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| Does feminism have mummy issues?Boomer grannies have lost the plot-Freud didn’t really understand women. This is not an original point: it was first made by Freud himself. According to his biographer Ernest Jones, Freud admitted: “The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?’”Nonetheless, he had a go at making sense of us — and especially how we mature. Male children are, he thought, animated by an infantile desire to possess their mother and destroy their father: the Oedipus complex. But things are different for girls, who must first get over their resentment at their mother for having birthed them without a penis. Only having done this, Freud thought, would women come to identify with their mothers and embrace female gender roles. Though Freud never used the term, Jung dubbed it the “Electra complex”, and it stuck.Freud’s convoluted attempts to make sense of women have been largely discarded by modern psychology. But the “Electra complex” does capture something important and true: relationships between mothers and daughters can be both intensely close and also, at the same time, bitterly ambivalent.Lighter fuel was poured on this cauldron of woes last week, in an article celebrating three older women hell-bent on smashing every grandmotherly stereotype out there. There’s no need, we gather, for a grandmother to sit about “patting her blue rinse while knitting quietly in a corner” as former Page 3 girl Jilly Johnson puts it, or “under pressure to tone down our behaviour and stay in the kitchen”, as journalist Jane Gordon scornfully suggests.Instead, grandmothers are taking a leaf from Demi Moore’s book and embracing their “hot kooky unhinged grandma era”. In this vision, the role of grandma is to be “unconventional”: challenging authority, flouting routines, giving your grandkids inappropriate things for breakfast, and doing “crazy things” with them. It left me wondering what their adult daughters make of “fun, crazy ‘Glammy’” and “Bubbie Bonkers”?Perhaps it doesn’t matter. The women featured are an actress, a journalist and a model: hardly representative of everyday life. Surely most grandmas aren’t like this? Except that boomer-age “Glammies” abound in real life too. The American conservative writer Helen Roy grumbled recently that “boomer grandparentism” means liberally dispensing parenting advice, while withholding all practical help and insisting on being called anything but “Grandma”.The response resembled an intergenerational online bloodbath, which rather suggests the topic is something of a sore point. And nor is anecdotal evidence of “Glammies” difficult to find. Emma, 31, a London-based mother to one toddler, reports that her mother-in-law claimed to be “too busy” to travel 90 minutes to see her first grandchild – all the while training for her first marathon.It’s not a British phenomenon either: Clare, 30, from South Carolina, tells me that her own mother has little interest in helping with Clare’s baby and young toddler, often “because she has a hair/Botox/facial appt, which she must travel cross-state to attend”. Ellie, 30, a New England mother of two under two, tells me “Our parents are just not interested in cultivating a deep relationship with us or our daughters.” Instead, her mother live-posts her “brief, rare” granny visits to social media for her friends — and never offers to wash up. And she scornfully rejected an offer to live rent-free closer by, in exchange for helping with childcare, as a hostile attempt to reduce her to “just a grandma”.For a young, conservative-leaning mum, with visions of an interconnected, resilient extended family, her own parents’ determinedly atomistic approach to grandparenthood has been profoundly disappointing, Ellie tells me. As she puts it: “Spiritually and emotionally, we feel robbed.”But the attrition of dependency between mothers and daughters cuts both ways. It’s difficult to disaggregate help with childcare from advice on childcare; and young mothers are often fiercely defensive about such unsolicited advice. Mumsnet is full of threads raging at mothers and mothers-in-law who dare to offer parenting tips.The transmission of female-specific forms of knowledge across generations seems to have come unstuck, across the board. But this isn’t just about parenting: in feminist politics, too, Susan Faludi has written about a “matricidal” tendency within the women’s movement. That is, instead of handing the baton on to younger generations, every wave of feminism rejects the achievements of those women who went before. The result is that, as Faludi puts it, “At the core of America’s most fruitful political movement resides a perpetual barrenness.”Faludi attributes this phenomenon — which, she points out, wasn’t a feature in first-wave feminism — to the colonisation of the women’s movement by the individualistic imperatives of consumer capitalism. But in any case, the upshot is a structural problem for feminism and mothers alike. And it’s grounded in the tension between what’s needed for “personhood” in the modern liberal sense, and what’s most conducive to flourishing as a mother.Older cultures have a better grasp of that sense of flourishing — but usually convey it obliquely. Somewhere on my shelves, for example, I have a matryoshka doll: a smiling, apple-cheeked wooden woman famous from Russian toymaking, who opens at the middle to reveal a smaller, smiling, apple-cheeked woman, who in turn opens to reveal another, smaller one and so on.This traditional toy contains a germ of literal truth: for every female baby is born with all the eggs she’ll ever have, already in her uterus. And this means every mother of a daughter carries the germ of her own grandchildren inside her own body, within her unborn granddaughter. As such, matryoshka dolls capture a profound insight about how mothers contain one another in an organismic sense.We do so in a social sense, too — when it works. In Mom Genes, her 2021 book on “the science of moms”, Abigail Tucker shows how the mothers most likely to flourish are those with good support networks — which often means having your own mother close at hand. After my own daughter was born, I was ill for some weeks — and when my husband had to go back to work, my mother was there, weathering my convalescent peevishness and helping in un-glamorous ways: making me a sandwich, changing sheets, watching my newborn so I could shower without fretting.This kind of presence isn’t just for moral support, but has a teaching dimension too. Caring confidently for little children is as much a skill as a matter of instinct. For most of human history, this has been passed on via informal knowledge transfer between generations of women, and within extended families.In contrast, both the Mumsnet advice-rejecters and the “Glammy” grandmothers take, as a basic premise, the idea that mothers don’t need their mothers in any practical sense. Instead, the job of a “Glammy”, per Jane Gordon, is not to support a mother but to circumvent her: “to be as unconventional as possible by helping them to question […] the rules society and their parents impose on them.”Somehow, passing the matriarchal baton has become hopelessly fraught. And it is within modern liberal feminism that the reason for this comes into focus. Faludi quotes an older feminist attendee at a NOW conference who grumbles: “I’m so sick of these young women treating us like a bunch of old bags who need to get out of the way.” I dare say some of the older women whose advice is spurned by angry Mumsnetters may feel much the same. But much of the motive force in modern liberal feminism has concerned pursuing “the radical notion that women are people”, as Marie Shear wrote in 1986. And to be a “person” has come, today, to mean being as far as possible a self-fashioning, unencumbered liberal subject on the model first set out by Jean-Jacques Rousseau — for women, as well as men.But if the ideal is to be unencumbered, what are we to make of those ways we depend on others, or others on us — especially in mothering, or being mothered? When I became a mother, this paradox shattered my reflexive youthful liberalism. And if unencumbered personhood makes mothers invisible, it’s worse still for grandmothers. For here lurks a double dose of caring, combined — in a world hyper-focused on women’s youth and beauty — with the steady fading of both.The feminist Victoria Smith denounces the wider political consequences of this in her book Hags — notably in the political marginalisation of older women. It is, she suggests, powered in part by misogyny, but also by a liberal feminism that is, she tells me, “obsessed with youth”.Inasmuch as women only really fit the Rousseauean “unencumbered” template while young and child-free, perhaps the obsession makes sense. Strikingly, though, it reverberates not just across feminism but also anti-feminism: it’s common in the manosphere to characterise every woman over the age of 30 as “used up”, having “hit the wall” and run out of viable eggs to fertilise.Both mothers and daughters, then, are under pressure to claw their way out of the matryoshka doll toward ‘personhood’. Given this, the miracle should be that many functioning mother/daughter relationships still remain — however fraught with ambivalence some of these may be.Should this continue, the nightmare vision is of a world where mothers and daughters no longer retain even today’s fragile, conflicted interdependence, and instead just orbit one another like work colleagues, or perhaps shopping pals. But if there’s even an iota of insight in Freud’s strange account of the Electra Complex, it’s in suggesting that every generation of women somehow becomes our mothers by rebelling against them.And in some cases, today, this means rebelling against the injunction to be ever less encumbered. Ellie tells me she and her husband struggle constantly with how to start from scratch, building an extended family — but also that this isn’t a reason to give up, or to pretend that they can just “go it alone”. Rather, she says, it’s a reason to be there for her own future extended family: “I just hold out for the long-term vision of helping with our grandchildren.”I suspect Ellie is far from the only mother who dreams of a life that’s perhaps a little less free, but is also infinitely warmer and more nurturing than the individualistic one that has sold us as emancipation. For such women, the work ahead is matricidal, in the sense of rebelling against recent generations of women. But it’s also, paradoxically, matriarchal too: the painstaking lifetime task of putting the matryoshka back together again.
