Category: Uncategorized

by RUNE MOLLER STAHL

Around Europe, old labor parties have alienated their base by forming grand coalitions with center-right forces. In Denmark, Mette Frederiksen’s Social Democrats have pursued this same strategy with the same dismal results.

Copenhagen saw a historic shift last Tuesday night, following the elections held in the Danish capital and across Denmark. After more than a century of holding power in Copenhagen, the Social Democrats finally lost the mayoralty.

Sisse Marie Welling, from the left-wing Socialist People’s Party (SF) instead claimed the lord mayor’s post within a broad coalition dominated by left-wingers. While the more moderate socialists in SF claimed the top job, the radical left Red-Green Alliance under leader Line Barfod emerged as the largest party with 22.1 percent of the vote. Together, the two socialist parties, supported by a smaller green party, almost secured an outright majority.

Following the election, these left-wing forces managed to create a coalition that did without virtually every other party in city hall. The Social Democrats were excluded even from a role in negotiations. This also saw the once-dominant party stripped of powerful board posts in important municipally led construction and public transport companies, historically central to the development of the city’s infrastructure.

The defeat came after an extremely negative — by Danish standards — campaign attacking the Red-Greens’ Barfod for her background in communist youth politics and denouncing the alliance’s Marxist foundations as a “corrosive, antidemocratic ideology.” Such accusations were remarkable coming from the Social Democrats, a party historically founded on Marxist principles.

This loss is both a substantial and symbolic shift. Copenhagen has been the center of the Danish labor movement since its rise in the 1870s. While other Scandinavian capitals like Oslo and Stockholm have moved rightward politically, Copenhagen has remained a historic bastion of left-wing politics.

Jacobin for more

by HAKKI OCAL

As the U.S. administration remains bound by Israel, Netanyahu drives the country into further extremism

The Atlantic magazine wonders if U.S. President Donald Trump could contain Israel’s hard right because Israel’s extremists, who keep Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the helm of Israel, seem not to be giving up on their ethnic cleansing policy. The Foreign Policy magazine asserts that only Trump could save Israel from its own government, but its editors suspect that even Trump could not stop history from repeating itself in Gaza because the Israeli army keeps planning for many more months of conflict to come, to kill and displace many more Palestinian civilians and to aggravate an already intolerable humanitarian situation.

Trump already began talking smut and using foul language when asked if Netanyahu violates his peace plan. While almost the entire foreign policy and international security team at the White House was in Tel Aviv, as if laughing in their faces, Netanyahu had the Knesset pass a law enabling the government to annex the West Bank. Knesset members also voiced the idea that Gaza City should be “West Shariazed” when the U.S. team was trying to make sure that Trump’s peace plan would not be violated.

Meaning of ‘West-Shariazed’

What is to be “West Shariazed” in the Zionists’ parlance? One of the three major regions of the Arab Partition of Palestine was named the “West Bank” (of the River Jordan or Nahr Al-Sharieat in Arabic) after the Zionists colonized Palestine. Through the policy to occupy, dispossess and settle in the Arab villages, towns, and even cities, or, as Ilan Pappe, an Israeli historian and a leading scientist among Israel’s new historians, calls it, the “urbicide of Palestine,” the Zionist colonialism nearly emptied the Arab partitions of the Arab population.

After the 1967 War, Israel annexed the northern-most Nazareth (Acre) section and implemented a military occupation regime in the middle (West Bank) and the south (Gaza City) sections. The Gaza Strip was under Israeli Military Administration from 1967 to 1994. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon disengaged the Israeli military from Gaza in 2004 and the actual unilateral dismantlement of the Zionist settlements occurred in 2005. However, the decision to disengage from Gaza was largely opposed by the Israeli hard right; they supported Netanyahu’s government with a six-vote majority in the Knesset in exchange for the promise to reoccupy Gaza and allow resettlement. Meanwhile, occupation, settlements and occasional annexation continued in the West Bank.

Now, Netanyahu’s accomplices in war crimes and genocide in Gaza, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, pushed the annexation of the West Bank and called for the same military regime to be implemented in Gaza after the dissolution of Hamas: hence, “West-Shariazing Gaza.”

U.S. officials should wake up

Meanwhile, a “senior American official” said that if Netanyahu screws up the Gaza deal, Trump will screw him! However, using foul language is not going to work on Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir or Smotrich. Neither would issuing “stark warnings” to Netanyahu if he allows the cease-fire to collapse!

