“Questions of how a new technology will change the way we work have only become more pressing since OpenAI’s Chat-GPT burst onto the scene in late 2022. Since then, we’ve seen frenzied predictions of how AI will upend American jobs — perhaps even doing away with the need to work altogether. Some wonder if their careers will even exist in a few years. Chances are, they will, but the tasks they do might be different. How exactly that will happen can feel obscure, but it’s been happening in much the same way for decades if not centuries. To put a human face on the way technology changes jobs, visit a fried chicken spot called Sansan Chicken in New York City’s East Village. There, the cashier takes your order over Zoom, from over 8,000 miles away in the Philippines. Another worker in the kitchen slides your order through a small window when it’s ready. These workers are employed by a company called Happy Cashier, which contracts them out to a handful of NYC-based restaurants. The big draw of Happy Cashier is that it saves the restaurants money, as the average hourly wage of a cashier in the Philippines is about $1, based on Indeed’s data. Happy Cashier’s ‘virtual assistants’ make $3 per hour, according to the New York Times. While video calling isn’t bleeding-edge tech, the Zoom cashier captures what often happens when an industry integrates new tech into its business model: Jobs don’t really disappear, they just shrink, along with their paycheck, and this degradation is presented as the natural outcome of automation and technological progress. Modern tech has allowed more industries to chop up jobs into smaller parts and to send many of those parts to underpaid workers overseas. The offshoring of American jobs is most immediately associated with the exodus of manufacturing work that kicked into high gear in the 1980s, but a great deal of foreign outsourcing has occurred in the digital age: think social media content moderation, customer support, and even virtual personal assistants. Silicon Valley can still be summed up by the famous labeling found on Apple products: designed in California, assembled in China. (Or, these days, the Philippines.) Now, with AI poised to automate new industries, instead of commanding a salary of $50,000 per year for taking charge of a whole range of tasks from start to finish, you might eke out a fraction of that for doing just a part of the work, the rest of the tasks fulfilled by an AI function.” (Whizy Kim/Vox)
“RUSSIAN MERCENARIES ARE chasing one of the world’s most notorious fugitives: the warlord Joseph Kony, who abducted tens of thousands of children from across central Africa, brutalizing and brainwashing them as child soldiers and sex slaves in a decadeslong maelstrom of terror … To understand the Wagner operation in pursuit of Kony, Rolling Stone connected with a rebel group whose members witnessed portions of the April 7 attack and its aftermath near a village in eastern Central African Republic called Yemen (like the country). As the rebel group — UPC, or Union for Peace in Central Africa — was on the move in the hinterlands, a rebel commander named Ousmane relayed the account from fighters on the ground in a series of voice messages. ‘At least four people were killed, including two civilians and two Wagner,’ Ousmane says, adding that Kony was ‘still in the area’ as of April 8. The operation began when 14 defectors from Kony’s ‘Lord’s Resistance Army,’ or the LRA, surrendered to a group of men posing as Central African Republic government forces at the end of March. The men were, in fact, a Chadian armed group affiliated with Wagner, which often partners with local militias to support its operations. The defection occurred in Central African Republic’s Haute-Kotto Prefecture, a wooded savanna of more than 33,800 square miles — larger than South Carolina — with few roads and numerous isolated villages. Its dense shrublands and intricate network of rivers, streams, and pools is a haven for armed groups, ivory smugglers, and poachers, and it has long been key to Kony’s survival.” (Mac William Bishop/RS)
“On 23 May, President William Ruto will begin a state visit to the U.S. The trip will be closely watched in East Africa and beyond … Kenyan and U.S. officials will have plenty to cover over the course of the three-day visit. On the security front, Kenya has committed to send a 1,000-person paramilitary police force to battle the gangs that have taken over swathes of the Haitian capital and triggered a devastating humanitarian crisis. Reports over the weekend suggested that U.S. contractors are already on the ground building bases from which the Kenyan forces will operate. The two sides remain apart on a number of issues, however, with Nairobi demanding the U.S. do more to rally financial support for the UN basket fund that will cover the mission’s costs. Kenya also wants the U.S. to commit greater backing to stemming the flow of arms into Haiti, including from U.S. ports in Florida. The two sides will doubtless also discuss counter-terrorism collaboration. Kenya hosts a U.S. air base in its northern Lamu county and cooperates with U.S. troops in security operations in part aimed at blunting the threat of Al-Shabaab’s lethal insurgency in neighbouring Somalia.Regional diplomacy is likely to feature, too. Kenya pulled its troops out of the Democratic Republic of Congo in December 2023, and, partly at Washington’s urging, continues trying to play a role in brokering a settlement among the numerous armed groups in that country’s conflict-riven east. Former President Uhuru Kenyatta is a monitor designated under the tenuous November 2022 agreement that ended the civil war in Ethiopia’s northernmost region Tigray. More recently, Kenya has been hosting talks among factions from South Sudan.” (Meron Elias/The Crisis Group)
