go from a people who gave the world the most beautiful buildings, science, technology, medicine, arts to being a joke? 'I'll tell you one thing – the next time that the world is going through a revolution, the next time they go to flip that switch, they will also pull out a prayer mat and they will also line it towards the Qibla [the direction towards Mecca] and they will also pray, but this time, not to make fun of us, they will do so because they are us.' Government eases stance on MCB Dr Akther also told his audience: 'We lost each other. And ever since we lost each other, we've been falling. We've been falling ever since. We are people now who are forced, we are forced by Allah to watch the genocide of our brothers and sisters in Gaza. 'This is a punishment for us if we know it. We are people who are forced to beg the ones who are doing the killing to stop it. We are people who are two billion strong but cannot even get one bottle of water into Gaza.' Dr Akhter said Gaza had 'woken' Muslims up and showed they needed to unite. 'We will continue to fall until the day we realise that only when we are united will we be able to reverse this. Until the day we realise that we need to sacrifice for this unity,' he added. British governments have maintained a policy of 'non-engagement' with the MCB since 2009 based on claims, disputed by the council, that some of its officials have previously made extremist comments. However, Angela Rayner, the Deputy Prime Minister, is drawing up a new official definition of Islamophobia, and last week it emerged the consultation has been thrown open to all groups including the MCB. Earlier this year, Sir Stephen Timms, a minister in the Department for Work and Pensions, was one of four Labour MPs to attend an MCB event.
BBC News
5 hours ago
- BBC News
Ushaw Historic House library open to public for one day
A library which holds historic books such as Sir Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica will open to the public for the first time – though just for a single Historic House, near Durham, will open its 50,000-item collection to the public on 9 August as part of its first ever book library at the former Roman Catholic seminary is usually reserved for researchers, Ushaw official Sanjay Gidda forward to welcoming a wider audience, Mr Gidda said: "This is one of the most exciting cultural days Ushaw has ever hosted." As part of the day's events, the library will display its copy of the Nuremberg Chronicle illustrated encyclopaedia from book is an account of Christian history from Creation to the early about a thousand copies exist in the world today, said Mr Gidda. In addition to the 1493 edition, the library also holds a pirated copy of the book printed four years later, which was smaller and cheaper to make and of which just a few hundred still is also home to a first edition copy of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, said Mr Gidda, as well as dozens of books printed during the earliest days of the printing press in Europe, known as incunabula. Follow BBC North East on X, Facebook, Nextdoor and Instagram.
The Guardian
5 hours ago
- The Guardian
‘Self-termination is most likely': the history and future of societal collapse
'We can't put a date on Doomsday, but by looking at the 5,000 years of [civilisation], we can understand the trajectories we face today – and self-termination is most likely,' says Dr Luke Kemp at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge. 'I'm pessimistic about the future,' he says. 'But I'm optimistic about people.' Kemp's new book covers the rise and collapse of more than 400 societies over 5,000 years and took seven years to write. The lessons he has drawn are often striking: people are fundamentally egalitarian but are led to collapses by enriched, status-obsessed elites, while past collapses often improved the lives of ordinary citizens. Today's global civilisation, however, is deeply interconnected and unequal and could lead to the worst societal collapse yet, he says. The threat is from leaders who are 'walking versions of the dark triad' – narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism – in a world menaced by the climate crisis, nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence and killer robots. The work is scholarly, but the straight-talking Australian can also be direct, such as when setting out how a global collapse could be avoided. 'Don't be a dick' is one of the solutions proposed, along with a move towards genuinely democratic societies and an end to inequality. His first step was to ditch the word civilisation, a term he argues is really propaganda by rulers. 'When you look at the near east, China, Mesoamerica or the Andes, where the first kingdoms and empires arose, you don't see civilised conduct, you see war, patriarchy and human sacrifice,' he says. This was a form of evolutionary backsliding from the egalitarian and mobile hunter-gatherer societies which shared tools and culture widely and survived for hundreds of thousands of years. 'Instead, we started to resemble the hierarchies of chimpanzees and the harems of gorillas.' Instead Kemp uses the term Goliaths to describe kingdoms and empires, meaning a society built on domination, such as the Roman empire: state over citizen, rich over poor, master over slave and men over women. He says that, like the biblical warrior slain by David's slingshot, Goliaths began in the bronze age, were steeped in violence and often surprisingly fragile. Goliath states do not simply emerge as dominant cliques that loot surplus food and resources, he argues, but need three specific types of 'Goliath fuel'. The first is a particular type of surplus food: grain. That can be 'seen, stolen and stored', Kemp says, unlike perishable foods. In Cahokia, for example, a society in North America that peaked around the 11th century, the advent of maize and bean farming led to a society dominated by an elite of priests and human sacrifice, he says. The second Goliath fuel is weaponry monopolised by one group. Bronze swords and axes were far superior to stone and wooden axes, and the first Goliaths in Mesopotamia followed their development, he says. Kemp calls the final Goliath fuel 'caged land', meaning places where oceans, rivers, deserts and mountains meant people could not simply migrate away from rising tyrants. Early Egyptians, trapped between the Red Sea and the Nile, fell prey to the pharaohs, for example. 'History is best told as a story of organised crime,' Kemp says. 'It is one group creating a monopoly on resources through the use of violence over a certain territory and population.' All Goliaths, however, contain the seeds of their own demise, he says: 'They are cursed and this is because of inequality.' Inequality does not arise because all people are greedy. They are not, he says. The Khoisan peoples in southern Africa, for example, shared and preserved common lands for thousands of years despite the temptation to grab more. Instead, it is the few people high in the dark triad who fall into races for resources, arms and status, he says. 