In the past few years, 10,000 to 20,000 apps have stampeded into the mental health space, offering to “disrupt” traditional therapy. With the frenzy around AI innovations like ChatGPT, the claim that chatbots can provide mental health care is on the horizon. The numbers explain why: Pandemic stresses led to millions more Americans seeking treatment. At the same time, there has long been a shortage of mental health professionals in the United States; more than half of all counties lack psychiatrists.
Chile's Patagonia is known for its mountains and hiking paradise but it is also home to the largest continuous kelp forest in the world.
Kelp forests are crucial for battling climate change by capturing carbon, regulating the sea's PH level, maintaining the structure of coasts and are home to multiple species.
But more than half of the world's kelp forests have been decimated by human activity and climate change.
"We want to show that this is what can be lost if we don't protect them," said Max Bello, a Chilean expert on ocean policy who was part of a nine-day scientific expedition run by American NGO Mission Blue to study the kelp forest in the southern area of Chiloe, around 1,400 kilometers south of Santiago.
"When you say Patagonia, we imagine mountains, huge rocks, wind, but few people know what there is underwater," added Bello.
"We know that Patagonia has the largest and best preserved continuous kelp forest in the world."
Bello said this potentially gave the kelp forest "greater carbon sequestration power even than the Amazon rainforest."
But it needs protecting -- a kelp forest off the coast of California has lost 97 percent of its size.
One threat the southern Patagonian kelp forest faces is exploitation of alginate, a principal component in cosmetics which is extracted from algae, usually illegally along the northern coasts of Chile.
"If we don't protect ourselves from this threat, if we don't stop what is happening in the north, we will lose one of the few answers we have to be able to stop climate change," said Bello.
Researchers said on Tuesday that an already widely used medical dye reduces the poisonous effects of death cap mushrooms in mice, raising hopes of the first targeted antidote for the world's deadliest mushroom.
The China-led team said the dye, which has yet to be tested as an antidote on humans but has already been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (US FDA) for other uses, has the potential to "save many lives".
Amanita phalloides, commonly known as death caps, are estimated to cause more than 90 percent of all deaths from mushroom poisoning worldwide.
They often resemble other species of mushrooms that people like to pick in the wild -- but eating just half of one can cause deadly failure of the liver or kidneys.
While originally native to Europe, death caps have spread across the world, causing more than 38,000 illnesses and nearly 800 deaths in China alone between 2010 and 2020.
For a new study published in the journal Nature Communications, the researchers sought to target alpha-amanitin, the main toxin produced by the mushrooms.
They used genome-wide CRISPR screening, a relatively new technique that has helped researchers understand the role specific genes play in infections and poisonings.
The team had previously used the technology to find a potential antidote for the box jellyfish, one of the world's most venomous animals.
The CRISPR screening identified that the protein STT3B was a key culprit in the toxic effects of death cap poisoning.
The team searched through a database of drugs already approved by the US FDA and found one that could potentially block the protein.
- 'Unexpected connection' -
It is a fluorescent dye called indocyanine green, which is administered intravenously. It has been widely used for decades in the US, Europe and elsewhere for diagnostic imaging, allowing doctors to measure liver and heart function.
Qiaoping Wang, a researcher at China's Sun Yat-sen University and senior author of the study, told AFP that "upon discovering this unexpected connection, the research team was understandably taken aback".
The team tested the antidote first on liver cells in a petri dish, then on mice.
In both cases, it "demonstrated significant potential in mitigating the toxic impact" of mushroom poisoning, Wang said.
"This molecule holds immense potential for treating cases of human mushroom poisoning and could mark the first-ever specific antidote with a targeted protein," he said.
"It could save many lives if it is as effective in humans as in mice."
The team now intends to conduct trials on humans using the dye as a death cap antidote.
An extract from milk thistle seeds called silibinin has previously been used to treat death cap poisoning, but exactly how it works has remained unclear.
In a first, US climate scientists have quantified the extent to which greenhouse gasses from the world's top fossil fuel companies have contributed to wildfires.
Their analysis, published Tuesday in Environmental Research Letters, found that carbon dioxide and methane emissions from the so-called "Big 88" firms were responsible for more than a third of the area scorched by forest blazes in western North America over the past 40 years.
First author Kristina Dahl, of the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), told AFP wildfires in the western United States and southwestern Canada have been worsening for decades: they are burning more intensely, over longer seasons, covering larger areas and reaching higher elevations.