How the world economy could avoid recession-Markets are giddy, but there is a long way to go-Last year markets had a terrible time. So far 2023 looks different. Many indices, including the Euro Stoxx 600, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng and a broad measure of emerging-market share prices, have seen their best start to the year in decades. America’s s&p 500 is up by 5%. Since reaching its peak in October, the trade-weighted value of the dollar has fallen by 7%, a sign that fear about the global economy is ebbing. Even bitcoin has had a good year. Not long ago it felt as though a global recession was nailed on. Now optimism is re-emerging.“Hello lower gas prices, bye-bye recession,” cheered analysts at JPMorgan Chase, a bank, on January 18th, in a report on the euro zone. Nomura, a bank, has revised its forecast of Britain’s forthcoming recession “to something less pernicious [than] what we originally expected”. Citigroup, another bank, said that “the probability of a full-blown global recession, in which growth in many countries turns down in tandem, is now roughly 30% [in contrast with] the 50% assessment that we maintained through the second half of last year.” These are crumbs: the world economy is weaker than at any point since the lockdowns of 2020. But investors will eat anything.Forecasters are in part responding to real-time economic data. Despite talk of a global recession since at least last February, when Russia invaded Ukraine, these data have held up better than expected. Consider a weekly estimate of gdp from the oecd, a group of mostly rich countries which account for about 60% of global output. It is hardly booming, but in mid-January few countries were struggling (see chart 1). Widely watched “purchasing-manager index” measures of global output rose slightly in January, consistent with gdp growth of about 2%.Official numbers remain a mixed bag. Recent figures on American retail sales came in below expectations. Meanwhile, in Japan machinery orders were far weaker than forecast. Yet after reaching an all-time low in the summer, consumer confidence across the oecd has risen. Officials are due to publish their first estimate of America’s gdp growth in the fourth quarter of 2022 on January 26th. Most economists are expecting a decent number, though pandemic disruptions mean these figures will be less reliable than normal.Labour markets seem to be holding up, too. In some rich countries, including Austria and Denmark, joblessness is rising—a tell-tale sign that a recession is looming. Barely a day goes by without an announcement from another big technology firm that it is letting people go. Yet tech accounts for a small share of overall jobs, and in most countries unemployment remains low. Happily, employers across the oecd are expressing their falling demand for labour largely by withdrawing job adverts, rather than sacking people. We estimate that, since reaching an all-time high of more than 30m early last year, unfilled vacancies have fallen by about 10%. The number of people actually in a job has fallen by less than 1% from its peak.Investors pay attention to labour markets, but what they really care about right now is inflation. It is too soon to know if the threat has passed. In the rich world “core” inflation, a measure of underlying pressure, is still 5-6% year on year, far higher than central banks would like. The problem, though, is no longer getting worse. In America core inflation is dropping, as is the share of small firms which plan to raise prices. Another data set, from researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, Morning Consult, a data firm, and Raphael Schoenle of Brandeis University, is a cross-country gauge of public inflation expectations. It also seems to be falling.Two factors explain why the global economy is holding up: energy prices and private-sector finances. Last year the cost of fuel in the rich world rose by well over 20%—and by 60% or more in parts of Europe. Economists expected prices to remain high in 2023, crushing energy-intensive sectors such as heavy industry. On both counts they were wrong. Helped by unseasonably warm weather, companies have proven unexpectedly flexible when it comes to dealing with high costs. In November German industrial gas consumption was 27% lower than normal, yet industrial production was only 0.5% down on the year before. And over the Christmas period European natural-gas prices have fallen by half to levels last seen before Russia invaded Ukraine.The strength of private-sector finances has also made a difference. Our best guess is that families in the g7 are still sitting on “excess” savings—ie, those above and beyond what you would expect them to have accumulated in normal times—of around $3trn (or about 10% of annual consumer spending), accumulated via a combination of pandemic stimulus and lower outlays in 2020-21. As a result their spending today is resilient. They can weather higher prices and a higher cost of credit. Businesses, meanwhile, are still sitting on large cash piles. And few face large debt repayments right now: $600bn of dollar-denominated corporate debt will mature this year, compared with $900bn due in 2025.Can the data continue to beat expectations? There is some evidence, including in a recent paper by Goldman Sachs, a bank, that the heaviest drag on economic growth from tighter monetary policy occurs after about nine months. Global financial conditions started seriously tightening about nine months ago. If the theory holds, then before long the economy might be on surer footing again, even as higher rates start to eat away at inflation. China is another reason to be optimistic. Although the withdrawal of domestic covid-19 restrictions slowed the economy in December, as people hid from the virus, abandoning “zero-covid” will ultimately raise demand for goods and services globally. Forecasters also expect the warm weather in much of Europe to continue.The pessimistic case, however, remains strong. Central banks have a long way to go before they can be sure inflation is under control, especially with China’s reopening pushing up commodity prices. In addition, an economy on the cusp of recession is unpredictable. Once people start losing their jobs, and cutting back on spending, predicting the depths of a downturn becomes impossible. And a crucial lesson from recent years is that if something can go wrong, it often does. But it is nice to have a glimmer of hope all the same.
How much innovation is necessary to see off fossil fuels?Mark Jacobson contributes to an urgent debate in “No Miracles Needed”“The stone age did not end for lack of stone, and the Oil Age will end long before the world runs out of oil.” That sounds like the oath of environmentalists opposed to the use of fossil fuels. In fact, the prediction was made by Sheikh Zaki Yamani, a Saudi Arabian oil minister who shot to prominence as the face of the Arab oil embargo of 1973. He was convinced that innovations in alternative energy sources and fuels would ultimately loosen oil’s grip on the global economy.It has not happened yet. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the first oil shock. Far from innovating its way to a clean-energy future, the world slipped into complacency as the disruptions of the 1970s faded from memory. Oil, coal and natural gas still make up over four-fifths of the world’s primary energy supply. That addiction—plus a concatenation of war, policy mistakes and economic trends—has now inflicted another energy crunch on the world. Will this squeeze also be forgotten, or could it lead to an overdue revolution in energy?There are two reasons to think change is coming. The first force is familiar: geopolitics. Five decades ago, it was the oiligopolists of the opec cartel who clumsily manipulated energy markets. This time Russia, an oil-and-gas powerhouse, has provided an ugly reminder of the dangers of relying on nasty authoritarian regimes. The second factor is rising anxiety about climate change. To avoid its worst effects, almost 200 countries have agreed to restrain emissions of greenhouse gases (ghgs); many are already moving towards a decarbonised energy system. Those twin forces have redoubled efforts to phase out fossil fuels.Responding to cuts in gas supplies from Russia, the European Commission has put in place aggressive policies to ramp up home-grown renewable alternatives, including electricity from wind power and green hydrogen. The International Energy Agency (iea), an official forecaster, predicts that full implementation of existing policies alone will lead to peaks in global consumption of coal and gas by 2030 and of oil by the mid-2030s. The hard question is what happens after that. Will innovation end the Oil Age, as Yamani predicted?That hope is championed by a camp of thinkers which includes Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft. In an influential recent book, Mr Gates argued that the pressing need to decarbonise the global economy requires big bets on a variety of nascent but promising technologies, ranging from advanced nuclear energy to “direct air capture” of ghgs. He warned against placing too much faith in wind and solar power, highlighting the constraints imposed by their intermittent generation.Investing in potential breakthroughs may seem uncontroversial. John Kerry, America’s special presidential envoy for climate change, discovered it is not. In the run-up to a un climate summit in Glasgow in 2021, he pointed to scientific assessments suggesting that perhaps half of ghg reductions needed by the middle of this century will “come from technologies we don’t yet have”. Mr Kerry was denounced by those who saw that as an attack on existing technologies. Michael Mann, a climate scientist, dismissed his comment as “pernicious technophilia”. Greta Thunberg, an activist, declared: “Great news! I spoke with Harry Potter and he said he will team up with Gandalf, Sherlock Holmes and the Avengers and get started right away!”Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks-Now Mark Jacobson, an influential engineering professor at Stanford University—whose research was the basis of the policy approach known as “ the Green New Deal”—is furthering the debate. In “No Miracles Needed” he says the world must urgently tackle the related scourges of global warming, energy insecurity and local air pollution. This, he insists, will require no “miracle technologies”. On the contrary, “we have 95% of the technologies that we need already commercially available. We also know how to build the rest.” The heart of his plan is a dramatic expansion of wind and solar power (alongside some hydro- and geothermal energy) and, relatedly, of energy storage and transmission.At first blush, that sounds plausible. Wind and solar are not only commercially viable and operating at scale around the world; they are the cheapest forms of new power generation in most countries. Renewable capacity is set to grow by 2,400gw from 2022 to 2027, equal to the entire power capacity in China today.Meanwhile, the technologies involved in power transmission are so well-established that America’s National Academy of Engineering hailed grid electrification as the greatest engineering feat of the 20th century. And though energy storage is not yet ubiquitous and affordable, large battery-based systems are operating successfully on grids from California to Australia.Professor Jacobson’s scholarly and analytical book is persuasive in other ways, too. In common with Mr Gates, he believes everything that can reasonably be electrified should be. He rightly denounces the inefficiency of internal-combustion engines and other fossil-burning generators in comparison with electric alternatives. He acknowledges that long-distance transport and certain industrial applications will require fuels such as hydrogen, rather than electricity, if they are to be decarbonised. And he cleverly rebuts concerns about the variability of wind and solar generation: big power plants, he notes, are themselves often unavailable owing to scheduled maintenance and outages. Much of France’s nuclear fleet has recently been offline, wreaking havoc on its grid.But there are two wrinkles in his argument. One is overreach. Other proponents of rapid decarbonisation advocate using renewables for the great majority of power within a couple of decades. Professor Jacobson wants them to cover a full 100% by 2035. “Did Magellan aspire to circumnavigate 99% of his way around the Earth?”Yet a big study by America’s Department of Energy in 2021 found that, though getting close to 100% could be cost-effective, the final few percent would be disproportionately pricey. A dash to supersize what are still smallish industries could stumble on bunged-up supply chains and shortages of talent. Other obstacles liable to raise costs and cause delays include nimbyism and regulatory backlogs. In America proposed solar projects dawdle in queues for interconnection for more than twice as long as in 2005. In each of Germany, Italy, Poland and Spain, over eight times as much wind capacity is waiting for permits as is under construction. Professor Jacobson acknowledges these problems but has no convincing answers to them.The second flaw in his case is that, by forswearing technological “miracles”, it is needlessly dismissive of potential game-changers such as nuclear fusion, a risky but alluring long-term bet that has recently attracted billions of dollars in private investment. The un’s authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change keeps the door open to various technologies for carbon-dioxide removal (cdr), from direct air capture of ghgs with giant machines to the use of carbon capture and sequestration in the generation of bioenergy. The author wants to rule out such kit, in part because he thinks it is less green than wind or solar and “diverts funding from lower-cost renewables”.That is a false economy. The iea, which is firmly with Professor Jacobson in calling for a peak in fossil consumption, nevertheless insists getting to net-zero ghg emissions by 2050—a goal adopted by many countries—requires “massive leaps in innovation” in advanced batteries, hydrogen, synthetic fuels, carbon capture and other technologies that are not yet commercial. “This is a Herculean task,” Fatih Birol, the agency’s boss, has said. Pressing on without investing in breakthrough innovation would make it even harder.
