Latest news with #Becker
The National
2 days ago
- Sport
- The National
Scottish Strokeplay Championship returns to North Berwick
Boris Becker, a smash-hit of a 17-year-old from Germany, would become the youngest Wimbledon champion that summer. A couple of weeks before his conquest at the All England Club, Becker romped to his first top-level triumph in the Stella Artois Championships at Queen's Club. His win wasn't enough to earn top billing in the sports pages of the Glasgow Herald that June weekend, mind you. Above a report of Becker's barnstorming breakthrough down in West Kensington was the headline act of Colin Montgomerie and his five-shot procession in the Scottish Open Amateur Strokeplay Championship at North Berwick and Dunbar. One likes to imagine that a 21-year-old Monty flicked through the pages of said newspaper, caught a glimpse of Becker's feat underneath his own write up and said, 'all credit to him' in that phrase of praise that would become a bit of a trademark. Or perhaps he chirped, 'all credit to me' before pinning the cutting on to his wall of fame with gleeful gusto? Here in 2025, the Scottish Open Amateur Strokeplay Championship returns to East Lothian again this weekend as the West Links at North Berwick stages the event for the first time since it co-hosted back in 1985. The decades hurtle by, don't they? 'Is it really 40 years?,' gasped Montgomerie of this passage of time. It sure is. Back in the day, a young Montgomerie had already underlined his potential by winning the Scottish Youths' title in 1983 before losing to a certain Jose Maria Olazabal in the final of the Amateur Championship at Formby a year later. 'Now on the Champions Tour, my parking spot at events is next to Jose Maria and he still mentions the Amateur Championship 40 years on,' smiled Monty of the Spaniard's gentle ribbing. In 1985, Montgomerie was a 21-year-old student at Houston Baptist University in Texas and arrived back on home soil for the Scottish Strokeplay Championship as one of the favourites. He justified that standing with a fine display of poise, polish and purpose on the east coast and eased to a victory which, at the time, was the biggest of his fledgling career. 'I'd just come back from American college and was playing better and better,' he reflected. 'I went into that event as one of the favourites and thankfully got the job done. 'The strokeplay was one of the big two amateur titles that I wanted on my CV and in 1987 I was able to win the Scottish Amateur Matchplay at Nairn. 'But I was thrilled to win that first title and it sent me on a really strong run for a few years.' That success at Dunbar in '85 helped Montgomerie secure a place in the GB&I Walker Cup team and he would retain his spot in the side two years later before making the leap into the pro ranks not long after. The rest is history. 'I look back very fondly on my amateur career,' said Monty, who was the European Tour's rookie of the year in 1988 and won his first title on the circuit the following season in Portugal by a whopping 11-shots. 'When I turned pro in September 1987, I very quickly had to go from trying to beat Sandy Stephen, George Macgregor and Ian Brotherston – all very good players - to coming up against Seve Ballesteros, Nick Faldo and Sandy Lyle.' A new generation, including reigning Scottish Amateur Matchplay champion Alexander Farmer, will tackle the delights, the rigours and the charming quirks of North Berwick over the next three days with an international field of 144 players gathering for this terrific links test. They'll be hard pressed to put on a show like Englishman Dominic Clemons did in the championship 12 months ago. Just along the A198 at Muirfield, Clemons conjured a quite remarkable performance that left onlookers scraping their jaws off the ground as he brought the formidable Open venue to its knees with a 24-under total. His closing day rounds of 65 and 62 gave Clemons a record-busting 17-stroke win which blitzed the previous best of eight set by Barclay Howard in 1997 and matched by Tommy Fleetwood in 2009. All credit to him, as Monty might have said.