To date, the cost of rebuilding and increasing resilience has largely been footed by the general public, "so we wanted to better understand the role that fossil fuel industry emissions have had in altering the wildfire landscape," she said.
"We really wanted to put a spotlight on their role in that, so that they can be held accountable for their fair share of the cost."
'Atmospheric thirst'
Using climate modeling, the team determined that emissions from the Big 88 -- which includes ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron and Shell -- were responsible for increasing global average temperatures by 0.9 degrees Fahrenheit (0.5 degrees Celsius) since the start of the 20th century, or roughly half of the observed warming.
For the purposes of this study, the authors included all emissions across the life cycle of fossil fuels -- from extraction and flaring operations to refinement and use inside a vehicle, for example.
The companies' contribution to planet-wide warming was then used to calculate how much they added to a rise in "vapor pressure deficit" or VPD -- a measure of air's ability to draw water out of plants and soils -- within the western North America region.
Because warmer air can hold more water vapor, rising temperatures caused by climate change are causing this measure of atmospheric thirst to increase too.
A higher VPD makes an area more fire prone, and recent research has established a clear exponential relationship between increases in this aridity indicator and the area burned by forest fires.
Combining all these elements, Dahl's research team found that emissions from the Big 88 were responsible for 37 percent of the total area razed by forest fires in western United States and southwestern Canada between 1986, when reliable fire area data became available, and 2021.
That is 19.8 million acres (8 million hectares) -- an area roughly the size of the Czech Republic.
The study also found that emissions from the same companies were responsible for nearly half of the observed increase in VPD since 1901.
Other factors that increased fire danger conditions over the last century include aggressive fire suppression that led to large buildups of vegetation that normally would have burned in smaller regularly occurring fires, often managed by Indigenous communities.
Accidental ignitions have also increased as humans encroached into fire-prone areas.
- Growing area of research -
The research builds on an accumulating body of climate "attribution" studies, which have calculated how much greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels have contributed to global temperature increases, sea level rise, and ocean acidification.
Such work has paved the way for impacted communities to seek redress through lawsuits, said Dahl, and helps shift the conversation about tackling climate change away from individual responsibility.
"Lowering our individual carbon footprints is a narrative that has been very heavily pushed by the fossil fuel industry," she said.
"While individuals need to make the best choices we can, we also have to acknowledge that we're living in a reality that's been shaped by these companies and our choices have been constrained because of them."
The UCS is pushing for government investigations into past and ongoing disinformation campaigns by industry aimed at denying climate science that was predicted by the companies’ own internal modeling.
The World Health Organization has come out against the use of non-sugar sweeteners (NSS) as a means to control weight or limit noncommunicable sickness. “The recommendation is based on the findings of a systematic review of the available evidence which suggests that use of NSS does not confer any long-term benefit in reducing body fat in adults or children,” WHO said in a statement Monday. That review also determined long-term use of NSS could contribute to type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular diseases and serious illness in adults. “Replacing free sugars with NSS does not help with weight control ...
Space is vast. But are certain parts of space in danger of becoming overcrowded with Internet satellites and cosmic junk? Concern has been increasing among government agencies, astronomers and others as the number of launched and proposed low-Earth orbit satellites surges. Worries center on the increased risk of collisions that create debris fields capable of taking out nearby satellites; bright reflections that harm scientific astronomy and change the night sky; atmospheric pollution from thousands of deorbiting satellites burning up every few years; and radio signal interference that blocks ...
Polynesians exposed to fallout from France's nuclear tests in the South Pacific have a slightly increased risk of developing thyroid cancer, a study suggested on Monday that used declassified military data for the first time.
France carried out 41 atmospheric nuclear weapon tests in French Polynesia between 1966 and 1975, exposing residents to fallout which has been a source of lasting friction between Paris and residents of the Pacific archipelago.
The study, published in the journal JAMA Network Open, used risk modeling to estimate that the nuclear tests were associated with between 0.6 percent and 7.7 percent of thyroid cancers in French Polynesia.
"This is the proportion of thyroid cancer attributable to the tests among all the cases of thyroid cancer that have or will develop in the people present at the time of the tests, in all islands combined," the study's lead author Florent de Vathaire told AFP.
The impact of the nuclear tests was "weak but not at all non-existent," said de Vathaire, a radiation expert at France's INSERM medical research institute.
The study compared 395 people who were diagnosed with thyroid cancer between 1984 and 2016 in French Polynesia with a control group of 555 from the general population.
It was an update from previous research the same team had published in 2010.
