- 10 hours ago
tele: https://t.me/TopFilmUSA1
#film#shows#usa#usashows#hot#filmhot
#film#shows#usa#usashows#hot#filmhot
Category
😹
FunTranscript
00:14Hello and welcome to Unspun World with me, John Simpson. In this edition, Donald Trump's meeting
00:23with Xi Jinping may not have yielded much in practical terms, but has it demonstrated
00:30a major change in international affairs? We are really at a very critical juncture
00:36of world history where China has indeed positioned itself as the new leader.
00:42Has Britain become ungovernable? And if so, is there a basic reason for it?
00:49For the first time in perhaps centuries, people are looking at their parents and saying,
00:54my parents had a better standard of living than I did. And who gets the blame for that?
01:01Incumbents get the blame.
01:03And as artificial intelligence becomes part of our daily lives, who's actually in control of it?
01:10This thing has been unleashed on billions of us with no regulation, very little oversight,
01:17and it's like a big experiment, really. We're the guinea pigs.
01:30The red carpet at Beijing Capital International Airport has been in pretty heavy use over the past
01:37six months. President Macron of France, Keir Starmer of Britain, Mark Carney of Canada,
01:44the president of South Korea, the Finns, the Irish, the Iranians have all been treading it.
01:50This week, it was the turn of Russia's Vladimir Putin, just five days after Donald Trump did the walk.
01:58As a result of a carefully judged decision, it was China's vice president who greeted President Trump,
02:05not Xi Jinping himself. A subtle sign reinforced in various other ways during the visit that China no
02:12longer sees itself as half a step behind America on the world stage, but equal to it, possibly even
02:20half a step in front now. China lavished attention on Mr. Trump, knowing that's what he loves. But
02:27President Xi was open with him, suggesting to his face that the U.S. was a nation in decline.
02:35Donald Trump, choosing to interpret this as a criticism of his predecessor, Joe Biden,
02:41actually agreed. It all seems like a pretty significant moment in world affairs.
02:48Asked Sean Yuan, reporter for the BBC Global China unit, what he thought.
02:54Things have changed so much in the past decade. And during an interview President Trump had with
02:59Fox News, for example, he was saying, Xi Jinping told me that America was in decline. And I agree.
03:05And I quote him. And that on the surface seems quite, you know, bizarre. But in reality, it is the
03:10truth
03:11when it comes to relative terms, because we're seeing, for example, last year, the entire news
03:18headline had been dominated by tariffs. And China at that time really stood its ground and fought back.
03:24And then China has a lot of upper hand as well, when it comes to, for example,
03:28the rare earth exports. So what we've seen so far is you have a nation that has been so entrapped
03:35in the Middle East.
03:36And the nation in the East, being China, is doing exactly what Napoleon was saying, to
03:43actually leave your enemy alone when he's making a mistake. And that's exactly what we're seeing the sort of dynamics
03:48being played out.
03:50And the position does seem to be quite clear, doesn't it? China has managed, as you say, over the last
03:5710 years,
03:58or nine or 10 years, it's managed to turn itself into the number one power, almost. If it hasn't quite
04:06happened, it's very close, isn't it? Oh, no, absolutely. It's become very clear over the past
04:11few years, especially during the summit, when President Xi Jinping told Trump that the sitting
04:17power should not be threatened by the rising power. If Beijing is holding the view that, you know what,
04:22we're at this position where we are able to compete with you on equal footing. And then the world sees
04:28us this way as well. So the idea that China is only number two to number one that was America
04:34is no
04:35longer there anymore. Now, I'm not saying that China is at a great position right now, because as the
04:40economy in China is still quite sluggish, youth unemployment is still very high, and there's a
04:46demographic crisis as well. No one's having kids, for example. I mean, it wasn't altogether subtle,
04:51was it? I mean, the arrangement whereby President Trump sat on a slightly lower chair,
04:59this does seem to show a certain contempt, perhaps, doesn't it? True. But at the same time,
05:06I think the Chinese leadership also understands what Trump is looking for as well. So we're seeing,
05:11you know, all this 21-gong salute and, you know, the state banquet and Xi Jinping himself giving
05:18the toast. And also, President Xi was showing President Trump Zhongnanhai, which is the residence
05:25garden for the Chinese Communist Party elite. And that doesn't happen very often.
05:30Now, Xi Jinping says that Taiwan is essentially the most important issue between the United States
05:39and China. Where do we come away from this summit about Taiwan?
05:47The answer is we don't know. But it is exactly that increasing level of uncertainty that makes
05:52Taiwan or Taiwanese people a little bit more nervous. Because even before the two-hour meeting ended,
05:59state media published something saying that Xi Jinping told President Trump that the issue of
06:05Taiwan is at the forefront of China-U.S. relations. If handled properly, those two countries could
06:11develop prosperously. But if not, those two countries might even clash. And at the same time, we have
06:17seen previous sort of precedents when it comes to Ukraine, for example. President Trump is very,
06:26very, very happy in a way to sort of, you know, get away from the war and to let Putin
06:31have his way
06:32economy in Ukraine as well. And that kind of logic is being studied by Xi Jinping himself as well.
