SpaceX Investor @GerberKawasaki tells me he’s not only “disgusted…from a humanity perspective” by restrictions on Starlink in Ukraine, but also: “…they've given everybody a reason not to use Starlink, that Starlink isn't reliable for national security for anybody but Trump.”

🇺🇸 Bill Clinton says he's had enough of the Muslim hate... "I'm tired of people denigrating Muslims for being Muslims. The Quran says, and I first heard this from my daughter, who read the Quran from start to finish when she was 15 years old, and she said, 'Read this.' Allah put the different people on the earth not that they might despise one another, but that they might come to know one another and learn from one another. There are bad actors in every faith because we're all flawed human beings. But the religious wars, the culture wars, I'm just tired." Writer: Michael

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هام وعاجل | للمرة الرابعة حصلنا على تسجيل صوتي جديد يفضح ولي العهد السعودي محمد بن سلمان وهو يعترف أن إسرائيل دخلت الحرب إلى جانب السعودية ضد الحوثيين منذ أكثر من أسبوعين، وأنها شنت خلال أسبوع واحد فقط أكثر من 500 غارة جوية على مواقع حوثية داخل اليمن بالتنسيق مع العمليات السعودية العسكرية الأخطر من ذلك أن ابن سلمان كشف أنه دفع مسبقاً لإسرائيل تريليون دولار مقابل استهداف واغتيال حسن نصر الله، كما دفع لأمريكا تريليون دولار مقابل حربها على إيران. وأضاف بوضوح: أمن إسرائيل من أمن السعودية، وأمن السعودية من أمن إسرائيل، مؤكداً أن ما يجمعه بأمريكا وتل أبيب هو هدف واحد: القضاء على النظام الإيراني الذي يشكل خطراً وجودياً على النظام السعودي والصهيوني في المنطقة. هذا التسريب المدوي يكشف حجم التورط السعودي–الإسرائيلي–الأمريكي في إشعال المنطقة، ويؤكد أن اليمن ولبنان وإيران أصبحت ساحات حرب مدفوعة الثمن، تُدار من الرياض وتل أبيب وواشنطن ضد شعوب المنطقة.

This is perhaps one of the great ironies of our time: China is increasingly shaping the future of AI, yet very few people in the West have the faintest idea how its key thinkers see it - its philosophers, sociologists or ethicists. As is too often the case, we - much like the frog in the well - assume our own AI debate covers every possible view, when much of it springs from the same cultural soil, built on assumptions about what defines us that we don’t even know we’re making. Take for instance the assumption that intelligence is a key part of what makes us human. It’s so intuitively obvious to us that we literally named our species after it - Homo sapiens (Latin for "wise man"). If you think about it, just this assumption explains a large share of the anxiety: if intelligence is what makes us human, then artificial intelligence - or super intelligence - threatens the very thing that makes us us: we’re about to compete with artificial or super “us”. No wonder this feels existential. But China has a tradition of thought as old as ours, if not older, and every bit as rich and sophisticated, which never placed intelligence at the core of what makes us human, and so meets the thinking machine from a completely different starting point. Have you, for instance, ever heard of Zhao Tingyang? Probably not, and yet he may be the most original thinker on AI you’ve never read. He’s one of China’s most prominent philosophers, at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. While Silicon Valley spends billions trying to make AI share our values, he for one argues that doing so “may very well be a suicidal mistake”. Sounds pretty important to hear him out, don’t you think? Or take Liu Yongmou, a philosopher of technology at Renmin University in Beijing. His thinking is almost the opposite of ours. Where we fear machines that become more and more like us, he says that “humanity’s biggest problem is the machinization of humans, not the humanization of machines.” You could even go back to antiquity, when, in many ways, we started asking questions about AI. Did you know, for instance, that Aristotle, in the Politics, imagined a world where “the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them”, and wondered about the social order consequences of this (mostly whether slaves would still be needed)? There are Chinese equivalents to this. For instance, in the Zhuangzi, a foundational Taoist classic, you’ll find a similar thought experiment, with a completely different worry attached. An old gardener is watering his vegetables by hand, hauling water out of a well jar by jar. A visitor shows him a labor-saving device, and the gardener turns it down for the reason that whoever uses machines ends up with 机心 (jīxīn), a “machine-heart” - a mind that schemes, calculates and loses its simplicity. “It is not that I do not know [the machine],” he says, “but I should be ashamed to use it.” Two labor-saving machines, two very different questions: where Aristotle wondered what automation would do to the social order, the Zhuangzi wondered what it would do to us, on the inside. Which, you’ll notice, is exactly Liu Yongmou’s worry, more than two thousand years earlier. In fact, as we’ll see, 心 (xīn), the heart, is a motif that runs deep through the Chinese AI debate. It appears both in the fear, from Zhuangzi to Liu Yongmou, that machines could give us a “machine-heart” and its mirror image: the ambition to give machines a heart of their own. Zhu Songchun, who heads the Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence, wants “to set a heart for machines” (为机器立心, wèi jīqì lì xīn). “Heart” in the Chinese sense, that is, which differs totally from the Valentine's Day fluff we’ve reduced it to. 心 (xīn) means heart and mind at once: it’s where we feel but also where we think, tell right from wrong and care for others. And, crucially, it’s in the heart that the quality Confucianism sees as the very definition of a human being takes root: 仁 (rén). We need two words to translate it, “benevolence” and “humaneness”, but in Chinese they’re one and the same: to be benevolent is to be human. It’s not about intelligence. This is the entire point of my new article: to step out of our well for a moment and peer over the edge of China's. What you’ll find there will, I think, surprise you, with questions you’d never thought to ask: from Zhao Tingyang warning that AI’s bad consequences can at least be fought, but that “humanity may die of all the good things AI creates”, to whether the fear that AI will make us “useless” rests on the false premise that a person is worth what they’re useful for. A premise that a 2,300-year-old Taoist tree, which survived precisely because it was useless, demolished long ago. Could our predicted uselessness turn out, much like that tree’s, to be our saving grace? Chinese thinkers’ answers to these questions are, I think, among the most interesting anyone has given to the defining question of our time. Whether or not you agree with them, they’re the intellectual backdrop of a country shaping much of AI, and with it our future: you might as well know what they think. Enjoy the read here: arnaudbertrand.substack.com/…