"This is the first study that uses confidential army reports declassified in 2013," de Vathaire said.
Using the documents, meteorological data and interviews with the cancer patients, the researchers simulated the radioactive cloud produced by each nuclear test, and estimated the dose of radiation received in the thyroid of each participant.
The average radiation dose for each person was nearly five milligrays, a standard unit of radiation absorption.
The scientists found "no significant association" between the radiation dose and the risk of thyroid cancer, INSERM said in a statement.
But the link was considered significant if the analysis only included invasive cancer requiring treatment.
France moved its nuclear tests underground in 1975, but continued conducting blasts in the Pacific until 1996. Over three decades, France carried out almost 200 tests.
During a visit to the capital Papeete in 2021, French President Emmanuel Macron acknowledged that France owes a "debt" to Polynesians for the nuclear tests, calling for confidential military information to be made public.
A recently developed technique can glean a huge amount of information from tiny samples of genetic material called environmental DNA, or eDNA, that humans and animals leave behind everywhere -- including in the air.
The tool could lead to a range of medical and scientific advances, and could even help track down criminals, according to the authors of a new study published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.
But it also poses a vast range of concerns around consent, privacy and surveillance, they added.
Humans spread their DNA -- which carries genetic information specific to each person -- everywhere, by shedding skin or hair cells, coughing out droplets, or in wastewater flushed down toilets.
In recent years, scientists have been increasingly collecting the eDNA of wild animals, in the hopes of helping threatened species.
For the new research, scientists at the University of Florida's Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience had been focused on collecting the eDNA of endangered sea turtles.
But the international team of researchers inadvertently collected a massive amount of human eDNA, which they called "human genetic bycatch".
David Duffy, a wildlife disease genomic professor at the Whitney Laboratory who led the project, said they were "consistently surprised" by the amount and quality of the human eDNA they collected.
"In most cases the quality is almost equivalent to if you took a sample from a person," he said.
The scientists collected human eDNA from nearby oceans, rivers and towns, as well as from areas far from human settlements.
Struggling to find a sample not tainted by humans, they went to a section of a remote Florida island inaccessible to the public.
It was free of human DNA -- at least until a member of the team walked barefoot along the beach. They were then able to detect eDNA from a single footprint in the sand.
In Duffy's native Ireland, the team found human DNA all along a river, with the exception of the remote mountain stream at its source.
Taking samples from the air of a veterinary hospital, the team captured eDNA that matched the staff, their animal patient and viruses common in animals.
One of the study's authors, Mark McCauley of the Whitney Laboratory, said that by sequencing the DNA samples, the team was able to identify if a person had a greater risk of diseases such as autism and diabetes.
"All of this very personal, ancestral and health-related data is freely available in the environment, and it's simply floating around us in the air right now," McCauley told an online press conference.
"We specifically did not examine our sequences in a way that we would be able to pick out specific individuals because of the ethical issues," he said.
But that would "definitely" be possible in the future, he added.
"The question is how long it takes until we're at that stage."
The researchers emphasised the potential benefits of collecting human eDNA, such as tracking cancer mutations in wastewater, discovering long-hidden archaeological sites or revealing the true culprit of a crime using only the DNA they left in a room.
Natalie Ram, a law professor at the University of Maryland not involved in the research, said the findings "should raise serious concern about genetic privacy and the appropriate limits of policing".
"Exploiting involuntarily shed genetic information for investigative aims risks putting all of us under perpetual genetic surveillance," she wrote in a commentary on the study.
The authors of the study shared her concerns.
McCauley warned harvesting human eDNA without consent could be used to track individual people or even target "vulnerable populations or ethnic minorities".
It is why the team decided to sound the alarm, they said in a statement, calling for policymakers and scientists to start working on regulation that could address the "ethical quagmire".
Climate change does not make cyclones, such as that battering Bangladesh, more frequent but it does render them more intense and destructive, according to climatologists and weather experts.
These immensely powerful natural phenomena have different labels according to the region they hit, but cyclones, hurricanes and typhoons are all violent tropical storms that can generate 10 times as much energy as the Hiroshima atomic bomb.
They are divided into different categories according to their maximum sustained wind strength and the scale of damage they can potentially inflict.
- Cyclones, hurricanes and typhoons -
"A cyclone is a low-pressure system that forms in the tropics in an area hot enough for it to develop," Emmanuel Cloppet, from French weather office Meteo France, told AFP.
"It is characterized by rain/storm clouds that start rotating and generate intense rains and winds, and a storm surge created by the wind," he added.