Daily Sabah for more

by EVANS MUCHUI

Hustlerfund, a mobile lending application in Kenya advances a 20-year-old woman named Khamba to stock up her fruit stall in Nakura. In another seven days, it has almost doubled. In a case where she is a day and a day late in paying, the platform starts sending messages to her entire contact list labelling her as a thief. Lagos, a young man, is a ride-hailing driver who borrows a N15,000 loan to fix his bike. He makes it back punctually over a period of months, but his credit limit does not change much. Rather, his information is repackaged on other portals, and he is profiled as owing more money.

These tales exist across the whole continent. They are the symptoms of a system that becomes similar to financial extraction, which is disguised by the language of inclusion. The African digital lending boom is frequently celebrated as an innovation, but in reality it may run just like a new colonial infrastructure, and it is not carried out using force but rather through algorithms, information capture, and pressure to repay debts.

From Taxation To Digital Dependence

Earlier colonialist governments would impose labour with a corrective form of tax regime. The digital lenders do not usurp the land and labour, they take away personal data, patterns of behaviour and future income today. The instant credit, short repayment cycles and obscurant pricing are helping to push borrowers toward a state of dependency. What is a form of access soon turns into a trap.

Access to credit is not the adversary. Mobile lending is the sole financial lifeline to millions of Africans, small entrepreneurs and gig workers as well as continual traders. What is at question and the way that access is organized. Thousands of platforms work within the cycles of high frequency borrowing, undisclosed fees rather than the open interest rates, and practical annual rates of up to 100 percent to half a million. It can even cause automatic harassment to people other than the borrower when default occurs, such as friends, employers and family. These are not financial instruments. They are pressure systems.

A Pan-African Pattern

Powerful credit ecosystems were established on early products in Kenya such as M-Shwari, Tala and Fuliza. They have gone viral and so has their criticism as the increase in the debt pressure and digital bullying incited the Central Bank to act.

In Nigeria, dozens of quick loan apps, most of which are offshore related, were sanctioned by the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission, and delisted. However, many we re-named and re-appeared. Unregulated fintech are increasing in Ghana, Uganda, Tanzania and South Africa due to increasing trends of mobile money. The trend is quite clear: technology at the cost of regulation, and profit at ethics.

Regulation Helps – But It Is Not Enough

African administrations are on the alert. They now license digital lending by the Central Bank of Kenya. Nigeria enforced stricter measures on the protection of data and outlawed organised blackmail and harassment for debt collection purposes. The South African government regulates the cost through the National Credit Regulator.

These steps matter. However, they are reactive rather than proactive. It takes the negative pain of heinous public crimes or scandals before regulators take action. Because of this, it is devastatingly worse that with some fragmentation of enforcement, companies arbitrarily have been able to hop jurisdictions, moving between those with a stiffer movement system and those with a less stiff one.

Africa should have standardised digital credit, preferably within the field of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA). A common continental standard would be able to guarantee:

• Complete transparency instead of masqueraded service fees.
• Limit in data-use and audit trails on data-use.
• Outlaw recovery methods based on harassment.
• Introduce egional borrower dispute mechanisms.

Even so, financial sovereignty will not be ensured unless regulation is upheld by banning coercive tactics used by lenders when trying to recover borrowed money from borrowers.

Beyond Regulation – Towards Financial Sovereignty

Cooperative finance has a long history in Africa. These systems exist on social trust, community reinvestment, accountability. The challenge and opportunity lies in how to digitise these indigenous models rather than bring in outside templates that aim at extracting profits.

Consider online lending cooperatives owned by users that have members who are also shareholders. Consider communal credit fund depositories, which are supported by open governance and split up. Consider having open-source credit-scoring systems, whose operation is directed by social organisations or co-operatives and not cartels and greedy private investors.

Innovation would not be substituted by these models. Rather, with local ownership and dignity these models would redefine it. Authentic inclusion also needs to be participation in the governance, rather than the dependency of imported applications.

A Financial Revolution -But Whose?

The digital finance revolution that Africa has been experiencing is not imaginary, but a revolution is assessed in terms of results, not press releases. Does instant credit simply lead to bond citizens indebted to never ending cycles of micro-debt? Does it make the small traders strong or are the old extractive hierarchies being reproduced in a new form?