The Herald Scotland
2 days ago
- Sport
- The Herald Scotland
Scottish Strokeplay Championship returns to North Berwick
A couple of weeks before his conquest at the All England Club, Becker romped to his first top-level triumph in the Stella Artois Championships at Queen's Club. His win wasn't enough to earn top billing in the sports pages of the Glasgow Herald that June weekend, mind you. Above a report of Becker's barnstorming breakthrough down in West Kensington was the headline act of Colin Montgomerie and his five-shot procession in the Scottish Open Amateur Strokeplay Championship at North Berwick and Dunbar. One likes to imagine that a 21-year-old Monty flicked through the pages of said newspaper, caught a glimpse of Becker's feat underneath his own write up and said, 'all credit to him' in that phrase of praise that would become a bit of a trademark. Or perhaps he chirped, 'all credit to me' before pinning the cutting on to his wall of fame with gleeful gusto? Here in 2025, the Scottish Open Amateur Strokeplay Championship returns to East Lothian again this weekend as the West Links at North Berwick stages the event for the first time since it co-hosted back in 1985. The decades hurtle by, don't they? 'Is it really 40 years?,' gasped Montgomerie of this passage of time. It sure is. Back in the day, a young Montgomerie had already underlined his potential by winning the Scottish Youths' title in 1983 before losing to a certain Jose Maria Olazabal in the final of the Amateur Championship at Formby a year later. 'Now on the Champions Tour, my parking spot at events is next to Jose Maria and he still mentions the Amateur Championship 40 years on,' smiled Monty of the Spaniard's gentle ribbing. In 1985, Montgomerie was a 21-year-old student at Houston Baptist University in Texas and arrived back on home soil for the Scottish Strokeplay Championship as one of the favourites. He justified that standing with a fine display of poise, polish and purpose on the east coast and eased to a victory which, at the time, was the biggest of his fledgling career. 'I'd just come back from American college and was playing better and better,' he reflected. 'I went into that event as one of the favourites and thankfully got the job done. 'The strokeplay was one of the big two amateur titles that I wanted on my CV and in 1987 I was able to win the Scottish Amateur Matchplay at Nairn. 'But I was thrilled to win that first title and it sent me on a really strong run for a few years.' That success at Dunbar in '85 helped Montgomerie secure a place in the GB&I Walker Cup team and he would retain his spot in the side two years later before making the leap into the pro ranks not long after. The rest is history. 'I look back very fondly on my amateur career,' said Monty, who was the European Tour's rookie of the year in 1988 and won his first title on the circuit the following season in Portugal by a whopping 11-shots. 'When I turned pro in September 1987, I very quickly had to go from trying to beat Sandy Stephen, George Macgregor and Ian Brotherston – all very good players - to coming up against Seve Ballesteros, Nick Faldo and Sandy Lyle.' A new generation, including reigning Scottish Amateur Matchplay champion Alexander Farmer, will tackle the delights, the rigours and the charming quirks of North Berwick over the next three days with an international field of 144 players gathering for this terrific links test. They'll be hard pressed to put on a show like Englishman Dominic Clemons did in the championship 12 months ago. Just along the A198 at Muirfield, Clemons conjured a quite remarkable performance that left onlookers scraping their jaws off the ground as he brought the formidable Open venue to its knees with a 24-under total. His closing day rounds of 65 and 62 gave Clemons a record-busting 17-stroke win which blitzed the previous best of eight set by Barclay Howard in 1997 and matched by Tommy Fleetwood in 2009. All credit to him, as Monty might have said.