These huge weather phenomena -- several hundreds of kilometers (miles) across -- are made more dangerous by their ability to travel huge distances.
Tropical cyclones are categorized according to wind intensity, rising from tropical depression (under 63 kilometers per hour (39 miles per hour)), through tropical storm (63-117 kph) to major hurricane (above that).
They are termed cyclones in the Indian Ocean and South Pacific, hurricanes in the North Atlantic and Northeast Pacific and typhoons in the Northwest Pacific.
Meteorological agencies monitoring them use different scales to categorize them, depending on the oceanic basin in which they occur.
The most well-known scale for measuring their intensity and destructive potential is the five-level Saffir-Simpson wind scale.
- More powerful cyclones -
"The overall number of tropical cyclones per year has not changed globally but climate change has increased the occurrence of the most intense and destructive storms," according to the World Weather Attribution (WWA), a group of climate scientists and climate impact specialists whose goal is to demonstrate reliable links between global heating and certain weather phenomena.
The most violent cyclones -- categories three to five on the Saffir-Simpson scale -- that cause the most destruction have become more frequent, the WWA said.
Climate change caused by human activity influences tropical cyclones in three major ways -- by warming the air and oceans and by triggering a rise in sea levels.
"Tropical cyclones are the most extreme rainfall events on the planet," the WWA said in its publication "Reporting Extreme Weather and Climate Change".
Since the atmosphere is warmer, it can hold more water, so when it rains it pours.
"A rise in air temperature of three degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) can potentially produce a 20-percent increase in the quantity of rain generated by a cyclonic event," said Cloppet.
It is these intense torrential downpours that lead to sometimes fatal floods and mudslides, as was the case of Cyclone Freddy, which killed hundreds of people in Malawi and Mozambique earlier this year.
Climate change is also warming the oceans. This warm water fuels cyclones and gives them their strength.
"Climate change therefore creates the conditions in which more powerful storms can form, intensify rapidly and persist to reach land, while carrying more water," the WWA said.
- Shifting north -
The fierce winds produced by cyclones generate storm surges which can cause coastal flooding.
These storm waves are higher now than in previous decades because of the sea level rise triggered by climate change.
Scientists also expect to see cyclones in places they have not happened before because global heating is expanding the regions where tropical sea water conditions occur.
"It's as if the tropics were spreading," Cloppet said.
"Areas that aren't really affected now could be hit much harder in future."
The WWA agreed: "As ocean waters warm, it is reasonable to speculate that (tropical) storms will shift further away from the Equator."
"A northward shift in cyclones in the western North Pacific, striking East and Southeast Asia, (is) a direct consequence of climate change," it said.
As a result, they could strike in relatively unprepared locations that have not, in the past, had reason to expect them.
An estimated 295 million people suffer from visual impairment globally. Around 43 million of those people are living with blindness. While not every form of blindness can be cured, recent scientific breakthroughs have uncovered new ways to treat some forms of inherited blindness through gene therapy.
Jean Bennett is a gene therapy expert and a professor emeritus of ophthalmology at the University of Pennsylvania. She and her laboratory developed the first gene therapy drug for a genetic disease to be approved in the U.S. The drug, Luxturna, treats patients with biallelic RPE65 mutation-associated retinal dystrophy, a rare genetic disorder that causes visual impairments and blindness in patients early in life.
In March, Bennett spoke at the 2023 Imagine Solutions Conference in Naples, Florida, about what gene therapy is, why it matters and the success she and her team have had helping the blind to see. The Conversation caught up with Bennett after the conference. Her edited answers are below.
Jean Bennett speaks at the 2023 Imagine Solutions Conference.
What is gene therapy and how does it work?
Gene therapy is a set of techniques that harness DNA or RNA to treat or prevent disease. Gene therapy treats disease in three primary ways: by substituting a disease-causing gene with a healthy new or modified copy of that gene; turning genes on or off; and injecting a new or modified gene into the body.
How has gene therapy changed how doctors treat genetic eye diseases and blindness?
In the past, many doctors did not think it necessary to identify the genetic basis of eye disease because treatment was not yet available. However, a few specialists, including me and my collaborators, identified these defects in our research, convinced that someday treatment would be made possible. Over time, we were able to create a treatment designed for individuals with particular gene defects that lead to congenital blindness.
Gene therapy treatments are now available in pharmacies and operating rooms all over the world.