491 days alone on the frontline. He amputated his own leg with a knife to survive. And when all hope seemed lost, a drone came to bring him home. This is the extraordinary story of Ukrainian soldier Kostiantyn Vlasenko. Imagine a concrete drainage pipe in almost-occupied territory. Two soldiers inside. Then there is only one left. Without legs. With no hope that anyone will come for him. And so it goes, month after month. Kostiantyn Vlasenko, from Kryvyi Rih, volunteered to fight. He had to beg for a long time just to be called up. He was assigned to a position known as “Vertun” — a concrete drainage pipe converted into a shelter. He and his comrade held it for months. Until one day, his comrade was killed — on his 50th birthday, February 16. Kostiantyn was left alone. The enemy knew he was there. They dropped a speaker playing a recording telling him to surrender. His own side would never save him, they said. A white drone would come for him and take him home. Kostiantyn answered over the radio: “russian warship, go fuck yourself.” And stayed at his position. Then came the explosive drops from enemy drones. His left leg was badly injured, and he twisted his right. His legs began to die. The flesh on his left foot rotted away on its own. He amputated his right foot himself — with a knife, resting it on a brick. “Tears were running down my face. It had to be cut off. So I cut it off,” he recalled. Later, he joked to his commander: “Congratulate me — I no longer have flat feet or size 44 shoes.” When the weather warmed up, he crawled to where his legs had been left behind. There, he saw orange-and-black butterflies swarming around them. “I thought: God, butterflies have come out of my legs, too.” It sounds like something out of a Stephen King novel. And that is no metaphor. His wife had sent him King's The Outsider in a care package. The book helped keep him going, along with thoughts of his daughter, Khrystyna. Then came the rescue. A drone flew in to bring Kostiantyn home alive. The pilot dropped instructions. The drone landed and shut down its engines. Kostiantyn clipped himself on with a carabiner, gave the camera an OK sign and a heart, and took off. As they flew over a river, he feared only one thing: that they would be shot down and he would fall into the water. He couldn't swim. Other drones provided cover. The enemy shot one of them down. But Kostiantyn made it. 491 days at his position. Both legs lost. A drone sent to bring him home alive. And a man who still doesn't consider himself a hero. He says: “I don't like being first. I'd rather be second.” He is alive. He is back on solid ground. His heroism and his story will live on forever.

BREAKING: Ukraine has carried out the world’s first medical evacuation of a human via a drone from the battlefield the 30th mechanised brigade of Ukraine managed to save their injured comrade from a minefield. Just absolutely insane.

Chief international anchor Christiane Amanpour announces that she will leave CNN next June after a 43-year career at the network cnn.it/4hY7PDe