Word: letting
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...ways. This fascinating idea, which deserves careful attention from all well-educated citizens, turns on machines becoming smarter than humans. In such a scenario, the artificial intelligences would recursively self-teach, gaining abilities the designers could not imagine. Irving John Good described this possibility in 1965: “Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence...
...stop people from trying to slip through. It was in Rawalpindi that Mohammad Amir Ajmal Qasab, the surviving gunman from the terrorist massacre that claimed 165 lives in Mumbai last November, took his first step toward infamy. In 2007 he visited a market stall run by Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), an Islamist extremist group that has been blamed for the Mumbai attacks, among others. Qasab, at the time, was neither particularly religious nor particularly violent - just one of millions of poor young men in South Asia trying to cross the fence to a better life, existing in a shadow land...
...everything changed. Pakistan, given no choice by the U.S., stopped supporting the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, which had allowed jihadi training camps to flourish on its soil. On Dec. 13, 2001, a band of Pakistan-based fighters attacked the Indian Parliament. Two weeks later, the U.S. government placed LeT, one of the jihadi groups thought to be behind the attack, on its list of proscribed organizations. The next month, Pakistan's then President, General Pervez Musharraf, bowed to international pressure and declared that no Pakistan-based group would be allowed to commit terrorism in the name of religion. Musharraf banned...
...Musharraf's interlocutors in Washington, this must have sounded like progress. But his decision just shunted the jihadist mentality underground. With a nod and a wink, organizations like LeT re-emerged under new names. The camps were officially closed, but training shifted to hideaways deep in the mountains, where government officials could ignore them. Recruitment continued, strengthened by the perception of unjust - and U.S.-driven - persecution of Muslims...
That's a view that infuriates activists like Yanar Mohammed, who heads the Organization of Women's Freedom in Iraq. "Let me take her to the nightclubs of Damascus and show her [trafficked] women by the thousands," she says. To date, the government has not prosecuted any traffickers. And for the past year it has prevented groups like Mohammed's from visiting women's prisons, where they have previously identified victims, many of whom are jailed for acts committed as a result of being trafficked, such as prostitution or possessing forged documents...