Gene therapy is even being used to restore vision to people whose photoreceptors – the cells in the retina that respond to light – have completely degenerated. This approach uses optogenetic therapy, which aims to revive those degenerated photoreceptors by adding light-sensing molecules to cells, thereby drastically improving a person’s vision.
You created one of the first gene therapies approved in the US. What is the current state of the clinical use of gene therapy?
There are now many approved gene therapies in the U.S., but the majority are combined with cell therapies in which a cell is modified in a dish and then injected back into the patient.
Many forms of gene therapy are helping to treat blindness.
The majority of those therapies target different forms of cancer, although there are several for devastating inherited diseases. The drug Skysona is a new injectable gene therapy medication that treats boys ages 4 to 17 with cerebral adrenoleukodystrophy, a genetic disease in which a buildup of very-long-chain fatty acids in the brain can lead to death.
The gene therapy that my team and I developed was the first FDA-approved project involving injection of a gene therapy directly into a person – in this case, into the retina. Only one other FDA-approved gene therapy is directly administered to the body – one that targets spinal muscular atrophy, a disease that causes progressive muscle weakness and eventually death. The drug, Zolgensma, is injected intravenously into babies and children diagnosed with the disease, allowing them to live as healthy, active children.
There are now more than two dozen FDA-approved cell and gene therapies, including CAR T-cell therapies – in which T cells, a type of immune system cells, are modified in the laboratory to better attack cancer cells in the body – and therapies for various blood diseases.
What are you currently working on that you’re most excited about?
I am very excited about some upcoming clinical trials that my team will soon initiate to target some other devastating blinding diseases. We will incorporate a new test of functional vision – how your eyes, brain and the visual pathways between them work together to help a person move in the world. This test utilizes a virtual reality game that is not only fun for the user but promises to provide an objective measure of the person’s functional vision. I hope that our virtual reality test will inform us of any potential benefits from the treatments and also serve as a useful outcome measure for other gene and cell therapy clinical trials involving vision.
What are the biggest challenges gene therapy faces?
The biggest challenges involve systemic diseases, or diseases affecting the entire body rather than a single organ or body part. For those diseases, super-high doses of gene therapy reagents must be delivered. Such diseases involve not only technical challenges – such as how to manufacture enormous amounts of gene therapy compounds without contaminating them – but also difficulties ensuring that the treatment targets diseased tissues without causing toxic immune side effects. That level of a problem does not exist with the eye, where relatively small doses are used and exposure to the rest of the body is limited.
Another challenge is how to address diseases in which the target gene is very large. Current approaches to delivering treatments into cells lack the capacity to hold large genes.
Cost remains a key issue in this effort – gene therapy drugs are enormously expensive. As drug manufacturers are able to refine this technique, gene therapy drugs may become more commonplace, causing their price to drop as a result.
Editor’s note: This article contains plot spoilers.
Society’s understanding of technology and cybersecurity often is based on simple stereotypes and sensational portrayals in the entertainment media. I’ve written about how certain scenarios are entertaining but misleading. Think of black-clad teenage hackers prowling megacities challenging corporate villains. Or think of counterintelligence specialists repositioning a satellite from the back of a surveillance van via a phone call.
But sometimes Hollywood gets it right by depicting reality in ways that both entertain and educate. And that’s important, because whether it’s a large company, government or your personal information, we all share many of the same cybersecurity threats and vulnerabilities. As a former cybersecurity industry practitioner and current cybersecurity researcher, I believe the final season of “Star Trek: Picard” is the latest example of entertainment media providing useful lessons about cybersecurity and the nature of the modern world.
So how does “Star Trek: Picard” relate to cybersecurity?
The nature of the threat
The show’s protagonist is Jean-Luc Picard, a retired Starfleet admiral who commanded the starship Enterprise-D in a previous series. Starfleet is the military wing of the United Federation of Planets, of which Earth is a member. In Season 3, the final season, Picard’s ultimate enemy, the Borg, returns to try conquering humanity again. The Borg is a cybernetic collective of half-human, half-machine “drones” led by a cyborg queen.
The Borg has partnered with other villains and worked for over a decade to deploy hidden agents able to compromise the DNA data contained in the software underpinning the transporter – a teleportation device used regularly by Starfleet personnel. Over many years, a certain subgroup of Starfleet personnel had their DNA altered by using the transporter.
Thus, in launching their final attack, the Borg is able to instantly activate thousands of “drones” to do its bidding in the form of altered, compromised Starfleet personnel. As Geordi La Forge, the Enterprise-D’s engineer, notes, “They’ve been assimilating the entire fleet this whole time, without anyone ever knowing it.”
