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The scandal over the negative treatment of the Windrush Generation, Commonwealth citizens who arrived in the U.K. decades ago, first erupted in 2018, forcing then Foreign Secretary Amber Rudd to resign

The scandal over the negative treatment of the Windrush Generation, Commonwealth citizens who arrived in the U.K. decades ago, first erupted in 2018, forcing then Foreign Secretary Amber Rudd to resign

The story so far: A recently-leaked report of the United Kingdom Home Office revealed that the almost three decades of legislation partly aimed at reducing the non-white population in the country eventually caused the Windrush immigration scandal that broke out in 2018, T he Guardian reported on Monday, May 30.

The publication of the report commissioned by the Home Office was reportedly suppressed last year. According to the British daily, the 52-page analysis stated that the deep-rooted racism of the Windrush scandal could be attributed to immigration legislation from 1950 to 1981 designed in part to lessen the number of people with black or brown skin who were permitted to live and work in the UK.

The Windrush generation is a generation of people who were invited to Britain from Caribbean nations between 1948 and 1971 to help plug the labour shortage and rebuild the country after the destruction of World War Two. They were allowed to lawfully live and work in Britain as part of the extended Colonial empire.

The name Windrush comes from a ship called the Windrush Empire on which the first group of nearly 500 Commonwealth citizens arrived in the UK in June 1948, from countries such as Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, and Barbados.

Some of them arrived without passports or as eight or nine-year-old children on the strength of their parents passports, as they had been invited by the British Empire, which had colonised their countries.

The University of Oxford estimates that over 5,00,000 British residents born in a Commonwealth nation arrived in the UK before 1971.

Immigration from the Caribbean to the U.K. largely stopped in 1971, when the Immigration Act was passed. It granted Commonwealth citizens already in the country indefinite leave to remain, but any foreign-born British passport holder post the passage of the Act would have to possess a work permit or proof that a previous generation was born in the country to continue to stay in the U.K.

The Windrush scandal surfaced in early 2018 when The Guardian began covering the stories of individuals belonging to the Windrush generation, who were wrongly being labelled illegal immigrants.

The issue snowballed, revealing that hundreds of naturalised British citizens who had come from Commonwealth countries years ago were now stuck in tangles with British immigration authorities. Despite spending over five to six decades in the U.K., they were being asked to provide proof of settlement and evidence of their lives in Britain, which they had never before been required to keep.

In some cases, several such citizens were detained by immigration officials, faced the risk of deportation, or were denied their rights to employment, residence, and healthcare by the National Health Service (NHS).

A prominent case that emerged in late 2017 was that of Paulette Wilson, a woman in her sixties who had come to Britain as a child in the 1960s. As per the law, she had indefinite leave to remain in the U.K., and she had also worked as a cook in the House of Commons for years. Despite this, the Home Office served her a letter when she was in her 50s, declaring her an illegal immigrant.

After spending years caught in bureaucratic tangles, she spent a week in a detention centre before being taken to the Heathrow airport, the usual point of departure for detainees sent back to their countries of origin. Her deportation was halted after the courts stepped in.

However, many who struggled like Ms. Wilson were eventually wrongly deported; the Home Office revealed in 2018 that nearly 63 immigrants from the Caribbean might have been wrongly deported.

The Windrush generation scandal broke right when leaders of Commonwealth countries were set to arrive in the U.K. for a summit with the then-Prime Minister Theresa May. Leaders of Caribbean nations took strong exception to the Windrush revelations. Prime Minister of Jamaica Andrew Holness pointed out that the Windrush generation, who had enriched Britain and British society for years, were now unable to claim their place as citizens.

Following this, Prime Minister May apologised to the Commonwealth leaders for any anxiety that had been caused to those belonging to the Windrush generation.

As Home Secretary in 2012, Theresa May outlined a strategy to weed out illegal immigrants. The aim is to create, here in Britain, a really hostile environment for illegal migration, she said to the press. This was believed to have led to the crackdown on Commonwealth citizens by U.K immigration authorities.

Immigration legislation in the U.K. post-2012 was largely built around what came to be known as the hostile environment policy. The 2014 and 2016 Immigration Acts essentially empowered officials and even private banks, employers, landlords, and service providers to determine whether their client or employee was an illegal immigrant and consequently deny them services. It gave immigration officials the power to identify illegal immigrants living in the country, simplify their removal process, and limit their right to appeal.

As a partial result of the policy, authorities also began to ask many Windrush generation citizens to provide evidentiary documentation of their life in Britain.