'Then as elites extract more wealth from the people and the land, they make societies more fragile, leading to infighting, corruption, immiseration of the masses, less healthy people, overexpansion, environmental degradation and poor decision making by a small oligarchy. The hollowed-out shell of a society is eventually cracked asunder by shocks such as disease, war or climate change.' History shows that increasing wealth inequality consistently precedes collapse, says Kemp, from the Classical Lowland Maya to the Han dynasty in China and the Western Roman empire. He also points out that for the citizens of early rapacious regimes, collapse often improved their lives because they were freed from domination and taxation and returned to farming. 'After the fall of Rome, people actually got taller and healthier,' he says. Collapses in the past were at a regional level and often beneficial for most people, but collapse today would be global and disastrous for all. 'Today, we don't have regional empires so much as we have one single, interconnected global Goliath. All our societies act within one single global economic system – capitalism,' Kemp says. He cites three reasons why the collapse of the global Goliath would be far worse than previous events. First is that collapses are accompanied by surges in violence as elites try to reassert their dominance. 'In the past, those battles were waged with swords or muskets. Today we have nuclear weapons,' he says. Second, people in the past were not heavily reliant on empires or states for services and, unlike today, could easily go back to farming or hunting and gathering. 'Today, most of us are specialised, and we're dependent upon global infrastructure. If that falls away, we too will fall,' he says. 'Last but not least is that, unfortunately, all the threats we face today are far worse than in the past,' he says. Past climatic changes that precipitated collapses, for example, usually involved a temperature change of 1C at a regional level. Today, we face 3C globally. There are also about 10,000 nuclear weapons, technologies such as artificial intelligence and killer robots and engineered pandemics, all sources of catastrophic global risk. Kemp says his argument that Goliaths require rulers who are strong in the triad of dark traits is borne out today. 'The three most powerful men in the world are a walking version of the dark triad: Trump is a textbook narcissist, Putin is a cold psychopath, and Xi Jinping came to rule [China] by being a master Machiavellian manipulator.' 'Our corporations and, increasingly, our algorithms, also resemble these kinds of people,' he says. 'They're basically amplifying the worst of us.' Kemp points to these 'agents of doom' as the source of the current trajectory towards societal collapse. 'These are the large, psychopathic corporations and groups which produce global catastrophic risk,' he says. 'Nuclear weapons, climate change, AI, are only produced by a very small number of secretive, highly wealthy, powerful groups, like the military-industrial complex, big tech and the fossil fuel industry. 'The key thing is this is not about all of humanity creating these threats. It is not about human nature. It is about small groups who bring out the worst in us, competing for profit and power and covering all [the risks] up.' The global Goliath is the endgame for humanity, Kemp says, like the final moves in a chess match that determine the result. He sees two outcomes: self-destruction or a fundamental transformation of society. He believes the first outcome is the most likely, but says escaping global collapse could be achieved. 'First and foremost, you need to create genuine democratic societies to level all the forms of power that lead to Goliaths,' he says. That means running societies through citizen assemblies and juries, aided by digital technologies to enable direct democracy at large scales. History shows that more democratic societies tend to be more resilient, he says. 'If you'd had a citizens' jury sitting over the [fossil fuel companies] when they discovered how much damage and death their products would cause, do you think they would have said: 'Yes, go ahead, bury the information and run disinformation campaigns'? Of course not,' Kemp says. Escaping collapse also requires taxing wealth, he says, otherwise the rich find ways to rig the democratic system. 'I'd cap wealth at $10 million. That's far more than anyone needs. A famous oil tycoon once said money is just a way for the rich to keep score. Why should we allow these people to keep score at the risk of destroying the entire planet?' If citizens' juries and wealth caps seem wildly optimistic, Kemp says we have been long brainwashed by rulers justifying their dominance, from the self-declared god-pharaohs of Egypt and priests claiming to control the weather to autocrats claiming to defend people from foreign threats and tech titans selling us their techno-utopias. 'It's always been easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of Goliaths. That's because these are stories that have been hammered into us over the space of 5,000 years,' he says. 'Today, people find it easier to imagine that we can build intelligence on silicon than we can do democracy at scale, or that we can escape arms races. It's complete bullshit. Of course we can do democracy at scale. We're a naturally social, altruistic, democratic species and we all have an anti-dominance intuition. This is what we're built for.' Kemp rejects the suggestion that he is simply presenting a politically leftwing take on history. 'There is nothing inherently left wing about democracy,' he says. 'Nor does the left have a monopoly on fighting corruption, holding power accountable and making sure companies pay for the social and environmental damages they cause. That's just making our economy more honest.' He also has a message for individuals: 'Collapse isn't just caused by structures, but also people. If you want to save the world then the first step is to stop destroying it. In other words: don't be a dick. Don't work for big tech, arms manufacturers or the fossil fuel industry. Don't accept relationships based on domination and share power whenever you can.' Despite the possibility of avoiding collapse, Kemp remains pessimistic about our prospects. 'I think it's unlikely,' he says. 'We're dealing with a 5,000-year process that is going to be incredibly difficult to reverse, as we have increasing levels of inequality and of elite capture of our politics. 'But even if you don't have hope, it doesn't really matter. This is about defiance. It's about doing the right thing, fighting for democracy and for people to not be exploited. And even if we fail, at the very least, we didn't contribute to the problem.' Goliath's Curse by Luke Kemp was published in the UK on 31 July by Viking Penguin