Instead of malicious software taking over computers, the plot involves malicious genetic code taking over humans.
The Borg’s prolonged, stealthy infiltration of the federation is indicative of how today’s most effective cyberattackers work. While it’s relatively easy to detect when hackers attempt to breach a system from the outside, experts worry about the effects of an enemy infiltrating critical systems from within. Attackers can put malicious code in software during manufacturing or in software updates, both of which are avenues of attack that do not arouse suspicion until the compromised systems are activated or targeted.
This underscores the importance of ensuring the security and integrity of digital supply chains from product development at the vendor through product deployment at client sites to ensure no silent “drones,” such as malware, are waiting to be activated by an adversary.
Equally important, “Star Trek: Picard” presents the very real and insidious nature of the insider threat faced by today’s organizations. While not infected with a cybernetic virus, recently arrested Massachusetts Air National Guard airman Jack Teixeira shows the damage that can occur when a trusted employee has malicious intent or becomes co-opted and inflicts significant damage on an employer.
In some cases, these compromised or malicious individuals can remain undiscovered for years. And some global adversaries of the U.S., such as China and Russia, are known for taking a long-term perspective when it comes to planning and conducting espionage activities – or cyberattacks.
Humans remain the weakest link
“Synchronistic technology that allows every ship in Starfleet to operate as one. An impenetrable armada. Unity and defense. The ultimate safeguard.”
With these words, humanity’s military defenders activated a feature that linked every Starfleet vessel together under one unified automated command system. While intended to serve as an emergency capability, this system – called Fleet Formation – was quickly hijacked by the Borg as part of its attack on Earth. In essence, Starfleet created a Borg-like defense system that the Borg itself used to attack the federation.
Here, the most well-intentioned plans for security were thwarted by enemies who used humanity’s own technologies against them. In the real world, capabilities such as on-demand real-time software updates, ChatGPT and centrally administered systems sound enticing and offer conveniences, cost savings or new capabilities. However, the lesson here is that organizations should not put them into widespread use without carefully considering as many of the potential risks or vulnerabilities as practical.
But even then, technology alone can’t protect humans from ourselves – after all, it’s people who develop, design, select, administer and use technology, which means human flaws are present in these systems, too. Such failings frequently lead to a stream of high-profile cybersecurity incidents.
Resiliency is not futile
To counter the Borg’s final assault on Earth, Picard’s crew borrows its old starship, Enterprise-D, from a fleet museum. The rationale is that its ship is the only major combat vessel not connected to the Borg collective via Starfleet’s compromised Fleet Formation protocol and therefore is able to operate independently during the crisis. As La Forge notes, “Something older, analog. Offline from the others.”
When a network has been compromised, it’s important to be able to use systems that aren’t connected to the network.
From a cybersecurity perspective, ensuring the availability of information resources is one of the industry’s guiding principles. Here, the Enterprise-D represents defenders in response to a cyber incident using assets that are outside of an adversary’s reach. Perhaps more important, the vessel symbolizes the need to think carefully before embracing a completely networked computing environment or relying on any single company or provider of services and connectivity for daily operations.
From natural disasters to cyberattack, what’s your plan if your IT environment becomes corrupted or inaccessible? Can your organization stay operational and still provide necessary services? For critical public messaging, do governments and corporations have their own uncorruptible Enterprise-D capabilities to fall back on, such as the fediverse, the decentralized microblogging platform that is immune to the impulsive manipulations of Twitter’s ownership?
Prepare for the unknown
The “Star Trek” universe explores the unknown in both the universe and contemporary society. How the crews deal with these experiences relies on their training, the appreciation of broad perspectives and ability to devise innovative solutions to the crisis of the week. Often, such solutions are derived from characters’ interests in music, painting, archaeology, history, sports and other nontechnical areas of study, recreation or expertise.
Similarly, as modern digital defenders, to successfully confront our own cyber unknowns we need a broad appreciation of things beyond just cybersecurity and technology. It’s one thing to understand at a technical level how a cyberattack occurs and how to respond. But it’s another thing to understand the broader, perhaps more systemic, nuanced, organizational or international factors that may be causes or solutions, too.
Lessons from literature, history, psychology, philosophy, law, management and other nontechnical disciplines can inform how organizations plan for and respond to cybersecurity challenges of all types. Balancing solid technical knowledge with foundations in the liberal arts and humanities allows people to adapt comfortably to constantly evolving technologies and shifting threats.