“Rafael Grossi slipped into Moscow a few weeks ago to meet quietly with the man most Westerners never engage with these days: President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Mr. Grossi is the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, and his purpose was to warn Mr. Putin about the dangers of moving too fast to restart the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, which has been occupied by Russian troops since soon after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. But as the two men talked, the conversation veered off into Mr. Putin’s declarations that he was open to a negotiated settlement to the war in Ukraine — but only if President Volodymyr Zelensky was prepared to give up nearly 20 percent of his country … Dealing with Iran’s leadership has been even more delicate, and in many ways more vexing, than sparring with Mr. Putin. Two years ago, not long after the I.A.E.A. board passed a resolution condemning Tehran’s government for failing to answer the agency’s questions about suspected nuclear activity, the Iranians began dismantling cameras at key fuel-production facilities. At the time, Mr. Grossi said that if the cameras were out of action for six months or so, he would not be able to offer assurances that fuel had not been diverted to other projects — including weapons projects. That was 18 months ago and since then, the Iranian parliament has passed a law banning some forms of cooperation with agency inspectors. Meanwhile, the country is steadily enriching uranium to 60 percent purity — perilously close to what is needed to produce a bomb … Last week, Mr. Grossi was in Tehran to take up all these issues with the foreign minister, Hossein Amir Abdollahian, and with the head of Iran’s atomic energy agency. It was just weeks since Iran and Israel had exchanged direct missile attacks, but Mr. Grossi did not detect any immediate decisions to speed up the nuclear program in response. Instead, Iranian officials seemed pleased that they were being taken seriously as a nuclear and a missile power in the region, increasingly on par with Israel — which already has a small nuclear arsenal of its own, though one it does not officially acknowledge.” (David Sanger/NYT)
“Orangutans have a lot to say. And the way they do so may be more complicated and sophisticated than previously appreciated, according to new study in PeerJ Life & Environment. Orangutans, the great apes of Southeast Asia, have a reputation for complex vocal communication. But understanding the nuances of their repertoire has proved challenging for researchers. Wendy Erb, a primatologist with the K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and her team sought to decipher ‘long calls’ between orangutans. Researchers believe they use these vocalizations to communicate over long distances in the rainforests of Indonesia … To reach that conclusion, the team first recorded hundreds of long calls of 13 orangutans over about three years. But the scientific team did much more than just listen to them. First, they broke the calls into 1,033 ‘pulses’— short units within a call with specific characterization, like intensity and frequency. Then they used software to examine 46 types of sound features. The software created spectrograms — visual representations of sound waves. Then, the researcher could zoom in on parts of those waves so they could examine how those snippets both looked and sounded. They also could slow down the sounds to better identify nuances.” (Paul Smaglik/Discover)
“A massive wave of Ukrainian drones and missiles struck oil refineries, ports, and electricity stations in southwestern Russia and Russian-occupied Crimea early Friday. The strike, which Russian authorities said involved more than 100 Ukrainian drones, is Ukraine’s biggest attack in months, as Kyiv aims to destroy military infrastructure and cripple Russia’s oil sector. Residents in the port of Novorossiysk lost power Thursday night after drones hit at least two fuel depots and two oil terminals, the Russian outlet Astra reported, and the Crimean city of Sevastopol experienced rolling blackouts after Russian authorities said an electricity substation was hit. It was the third attack in two days against Sevastopol, where schools were closed on Friday.” (semafor)
“Racial redlining of neighborhoods has been replaced with exclusionary zoning policies that keep low-income families out of certain communities.5 Housing markets are heavily impacted by school district boundaries and attendance zones. And school choice policies create an uneven playing field for families of different socioeconomic means trying to access different schools. The causes of both racial and economic segregation are also more complex than they were in 1954. Although de jure segregation has ended, a number of population changes and educational trends over the past six decades have contributed to changing school compositions, including the creation of new private schools; demographic shifts across school district lines and within them, driven by migration, immigration, and population growth; redrawing school attendance boundaries; and the rise of school choice policies. The increasing diversity of the American school population as well as the variety of factors contributing to school segregation today call for data to understand how these complicated dynamics interact and play out in our nation’s classrooms … Out of 403 metro areas, there are thirty-nine (nearly 10 percent) in which Black–White segregation is over 0.5—meaning the equivalent of a 50-point difference between the racial composition of the average Black student’s school as compared to the average White student’s school. With a variance ratio of 0.5, that means in a metro area where the average Black student’s school is 75 percent Black, the average White student’s school would be just 25 percent Black. Only seven metro areas have similarly high Hispanic–White segregation, just four have such high levels of American Indian–White segregation, and none have equivalently high levels of Asian–White segregation.” (Halley Potter/The Century Foundation)