In 2018, it was also revealed that thousands of landing slips recording the dates of arrival of Windrush immigrants were destroyed when a department of the Home Office moved to another building in 2010, despite warnings from employees.

After the scandal broke out, the government in April 2018 announced an inquiry into the Windrush controversy and a scheme to give British citizenship and compensation to those belonging to the generation.

However, amid growing criticism from the Opposition, civil society, and Windrush campaigners, the then-Home Secretary Amber Rudd resigned in late April. She admitted that many Windrush citizens has been mistreated by the Home office and said that their treatment appalled her. She was replaced by former Home Secretary Sajid Javed.

In 2020, a government inquiry report revealed that the Home Office showed institutional ignorance and thoughtlessness towards the issue of race, and that the departments outlook toward the Windrush generation had been consistent with some elements of the definition of institutional racism.

Following the report, Home Secretary Preeti Patel vowed that the Home Office would transform its culture and become a more compassionate department.

In 2021, it was revealed by the Home Office that 21 people had died since the launch of the compensation scheme, still waiting for their compensations to be remitted. The Home Affairs Committee found the same year that only 5 per cent of those targeted in the Windrush scandal had received their compensation.

In March this year, a report by an independent inspector stated that the Home Office had failed to make tangible progress in transforming its culture and implementing the recommendations of the 2020 report.

Last month, Britains immigration policy had come under the scanner for a new plan to send asylum seekers unofficially arriving in the U.K. to Rwanda. The plan was heavily criticized by refugee organisations and the Opposition.

Read more here:
Explained | The U.K.s Windrush immigration scandal and the new revelations about it - The Hindu

None fix everything, but all help

Gun rights supporters complain about proposals for longer waiting periods when they buy a gun. Pay attention: Theres a waiting period for everything, from minutes to weeks to months.

Buy something online? We wait for delivery. Why not for guns? Last year I waited six months after placing an order for an appliance to take possession.

Now lets add better more comprehensive background checks, better red flag laws, and mandatory weapon insurance against death or injury.

None of these changes individually or collectively will stop all massacres in schools or other situations, but each will help reduce the carnage.

Finally, consider the cost, the cost to school and civic budgets. Taxpayers should be outraged. Prevention is a much better and cheaper method of controlling such murderous behavior, than is the cleanup after more massacres.

Carl Brookins, Roseville

I went to church the other morning. I sat behind a family with two young children. These little girls did what children do in church wiggle, climb on their parents laps, etc.

One of the girls was being distracting so her dad picked her up. She put her arms around her dads neck and grinned a little. That just broke my heart. I couldnt stop crying and thinking of the families in Uvalde who will never again be able to pick up or hug their precious babies. What a total nightmare that will never end.

Please think of these people and imagine this happening to you. We allow this to happen. God help us. Why?

Chris Marken, Woodbury

For the past 30 years and more, from the presidency of William Clinton, who said in one of his State of the Union messages that illegal immigration at the southern border was out of control and something must be done, to Sen. Chuck Schumer and others on both sides of the aisle who echoed that message. Nothing definitive was done to address the issue.

Six years ago, candidate Trump ran on a platform of securing that southern border and for that and other reasons, won that election, against all odds. During the four years of Donald Trumps presidency, he attempted to gain funding from Congress to close the boarder to the surge of illegal immigration, and at nearly every turn, his efforts were blocked. But his efforts did result in a significant drop in that influx.

Now we are continually faced with tens of thousands of migrants illegally crossing our border and our government is unable or unwilling to stop the flood. Reportedly the United States has the best trained, advanced and technologically superior government resources in the world, yet we/they are unable to control or stop this influx of unarmed women, children and young males into this country.

God help these United States of America if we are ever threatened with a military invasion by a foreign power.

Jim Feckey, Mendota Heights

Thank you for Its our Honor to Honor, the beautiful story of how a group of American veterans honor another fallen veteran during ceremonies at Fort Snelling. My wife and I witnessed this personally with the death of her dad, my uncle, and most recently, a brother-in-law.

Presentation of the American flag to a survivor is powerful, filled with meaning, a profound reminder that America the Great will always remember the service of her military veterans.

Someday it will be my turn. Im thanking the Honor Guard in advance.

Dave Racer, Woodbury

Looks like our presidents handlers have come up with a new stategy for the mid-terms. I didnt do it.

Lets blame the oil companies, corporate greed, Putin, the Federal Reserve and, of course, Donald Trump. Pretty sure the complicit press will jump on board with whatever they say.

Pete Bradt,Mendota Heights

Link:
Letters: None of these gun-laws changes will save the day, but each will help - St. Paul Pioneer Press

We are survival machines robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment.