Dystopic metaphors in fiction often reflect current social concerns, and the “Star Trek” universe is no different. Although rooted in a science fiction fantasy, “Star Trek: Picard” provides some accurate, practical and understandable cybersecurity reminders for today.
Season 3, in particular, offers viewers both entertainment and education – indeed, the best of both worlds.
For the most part, the focus of contemporary emergency management has been on natural, technological and human-made hazards such as flooding, earthquakes, tornadoes, industrial accidents, extreme weather events and cyber attacks.
However, with the increase in the availability and capabilities of artificial intelligence, we may soon see emerging public safety hazards related to these technologies that we will need to mitigate and prepare for.
We are now reaching a turning point where AI is becoming a potential source of risk at a scale that should be incorporated into risk and emergency management phases — mitigation or prevention, preparedness, response and recovery.
AI and hazard classification
AI hazards can be classified into two types: intentional and unintentional. Unintentional hazards are those caused by human errors or technological failures.
As the use of AI increases, there will be more adverse events caused by human error in AI models or technological failures in AI based technologies. These events can occur in all kinds of industries including transportation (like drones, trains or self-driving cars), electricity, oil and gas, finance and banking, agriculture, health and mining.
Intentional AI hazards are potential threats that are caused by using AI to harm people and properties. AI can also be used to gain unlawful benefits by compromising security and safety systems.
In my view, this simple intentional and unintentional classification may not be sufficient in case of AI. Here, we need to add a new class of emerging threats — the possibility of AI overtaking human control and decision-making. This may be triggered intentionally or unintentionally.
AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton is interviewed by CBS about the dangers of the technology.
Public safety risks
Public safety and emergency management experts use risk matrices to assess and compare risks. Using this method, hazards are qualitatively or quantitatively assessed based on their frequency and consequence, and their impacts are classified as low, medium or high.
Hazards that have low frequency and low consequence or impact are considered low risk and no additional actions are required to manage them. Hazards that have medium consequence and medium frequency are considered medium risk. These risks need to be closely monitored.
Hazards with high frequency or high consequence or high in both consequence and frequency are classified as high risks. These risks need to be reduced by taking additional risk reduction and mitigation measures. Failure to take immediate and proper action may result in sever human and property losses.
Up until now, AI hazards and risks have not been added into the risk assessment matrices much beyond organizational use of AI applications. The time has come when we should quickly start bringing the potential AI risks into local, national and global risk and emergency management.
AI risk assessment
AI technologies are becoming more widely used by institutions, organizations and companies in different sectors, and hazards associated with the AI are starting to emerge.
In 2018, the accounting firm KPMG developed an “AI Risk and Controls Matrix.” It highlights the risks of using AI by businesses and urges them to recognize these new emerging risks. The report warned that AI technology is advancing very quickly and that risk control measures must be in place before they overwhelm the systems.
Governments have also started developing some risk assessment guidelines for the use of AI-based technologies and solutions. However, these guidelines are limited to risks such as algorithmic bias and violation of individual rights.
At the government level, the Canadian government issued the “Directive on Automated Decision-Making” to ensure that federal institutions minimize the risks associated with the AI systems and create appropriate governance mechanisms.
The main objective of the directive is to ensure that when AI systems are deployed, risks to clients, federal institutions and Canadian society are reduced. According to this directive, risk assessments must be conducted by each department to make sure that appropriate safeguards are in place in accordance with the Policy on Government Security.
In 2021, the U.S. Congress tasked the National Institute of Standards and Technology with developing an AI risk management framework for the Department of Defense. The proposed voluntary AI risk assessment framework recommends banning the use of AI systems that present unacceptable risks.
Threats and competition
Much of the national level policy focus on AI has been from national security and global competition perspectives — the national security and economic risks of falling behind in the AI technology.
The U.S. National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence highlighted national security risks associated with AI. These were not from the public threats of the technology itself, but from losing out in the global competition for AI development in other countries, including China.
In its 2017 Global Risk Report, the World Economic Forum highlighted that AI is only one of emerging technologies that can exacerbate global risk. While assessing the risks posed by the AI, the report concluded that, at that time, super-intelligent AI systems remain a theoretical threat.
However, the latest Global Risk Report 2023 does not even mention the AI and AI associated risks which means that the leaders of the global companies that provide inputs to the global risk report had not viewed the AI as an immediate risk.