Nearly 70% of American adults are overweight; over a third are obese. Grocery shops contain aisle after aisle of salty crisps, sugary drinks and processed snacks. Cues to eat unhealthily abound. But if this is your archetypal American diet, argues Dan Buettner in “The Blue Zones American Kitchen”, a work of anthropological reporting posing as a cookbook, you are looking in the wrong places.Mr Buettner studies and writes about “Blue Zones”, areas where people tend to live long, healthy lives, with unusually high numbers of centenarians and long life expectancy in middle age. In this book, he finds the principles of Blue Zone diets—very little meat and processed foods, with most calories coming from whole grains, greens, tubers, nuts and beans—in the cuisines of four demographic groups: Native Americans, African-Americans, Latinos and Asian-Americans.The recipes that Mr Buettner presents do not necessarily represent what most people in these groups actually eat. For a variety of reasons, for instance, Native Americans and Latinos suffer higher obesity rates than non-Hispanic whites—which would probably not be the case if they all ate as this book recommends. But, historically, each of these groups had healthy cuisines, and Mr Buettner talks to people trying to revive them.African-American cuisine is often unfairly maligned for over-relying on fried and processed foods. Mr Buettner says this aspect of it is an artefact of the Great Migration, when black people left bountiful gardens in the South, which provided greens, beans and root vegetables, for industrial northern cities. And so the recipes in this part of the book feature crops such as okra, collard greens and Carolina Gold rice, a delicious west African strain. All these played crucial roles in African-American diets for centuries.Diverse as the recipes collected here are, most rely on seasonal, fresh produce, often home-grown. Mr Buettner recounts his confusion when following his gps directions to meet a Hmong woman in her garden, and ending up in the car park of Target, a department store. Behind a row of trees, he found a five-acre garden bought by Hmong refugees in the 1970s that, he says, “looked like Cambodia in the morning, [with] fields of bitter melon and zucchini, and people walking around with wicker baskets.”He says the encounter left him convinced that “there’s so much culinary genius in America that also lines up perfectly with the dietary patterns that produced the longest-lived humans in history. It’s so easy if you look for it.” The truth is a bit more complicated. For urbanites without a garden, these recipes may prove expensive and time-consuming. And as Mr Buettner’s other work on Blue Zones attests, food is just one part of the longevity puzzle. Centenarians tend to live active, purposeful lives centred on family and community.So this book is not a shortcut to a 100th birthday. But anyone who wants a shot at a century should probably eat less meat and munch more legumes and whole grains.
What should readers make of Norman Mailer’s life and work?His books are ambitious and often lyrical. Like their author, they can also be noxious and flawed-It was the novel that made Norman Mailer famous, aged just 25. Published in 1948, “The Naked and the Dead” was based on his experiences as a us Army rifleman in the Philippines, and astonished readers with its portrait of war’s random violence and the pungency of its language. Though banned from many American libraries and in several other countries, it was widely hailed as a victory for free speech and topped the New York Times’s bestseller list for 11 weeks. Britain’s attorney general condemned it as “foul, lewd and revolting”; George Orwell believed it “the best book of the last war yet”. Such was the divisiveness of Mailer’s work. It remains so on the centenary of his birth, which falls on January 31st.It was as a journalist that Mailer excelled, chronicling what he called “the dream life of the nation” and documenting its chaos, profligacy and evils. American politics was a favourite subject and he wrote most bracingly about it in the 1960s, as he repeatedly mused on the presidency of John F. Kennedy and the Vietnam war.Another preoccupation was boxing, which he likened to writing in its need for “discipline and intelligence and restraint”. “The Fight” (1975) documented the so-called Rumble in the Jungle, which pitted Muhammad Ali against George Foreman, and celebrated Ali’s win as the triumph of art over power. Mailer was prolific in other fields, both public and private; besides publishing poetry and producing biographies of Marilyn Monroe and Pablo Picasso, he was interviewed more than 700 times and wrote 45,000 letters.Since his death in 2007, his reputation has declined. Now he is remembered mainly for his personal failings, which were legion: serially unfaithful and an inveterate risk-taker, he revelled in confrontation. Mailer required life to be vivid, and his attempts to make it so could be hot-headed, the worst being when he stabbed his wife, Adele Morales (the second of six spouses).This happened in 1960, at a gathering where he planned to announce a characteristically provocative campaign to be mayor of New York. The guests were a volatile mix; at four in the morning an agitated Mailer confronted his wife, responding to her taunts with two jabs of a penknife. He punctured her pericardium, but the attack wasn’t fatal, except to their marriage. (Morales did not press charges, in order to protect their children.) In her memoir, “The Last Party” (1997), she said that it took 28 years for Mailer to manage a single sentence of apology.Feuds occurred frequently, his most notorious being with a fellow novelist, Gore Vidal, who wrote an unfavourable review of his book about feminism, “The Prisoner of Sex” (1971). Six years later Mailer saw him at a glitzy party and punched him in the face (to which Vidal responded, “Norman, once again words have failed you”). Many of his views—for instance, that it is “easier to be a homosexual than a heterosexual”—now seem odious. His belligerence was matched by an appetite for publicity, which made him a perennial subject for gossip columns. Once, when he needed money, he even charged guests to attend his birthday party.The books resemble their author: flawed, unpredictable, grandiose and often overblown, sometimes noxious. Yet their range is remarkable. He published more than 40 and tried a different style in each. They include such curios as “Ancient Evenings” (1983), a novel set 3,000 years ago in Egypt, and “The Gospel According to the Son” (1997), which represents itself as Jesus Christ’s autobiography.Among the more compelling is “The Armies of the Night” (1968), a lyrical account of a protest against the Vietnam war. Placing himself at the heart of the event, but referring to himself in the third person, Mailer blends the techniques of factual reporting and fiction. The book’s subtitle is “History as a Novel / The Novel as History”, and such genre-bending is a feature of his work.Mailer’s greatest achievement may well be “The Executioner’s Song” (1979). A 400,000-word chronicle of the life of Gary Gilmore, a convicted murderer, it too blurs the distinction between documentary and novel. Here the virtuosic Mailer gives way to a more coolly observant one who captures the emptiness of Gilmore’s world with unnerving accuracy. In accommodating and attending to so many others—family, friends, lawyers, reporters, Gilmore—Mailer’s own voice was never quieter. It is a typically vast, audacious and dangerous project.
Insect repellents-A better way of keeping mosquitoes at bay is under development-A nifty piece of chemistry may have found a safe, effective, long-lasting protectionMosquito repellents have come a long way. For decades, the market leader was deet, which fends the pests off successfully, but only for an hour or two. Recently, Icaridin has become available. This lasts up to eight hours and is just as effective. Yet both are mildly poisonous to cells grown in culture and their toxicity (if any) to human users is constantly debated. The search is thus on for something that is unquestionably not toxic at all.Francesca Dani of the University of Florence, in Italy, thinks she might have the answer. As she and her colleagues describe in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, they looked at a range of chemicals called aldehydes and ketones, and, with a bit of tweaking, produced something that seems a good, long-lasting, safe mosquito repellent.Dr Dani knew from the scientific literature that some aldehydes and ketones have insect-repelling properties. Such chemicals, however, vaporise faster than deet. But she also knew from her own work that molecules called hydroxylated cyclic acetals, which form from certain aldehydes and ketones when exposed to an alcohol, evaporate much less readily. That, she thought, might be the key to the puzzle.She and her colleagues therefore made a score of hydroxylated cyclic acetals and tested their mosquito-repelling qualities against those of deet and Icaridin. The standard way to do this is to spray some onto the back of a volunteer’s hand and have him or her then put both hands into a mosquito cage. The unsprayed hand acts as a control, and it is thereby possible to decide, by comparing the number of insects landing on each, how effective a repellent a particular chemical is.As expected, deet scored 95% protection efficiency (calculated by subtracting the number of mosquito probings on the treated hand from the number on the untreated one, dividing this by the number on the untreated one and then multiplying by 100). Such protection was granted by 8.3 micrograms of the stuff being applied per square centimetre of skin, and lasted two hours. For Icaridin, a fifth of that dose produces an equal repulsion for eight hours.To the researchers’ delight, two of their hydroxylated cyclic acetals performed as well as Icaridin. And when they tested them on cell cultures they found that one, called 12a in the paper for simplicity’s sake, killed none of the cells exposed to it.deet and Icaridin have had good runs. deet was developed in the 1940s, to help safeguard American soldiers from mosquito-borne diseases when on campaign. Icaridin, with its longer period of protection, arrived in the 2000s. If 12a passes muster, though, it may be that both will soon come to the ends of their useful lives.