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
A Reality Check for Tech Oligarchs
Technologists currently wield a level of political influence that was recently considered unthinkable. While Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency slashes public services, Jeff Bezos takes celebrities to space on Blue Origin and the CEOs of AI companies speak openly of radically transforming society. As a result, there has never been a better moment to understand the ideas that animate these leaders' particular vision of the future. In his new book, More Everything Forever, the science journalist Adam Becker offers a deep dive into the worldview of techno-utopians such as Musk—one that's underpinned by promises of AI dominance, space colonization, boundless economic growth, and eventually, immortality. Becker's premise is bracing: Tech oligarchs' wildest visions of tomorrow amount to a modern secular theology that is both mesmerizing and, in his view, deeply misguided. The author's central concern is that these grand ambitions are not benign eccentricities, but ideologies with real-world consequences. What do these people envision? In their vibrant utopia, humanity has harnessed technology to transcend all of its limits—old age and the finite bounds of knowledge most of all. Artificial intelligence oversees an era of abundance, automating labor and generating wealth so effectively that every person's needs are instantly met. Society is powered entirely by clean energy, while heavy industry has been relocated to space, turning Earth into a pristine sanctuary. People live and work throughout the solar system. Advances in biotechnology have all but conquered disease and aging. At the center of this future, a friendly AI—aligned with human values—guides civilization wisely, ensuring that progress remains tightly coupled with the flourishing of humanity and the environment. Musk, along with the likes of Bezos and OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman, aren't merely imagining sci-fi futures as a luxury hobby—they are funding them, proselytizing for them, and, in a growing number of cases, trying to reorganize society around them. In Becker's view, the rich are not merely chasing utopia, but prioritizing their vision of the future over the very real concerns of people in the present. Impeding environmental research, for instance, makes sense if you believe that human life will continue to exist in an extraterrestrial elsewhere. More Everything Forever asks us to take these ideas seriously, not necessarily because they are credible predictions, but because some people in power believe they are. [Read: The rise of techno-authoritarianism] Becker, in prose that is snappy if at times predictable, highlights the quasi-spiritual nature of Silicon Valley's utopianism, which is based on two very basic beliefs. First, that death is scary and unpleasant. And second, that thanks to science and technology, the humans of the future will never have to be scared or do anything unpleasant. 'The dream is always the same: go to space and live forever,' Becker writes. (One reason for the interest in space is that longevity drugs, according to the tech researcher Benjamin Reinhardt, can be synthesized only 'in a pristine zero-g environment.') This future will overcome not just human biology but a fundamental rift between science and faith. Becker quotes the writer Meghan O'Gieblyn, who observes in her book God, Human, Animal, Machine that 'what makes transhumanism so compelling is that it promises to restore through science the transcendent—and essentially religious—hopes that science itself obliterated.' Becker demonstrates how certain contemporary technologists flirt with explicitly religious trappings. Anthony Levandowski, the former head of Google's self-driving-car division, for instance, founded an organization to worship artificial intelligence as a godhead. But Becker also reveals the largely forgotten precedents for this worldview, sketching a lineage of thought that connects today's Silicon Valley seers to earlier futurist prophets. In the late 19th century, the Russian philosopher Nikolai Fedorov preached that humanity's divine mission was to physically resurrect every person who had ever lived and settle them throughout the cosmos, achieving eternal life via what Fedorov called 'the regulation of nature by human reason and will.' The rapture once preached and beckoned in churches has been repackaged for secular times: In place of souls ascending to heaven, there are minds preserved digitally—or even bodies kept alive—for eternity. Silicon Valley's visionaries are, in this view, not all cold rationalists; many of them are dreamers and believers whose fixations constitute, in Becker's view, a spiritual narrative as much as a scientific one—a new theology of technology. Let's slow down: Why exactly is this a bad idea? Who wouldn't want 'perfect health, immortality, yada yada yada,' as the AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky breezily summarizes the goal to Becker? The trouble, Becker shows, is that many of these dreams of personal transcendence disregard the potential human cost of working toward them. For the tech elite, these are visions of escape. But, Becker pointedly writes, 'they hold no promise