Current Events by John R. Patrick – 04/21/2023
I changed the name of this section from What’s new? to Current Events by John R. Patrick. Feedback told me there was some confusion about “news”. The In The News section contains news about a new publication by me or a news story which mentions me or is about me.The Current Events by John R. Patrick blog posts contain snippets of current events I am following. Some of the topical areas change from time to time. The following are the current topics. Please send feedback on this new section to j[email protected].
Not only is AI exploding but news coverage about it may be exploding even more. We could easily spend all of our waking hours reading articles, blog posts, tweets, podcasts, conference notes, research papers, and on and on. The Wall Street Journal, on Friday morning, published an article titled “The 25 Questions You Need to Ask Yourself Now That ChatGPT Is Here”. The article describes how “artificial intelligence raises all sorts of issues that we’re only beginning to address. There’s a lot to work out.” It could take a very long time to read and absorb the article. If you have time, you can read it here. I read a lot of articles but only a fraction of what is out there. The one I find the most scary was published by The Economist titled, “It doesn’t take much to make machine-learning algorithms go awry“. The article is about data poisoning. Bad actors can post information into Wikipedia and other sources we trust which is misinformation. As the large language models digest the content of the web, they can include the bad stuff, which can cause a lot of bad things. There are many other negative and risky things to say about AI, but I will continue to focus on the many positives of AI, especially in healthcare. I wrote about this in Health Attitude: Unraveling and Solving the Complexities of Healthcare.
The chief consultant of the department of organizational work of the head of the Ukraine President’s Office, the losses from the Russian aggression were calculated to be $700 billion.
According to his information, the occupiers destroyed and damaged:
- 74.4 thousand residential buildings;
- 2,500 educational institutions;
- 500 hospitals;
- 400 cultural buildings;
- 120 religious buildings;
- 4.5 thousand objects of networks and communications;
- 114 energy facilities.
Even if you cut the numbers in half, it is horrifying. Ukraine will take all measures to make Russia compensate for this damage. It will take about 5-7 years, in the worst case — up to 10 years. You can see for yourself on Telegram.
In addition to the disturbing list, more than 77,000 alleged facts of Russian war crimes have been registered in Ukraine.
Crypto had a nice rally this week. Why? A myriad set of variables around the world set the pace for crypto. Ethereum had a big breakthrough to $2,100. This is due to a blockchain update which will make trades on ETH easier. The market seems to like the change. Overall, crypto market cap is $1.3 trillion with Bitcoin representing 46% of the total. The rest of the 23,387 cryptocurrencies was 34% and ETH was about 20%. Regulatory debate is heating up. I view this as a positive. Some think the SEC will totally shut down crypto. I do not think so. We need regulation but not strangulation.
NFT sales broke $2 billion in March
Another up and down week. Some gains, some losses. GAMMAT stocks are up to $8.2 trillion. The government wants to take them on but can’t get their act together. As I have long predicted, tech will outsmart congress. The senate is looking like an assisted living home.