Archers and heart rates-How to measure how stress affects athletes’ performance-Pick a sport where they don’t move much, and study skin flushing-How much stress is good for an athlete? Surprisingly, since modern, professional sport of all sorts now seems to be in the hands of number crunchers trying to extract another zillionth of a percent of performance from their charges, no one knows. The reason is that, to avoid decrements in performance of equal and opposite magnitude, top athletes are rarely willing to carry even the tiniest monitoring devices when in competition. And when they are not in competition such measurements would be meaningless.However, two behavioural economists, Lu Yunfeng of Nanjing University, in China, and Zhong Songfa of the National University of Singapore, think they have found a way around this—at least for athletes whose disciplines do not require them to move a lot.Dr Lu was inspired to investigate the matter when watching the 2020 Olympic games on television. He noticed that in the archery contests, competitors’ heart rates were shown to viewers as they stood at the mark and shot. Heart rate is well known as an indicator of psychological stress, so he saw this as an opportunity to investigate the relation between stress and performance. To this end, he recruited Dr Zhong, who has a long history of working on stress and behaviour.When they dug into the matter, the two researchers found that 122 of the 128 archers in the games had agreed to have their heart rates measured. The trick was that, since competitors were stationary, their heart rates could be monitored remotely by a technique called photoplethysmography, which registers changes in the reflectivity of skin caused by flushing when the heart pumps, and correlates well with more conventional measurements such as electrocardiograms. Altogether, they were able to match heart rate to score for 2,247 shots.As they report in a paper in Psychological Science, heart rates during the competition varied tremendously between archers. A few hearts pumped at just over one beat per second while one competitor’s raced along at more than three. The average was 138 beats per minute.Overall, archers with higher heart rates had lower scores and those with lower rates, higher ones. The average rate for a toxophilite who hit inner gold, or ten-ring (a bullseye, to non-cognoscenti), for a score of ten, was 134.2 beats per minute. It was 135.7 for outer gold (nine-ring). And for eight-ring, the inner red, it was 137.9. Overall, Dr Zhong and Dr Lu calculated that each extra heartbeat per minute resulted in a 0.004-point decrease in score.These findings support the notion that the performance of even some of the world’s most elite athletes declines as they experience increased stress. Whether that is peculiar to those who need a steady aim to win, or also applies to athletes who have to run around as they compete, remains to be seen.
Surveillance technology-Wi-Fi signals could prove useful for spies-A router’s emissions can paint a picture of activity in a room-Like all radio waves, Wi-Fi signals undergo subtle shifts when they encounter objects—human beings included. These can reveal information about the shape and motion of what has been encountered, in a manner akin to the way a bat’s chirps reveal obstacles and prey.Starting from this premise Jiaqi Geng, Dong Huang and Fernando De la Torre, of Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, wondered if they could use Wi-Fi to record the behaviour of people inside otherwise unobservable rooms. As they describe in a posting on arXiv, they have found that they can. “DensePose from Wi-Fi”, the paper in question, describes how they ran Wi-Fi signals from a room with appropriate routers in it through an artificial-intelligence algorithm trained on signals from people engaging in various, known activities. This algorithm was able to reconstruct moving digital portraits, called pose estimations, of the individuals in the room.Mr Geng, Dr Huang and Dr De la Torre are not the first to think of doing this. But they seem to have made a significant advance. Earlier experiments had managed to obtain two-dimensional (2d) pose estimations based on as many as 17 “vector points” on the body—such as head, chest, knees, elbows and hands. The new paper, by contrast, describes “2.5d” portraits that track 24 vector points (see picture). And, according Dr Huang, the team has now built an enhanced version capable of generating complete 3d body reconstructions that track thousands of vector points. Moreover, this work employed standard antennas of the sort used in household Wi-Fi routers. Previous efforts have relied on souped-up versions of the equipment.Detailed Wi-Fi-based body-tracking with a standard-issue router would have many uses. Mr Geng, Dr Huang and Dr De la Torre talk of employing it to “monitor the well-being of elder people”. A team working on similar technology, led by Yili Ren of Florida State University, suggests it could be used in interactive gaming and exercise monitoring. And, in 2016, Dina Katabi, Mingmin Zhao and Fadel Adib of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology demonstrated how Wi-Fi-like radio signals could detect a volunteer’s heartbeat (and thus his or her emotional state) remotely.These ideas are, however, distractions from what any such system would almost certainly be used for to start with, namely surveillance and espionage. In 2018, for example, Yanzi Zhu of the University of California, Santa Barbara and his colleagues showed how hackers posted outside someone’s home could track the movements (though not then visualise the postures) of people inside, by intercepting escaping Wi-Fi signals.It is easy to imagine who might be interested in the ability to turn any building’s Wi-Fi network into a mini panopticon. Dr Huang declined to say who is sponsoring his team’s work. However, another of their projects—developing techniques for detecting specific human behaviours in video-surveillance footage—is paid for by iarpa, the research hub of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees America’s spies.
Fertility testing-Hormone tests for women’s fertility seem not to work-They estimate egg number, but not egg quality-Women seeking to defer motherhood are often encouraged to check their fertility. Though fecundity is tied to age, the effect of time’s passage varies. Some 35-year-olds find they cannot get pregnant. Others manage at the first attempt.The main causes of fertility’s reduction with advancing years are declines in the number and quality of the eggs in a woman’s ovaries. Unlike men, who manufacture sperm throughout their post-pubertal lives, albeit in ever-decreasing quantities, all of a woman’s potential eggs develop while she is still a fetus. A newborn girl has over 1m of them. By puberty, she is left with about 400,000. When the menopause arrives, that has been whittled down below 1,000, which are likely to be duds.But fertility tests currently on offer neither count the number of eggs remaining nor assess their quality. Rather, they rely on an indirect approach—sampling what are hoped to be relevant hormones. Hormone tests do have some value in estimating the timing of menopause and the success of harvesting eggs for in vitro fertilisation. But forecasting pregnancy? The evidence suggests that they can’t.One test-sceptic is Anne Steiner of the Duke Fertility Centre, in North Carolina. She suspects hormone tests do indicate how many eggs are left to a woman, but that this is not what matters—rather, it is the eggs’ quality which is crucial.Between 2008 and 2016 Dr Steiner and her colleagues ran the Time to Conceive study. Its purpose was to determine whether hormone levels could indeed assess a woman’s fertility, independent of her age. The team found then that those levels had no value in predicting pregnancy in the year subsequent to testing. Now, in a follow up to the original investigation, just published in Fertility and Sterility, Dr Steiner has shown that they have no longer-term predictive power, either.Time to Conceive looked at 750 women aged between 30 and 44 who were living with a male partner not known to be infertile, had no diagnosis of infertility of their own, and had recently started trying to become pregnant. The team took blood and urine samples from these volunteers and measured levels of three hormones often examined by fertility tests. They then followed each volunteer for a year. The upshot, published in 2017, was that hormone levels were uncorrelated with pregnancy within the 12-month window through which the researchers were looking.But perhaps, Dr Steiner subsequently speculated, that window was too narrow. In 2020 she therefore got back in touch with the original participants for a follow-up. She asked them if they would fill out a questionnaire about how many children they had had, how long it had taken to get pregnant and whether they had been diagnosed with infertility.Some 336 of them agreed to participate. Among these there had been 239 pregnancies, resulting in 225 live births. More sadly, 73 participants were infertile. But the hormone levels in the tests carried out in the original study did not predict these outcomes. There was no difference, the researchers found, between women with poor results and those with normal ones.In the case of one substance, for example—anti-Mullerian hormone, which is thought predictive because it is produced by cells in the egg-bearing follicles of the ovaries, and is thus believed to reflect the number of those follicles—79% of those with low levels of it went on to give birth. That was statistically indistinguishable from the 71% of mothers with normal levels. The decline in fertility, says Dr Steiner, is thus clearly not related to the decline in the quantity of eggs, but presumably to their quality. And how to measure that remains unknown.
We need to break the taboo around male fertility, says Leslie Schrock-The health entrepreneur says poor-quality sperm affects women and children. But improving it is possible-Infertility affects one in six couples, and for half of those, the problem lies with the male partner. Sperm is on the decline. Its concentration and count—the number of sperm per millilitre of semen and the total number of sperm in an ejaculate—has dropped by more than 50% on average in Western countries since the 1970s. No one knows why for sure, but increased rates of obesity, lifestyle factors such as smoking and physical inactivity, and exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals, such as bpas and phthalates, are the leading theories. “Spermpocalypse”—a scenario in which future men have little or no sperm—is unlikely. For now, sperm meet the basic requirements for human reproduction. But poor-quality sperm is not only linked to the deterioration of men’s overall health, it negatively affects women and children too.Men’s health is a mess. Their lifespans are on average five years shorter than women’s, and they are diagnosed with more chronic diseases. Sperm quality is a biomarker for a man’s overall health and, when abnormal, can indicate serious ailments such as tumours, cancer, diabetes and overall morbidity. Yet sperm is rarely discussed. Its first researcher, the Dutch scientist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, hesitated to share his discovery of the strange “animalcules” in his semen with the scientific world in 1677, worried that his “observations may disgust or scandalise the learned”. Four centuries later, some still squirm about sperm.I have interviewed fertility experts around the world and discovered just how little most people know about this topic. The fertility industry’s marketing only targets women and reminds them of their biological clocks, partly because the word sperm is banned on many ad platforms. But men experience age-related fertility decline starting at 35, too. Every year of a man’s life beyond 35, sperm motility (its movement) decreases, morphology (the percentage of sperm with normal size and shape) goes down and dna fragmentation, a cause of recurrent miscarriage and birth defects, increases. Increased paternal age puts pregnant women at a greater risk for gestational diabetes and pre-eclampsia. Women contribute just a quarter of age-related genetic mutations to a future child. The risk of schizophrenia, Down’s syndrome, bipolar disorder, autism, childhood leukaemia and other cancers in future children increases with paternal age. So does the risk of premature birth, seizures and disabilities like congenital heart disease and cleft palates.Women’s lifestyle choices—what we eat, drink, do, and use on our bodies—are scrutinised from conception through pregnancy. The same factors influence sperm. Unlike eggs which, once chromosomally abnormal, stay that way, sperm can be improved. Producing healthier sperm is simple: avoid hot tubs and saunas, stop cycling, smoking, and recreational drug use (including cannabis), eat less processed food, drink less alcohol, quit fizzy drinks, stay active, sleep more and avoid hormone-disrupting chemicals in household products for three months before trying to conceive. Yet men rarely receive this guidance.Boys get even less reproductive health education than girls, and are often told that men don’t complain about health problems. The result is that many men avoid seeking help until an issue is too big or painful to ignore and male fertility problems go untreated, since, most of the time, symptoms are mild. Urology deals with the urinary tract and andrology addresses infertility, but there is no medical specialty that proactively manages men’s reproductive health as gynaecology does for women.Pre-conception appointments are unusual, too, so the possible side-effects of medications on male fertility are rarely communicated to patients, and unlike risks to pregnancy, are not universally indicated on warning labels. Metformin, for example, is prescribed to over 150m people to treat type-2 diabetes. A recent study suggests that it reduces sperm count and quality and carries another insidious effect: sons of fathers who took it within three months of conception are more likely to have genital birth defects. When couples seek help for infertility, 25% of American men are never even examined by doctors. Ultimately, women are left to undergo invasive, expensive and sometimes unnecessary fertility treatments when all that may be required is a semen analysis, physical exam and lifestyle tweaks.I am tired of watching women shoulder infertility’s physical and emotional burden. I am also the mother of two young boys and worry for their futures if male fertility continues its descent. I do not particularly want to give sperm-freezing as a graduation gift, but if nothing changes, I may have no choice. Raising well-informed, respectful men who understand their sexual health while reproductive health care is in jeopardy feels more critical than ever.So, men, the future is in your hands. Don’t want to go to the doctor? Do a semen analysis from home—it is a proxy for your overall health even if babies are not on your mind. Thinking about conception? Prepare your body to create a human by improving your lifestyle and checking your medications. Governments and policymakers should fund early-youth educational programmes that give boys the tools to better care for their minds and bodies. As a bonus, the same groups should launch a preventative-health initiative for men that includes a semen analysis. That alone could reduce the number of unnecessary fertility treatments and rates of chronic disease.To everyone else: have an honest chat with your son, father or partner about reproductive health. It’s time we embrace these tiny, miraculous cells that are half of the source of human survival for their other superpower—the ability to improve and even save lives.