of escape for the rest of us, only nightmares closing in.' Perhaps the most extreme version of this nightmare is the specter of an artificial superintelligence, or AGI (artificial general intelligence). Yudkowsky predicts to Becker that a sufficiently advanced AI, if misaligned with human values, would 'kill us all.' Forecasts for this type of technology, once fringe, have gained remarkable traction among tech leaders, and almost always trend to the stunningly optimistic. Sam Altman is admittedly concerned about the prospects of rogue AI—he famously admitted to having stockpiled 'guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to'—but these worries don't stop him from actively planning for a world reshaped by AI's exponential growth. In Altman's words, we live on the brink of a moment in which machines will do 'almost everything' and trigger societal changes so rapid that 'the future can be almost unimaginably great.' Becker is less sanguine, writing that 'we just don't know what it will take to build a machine to do all the things a human can do.' And from his point of view, it's best that things remain that way. [Read: Silicon Valley braces for chaos] Becker is at his rhetorically sharpest when he examines the philosophy of 'longtermism' that underlies much of this AI-centric and space-traveling fervor. Longtermism, championed by some Silicon Valley–adjacent philosophers and the effective-altruism movement, argues that the weight of the future—the potentially enormous number of human (or post-human) lives to come—overshadows the concerns of the present. If preventing human extinction is the ultimate good, virtually any present sacrifice can and should be rationalized. Becker shows how today's tech elites use such reasoning to support their own dominance in the short term, and how rhetoric about future generations tends to mask injustices and inequalities in the present. When billionaires claim that their space colonies or AI schemes might save humanity, they are also asserting that only they should shape humanity's course. Becker observes that this philosophy is 'made by carpenters, insisting the entire world is a nail that will yield to their ministrations.' Becker's perspective is largely that of a sober realist doing his darnedest to cut through delusion, yet one might ask whether his argument occasionally goes too far. Silicon Valley's techno-utopian culture may be misguided in its optimism, but is it only that? A gentle counterpoint: The human yearning for transcendence stems from a dissatisfaction with the present and a creative impulse, both of which have driven genuine progress. Ambitious dreams—even seemingly outlandish ones—have historically spurred political and cultural transformation. Faith, too, has helped people face the future with optimism. It should also be acknowledged that many of the tech elite Becker critiques do show some awareness of ethical pitfalls. Not all (or even most) technologists are as blithe or blinkered as Becker sometimes seems to suggest. In the end, this is not a book that revels in pessimism or cynicism; rather, it serves as a call to clear-eyed humanism. In Becker's telling, tech leaders err not in dreaming big, but in refusing to reckon with the costs and responsibilities that come with their dreams. They preach a future in which suffering, scarcity, and even death can be engineered away, yet they discount the very real suffering here and now that demands our immediate attention and compassion. In an era when billionaire space races and AI hype dominate headlines, More Everything Forever arrives as a much-needed reality check. At times, the book is something more than that: a valuable meditation on the questionable stories we tell about progress, salvation, and ourselves. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
3 days ago
- Business
- Atlantic
Silicon Valley's Misguided Utopian Visions
Technologists currently wield a level of political influence that was recently considered unthinkable. While Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency slashes public services, Jeff Bezos takes celebrities to space on Blue Origin and the CEOs of AI companies speak openly of radically transforming society. As a result, there has never been a better moment to understand the ideas that animate these leaders' particular vision of the future. In his new book, More Everything Forever, the science journalist Adam Becker offers a deep dive into the worldview of techno-utopians such as Musk—one that's underpinned by promises of AI dominance, space colonization, boundless economic growth, and eventually, immortality. Becker's premise is bracing: Tech oligarchs' wildest visions of tomorrow amount to a modern secular theology that is both mesmerizing and, in his view, deeply misguided. The author's central concern is that these grand ambitions are not benign eccentricities, but ideologies with real-world consequences. What do these people envision? In their vibrant utopia, humanity has harnessed technology to transcend all of its limits—old age and the finite bounds of knowledge most of all. Artificial intelligence oversees an era of abundance, automating labor and generating wealth so effectively that every person's needs are instantly met. Society is powered entirely by clean energy, while