Faster than policy
AI development is progressing much faster than government and corporate policies in understanding, foreseeing and managing the risks. The current global conditions, combined with market competition for AI technologies, make it difficult to think of an opportunity for governments to pause and develop risk governance mechanisms.
While we should collectively and proactively try for such governance mechanisms, we all need to brace for major catastrophic AI’s impacts on our systems and societies.
Ali Asgary, Professor, Disaster & Emergency Management, Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies & Director, CIFAL York, York University, Canada
Molly was 88 years old and in good health. She had outlived two husbands, her siblings, most of her friends and her only son.
“I don’t have any meaningful relationships left, dear,” she told me. “They’ve all died. And you know what? Underneath it all, I want to leave this world too.” Leaning a little closer, as though she was telling me a secret, she continued:
Shall I tell you what I am? I’m strong. I can admit to myself and to you that there’s nothing left for me here. I’m more than ready to leave when it’s my time. In fact, it can’t come quickly enough.
I’ve interviewed many older people for research. Every so often, I’m struck by the sincerity with which some people feel that their life is completed. They seem tired of being alive.
I’m a member of of the European Understanding Tiredness of Life in Older People Research Network, a group of geriatricians, psychiatrists, social scientists, psychologists and death scholars. We want to better understand the phenomenon and unpick what is unique about it. The network is also working on advice for politicians and healthcare practices, as well as caregiver and patient support.
Professor of care ethics Els van Wijngaarden and colleagues in the Netherlands listened to a group of older people who were not seriously ill, yet felt a yearning to end their lives. The key issues they identified in such people were: aching loneliness, pain associated with not mattering, struggles with self-expression, existential tiredness, and fear of being reduced to a completely dependent state.
This need not be the consequence of a lifetime of suffering, or a response to intolerable physical pain. Tiredness of life also seems to arise in people who consider themselves to have lived fulfilling lives. One man of 92 told the network’s researchers:
You have no effect on anything. The ship sets sail and everyone has a job, but you just sail along. I am cargo to them. That’s not easy. That’s not me. Humiliation is too strong a word, but it is bordering on it. I simply feel ignored, completely marginalized.
Another man said:
Look at the condition of those old ladies in the building opposite. Gaunt and half-dead, pointlessly driven around in a wheelchair … It has nothing to do with being human anymore. It is a stage of life I simply don’t want to go through.
A unique suffering
The American novelist Philip Roth wrote that “old age is not a battle, old age is a massacre”. If we live long enough, we can lose our identity, physical capabilities, partner, friends and careers.
For some people, this elicits a deep-rooted sense that life has been stripped of meaning – and that the tools we need to rebuild a sense of purpose are irretrievable.
Care professor Helena Larsson and colleagues in Sweden have written about a gradual “turning out of the lights” in old age. They argue that people steadily let go of life, until they reach a point where they are ready to turn off the outside world. Larsson’s team raises the question of whether this might be inevitable for us all.
Of course, this sort of suffering shares characteristics (it’s depressing and painful) with anguish we encounter at other points in life. But it’s not the same. Consider the existential suffering that might arise from a terminal illness or recent divorce. In these examples, part of the suffering is connected to the fact that there is more of life’s voyage to make – but that the rest of the journey feels uncertain and no longer looks the way we fantasized it would.
This sort of suffering is often tied to mourning a future we feel we should have had, or fearing a future we are uncertain about. One of the distinctions in tiredness of life is that there is no desire for, or mourning of, a future; only a profound sense that the journey is over, yet drags on painfully and indefinitely.
The global view
In countries where euthanasia and assisted suicide are legal, doctors and researchers are debating whether tiredness of life meets the threshold for the sort of unceasing emotional suffering that grants people the right to euthanasia.
The fact that this problem is common enough for researchers to debate it may suggest that modern life has shut older people out of western society. Perhaps elders are no longer revered for their wisdom and experience. But it’s not inevitable. In Japan, age is seen as a spring or rebirth after a busy period of working and raising children. One study found older adults in Japan showed higher scores on personal growth compared with midlife adults, whereas the opposite age pattern was found in the US.
Surgeon and medical professor Atul Gawande argues that in western societies, medicine has created the ideal conditions for transforming aging into a “long, slow fade”. He believes quality of life has been overlooked as we channel our resources towards biological survival. This is unprecedented in history. Tiredness of life may be evidence of the cost.
Kelp forests can store huge amounts of carbon, making them crucial in the fight against climate change © ANDY MANN / MISSION BLUE NGO/AFP
