Pope Francis image courtesy of Jeffrey Bruno/Aleteia under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.0Generic License (the image has been cropped)
Billionaire Petro Poroshenko won the Ukrainian presidential election with 55% of the vote. Voter turnout was high, although pro-Russian separatists prevented many people from voting in the eastern part of the country. Poroshenko promised to bring peace to the eastern regions and move the country closer to the European Union. Russia said that it was moving its forces away from the Ukrainian border, but NATO officials said that a large “coercive force” was still in place. US Air Force General and Supreme Allied Commander Europe Philip Breedlove said that “Russia’s illegal military actions have created a new security situation in Europe and it is necessary for NATO as a defense alliance to adapt to that new situation.”
Pope Francis gave a speech warning about the dangers of climate change and calling on Christians to become “custodians of Creation”. The Pope said that when we damage the environment we set ourselves above God’s works.
Creation is not a property, which we can rule over at will; or, even less, is [it] the property of only a few: Creation is a gift, it is a wonderful gift that God has given us, so that we care for it and we use it for the benefit of all, always with respect and gratitude.
The Pope said that if we don’t act as custodians for the planet, the consequences could be apocalyptic. “Safeguard Creation,” the Pope said. “Because if we destroy Creation, Creation will destroy us.”
The US National Climate Assessment found that “human influence on the climate has already roughly doubled the probability of extreme heat events such as the record-breaking summer heat experienced in 2011 in Texas and Oklahoma”. The report found that global warming is negatively affecting the health of Americans in many different ways:
For example, increasingly frequent and intense heat events lead to more heat-related illnesses and deaths and, over time, worsen drought and wildfire risks, and intensify air pollution. Increasingly frequent extreme precipitation and associated flooding can lead to injuries and increases in waterborne disease. Rising sea surface temperatures have been linked with increasing levels and ranges of diseases. Rising sea levels intensify coastal flooding and storm surge, and thus exacerbate threats to public safety during storms.
The CNA corporation, a US non-profit operations research and analysis group, released a report on “National Security and the Accelerating Risks of Climate Change”. The report warned that climate change “will challenge key elements of our National Power and encumber our homeland security” and called on the US to take a global leadership role in combating climate change. The report argued that the US cannot afford to wait for the science to improve before acting. “Speaking as a soldier, we never have 100 percent certainty,” CNA military advisory board member retired Army General Gordon Sullivan said. “If you wait until you have 100 percent certainty, something bad is going to happen on the battlefield.”
The World Health Organization (WHO) declared that the resurgence of polio is “a public health emergency of international concern”. WHO noted that, although we had been making progress toward eradicating polio, the disease recently reappeared in three major epidemiological zones—Central Asia, the Middle East, and Central Africa. WHO said efforts to stop the spread of the virus are complicated by violence and humanitarian crises in countries like Pakistan and Syria. “There is always the risk that if the virus is reintroduced to a polio-free area, it could become endemic again,” WHO Assistant Director-General Bruce Aylward said. “Indeed, it could become endemic again in the entire world.”
The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) promised that it would not use vaccination campaigns in its operations again. The CIA used a fake vaccination drive in Abbottabad to get DNA from Osama bin Laden’s family. Since the CIA operation came to light, a number of health workers working on the polio vaccination campaign have been killed in Pakistan. The CIA’s promise came in response to an open letter sent to President Obama by the deans of 12 US public health schools almost a year and a half ago arguing that disguising “an intelligence-gathering effort as a humanitarian public health service has resulted in serious collateral consequences that affect the public health community”.
In a PLoS Medicine editorial, Marc Lipsitch and Alison Galvani wrote that creating “potential pandemic pathogens” for research purposes poses “substantial risks to human life”. They note that a strain of the H1N1 avian influenza virus that killed people around the world for more than 20 years apparently emerged out of a laboratory accident. Lipsitch and Galvani argued that because of the risk of a global pandemic, we need to find alternatives to “gain-of-function” experiments like recent work making the H5N1 virus more easily transmissible. Lipsitch and Galvani also called for “rigorous, quantitative, impartial risk-benefit assessment” of this type of research. Lipsitch said that while laboratory infection with biological agents is not common, we have nevertheless seen it happen “over and over again”.
The US Government Accountability Office (GAO) said that the US Defense Department is not following its own procedures for protecting against “potentially catastrophic” biological attacks. The Defense Department is supposed to reevaluate the greatest biological threats every year so that it can “develop countermeasures for the most serious and likely biological threat agents.” The Defense Department said that it would review its biodefense programs to “to ensure they align with current planning processes.”
Hong Kong biotechnology venture capital fund Deep Knowledge appointed a software program to its board of investors. The program, called VITAL, is designed to evaluate investment opportunities using data about companies’ financing, clinical trials, and intellectual property. VITAL will get an equal vote on whether the fund should invest in different companies as the other five members of Deep Knowledge’s board. “It’s not what you’d call AI at this stage,” Deep Knowledge spokesperson Charles Groome said. “But that is the long-term goal.”
Stephen Hawking, Stuart Russell, Max Tegmark, and Frank Wilczek—all widely respected professors of physics and computer science— wrote in The Independent that we are not doing enough to make sure that the development of AI doesn’t have disastrous consequences. The potential benefits of AI could include “the eradication of war, disease, and poverty”. But the potential risks of AI are also huge:
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.
The group said that we are doing very little to maximize the benefits and minimize the risks. “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’?” they write. “Probably not—but this is more or less what is happening with AI.”
This news summary was put together in collaboration with Anthropocene. Thanks to Tony Barrett, Seth Baum, Kaitlin Butler, and Grant Wilson for help compiling the news.
For last month’s news summary, please see GCR News Summary April 2014.
You can help us compile future news posts by putting any GCR news you see in the comment thread of this blog post, or send it via email to Grant Wilson (grant [at] gcrinstitute.org).