heavy industry has been relocated to space, turning Earth into a pristine sanctuary. People live and work throughout the solar system. Advances in biotechnology have all but conquered disease and aging. At the center of this future, a friendly AI—aligned with human values—guides civilization wisely, ensuring that progress remains tightly coupled with the flourishing of humanity and the environment. Musk, along with the likes of Bezos and OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman, aren't merely imagining sci-fi futures as a luxury hobby—they are funding them, proselytizing for them, and, in a growing number of cases, trying to reorganize society around them. In Becker's view, the rich are not merely chasing utopia, but prioritizing their vision of the future over the very real concerns of people in the present. Impeding environmental research, for instance, makes sense if you believe that human life will continue to exist in an extraterrestrial elsewhere. More Everything Forever asks us to take these ideas seriously, not necessarily because they are credible predictions, but because some people in power believe they are. Becker, in prose that is snappy if at times predictable, highlights the quasi-spiritual nature of Silicon Valley's utopianism, which is based on two very basic beliefs. First, that death is scary and unpleasant. And second, that thanks to science and technology, the humans of the future will never have to be scared or do anything unpleasant. 'The dream is always the same: go to space and live forever,' Becker writes. (One reason for the interest in space is that longevity drugs, according to the tech researcher Benjamin Reinhardt, can be synthesized only 'in a pristine zero-g environment.') This future will overcome not just human biology but a fundamental rift between science and faith. Becker quotes the writer Meghan O'Gieblyn, who observes in her book God, Human, Animal, Machine that 'what makes transhumanism so compelling is that it promises to restore through science the transcendent—and essentially religious—hopes that science itself obliterated.' Becker demonstrates how certain contemporary technologists flirt with explicitly religious trappings. Anthony Levandowski, the former head of Google's self-driving-car division, for instance, founded an organization to worship artificial intelligence as a godhead . But Becker also reveals the largely forgotten precedents for this worldview, sketching a lineage of thought that connects today's Silicon Valley seers to earlier futurist prophets. In the late 19th century, the Russian philosopher Nikolai Fedorov preached that humanity's divine mission was to physically resurrect every person who had ever lived and settle them throughout the cosmos, achieving eternal life via what Fedorov called 'the regulation of nature by human reason and will.' The rapture once preached and beckoned in churches has been repackaged for secular times: In place of souls ascending to heaven, there are minds preserved digitally—or even bodies kept alive—for eternity. Silicon Valley's visionaries are, in this view, not all cold rationalists; many of them are dreamers and believers whose fixations constitute, in Becker's view, a spiritual narrative as much as a scientific one—a new theology of technology. Let's slow down: Why exactly is this a bad idea? Who wouldn't want 'perfect health, immortality, yada yada yada,' as the AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky breezily summarizes the goal to Becker? The trouble, Becker shows, is that many of these dreams of personal transcendence disregard the potential human cost of working toward them. For the tech elite, these are visions of escape. But, Becker pointedly writes, 'they hold no promise of escape for the rest of us, only nightmares closing in.' Perhaps the most extreme version of this nightmare is the specter of an artificial superintelligence, or AGI (artificial general intelligence). Yudkowsky predicts to Becker that a sufficiently advanced AI, if misaligned with human values, would 'kill us all.' Forecasts for this type of technology, once fringe, have gained remarkable traction among tech leaders, and almost always trend to the stunningly optimistic. Sam Altman is admittedly concerned about the prospects of rogue AI —he famously admitted to having stockpiled 'guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to'—but these worries don't stop him from actively planning for a world reshaped by AI's exponential growth. In Altman's words, we live on the brink of a moment in which machines will do 'almost everything' and trigger societal changes so rapid that 'the future can be almost unimaginably great.' Becker is less sanguine, writing that 'we just don't know what it will take to build a machine to do all the things a human can do.' And from his point of view, it's best that things remain that way. Becker is at his rhetorically sharpest when he examines the philosophy of 'longtermism' that underlies much of this AI-centric and space-traveling fervor. Longtermism, championed by some Silicon Valley–adjacent philosophers and the effective-altruism movement, argues that the weight of the future—the potentially enormous number of human (or post-human) lives to come—overshadows the concerns of the