Generative AI: how will the new era of machine learning affect you?Systems like ChatGPT can produce content to order, threatening not just jobs but a surge of misinformation-Just over 10 years ago, three artificial intelligence researchers achieved a breakthrough that changed the field forever. The “AlexNet” system, trained on 1.2mn images taken from around the web, recognised objects as different as a container ship and a leopard with far greater accuracy than computers had managed before. That feat helped developers Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever and Geoffrey Hinton win an arcane annual competition called ImageNet. It also illustrated the potential of machine learning and touched off a race in the tech world to bring AI into the mainstream. Since then, computing’s AI age has been taking shape largely behind the scenes. Machine learning, an underlying technology that involves computers learning from data, has been widely used in jobs such as identifying credit card fraud and making online content and advertising more relevant. If the robots are starting to take all the jobs, it’s been happening largely out of sight. That is, until now. Another breakthrough in AI has just shaken up the tech world. This time, the machines are operating in plain sight — and they could finally be ready to follow through on the threat to replace millions of jobs. ChatGPT, a query-answering and text-generating system released at the end of November, has burst into the public consciousness in a way seldom seen outside the realm of science fiction. Created by San Francisco-based research firm OpenAI, it is the most visible of a new wave of so-called “generative” AI systems that can produce content to order. If you type a query into ChatGPT, it will respond with a short paragraph laying out the answer and some context. Ask it who won the 2020 presidential election, for example, and it lays out the results and tells you when Joe Biden was inaugurated. Simple to use and able in an instant to come up with results that look like they were produced by a human, ChatGPT promises to thrust AI into everyday life. The news that Microsoft has made a multibillion dollar investment in OpenAI — co-founded by AlexNet creator Sutskever — has all but confirmed the central role the technology will play in the next phase of the AI revolution. ChatGPT is the latest in a line of increasingly dramatic public demonstrations. Another OpenAI system, automatic writing system GPT-3, electrified the tech world when it was unveiled in the middle of 2020. So-called large language models from other companies followed, before the field branched out last year into image generation with systems such as OpenAI’s Dall-E 2, the open-source Stable Diffusion from Stability AI, and Midjourney. These breakthroughs have touched off a scramble to find new applications for the technology. Alexandr Wang, chief executive of data platform Scale AI, calls it “a Cambrian explosion of use cases”, comparing it to the prehistoric moment when modern animal life began to flourish. If computers can write and create images, is there anything, when trained on the right data, that they couldn’t produce? Google has already shown off two experimental systems that can generate video from a simple prompt, as well as one that can answer mathematical problems. Companies such as Stability AI have applied the technique to music. The technology can also be used to suggest new lines of code, or even whole programs, to software developers. Pharmaceutical companies dream of using it to generate ideas for new drugs in a more targeted way. Biotech company Absci said this month it had designed new antibodies using AI, something it said could cut more than two years from the approximately four it takes to get a drug into clinical trials. But as the tech industry races to foist this new technology on a global audience, there are potentially far-reaching social effects to consider. Tell ChatGPT to write an essay on the Battle of Waterloo in the style of a 12-year-old, for example, and you’ve got a schoolchild’s homework delivered on demand. More seriously, the AI has the potential to be deliberately used to generate large volumes of misinformation, and it could automate away a large number of jobs that go far beyond the types of creative work that are most obviously in the line of fire. “These models are going to change the way that people interact with computers,” says Eric Boyd, head of AI platforms at Microsoft. They will “understand your intent in a way that hasn’t been possible before and translate that to computer actions”. As a result, he adds, this will become a foundational technology, “touching almost everything that’s out there”. The reliability problem Generative AI advocates say the systems can make workers more productive and more creative. A code-generating system from Microsoft’s GitHub division is already coming up with 40 per cent of the code produced by software developers who use the system, according to the company. The output of systems like these can be “mind unblocking” for anyone who needs to come up with new ideas in their work, says James Manyika, a senior vice-president at Google who looks at technology’s impact on society. Built into everyday software tools, they could suggest ideas, check work or even produce large volumes of content. Yet for all its ease of use and potential to disrupt large parts of the tech landscape, generative AI presents profound challenges for the companies building it and trying to apply it in practice, as well as for the many people who are likely to come across it before long in their work or personal lives. Foremost is the reliability problem. The computers may come up with believable-sounding answers, but it’s impossible to completely trust anything they say. They make their best guess based on probabilistic assumptions informed by studying mountains of data, with no real understanding of what they produce. “They don’t have any memory outside of a single conversation, they can’t get to know you and they don’t have any notion of what words signify in the real world,” says Melanie Mitchell, a professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Merely churning out persuasive-sounding answers in response to any prompt, they are brilliant but brainless mimics, with no guarantee that their output is anything more than a digital hallucination. It’s a tool that people can use morally or immorally, legally or illegally, ethically or unethically There have already been graphic demonstrations of how the technology can produce believable-sounding but untrustworthy results. Late last year, for instance, Facebook parent Meta showed off a generative system called Galactica that was trained on academic papers. The system was quickly found to be spewing out believable-sounding but fake research on request, leading Facebook to withdraw the system days later. ChatGPT’s creators admit the shortcomings. The system sometimes comes up with “nonsensical” answers because, when it comes to training the AI, “there’s currently no source of truth”, OpenAI said. Using humans to train it directly, rather than letting it learn by itself — a method known as supervised learning — did not work because the system was often better at finding “the ideal answer” than its human teachers, OpenAI added. One potential solution is to submit the results of generative systems to a sense check before they are released. Google’s experimental LaMDA system, which was announced in 2021, comes up with about 20 different responses to each prompt and then assesses each of these for “safety, toxicity and groundedness”, says Manyika. “We make a call to search to see, is this even real?” Yet any system that relies on humans to validate the output of the AI throws up its own problems, says Percy Liang, an associate professor of computer science at Stanford University. It might teach the AI how to “generate deceptive but believable things that actually fool humans,” he says. “The fact that truth is so slippery, and humans are not terribly good at it, is potentially concerning.” According to advocates of the technology, there are practical ways to use it without trying to answer these deeper philosophical questions. Like an internet search engine, which can throw up misinformation as well as useful results, people will work out how to get the most out of the systems, says Oren Etzioni, an adviser and board member at A12, the AI research institute set up by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. “I think consumers will just learn to use these tools to their benefit. I just hope that doesn’t involve kids cheating in school,” he says. An AI engine in action This shows how prompts can be used to change the output of the AI generator Midjourney Prompt: A robot in an office, detailed This is what Midjourney returned for the simplest prompt. Advanced users can add details for aspect ratio, lighting, style and other variables Prompt: A robot in an office, ink drawing, sumi-e Prompt: A robot in an office, detailed, in style of Van Gogh Van Gogh images are widespread on the internet, so the reproduction of the artist’s characteristic style is faithful Prompt: A robot at the centre of a Shepard Fairey mural, detailed The AI does not know whether we want to see the mural on the wall in situ or not so it often offers both options But leaving it to the humans to second-guess the machines may not always be the answer. The use of machine-learning systems in professional settings has already shown that people “over-trust the predictions that come out of AI systems and models”, says Rebecca Finlay, chief executive of the Partnership on AI, a tech industry group that studies uses of AI. The problem, she adds, is that people have a tendency to “imbue different aspects of what it means to be human when we interact with these models”, meaning that they forget the systems have no real “understanding” of what they are saying. These issues of trust and reliability open up the potential for misuse by bad actors. For anyone deliberately trying to mislead, the machines could become misinformation factories, capable of producing large volumes of content to flood social media and other channels. Trained on the right examples, they might also imitate the writing style or spoken voice of particular people. “It’s going to be extremely easy, cheap and broad-based to create fake content,” says Etzioni. Every single major content provider in the world thought they needed a metaverse strategy: they all need a generative media strategy This is a problem inherent with AI in general, says Emad Mostaque, head of Stability AI. “It’s a tool that people can use morally or immorally, legally or illegally, ethically or unethically,” he says. “The bad guys already have advanced artificial intelligence.” The only defence, he claims, is to spread the technology as widely as possible and make it open to all. That is a controversial prescription among AI experts, many of whom argue for limiting access to the underlying technology. Microsoft’s Boyd says the company “works with our customers to understand their use cases to make sure that the AI really is a responsible use for that scenario.” He adds that the software company also works to prevent people from “trying to trick the model and doing something that we wouldn’t really want to see”. Microsoft provides its customers with tools to scan the output of the AI systems for offensive content or particular terms they want to block. It learnt the hard way that chatbots can go rogue: its Tay bot had to be hastily withdrawn in 2016 after spouting racism and other inflammatory responses. To some extent, technology itself may help to control misuse of the new AI systems. Manyika, for instance, says that Google has developed a language system that can detect with 99 per cent accuracy when speech has been produced synthetically. None of its research models will generate the image of a real person, he adds, limiting the potential for the creation of so-called deep fakes. Jobs under threat The rise of generative AI has also touched off the latest round in the long-running debate over the impact of AI and automation on jobs. Will the machines replace workers or, by taking over the routine parts of a job, will they make existing workers more productive and increase their sense of fulfilment? Most obviously, jobs that involve an substantial element of design or writing are at risk. When Stability Diffusion appeared