African Arguments for more

by DEAN BAKER

I haven’t given my diatribe on cheap drugs for a while, but what the hell. It’s a huge deal and no one in a position of power gives a damn (just like the housing bubble), but I’ll keep trying. 

Just to remind everyone of where things stand, drugs are cheap. The government makes them expensive with patent monopolies and other forms of protection. 

There are all sorts of self-imagined progressive types who see their goal in life as getting the government to rein in the market to end poverty and reduce inequality. In the case of prescription drugs, the problem is the government, not the market. 

Drugs are almost invariably cheap to manufacture and distribute. They would sell for $10, $20, or $30 per prescription in a free market. The reason people end up paying tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars for drugs they need for their health or life is because the government prevents competition that would bring prices down close to the drug’s cost. 

We need to pay for the development of drugs, but we don’t need patent monopolies for that. We used to spend over $50 billion a year for biomedical research through the NIH and other government agencies. We would need to spend perhaps three times that amount to replace the research now supported through patent monopolies. 

That additional $100 billion sounds like a lot of money, except we would likely save on the order of $550 billion a year on what we spend on drugs. We currently spend over $720 billion a year for drugs that would likely sell for around $150 billion in a free market. 

The difference of more than $550 billion a year comes to more than $4,000 per household. It’s more than the tax breaks in Trump’s big bill. This is a huge amount of money that the government is transferring every year from the rest of us to the people in a position to benefit from patent monopolies. But somehow, we are all just supposed to accept that this is the free market. 

I was reminded of how corrupt and immoral this system is when I recorded a podcast with Joe Stiglitz, who has written extensively on intellectual property, as well as many other areas. In addition to making drugs expensive or altogether unaffordable for hundreds of millions of people around the world, these monopolies hugely hampered the response to the pandemic.

Rather than trying to get vaccines, tests, and treatments produced and distributed as widely as possible, the international community focused on setting up structures to ensure that the pharmaceutical industry would be adequately compensated. Arguably the structure already existed with the compulsory licensing terms that were put in place in the Doha round of the WTO, but that is really beside the point. 

The issue of distribution of vaccines and drugs is completely separable from the question of appropriate compensation for the pharmaceutical industry. Common sense would have dictated that the countries with the necessary technology and expertise do everything possible to maximize production of pandemic related vaccines and treatments immediately. 

The debate over appropriate compensation could have proceeded on a separate track and taken as long as necessary. There was no emergency in determining compensation for Pfizer or Moderna. If it took a year or two to iron out a fair level of compensation, that would be no big deal. Getting out the vaccines and treatments was an emergency involving tens of millions of lives. 

Some of us had vague hopes that Trump might actually do something to rein in the pharmaceutical industry. In his campaign he complained about high drug prices. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., his Secretary for Health and Human Services, has made a career complaining about corruption in the industry, so there was some basis for thinking he might look to fundamentally change the industry’s business model

CEPR for more

by GREY ANDERSON

In January 2022, Richard Bruce Cheney made a surprise appearance on the floor of Congress. His return to Capitol Hill marked the anniversary of the ruckus that briefly delayed certification of election results the previous year. Cheney, accustomed to rough words from his opponents, found himself in an improvised receiving line. ‘No Republicans showed up’, the New York Times recounted,

But Democrats in the House, including the Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, were effervescent. After 13 years in retirement and of all-but-unimaginable changes in American life wrought by the rise and fall of President Trump, Mr Cheney and Liz Cheney were engulfed by a parade of Democratic well-wishers, many of whom had once called the former vice president a war criminal. The Democrats shook Mr Cheney’s hand, and some embraced Ms Cheney, who introduced him to her erstwhile colleagues, saying: ‘This is my father. This is Dad.’ It was a stunning moment and an emblem of how much had changed in the Trump era.

Pelosi praised his attendance, declaring that, whatever past quarrels, they had never differed over their commitment to ‘honoring our oath of office to support and defend the Constitution’; Steny Hoyer saluted Liz Cheney ‘for having the courage to stand up for truth’; Adam Schiff looked back misty-eyed to ‘a time when there were broad policy differences, but there were no differences when it came to both parties’ devotion to the idea of democracy’. ‘It’s an important historical event’, Cheney explained when asked what drew him to Washington to commemorate the January 6^th ‘insurrection’: ‘I was honoured and proud . . . to recognize this anniversary, to commend the heroic actions of law enforcement that day, and to reaffirm our dedication to the Constitution’. Media accolades did not save his daughter’s seat in Congress from a MAGA primary challenge, although the Resistance circuit offered a lucrative fallback. When he endorsed Kamala Harris last September, Cheney said of Trump ‘there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic’.