present. If preventing human extinction is the ultimate good, virtually any present sacrifice can and should be rationalized. Becker shows how today's tech elites use such reasoning to support their own dominance in the short term, and how rhetoric about future generations tends to mask injustices and inequalities in the present. When billionaires claim that their space colonies or AI schemes might save humanity, they are also asserting that only they should shape humanity's course. Becker observes that this philosophy is 'made by carpenters, insisting the entire world is a nail that will yield to their ministrations.' Becker's perspective is largely that of a sober realist doing his darnedest to cut through delusion, yet one might ask whether his argument occasionally goes too far. Silicon Valley's techno-utopian culture may be misguided in its optimism, but is it only that? A gentle counterpoint: The human yearning for transcendence stems from a dissatisfaction with the present and a creative impulse, both of which have driven genuine progress. Ambitious dreams—even seemingly outlandish ones—have historically spurred political and cultural transformation. Faith, too, has helped people face the future with optimism. It should also be acknowledged that many of the tech elite Becker critiques do show some awareness of ethical pitfalls. Not all (or even most) technologists are as blithe or blinkered as Becker sometimes seems to suggest. In the end, this is not a book that revels in pessimism or cynicism; rather, it serves as a call to clear-eyed humanism. In Becker's telling, tech leaders err not in dreaming big, but in refusing to reckon with the costs and responsibilities that come with their dreams. They preach a future in which suffering, scarcity, and even death can be engineered away, yet they discount the very real suffering here and now that demands our immediate attention and compassion. In an era when billionaire space races and AI hype dominate headlines, More Everything Forever arrives as a much-needed reality check. At times, the book is something more than that: a valuable meditation on the questionable stories we tell about progress, salvation, and ourselves.
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Yahoo
Will Michigan AG retry Christopher Schurr in death of Patrick Lyoya?
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) — The future of the murder case against former Grand Rapids police officer Christopher Schurr is up in the air after the Kent County prosecutor announced he would not pursue the case any further following a mistrial. When Prosecutor Chris Becker said Thursday he the criminal case against Schurr, he was asked about the possibility of Attorney General Dana Nessel taking over the prosecution herself. 'Technically, the attorney general could,' Becker said. 'She never has before. But technically I think that's always a possibility.' Becker said he hadn't heard from Nessel's office about that possibility. Now that Becker is done with the case, Lyoya family advocates are pressing Nessel to take it on. Lyoya family hurt, Schurr relieved by prosecutor's decision not to retry, advocates say The Greater Grand Rapids NAACP and the Urban League of West Michigan have both reached out to her office urging her to prosecute the case. 'We are imploring her to file charges to pick this up so the Lyoya family as well as our community can have the justice it so rightly deserves,' said Eric Brown, the president and CEO of the Urban League of West Michigan. 'We are all in support to carry this as far as it can be carried out.' After Schurr shot and killed in April 2022, Attorney General Dana Nessel that she would take up the murder case against Christopher Schurr if she was asked to. At an event in Kalamazoo back then, Nessel said she often invites local prosecutors to refer these types of cases to the AG's office. She argued that prosecuting officer-involved shootings can create friction between the prosecutor and the police department, so it's often better for the AG to handle it. 'The Department of the Attorney General is best suited to handle these cases,' she said in 2022. Of course, Becker ultimately took on the case himself. Earlier this month, his case ended in a hung jury and the judge . Explaining his decision not to retry the case, Becker argued the jury overwhelmingly leaned toward acquittal with a 10 to 2 vote in the end. He said most of the time, another trial doesn't end differently. Prosecutor will not retry Christopher Schurr in Patrick Lyoya's death 'What it boils down to is I don't think we reach a different verdict if I do a retrial … the jury came back deadlocked,' he said. It's an open question what Nessel will do. News 8 has reached out to Nessel asking if her office will get involved. Nessel's on the case came amid jury deliberations on May 6. She responded to a social media commentator who claimed Nessel wanted her 'own ,' the former Minneapolis police officer who was convicted of murdering George Floyd. 'Christopher Schurr was charged and tried by Chris Becker, the Republican Kent County Prosecutor,' Nessel wrote in a response on social media. 'My department had no involvement.' Now it's her call whether she wants to get involved. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
