🚨Info about what’s happening in France: This is now serious nationwide public disorder, but France is not close to losing control of the country as a whole. This started as a student based protest with modest demands concerning schooling and school conditions. Those protests created an opportunity for various groups to mobilise, groups set in confrontation and violence. Amongst those groups are significant groups of immigrants and Muslims. The protests today appear to be coordinated nationwide. Intelligence reports significant social media boosts, bots and viral posts suspected by VIGINUM (State agency tasked with detecting foreign influence operations) to originate from abroad, and has identified recent targeting by the “Russian Matryoshka” group. The Interior Ministry now puts participation in protests at around 550,000 nationwide and 110,000 in Paris. Local tactical control was lost at points in the day in Paris, Marseille, Lyon, Bordeaux, Lille, Angers, Rennes, Nantes. 937 police and gendarmes have been injured (as at 7pm). In summary, these aren’t simple protests anymore. They started with education related protests but these created opportunity for others, including migrant and Muslim groups and, possibly, foreign actors, to create real instability. France is now, as a result, moving into a significant public-order crisis. But the situation has not crossed into being a national breakdown of public order. The next 24-48 hours will be crucial. If the protesters are unable to maintain momentum and the situation calms down, then stability and the rule of law will pretty much return, leaving serious social scars and security concerns. If the situation has not calmed, France may be required to deploy the military, as police and gendarmerie force deployments will require relief. Finally, it’s important to note that unrest has spread, to a lesser extent at the moment to Belgium and Italy. Some people here aren’t going to be having a quiet night.

SI.gov 👀

The OECD conducts an assessment called PISA that measures the reading, science, and maths skills of 15-year-olds. The latest results are quite dismal. Across much of the world, kids are getting worse at reading and maths, and the decline isn't small. COVID probably explains some of this, but there seems to be a longer-term trend at play. And now there's AI. I can see a lot of this in myself. Pretty much every post I write now goes through ChatGPT, Claude, etc. Because I know AI will fix my grammar and typos, there's less incentive to get them right in the first place. And over time, I genuinely feel like my writing without AI is getting worse. I keep asking K (CTO) about coding and whether something similar is happening with our tech team. His answer isn't very reassuring either. 😬 All of this makes me wonder what the right approach is with kids. On the one hand, you don't want them outsourcing thinking, writing, problem-solving, etc., before they've learnt how to do these things themselves by making mistakes. On the other hand, if they're growing up in a world where AI will be a big part of their lives, you want them to be good at using it. The problem with humans is that, given a choice between an easy thing and a hard thing, we'll almost always choose the easy path. The same applies to AI. Even if it can help us think and do more, I think most of us will end up outsourcing a lot of our thinking and doing to it. I don't know how many here have watched Idiocracy, but sometimes it feels like we are accelerating towards it. 😬 PS: Idiocracy is about an average man who wakes up 500 years in the future to discover that human intelligence has declined so much that he is now the smartest person alive.🙂 Chart: @TheEconomist

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