Ancient Greeks imagined their gods to be capable of building robots. Hundreds of years have passed since the collapse of the greatest civilization, yet the human pursuit of developing something in their own image continues unabated. Thanks to the advances in AI, we now have the means to create human-like robots.

In his book, Human Natures: Genes Cultures and the Human Prospect, Paul Ehrlich said the concept of religion first appeared when humans developed brains large enough for abstract thought. On the other hand, artificial intelligence is brand new but pervasive.

Science and religion rarely see eye to eye, except for occasional outliers like the artificial intelligence church. Even though the church is closed now, it does pose a critical question, how will religion react to a sentient machine with free will?

Interestingly, some cultures are more open to technology than others. For example, a 400-year-old Buddhist temple in Kyoto, Japan, called Kodaji caught the public imagination last year when it announced a new clergy member, a robot priest that performs sermons. Called Mindar, the USD 1 million robot was designed to look like Kannon, the Buddhist deity of mercy. The idea behind the priest robot was to rekindle peoples faith. Meanwhile, SoftBanks humanoid robot Pepper is available for hire as a Buddhist priest for funerals.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2018, Pope Francis said AI, robotics, and other innovations should be used to serve humanity and protect our common home.

These are examples of religion leveraging modern-day technology. But, what happens when AI hits singularity, or we achieve AGI? What happens when we create something in our own image?

What happens when an AI robot with the same intellectual ability as a human makes its own decisions? Should this machine be considered a human? Does it have a soul?

Religion argues that God has a plan for everybody. Religion also tells people how they should lead their life. So, where does this AI robot fit in? Herein lies the rub: Technology has the power to shake the foundations of religion.

In his 1950 paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Alan Turing, the founding father of AI, said: Thinking is a function of mans immortal soul. God has given an immortal soul to every man and woman, but not to any other animal or machines. Hence no animal or machine can think. Plato believed that the soul was both the source of life and the mind.

Different faiths react differently to technology. For example, last year, a top religious body in Indonesia forbade cryptocurrencies under Islamic law. Also, it can be argued that faith is very personal, so individuals will respond differently to AI.

AGI is the north star of companies like OpenAI, DeepMind and AI2. While OpenAIs mission is to be the first to build a machine with human-like reasoning abilities, DeepMinds motto is to solve intelligence.

DeepMinds AlphaGo is one of the biggest success stories in AI. In a six-day challenge in 2016, the computer programme defeated the worlds greatest Go player Lee Sedol. DeepMinds latest model, Gato, is a multi-modal, multi-task, multi-embodiment generalist agent. Googles 2021 model, GLaM, can perform tasks like open domain question answering, common-sense reading, in-context reading comprehension, the SuperGLUE tasks and natural language inference.

OpenAIs DALL.E2 blew minds just a few months ago with imaginative renderings based on text inputs. Yet, all these achievements are pale compared to the intelligence of the human child.

However, people from the AI/ML community believe that AGI is achievable. Recently, Elon Musk, who has invested a lot in AI over the years, tweeted that he would be surprised if we do not achieve AGI by 2029.

Meanwhile, a popular critic of deep learning and AGI Gary Marcus said current AI is illiterate in an interview. It can fake its way through, but it doesnt understand what it reads. So the idea that all of those things will change on one day and on that magical day, machines will be smarter than peopleis a gross oversimplification, he said.

When Anthony Levandowski established the first church of artificial intelligence, called Way of the Future, it raised a few eyebrows.

If we achieve AGI in the coming years, it will change many things. When technology becomes far superior, and these artificial beings can do things beyond a human being, there are chances that people will associate them with a higher power. For example, AI in its current form is already aiding scientists in drug discovery. Humans are always on the lookout for God, even if on a personal level.

But one of the worst possible outcomes would be that AI emerges as a polarising factor. Hence, it warrants a greater discussion in this context. There is also an increasing need for the larger participation of religious groups in deliberating the ethical implications of AI development.

Read the original post:
The role of 'God' in the 'Matrix' - Analytics India Magazine

As an observer of artificial intelligence over the last few years at DSAITrends, it is fascinating to observe the dichotomy between the sheer amount of research and development in AI, and its glacial real-world impact.

No doubt, we do have plenty of jaw-dropping developments from AI-synthesized faces that are indistinguishable from real faces, AI models that can explain jokes, and the ability to create original, realistic images and art from text descriptions.

But this has not translated into business benefits for more than a handful of top tech firms. For the most part, businesses are still wrestling with their board about whether to implement AI or struggling to operationalize AI.