Twenty-five years ago, Cheney displayed a different attitude towards the sacral rites of democratic transition. As lawyers contested George W. Bush’s razor-thin Florida margin, his running mate took charge of a privately funded transition operation based at his McLean residence, preparing a presidential team before an official victor was declared. Recounts stalled in Miami-Dade and the courts deliberated over ‘hanging chads’; Cheney nonetheless pressed ahead, bringing in Ari Fleischer as spokesman and vetting cabinet nominees all while the General Services Administration refused to release federal resources. He declared Florida’s certification to be conclusive, dismissed Gore’s legal challenges as an exercise in denial and warned that any hesitation in assembling a government would jeopardize national security. Meetings with congressional leaders in Austin followed, signalling that the administration-in-waiting intended to behave as though the matter were settled. The haste was not improvised. In truth, the VP-elect had devoted the better part of a long career to reflection on the relays of power.

He wasn’t born to it. Raised in Wyoming by New Dealer parents, Cheney won admission to Yale through connections of his future wife, Lynne, only to flunk out twice. A period of drift and minor alcohol-related scrapes back West ended when she insisted on a more disciplined course. Five draft deferments later, by his mid-thirties he was serving in the Office of Economic Opportunity as deputy to Donald Rumsfeld, whom he followed into the Ford Administration and eventually replaced as chief of staff to the president. A Watergate survivor, he learned the lesson of Nixon’s collapse: ‘Don and I survived and prospered in that environment because we didn’t leave a lot of paper lying around’, he observed. At the White House he proved a virtuoso of bureaucratic manoeuvre. He and Rumsfeld eased Rockefeller off the 1976 ticket, sidelined Kissinger and conspired to extinguish détente. Quiet, relentless, Cheney rarely took credit; he showed an appetite for minutiae and stamina for unglamorous work, seeing to it that the West Wing plumbing got fixed and cruets were replaced on the presidential table. Colleagues remembered a discreet, preternaturally middle-aged man, his distinguishing features a lawless smirk and ‘snake-cold eyes, like a Cheyenne gambler’s’, as another Ford adviser recalled.

NLR for more

by MARY J. SCOURBOUTAKOS

It starts with a slight scratchiness at the back of your throat.

Then, a sneeze.

Then coughing, sniffling and full-on congestion, with or without fever, for a few insufferable days.

Viral upper respiratory tract infections – also known as the common cold – afflict everyone, typically three times per year, lasting, on average, nine days.

Colds don’t respond to antibiotics, and most over-the-counter medications deliver modest results at best.

In recent years, research has emerged demonstrating the effectiveness of the ancient practice of nasal saline irrigation in fighting the common cold in both adults and children.

Not only does nasal saline irrigation decrease the duration of illness, it also reduces viral transmission to other people, minimizes the need for antibiotics and could even lower a patient’s risk of hospitalization. Better yet, it costs pennies and doesn’t require a prescription.

I’m both an adjunct assistant professor of medicine and a practicing physician. As a family doctor, I see the common cold every day. My patients are usually skeptical when I first recommend nasal saline irrigation. However, they frequently return to tell me that this practice has changed their life. Not only does it help with upper respiratory viruses, but it also helps manage allergies, chronic congestion, postnasal drip and recurrent sinus infections.

What is nasal saline irrigation?

Nasal saline irrigation is a process by which the nasal cavity is bathed in a saltwater solution. In some studies, this is accomplished using a pump-action spray bottle.

In others, participants used a traditional neti pot, which is a vessel resembling a teapot.

This practice of nasal irrigation originated in the Ayurvedic tradition, which is a system of alternative medicine from India dating back more than 5,000 years.

The neti pot can be traced back to the 15th century. It garnered mainstream interest in the U.S. in 2012 after Dr. Oz demonstrated it on the “Oprah Winfrey Show.” But it’s not the only device that has historically been employed for such purposes. Ancient Greek and Roman physicians had their own nasal lavage devices. Such practices were even discussed in medical journals such as The Lancet over a century ago, in 1902.