late last summer, its promise of instant imagery to match any prompt sent a shiver through the commercial art and design worlds. How four of the online AI Image generators deal with the prompt ‘football player in a stadium in the style of Warhol’ Some tech companies are already trying to apply the technology to advertising, including Scale AI, which has trained an AI model on advertising images. That could make it possible to produce professional-looking images from products sold by “smaller retailers and brands that are priced out of doing photoshoots for their goods,” says Wang. That potentially threatens the livelihoods of anyone who creates content of any kind. “It revolutionises the entire media industry,” says Mostaque. “Every single major content provider in the world thought they needed a metaverse strategy: they all need a generative media strategy.” According to some of the humans at risk of being displaced, there is more at stake than just a pay cheque. Presented with songs written by ChatGPT to sound like his own work, singer and songwriter Nick Cave was aghast. “Songs arise out of suffering, by which I mean they are predicated upon the complex, internal human struggle of creation and, well, as far as I know, algorithms don’t feel,” he wrote online. “Data doesn’t suffer.” Techno-optimists believe the technology could amplify, rather than replace, human creativity. Armed with an AI image generator, a designer could become “more ambitious”, says Liang at Stanford. “Instead of creating just single images, you could create whole videos or whole new collections.” The copyright system could end up playing an important role. The companies applying the technology claim that they are free to train their systems on all available data thanks to “fair use”, the legal exception in the US that allows limited use of copyrighted material. Others disagree. In the first legal proceedings to challenge the AI companies’ profligate use of copyrighted images to train their systems, Getty Images and three artists last week started actions in the US and UK against Stability AI and other companies. According to a lawyer who represents two AI companies, everyone in the field has been braced for the inevitable lawsuits that will set the ground rules. The battle over the role of data in training AI could become as important to the tech industry as the patent wars at the dawn of the smartphone era. Ultimately, it will take the courts to set the terms for the new era of AI — or even legislators, if they decide the technology breaks the old assumptions on which existing copyright law is based. Until then, as the computers race to suck up more of the world’s data, it is open season in the world of generative AI.
West grapples with dilemma over Iran nuclear talks-Even as relations touch new lows, US and European officials are keeping the door open to diplomacy-For months, the west has been hardening its rhetoric against Iran as the Islamic republic has cracked down on protesters and sold drones to Moscow that Russian forces have used in the war against Ukraine. The US, UK and EU this week imposed new sanctions on dozens of Iranian officials and entities in their latest attempt to increase the pressure on Tehran. The UK is also reviewing whether to proscribe the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp as a terrorist organisation, while the European parliament has called for the blacklisting of the most powerful wing of the republic’s state security forces. Yet even as relations touch new lows, US and European officials are keeping the door open to diplomacy to save what is left of the moribund 2015 nuclear deal Tehran signed with world powers. That is not because they are optimistic about a breakthrough — there have been no nuclear talks since Iran rejected a draft proposal to revive the deal agreed by the accord’s other signatories in September. Instead, it is a reflection of the dilemma western powers face as they consider their limited options to stop Iran from expanding its aggressive nuclear programme. On the one hand, they fear that pulling the plug on the nuclear diplomacy would hand Iran a propaganda victory by enabling it to blame the west for the collapse. They are also wary of triggering a broader crisis by ending all avenues of diplomacy with Tehran, diplomats and analysts say. On the other hand, western countries do not want to engage with Iran while it sells drones to Moscow and uses repression to crush civil unrest at home, including executing demonstrators. They also worry that there are no credible alternatives to the accord, known by its acronym JCPOA, that can prevent Iran from acquiring the capacity to develop nuclear weapons. “We know that [Iran] are following a steady path of progression on their nuclear programme,” said a senior US official. “It’s one that’s extremely concerning and that we still believe is far better tackled through diplomacy than any of the alternatives.” Other options include seeking a more limited deal, military action, or a return to former US president Donald Trump’s “maximum pressure” strategy against Iran that increased tensions across the region. Trump sparked the nuclear stand-off with Iran by unilaterally withdrawing from the accord in 2018 and imposing waves of sanctions on the republic. Tehran responded by aggressively expanding its nuclear programme. It is now enriching uranium at 60 per cent purity — its highest level and close to weapons grade. It has also been accused of attacking tankers and oil infrastructure in Saudi Arabia. President Joe Biden pledged to rejoin the deal and lift many sanctions if Tehran returned to compliance with the accord. But more than a year of EU-brokered indirect talks between Washington and Tehran failed to secure an agreement, with each side blaming the other for the deadlock. The US official described the accord as now in “the deep freeze”. Analysts say both the US and Iran are sticking with a “no deal, no crisis” status quo in which neither crosses red lines that would lead to an escalation. Iran’s foreign minister Hossein Amirabdollahian, right, at a press conference with the EU’s Josep Borrell in Tehran last June © Atta Kenare/AFP/Getty Images “The Iranians are not pushing for a deal. They understand even if there’s an agreement that provides sanctions relief, it’s going to be minimal, so it’s become even harder for anyone to stick their neck out for a deal,” said Ellie Geranmayeh, an analyst at the European Council on Foreign Relations. “It’s the same for the US. Biden doesn’t want a crisis with Iran, nor does he want a deal, so everyone is just hoping this situation can simmer along.” But analysts say such an approach is unsustainable and risks a miscalculation by one party that triggers an escalation. Diplomats and analysts say one option could be to seek an interim agreement that keeps a lid on Iran’s nuclear activity in return for limited sanctions relief. “There’s now interest in what type of other deal could be done,” said a western official. “If we do nothing, Iran gets closer and closer to 90 per cent purity uranium enrichment and there’s the real risk of misunderstanding and escalation.” Ali Vaez, Iran project director at the Crisis Group think-tank, said there was “no other option available, because support for the JCPOA, even among Democrats, is now questionable”. But he added: “Even a limited deal is hard to imagine in the current circumstances.” Recommended Kim Ghattas Unrest and unsettled leaders bode ill for the Middle East in 2023 That would become less likely should the UK, one of three European signatories to the accord, or the EU push ahead with the designation of the Revolutionary Guards. Iranian officials have said the country would respond, while analysts say it would risk a severing of diplomatic ties. “The European parliament shot itself in the foot,” Iran’s foreign minister Hossein Amirabdollahian said on Sunday, adding the parliament in Tehran would put European armies on its own terrorist list. EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said this week that the bloc could not formally designate the Revolutionary Guards until a national government’s judiciary ruled that the force was a terrorist group. But officials said that could come after a political decision to move ahead on designating the organisation, which would require the backing of France and Germany, the other European signatories to the accord. “No one wants the JCPOA to die like this,” said a senior EU official, warning that it would be difficult for the nuclear talks to survive a designation. “What we’re left with at that point is a return to ‘maximum pressure’,” the official added. “And we know how well that worked last time.”
Iran nuclear chief announces enrichment programme expansion-Move follows rebuke by UN watchdog over uranium traces found at undeclared sites-Iran has announced an expansion of its nuclear enrichment programme, in a provocative response to a rebuke by the UN’s watchdog over the alleged existence of undeclared nuclear sites. The head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran on Tuesday said it had added the underground Fordow facility to the list of locations where it was enriching uranium to the 60 per cent purity level, just below weapons grade. This followed a resolution by the International Atomic Energy Agency’s board last week calling on Iran to co-operate over uranium traces found at three undeclared sites in the country. “We had warned before that political pressure and resolutions would not make Iran change its approach,” Iran’s nuclear chief Mohammad Eslami said, referring to the IAEA statement. “For this reason, we started enriching uranium at Fordow.” The escalation comes as Iran faces international criticism over the crackdown on protesters in the country, and the alleged sale of missiles and drones to Russia that are being used to attack Ukrainian cities. John Kirby, a top spokesperson for the US National Security Council, on Tuesday said the White House was watching Iran’s nuclear progress with “great concern”, adding: “We’re going to make sure?.?.?.?all options are available to the president [Joe Biden].” “Nothing has changed about our policy,” Kirby added. “Iran will not be allowed to achieve a nuclear weapons capability.” Iran has always insisted its nuclear programme is purely for peaceful purposes, although experts say uranium enrichment to 60 per cent is a step away from weapons-grade levels of 90 per cent. Tehran has also said that old allegations over its nuclear activities were all addressed in the nuclear accord it signed with the US, UK, France, Germany, Russia and China in 2015 and that those issues could not be reopened. Iran’s past activities were glossed over as part of the deal that helped curb its nuclear programme in return for lifting most US sanctions. But after the US, under then-president Donald Trump, withdrew from the accord in 2018 and imposed tough sanctions, Iran rolled back its commitments without officially walking out of the deal. A year later it restarted enriching uranium towards 60 per cent while also installing advanced centrifuges. The 60 per cent level was reached in April 2021. Recommended Europe Express EU broadens Iran sanctions regime in response to brutal crackdown Premium content The IAEA this month said Iran had an estimated 62.3kg of uranium enriched up to 60 per cent, an amount that has sparked alarm in western capitals. Biden has pursued a revival of the 2015 deal but indirect talks between Tehran and Washington, under EU mediation, have stalled since August. It was thought the two sides could restart talks after the conclusion of this month’s US midterm elections. Yet western diplomats in Tehran say sitting at the negotiating table with Iran has become next to impossible if the Islamic republic continues to violently suppress large anti-regime demonstrations. At least 305 protesters, including 41 children, have been killed during the protests, Amnesty International has said. “We’re not close to getting a diplomatic path here. We still would vastly prefer that. But we are just too far apart,” Kirby said, adding that the current focus was on the way Iran was “treating their own citizens, peaceful protesters, which continue to come under violent attack by the regime”. Western governments fear a revival of the nuclear deal now could strengthen the hand of Tehran’s leadership, diplomats said, as it would include unfreezing billions of dollars of Iran’s assets overseas.