In the meantime, ethical quandaries are as yet unresolved, bias is rampant, and at least one regulator has warned banks about the use of AI.

One popular business quote comes to mind: We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.

So yes, while immediate AI gains seem lacking, the impact of AI in the long term might yet exceed our wildest expectations. And new, powerful AI hardware could well accelerate AI developments.

More powerful AI hardware

But why the fascination with more powerful hardware? In the groundbreaking Scaling laws for neural language models paper published in 2020, researchers from OpenAI concluded that larger AI models will continue to perform better and be much more sample efficient than previously appreciated.

While the researchers cautioned that more work is needed to test if the scaling holds, the current hypothesis is that more powerful AI hardware could train much larger models that will yield capabilities far beyond todays AI model.

Leading the charge on the hardware front would be data center-class GPUs from NVIDIA and AMD, as well as specialized AI processors from technology giants such as Google. For example:

Stepping outside the box

There are research fields that could impact the development of AI, too. For example, the Loihi 2 is a second-generation experimental neuromorphic chip by Intel. Announced last year, a neuromorphic processor mimics the human brain using programmable components to simulate neurons.

According to its technical brief (pdf), the Loihi 2 has 128 cores and has potentially more than a million digital neurons due to its asynchronous design. The human brain does have roughly 90 billion interconnected neurons, so there is still some way to go yet.

Chips like the Loihi 2 has another advantage though. As noted by a report on The Register, high-end AI systems such as DeepMinds AlphaGo require thousands of processing units running in parallel, with each consuming around 200 watts. Thats a lot of power and we havent even factored in the ancillary systems or cooling equipment yet.

On its part, neuromorphic hardware promises between four and 16 times better energy efficiency than other AI models running on conventional hardware.

Warp speed ahead with quantum computing

While the Loihi 2 is made of traditional transistors there are 2.3 billion of them in the Loihi 2 another race is underway to make a completely different type of computer known as quantum computers.

According to a report on AIMultiple, quantum computing can be used for the rapid training of machine learning models and to create optimized algorithms. Of course, it must be pointed out that quantum computers are far more complex to build due to the special materials and operating environments required to access the requisite quantum states.

Indeed, experts estimate that it could take another two decades to produce a general quantum computer, though working quantum computers of up to 127-qubit exists.

In Southeast Asia, Singapore is stepping up its investments in quantum computing with new initiatives to boost talent development and provide access to the technology. This includes a foundry to develop the components and materials needed to build quantum computers.

Whatever the future brings for AI in the decades ahead, it will not be for lack of computing prowess.

Paul Mah is the editor of DSAITrends. A former system administrator, programmer, and IT lecturer, he enjoys writing both code and prose. You can reach him at [emailprotected].

Image credit: iStockphoto/jiefeng jiang

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The Powerful New AI Hardware of the Future - CDOTrends

During the widespread COVID lockdowns of 2020, scores of Americans decided to learn something new in their idle time, taking up sourdough baking, woodworking, or bird watching. Many also turned to documentaries to stimulate their minds. Documentaries were, in fact, the fastest growing genre on streaming platforms in 2020.

The age of streaming has made non-fiction movies more popular and lucrative than ever before. Documentaries have become more accessible to audiences, and streaming platforms and production houses are putting more and more money into such films as true crime docuseries, celebrity biographies, and cult exposs. (Similar subjects are also fictionalized, of course not always successfully. These are the 50 worst movies based on true events.)

To identify the 50 best documentaries of all time, 24/7 Tempo reviewed the 22,407 movies in our database for which data was available from both IMDb, an online movie database owned by Amazon and Rotten Tomatoes, an online movie and TV review aggregator, and developed an index using average IMDb ratings and a combination of audience scores and Tomatometer scores on Rotten Tomatoes. Ties were broken based on the number of IMDb votes. (Directorial credits come from IMDb.)

Click here to see the 50 best documentaries of all time

Some are heart-wrenching narratives straight from the mouths of people who survived some of the worst atrocities of our times, including the Holocaust and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Many are concerts and band biographies. Others are inspiring accounts of great athletic feats and the perseverance of those who accomplished them. (Here are the 30 most inspirational movies of the last 100 years.)

Many of the best documentaries of all time are calls to arms, delving into current crises with empathy and urgency and covering topics such as racism, income inequality, and environmental devastation. At their best, documentaries have the power to shape how we view the world and to motivate change.

Read more from the original source:
The 50 Best Documentaries of All Time 24/7 Wall St. - 24/7 Wall St.