How does nasal saline irrigation work?

Nasal saline has a few key benefits. First, it physically flushes debris out of the nasal passage. This not only includes mucus and crust, but also the virus itself, along with allergens and other environmental contaminants.

The Conversation for more

by B. R. GOWANI

This song’s heart wrenching lyrics were written by the revolutionary poet Sahir Ludhianvi and is from the 1956 Indian film Chandrakanta. The great Mohammed Rafi sang it to the music of Datta Naik i.e., N. Datta.

Original lyrics in Hindi/Urdu

maiN ne chAnd aur sitAroN ki tamannA ki thi

maiN ne chAnd aur sitAroN ki tamannA ki thi
mujh ko rAtoN ki siyAhi ke sivA kuchh na milA

maiN vo naghmA huuN jise pyAr ki mehfil na mili
vo musAfir huuN jise koi bhi manzil na mili
zakhm pAe haiN bahAroN ki tamannA ki thi
maiN ne chANd aur sitAroN ki tamannA ki thi

kisi gesu kisi ANchal kA sahArA bhi nahiN
rAste meN koi dhuNdlA sA sitAra bhi nahiN
meri nazroN ne nazAroN ki tamannA ki thi
maiN ne chANd aur sitAroN ki tamannA ki thi

dil meiN nAkAm umidoN ke basere pAe *
roshni lene ko niklA to aNdhere pAe
raNg aur noor ke dhAroN ki tamannA ki thi
maiN ne chANd aur sitAroN ki tamannA ki thi

meri rAhoN se judA ho gaeeN rAheN un ki
Aj badli nazar Ati hai nigAheN un ki
jin se is dil ne sahAroN ki tamannA ki thi
maiN ne chANd aur sitAroN ki tamannA ki thi

pyaar mANgA to sisakte hue armAn mile
chain chAhA to umaDte hue tufAn mile
Dubte dil ne kinAroN kI tamannA kI thI
maiN ne chANd aur sitAroN kI tamannA kI thI

Translation

my desire was the moon and the stars
received nothing but the dark of the night

I am the song that didn’t find any audience of love
I am the traveler who didn’t find any destination
I have received wounds instead of the spring I desired
my desire was the moon and the stars

I found no refuge in any tresses nor any arms
I found not even a blurry star on my path
my eyes had desired a beautiful enounter
my desire was the moon and the stars

I found failed hopes nestled in my heart
I wanted to attain light but only found darkness
I had desired the stream of colorful luminosity
my desire was the moon and the stars

my path has diverged from the path of my love
I find today her glance towards me is altered
the one from whom my heart had desired shelter
my desire was the moon and the stars

I had asked for love, instead gained sighs of longing
I wanted tranquility, but I got surging storms
my sinking heart had desired the shore
my desire was the moon and the stars

*This verse was not part of the song and that’ why it is mising in the above video.

B. R. Gowani can be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com

by JOHN GOWLETT

In pursuit of knowledge, the evolution of humanity ranks with the origins of life and the universe. And yet, except when an exciting find hits the headlines, palaeoanthropology and its related fields have gained far less scientific support and funding – particularly for scientists and institutions based in the African countries where so many landmark discoveries have occurred.

One of the first was made a century ago in Taung, South Africa, by mineworkers who came across the cranium of a 2.8 million-year-old child with human-like teeth. Its fossilised anatomy offered evidence of early human upright walking – and 50 years later, in the Afar region of northern Ethiopia that would become a hotspot for ancient human discovery, this understanding took another leap backwards in time with the discovery of Lucy.

The part-skeleton of this small-bodied, relatively small-brained female captured the public’s imagination. Lucy the “paleo-rock star” took our major fossil evidence for bipedal walking, human-like creatures (collectively known as hominins) beyond 3 million years for the first time. The race to explain how humans became what we are now was well and truly on.

Since then, the picture has changed repeatedly and dramatically, shaped by waves of new fossil discovery, technology and scientific techniques – often accompanied by arguments about the veracity of claims made for each new piece of the puzzle.

Even the term “human” is arguable. Many scholars reserve it for modern humans like us, even though we have Neanderthal genes and they shared at least 90% of our hominin history from its beginnings around 8 million years ago. The essence of hominin evolution ever since has been gradual change, with occasional rapid phases. The record of evolution in our own genus, Homo, is already full enough to show we cannot separate ourselves with hard lines.