Iran nuclear deal ‘in danger’, says EU chief negotiator Josep Borrell ‘less confident’ about finalising agreement after US and Tehran diverge Josep Borrell, Iran nuclear deal ‘in danger’, says EU chief negotiator Iran nuclear deal ‘in danger’, says EU chief negotiator on facebook (opens in a new window) Iran nuclear deal ‘in danger’, says EU chief negotiator current progress 98% Henry Foy in Brussels, Felicia Schwartz in Washington and Najmeh Bozorgmehr in Tehran SEPTEMBER 5 2022 54 Print this page Receive free Iran nuclear deal updates We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest Iran nuclear deal news every morning. The EU’s chief diplomat has said that efforts to strike a new agreement on Iran’s nuclear program are “in danger” after the US and Iranian positions diverged in recent days. Josep Borrell, who chairs the indirect negotiations between Washington and Tehran on reviving the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), said on Monday that he was losing confidence in finding a deal. In his most pessimistic remarks since he sent both sides a “final draft” of a possible agreement last month, the EU’s high representative for foreign and security policy said: “The positions are not closer?.?.?.?If the process does not converge, then the whole process is in danger.” ”I am sorry to say that I am less confident today than [48] hours ago about the convergence of the negotiation process and the prospect of closing the deal,” he added. After months of intense indirect negotiations between the US and Iran in Vienna, the EU submitted a draft agreement in August, prompting hopes that a deal was close. But Tehran and Washington have since submitted responses to the text, with the two sides clashing over the status of a probe into Iran’s nuclear program by the UN’s atomic watchdog and Iran’s demand that the US guarantee it will continue to receive the economic benefits of sanctions relief if the deal later collapses. The JCPOA all but collapsed in 2018 when former US president Donald Trump unilaterally abandoned it and imposed hundreds of sanctions against Iran. His successor Joe Biden entered office pledging to rejoin the deal and lift many sanctions if Iran, which is enriching uranium at close to weapons-grade levels, returned to compliance with the accord. “At a certain moment, my responsibility as co-ordinator is to say ‘that’s enough, this is the most balanced text I can produce taking into account all views’,” Borrell said of the draft text. “Then we started a process of interactions?.?.?. an interactive process is good if it converges,” he added. “They were converging to a closer position. But then the last interactions was not converging. It was diverging.” After receiving Iran’s response last week, American officials were downbeat about possible progress in the talks. US state department spokesperson Vedant Patel described it as “not constructive”. Officials said they did not expect any imminent breakthroughs and that the process could stretch past the US midterm elections in November. National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson said gaps remained between the two sides. “The president will only conclude a deal that he determines is in the national security interest of the United States,” she said. Tehran said it was ready to sign a deal immediately if its two top demands were met. Iran’s president Ebrahim Raisi said last week that the Islamic Republic should be able to “objectively and practically verify” that the US lifted sanctions “in a sustainable fashion”. He also said the International Atomic Energy Agency had to put aside its “politically-motivated claims”. While many Iranians believe the agreement is necessary to boost the economy, hardline politicians argue that western states need an agreement to enable the return of Iranian crude to the market. Mohammad Marandi, an adviser to Iran’s negotiating team, said over the weekend that “Iran won’t accept ambiguities or loopholes in the text. Winter is approaching and the EU is facing a crippling energy crisis”. “Iran will be patient,” he added.
How America picks its battles-Isolationist superpower or still ‘the world’s policeman’? Two books explore the competing impulses in US politicsBritain strode out in its quest for empire. Colonialism, it told itself, carried its superior system of government to remote corners of the world and bestowed power and riches along the way. The US was a reluctant entrant to the club of great powers. Its economy surpassed that of Britain during the 1870s, but it wasn’t until 1945 that it fully took its place at the centre of world affairs. America’s journey from Thomas Jefferson’s aversion to foreign entanglements to its post-1945 restructuring of the international order was stuttering and painful. The forces that pulled it by turns towards isolationism and interventionism still live on — witness President George W Bush’s military misadventures in the Middle East and Donald Trump’s America First unilateralism. Those on both sides of the argument have generally paid scant attention to consequences elsewhere.For Europeans, if there is something worse than an over-mighty superpower it is an absent America content to leave the rest of the world to settle its own scores. Even now, as Joe Biden’s administration leads the west’s response to Russian aggression in Ukraine, Europeans fret that Trump might yet find a way back to the White House in 2024. Robert Kagan, a scholar at the Brookings Institution, is an unabashed apostle for the utility of US power in upholding international order. He was prominent among the cheerleaders for GW Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a critic of Barack Obama’s efforts to draw a tighter line around Washington’s responsibilities. Americans are from Mars and Europeans from Venus, he observed, when allies protested at the toppling of Saddam Hussein.So in charting America’s hesitant path during the four decades of the 20th century before its hand was forced by the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, Kagan has an agenda: the collapse of world order during that period was in no small part due to America’s refusal to pick up the baton from the British empire. Today’s isolationists, Kagan believes, should take note. The world, though, has changed. A century on, the US remains the world’s pre-eminent power but its dominion is contested, not least by China’s rise and by Russia’s revanchism. And it confronts enemies within. As Richard Haass, a former US diplomat, explains, if America wants to hold its own in a world that could sleepwalk again into great power conflict, it needs to fix its democracy. Trump’s attempted coup in January 2021 spoke to deep-seated cracks in the foundations of the republic.The Ghost at the Feast, the second in Kagan’s planned trilogy charting America’s foreign policy, sets the competing impulses in domestic politics — the instinct to stand back versus shining-city-on-the-hill internationalism — against the breakdown of the balance of power arrangements that had kept the global peace since the Congress of Vienna of 1814-15. The story is fluently told, if somewhat overburdened by footnotes.At the opening of the 20th century, America had already established itself as the preponderant global economic power. Geology gave it an abundance of the energy and mineral resources that powered industrialisation. Geography — the natural defences provided by two oceans — provided a unique degree of security. Americans saw no reason to engage in the great-power rivalry that would lead Europe into two world wars. Pacifying Cuba and seizing the Philippines from Spain to protect the Atlantic and Pacific approaches was as far as its foreign adventurism went. As Kagan says: “Whatever being a ‘world power’ meant, most Americans were not interested.” When the world went to war in 1914, the US was determinedly neutral. East Coast sympathies for Britain were tempered by the countervailing loyalties of German and Irish Americans. “We definitely have to be neutral,” Woodrow Wilson warned in September 1914, “since otherwise our mixed populations would wage war on each other.” It was not until 1917, when the Kaiser’s U-boat fleet resumed indiscriminate attacks on Atlantic shipping, that Wilson reframed the war as a struggle between democracy and tyranny and dispatched American troops to Europe.The change of heart did not survive the peace. Congress disowned Wilson’s grand plan for a rules-based international system by refusing to sign up to the League of Nations. Successive Republican presidents were more interested in securing the repayment of American war loans than the chaos of Weimar Germany.For Kagan, Europe’s descent into fascism owed more to this US refusal to serve as the guardian of international order than to the burdens placed on Germany by the Versailles treaty. On the other side of the world, Washington was equally resolute in its inaction when imperial Japan invaded Manchuria as a prelude to the occupation of China. Franklin D Roosevelt, president from 1933, spoke out occasionally against Hitler’s Nazis and Japanese militarism, warning in 1937 that the “contagion” of war could threaten the US. But his political energies were directed towards securing recovery from depression. “I hate war,” he declared during his 1936 re-election campaign. “You will get nothing out of the Americans but words,” was the caustic judgment of Britain’s interwar prime minister Stanley Baldwin. Britain had to wait until Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and Hitler declared war on the US before American troops again crossed the Atlantic. Kagan overstates his case. His analysis of the competing impulses in American politics is stronger than that of the nationalist dynamics of interwar Europe. It’s not self-evident that a more active US would have saved the continent from itself or China from Japanese aggression.For all that, the underlying argument — that America’s studied absence sent a powerful signal to Mussolini, Hitler and Franco in Europe and to the militarists in Tokyo — is well made. It also encouraged appeasement. However much it might like to retreat from the world, the US cannot avoid the fact of its power. Even today, as China challenges US primacy, the war in Ukraine is a reminder that the advanced democracies still take their cue from Washington. Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, has written extensively about America’s role as an organising power. Eschewing the unilateral interventionism of neoconservatives, he is cheerleader for American alliance-building. In this latest short book, The Bill of Obligations, however, he admits a deeper concern than threats from China, Russia or North Korea and Iran. Foreign policy begins at home, and “The most urgent and significant threat to American security and stability stems not from abroad but from within.”At risk, in Haass’s mind, is the very fabric of American democracy. The Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol on January 6 2021 failed in their attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election. The message they carried is chilling nonetheless. A sizeable segment of the US electorate still rejects the legitimacy of Biden’s presidency — and do so with encouragement from prominent figures in the Republican party. When the outcome of a free and fair election is rejected by “tens of millions” of Americans, democracy is in serious trouble.Behind this, Haass argues, lies the fading of the shared belief that citizens remain part of a single community. Stagnating middle-class incomes and the closure of traditional industries in the face of technological advance have created an era of economic insecurity. Upward mobility, once at the very heart of the American dream, “has become more dream than reality”. The global financial crash drained public confidence in the government’s capacity and willingness to respond to the concerns of voters. Electoral gerrymandering has shrunk the space for bipartisan collaboration. The fragmented world of digital media has empowered populists by creating echo chambers calculated to amplify the anger and fears of the excluded. Underneath this, Haass says, lies a dangerous erosion of the nation’s political culture. American democracy, long a beacon for nations escaping tyranny, has been drained of civility, respect for truth and facts, appreciation of values and norms and willingness to compromise. The rights of citizens are guaranteed by the constitution and enforced by the law, but a healthy democracy also depends on broad acceptance of an ecosystem of obligations. Without mutual respect for civic values, rights become a source of conflict.Haass’s answer is “nothing less than ‘A Bill of Obligations’” to sit alongside the Bill of Rights embedded in the constitution. Some will ask whether that is a practical proposition, but it is hard to disagree with the sentiments expressed in former president Jimmy Carter’s inaugural address: “Our nation can be strong abroad only if it is strong at home. And we know that the best way to enhance freedom in other lands is to demonstrate here that our democratic system is worthy of emulation.” A thought, perhaps, for neoconservatives.Kagan’s case for muscular American interventionism sits uneasily alongside the power shifts of the present century. Biden’s recasting of the US role as that of the west’s convening power fits more comfortably with the geopolitical realities of the 2020s. For its part, Haass’s analysis of the threats within feels overly pessimistic. What’s true is that, as during the first decades of the 20th century, the rest of the world will not escape the consequences of America’s choices.