“On the long list of humiliating things that Donald Trump’s political backers have done over the years in the name of demonstrating their fealty to the Boss, showing up at his New York hush-money trial dressed like Trump hardly rates. Still, it was one of those only-in-2024 moments to see the indicted ex-President head into court this week, flanked by an array of Republican Mini-Mes—including aspiring Vice-Presidential candidates such as North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, and the Ohio Senator J. D. Vance—attired in Trump’s trademark outfit of dark-blue jacket, white shirt, and over-long red tie. Several of them even shot a fund-raising video inside the dingy courthouse with Lara Trump, who, as the newly installed co-chair of the Republican National Committee, has vowed to spend ‘every single penny’ of the Party’s money to reëlect her father-in-law. On Tuesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson appeared outside the Manhattan courthouse to blast the trial as a ‘ridiculous’ political proceeding staged by a ‘corrupt’ legal system. On Thursday, another eleven Republican members of Congress arrived in court, where they could be observed, in uniform, standing behind the only former American President ever to be put on trial as he criticized the criminal case against him as a ‘sham’ and a ‘scam’ that ‘should not happen.’ So many of them came to New York to preen for the cameras, in fact, that they temporarily left House Republicans in Washington without a functional majority, and a House committee vote to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt had to be postponed until Thursday evening. The photo op, as the old saying would have it, must go on. Mitt Romney, a rare anti-Trump holdout in the Senate, was left marvelling to reporters on Capitol Hill about the ‘demeaning’ and ‘embarrassing’ scene.” (Susan B Glasser/TNY)
“‘As the world falls around us, how must we bear its cruelties?’ The words we hear right at the start of George Miller’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga are very much in line with the apocalyptic prologues of most of the films in the Mad Max series. But this time the question never dissipates, haunting Miller’s slow-burn epic like a malignant, merciless spirit. Furiosa feels like a personal and perhaps necessary counterpoint to the exhilarations of Mad Max: Fury Road. That 2015 masterpiece, a belated return to the postapocalyptic-gearhead action series upon which Miller had built his early career, was so rousing that it was easy to lose sight of the bigger, sadder picture. Furiosa — somber, steady, and supremely twisted — is a reminder that none of this stuff is really supposed to be cool. ‘We are the already dead, Little D, you and me,’ Chris Hemsworth’s sadistic warlord Dementus says to Anya Taylor-Joy’s vengeful Furiosa at one point late in the film, using the nickname he gave her as a child. These are the End Times, and they are the End People. Some Fury Road fans may have forgotten this bleak truth, but Miller clearly wants to remind them (us). A prequel, a revenge tale, and even something of a bildungsroman, the new film begins with young Furiosa (played as a child by Alyla Browne) kidnapped by a group of Dementus’s motorcycle marauders, who are then chased by her mother (Charlee Fraser), a member of the matriarchal Vuvalini tribe. Intending not just to save her daughter but also to make sure no outsiders learn of the Green Place, the Vuvalini’s verdant little oasis, Mom takes the riders out one by one. What makes this early chase so striking is the way Miller presents it as a relay race of dwindling resources: Everyone constantly scrambles to conserve what they have, transferring fuel tanks from one bike to another as soon as one rider goes down. Everything in this movie is always on the verge of running out and dying out.” (Bilge Ebiri/Vulture)
“The year 1988 marks the introduction of a third class of antidepressant drugs, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs, the first and most famous of which, fluoxetine, was trademarked as Prozac. It is difficult to ingest a fatal overdose of Prozac, and its consumption does not entail dietary restrictions. And while MOAIs and tricyclics modify the biochemistry of the brain in opaque ways, Prozac, it was claimed, narrowly targets a particular neurotransmitter, serotonin. When Eli Lilly brought Prozac to market, it asserted that this novel mode of action had created a new, more powerful, and more easily tolerated antidepressant. The sales of the previous generation of antidepressants had been modest—from January to August 1975, they brought in a mere $200 million. That changed rapidly. The cover of the March 26, 1990, issue of Newsweek featured a light-yellow-and-pale-green capsule. Prozac, its readers were informed, was “a breakthrough drug for depression.” And so it proved. As cases of depression soared, so did the market for the new pills. By 1998, Prozac’s annual sales were $2.8 billion. Inevitably, Prozac’s commercial success ensured that the marketplace would be flooded with a host of copycat drugs, the best known of which are Zoloft, Lexapro, and Paxil. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter and hormone that plays a vital role in a host of bodily functions. It has a particularly important role to play in digestion, helping to protect the gut and control bowel function as well as affecting appetite, but it is also important for healing wounds, regulating sleep and body temperature, controlling sexual health, causing feelings of nausea, and more. Excessive levels of serotonin in the gut may heighten a person’s susceptibility to osteoporosis and fractured bones. Reflecting its wide-ranging importance beyond its role as a neurotransmitter, over 90 percent of the serotonin in the body is found in the gut, which is also where it is manufactured as an amino acid from some of the foods we eat. As all this suggests, there is every reason to be concerned about the long-term bodily effects of tampering with serotonin levels, quite apart from its possible effects on mood regulation and the brain.” (Andrew Skull/LARB)
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