Nonetheless, there is enough consensus to thread the story of human evolution all the way from early apes to modern humanity. Most of this story centres on Africa, of course, where countries such as Kenya, South Africa and Ethiopia are rightly proud of their heritage as “cradles of humankind” – providing many of their schoolchildren with a much fuller answer then those in the west to this deceptively simple question: how did we get here?

Early apes to ‘hominisation’ (around 35m to 8m years ago)

The story of human evolution usually starts at the point our distant ancestors began to separate from the apes, whose own ancestors are traceable from at least 35 million years ago and are well attested as fossils. Around 10 million years ago, the Miocene world was warm, moist and forested. Apes lived far and wide from Europe to China, though we have found them especially in Africa, where sediments of ancient volcanoes preserve their remains.

This world was soon to be disrupted by cooling temperatures and, in places, great aridity – best seen around the Mediterranean, where continental movements closed off the Straits of Gibraltar and the whole sea evaporated several times, leaving immense salt deposits under the floor of the modern sea. Widespread drying was reported from around 7 to 6 million years ago, leading to a stronger expression of seasons in much of the world, and changes in plant and animal communities.

The Conversation for more

by NICOLA JONES

Blending ‘old-fashioned’ logic systems with the neural networks that power large language models is one of the hottest trends in artificial intelligence.

Will computers ever match or surpass human-level intelligence — and, if so, how? When the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), based in Washington DC, asked its members earlier this year whether neural networks — the current star of artificial-intelligence systems — alone will be enough to hit this goal, the vast majority said no. Instead, most said, a heavy dose of an older kind of AI will be needed to get these systems up to par: symbolic AI.

Sometimes called ‘good old-fashioned AI’, symbolic AI is based on formal rules and an encoding of the logical relationships between concepts¹. Mathematics is symbolic, for example, as are ‘if–then’ statements and computer coding languages such as Python, along with flow charts or Venn diagrams that map how, say, cats, mammals and animals are conceptually related. Decades ago, symbolic systems were an early front-runner in the AI effort. However, in the early 2010s, they were vastly outpaced by more-flexible neural networks. These machine-learning models excel at learning from vast amounts of data, and underlie large language models (LLMs), as well as chatbots such as ChatGPT.

Now, however, the computer-science community is pushing hard for a better and bolder melding of the old and the new. ‘Neurosymbolic AI’ has become the hottest buzzword in town. Brandon Colelough, a computer scientist at the University of Maryland in College Park, has charted the meteoric rise of the concept in academic papers (see ‘Going up and up’). These reveal a spike of interest in neurosymbolic AI that started in around 2021 and shows no sign of slowing down².

Plenty of researchers are heralding the trend as an escape from what they see as an unhealthy monopoly of neural networks in AI research, and expect the shift to deliver smarter and more reliable AI.

A better melding of these two strategies could lead to artificial general intelligence (AGI): AI that can reason and generalize its knowledge from one situation to another as well as humans do. It might also be useful for high-risk applications, such as military or medical decision-making, says Colelough. Because symbolic AI is transparent and understandable to humans, he says, it doesn’t suffer from the ‘black box’ syndrome that can make neural networks hard to trust.

There are already good examples of neurosymbolic AI, including Google DeepMind’s AlphaGeometry, a system reported last year³ that can reliably solve maths Olympiad problems — questions aimed at talented secondary-school students. But working out how best to combine neural networks and symbolic AI into an all-purpose system is a formidable challenge.

“You’re really architecting this kind of two-headed beast,” says computer scientist William Regli, also at the University of Maryland.

War of words

In 2019, computer scientist Richard Sutton posted a short essay entitled ‘The bitter lesson’ on his blog (see go.nature.com/4paxykf). In it, he argued that, since the 1950s, people have repeatedly assumed that the best way to make intelligent computers is to feed them with all the insights that humans have arrived at about the rules of the world, in fields from physics to social behaviour. The bitter pill to swallow, wrote Sutton, is that time and time again, symbolic methods have been outdone by systems that use a ton of raw data and scaled-up computational power to leverage ‘search and learning’. Early chess-playing computers, for example, that were trained on human-devised strategies were outperformed by those that were simply fed lots of game data.

Nature for more