Chip designer Arm targets car market for growth-SoftBank-owned company battles Intel and MIPS in auto sector as it prepares for blockbuster listing-Chip designer Arm has more than doubled revenue at its automotive business since 2020 as the UK-headquartered company seeks new avenues for growth ahead of a hotly anticipated public listing this year. Dennis Laudick, vice-president of automotive go-to-market at Arm, said the pace of the segment’s growth — to power everything from electrification to advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and in-vehicle “infotainment” — had been faster than its other divisions such as smartphones and data centres. That is because modern cars require a greater amount of chips, which are also more expensive than ever before. It is one of the few parts of the chip sector that is expected to suffer from severe shortages throughout this year because of strong demand. “A high-end car is approaching one of the most complex pieces of software you can have in the world at the moment,” Laudick told the Financial Times. “It’s basically a data centre on wheels.” Arm’s total revenues grew 35 per cent in 2022 to £2.7bn. The SoftBank-owned company does not disclose specific figures, but said revenue from its automotive business increased fivefold over the past four years. Its concerted push into supplying an industry rapidly turning to electric vehicles and driverless capabilities will be crucial to the plans drawn up by SoftBank’s billionaire chief Masayoshi Son for Arm’s return to the public markets this year through a blockbuster New York listing. Investors will be sizing up whether Arm, which has profited hugely from providing the chip designs found in most of the world’s smartphones, can continue to achieve growth. It faces stiff competition from rivals like Intel, MIPS and Synopsys, which are also battling to build the most efficient and powerful intellectual property for chipmakers in an industry that is evolving quickly. “The semi industry has been doing well in giant spurts of growth and now all of the chip companies are chasing the next high,” said Jay Goldberg, an analyst at D2D Advisory. “The automotive market is crucially important, and no one has won that yet.” SoftBank’s Son announced in November that his exclusive focus from now on would be the chip designer. “I’ll be thinking about the business opportunity for Arm — the source of my energy, the source of my happiness, the source of my excitement,” he said. SoftBank, which has owned Arm since 2016, has retrenched to a more defensive strategy after recording $10bn of losses in the past quarter. Arm had now captured around 85 per cent of the global market for in-vehicle “infotainment”, and 55 per cent in ADAS, Laudick said. All of the top 15 automotive chipmakers, including Nvidia, STMicroelectronics and Renesas, use designs licensed by Arm. However, the company faces much stiffer competition on chips for functions like sensors and body control. While Arm has made significant inroads developing IP for chips used in data centres in recent years, it is the automotive market — which already contain dozens of concealed computers that have an insatiable appetite for increasingly advanced chips — that Arm is focusing its attention on most acutely. Some high-end vehicles contain more than 100mn lines of code, with fully autonomous vehicles expected to reach half a billion by the end of the decade — compared with a Boeing 747 aircraft that contains about 14mn. Arm is increasingly giving automotive chipmakers the ability to play around with different types of designs before they buy a licence © ARM The average value of semiconductors per car is forecast to rise from $700 in 2020 to $1,138 by 2028, according to S&P Global Mobility. “Even traditional automotive applications need a quantity of silicon much higher than in the past,” said Marco Monti, president of automotive at European chipmaker STMicroelectronics, speaking at the company’s capital markets day last year. Monti said that automotive chip demand was accelerating rapidly, even as demand for cars themselves remained flat, adding that full electrification would add around $1,000 in the value of semiconductors to each vehicle and could require up to five times more chips. As cars have progressed from being predominantly large boxes of hardware to complex agglomerations of software, powering everything from steering to entertainment, Arm has rapidly increased its investment in software engineering. In 2016, the company invested around 75 per cent of its engineering resources in hardware, with 25 per cent on software. Today, it says the split is 50:50. Arm is increasingly giving automotive chipmakers such as STMicroelectronics and Nvidia the ability to play around with different types of designs before they buy a licence, as a way to familiarise them with its products and capture customers in a competitive market. This strategic manoeuvring is central to the company’s ability to attract and retain customers across its business, given that some of its most nimble competitors — including companies offering a rival open source alternative to Arm called Risc-V — allow engineers to tinker with their IP. Not all chipmakers have been won over. Mobileye, an autonomous driving company that was spun out of Intel in October and has 70 per cent of the market for cameras used in driver-assist technology, uses IP developed by MIPS, based on Risc-V, for some of its most advanced chips. “We like to buy a [computer processing unit] that has multiple vendors,” said Amnon Shashua, Mobileye’s founder, referring to the attraction of the open source architecture underpinning MIPS’s designs. Mobileye builds the rest of its chips — for things like infotainment and displays — in-house. Shashua added that if Mobileye had been entirely reliant on Arm, and the chip designer had been successfully sold to rival chipmaker Nvidia for $66bn last year, it “would have been a disaster”. The most advanced autonomous cars are only expected to come to market at the end of the decade. In the intervening years, chip designers including Arm, Intel and MIPS will be busily crafting designs for the next fleet of vehicles that will transform how millions travel. “They’re fighting the fight now but no one is going to win for a few years,” said Goldberg.
Arm should have cake and eat it-Dual listing FTW-The debate over when the UK will produce a global technology leader has raged for a long time. Now the debate is turning to whether it will be able to remain the home of the most notable one that it has created: Arm. A lot is at stake in SoftBank’s decision on where to take Arm public again. If the UK is not able to demonstrate it is the right place to list the technology companies it produces, then its hope of being a global technology superpower is diminished. It is therefore easy to understand why the UK government has been engaged in the process, given Arm’s importance to the wider British technology ecosystem. Much of the commentary advocating for a sole listing in the US focuses on it being a more liquid market, with closer peers and the simplicity which comes with a single rather than a dual listing in both markets. This is all true! But it fails to recognise a key point; Arm is in a unique position to both capitalise on its status as a UK national champion and access the American capital it so desires. A dual listing of Arm would allow it to enter the FTSE 100 as well as the Nasdaq 100 (the former attracting significantly more capital than the latter, by the way). Arm is unlikely to be eligible for the S&P 500 unless it is deemed to be a US company, making FTSE 100 inclusion even more attractive. With about $360bn actively and passively benchmarked to the FTSE 100 and relevant European indices by over 1,000 fund managers, Arm could expect to conservatively receive $1bn of incremental demand in an IPO (depending upon valuation and free float) assuming investors simply hold equal weight positions. This doesn’t include European funds who cannot hold US stocks but would be able to hold a UK listed one. Inclusion in indices on both sides of the pond is an undeniable win-win. US investors aren’t a sure-fire bet either. They will be faced with the choice of whether to sell Arm’s peers to buy it, or increase their exposure to an already widely held sector. After all, they can choose between a lot of similar companies already, including ones that are 10 times the size of Arm. That is a different dynamic to that facing UK investors who, for the most part, have no other way to gain exposure to the technology sector. For UK investors, the choice will be whether to reduce exposure to sectors outside of technology or not — a choice they are widely expected to make. History supports this. When Arm was last listed in both the UK and US, it traded at a premium over its US listed peers. In other words, in the UK, stocks like Arm are scarce, and scarcity drives demand. Again, a dual listing provides access to both pools. Last, but not least, geopolitics are becoming increasingly complicated, particularly in a sector as sensitive as semiconductors. Having a government in your corner cannot be undervalued. As a foreign company Arm would get no special treatment in the US. In the UK it is a national champion. Would a sole listing in the US be simpler? Yes. But the best things in life sometimes do not come for free! A dual listing is a price worth paying to capitalise on the unique situation that Arm finds itself in. Being the largest technology company in the FTSE 100; enjoying scarcity value among UK and European investors; an appreciative and supportive government; inclusion in the Nasdaq 100; and still having access to US investors feels like a |
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