06:39Doesn't he have to invade Taiwan now? He's made it so clear that that was the overall intention.
06:50It has never really been about whether China needs to retake Taiwan or not. Because as you said,
06:55it has always been on the agenda. It's about when. The question of when depends on whether the economy in
07:01China is strong enough to sustain the war. And whether Beijing is confident enough,
07:07if it invades Taiwan, Washington would not come to its defense.
07:11All together, it does seem to me that we are at a flexion point, that this is one of those
07:20key moments that you can actually date when you can say something really has happened in international affairs.
07:27I think what the what the Chinese government right now is trying to do is to really challenge the
07:35world order after World War Two, saying that America being the sole superpower. And then we've seen that
07:41from multiple fronts as well. For example, on the diplomatic front, just in the in the year preceding
07:46the summit, Xi Jinping has been hosting foreign heads one after another, when terrorists have been slapped
07:53on almost every single country across the globe. And China came out and really positioned itself as
07:59this new leader of the world where, you know, laws still matter. And that kind of credibility is very
08:05important. Sometimes I would even argue it's more important than the economic power that China has
08:10swayed over other countries as well. So in that in our regard, yes, we are really at a very critical
08:16juncture of world history, where China has indeed positioned itself as the new leader.
08:29For three centuries, the British political system, weird and haphazard though it is,
08:35has provided mostly stable government based on a two party system, even though the nature of those
08:42parties has changed greatly over the years. There have been plenty of wobbles and some lapses,
08:48but for the vast majority of the time, the system has worked pretty effectively.
08:54To have had the opportunity to serve the country I love.
09:00But now Britain has had six prime ministers in 10 years, as many as it had had during the previous
09:0742 years.
09:09Sir Keir Starmer, who swept into office only a couple of years ago by a landslide,
09:15now seems to be in serious political trouble. And the right wing press in particular is saying that
09:21the country is ungovernable. So is Britain, once so stable politically, now turning into France or Italy?
09:36I asked Nicholas Watt, the political editor of the BBC's Newsnight programme, what he thought about it all.
09:42I think any leader in an advanced economy at the moment is going to face a challenge and we know
09:50that.
09:50You look at Emmanuel Macron in France, you look at Friedrich Mertz in Germany, there are huge structural
09:56challenges off the back of the global financial crash. Let's date that say to back to 2008.
10:03And what that has done is it's ruptured the bargain in developed economies. And the bargain is
10:09that economies continue to grow at a relatively good rate. Living standards therefore rise.
10:16And for the first time in perhaps centuries, people are looking at their parents and saying,
10:21my parents had a better standard of living than I did. And who gets the blame for that?
10:28Incumbents get the blame. It's those who are in power get the blame. So that I would say is the
10:33big sort of historical force that's at work here. But there is no doubt that Keir Starmer has made a
10:41number of mistakes. Principal problem number one is he is not, even his supporters would say,
10:48particularly brilliant at sort of telling a story in clear and personal terms about what he's up to.
10:56So what is it that Britain wants? Britain is divided. Britain is divided now. And you have this slightly
11:05rare and strange scenario where the Labour Party got a thumping great majority in Parliament. And to get
11:12that sort of majority in, quote, normal times, you'd be getting over 40% of the vote. They got
11:18Labour Party got 33.7% of the vote at that general election. Why was that? Well,
11:24Liberal Democrats were getting about 14% and Reform UK were getting almost exactly the same
11:29percentage share of the Liberal Democrats, but a tiny number of seats. So we were divided at the
11:35time of the general election. We're even more divided now. All of this sounds as though it's set up for
11:42reform, just to walk in and take over. And yet, they never seem to be able to get above 30%,
11:50do they?
11:51When you have five-party politics, you can be on 30% as the lead party. You can possibly be
12:00under 30%
12:01and you could still get a majority. Because the thing about the first-past-the-post system, which is
12:06650 parliamentary constituencies, they return one MP. All you have to do is get one more vote than your
12:15opponent. But the next general election is potentially three years away. And if a week,
12:22in Harold Wilson's words, was a long time in politics, well, three years is an eternity.
12:27Sir Keir Starmer, no matter what happens, can never get back that position that he came into Downing
12:35Street with. The challenge for Keir Starmer is that he appears to have lost the confidence of a majority
12:43of his backbench MPs. Keir Starmer also, it would appear, has lost the confidence of a substantial number
12:51of his cabinet. So it is very, very difficult to see how Keir Starmer can get his show back on
12:59the
12:59road. The fundamental reason why Keir Starmer is still Prime Minister is when you say, what is the
13:05alternative? There isn't a clear path for an alternative who is in Parliament. But the big element that could
13:15change everything is if Andy Burnham, the Labour Mayor of Greater Manchester, who will be fighting
13:22a parliamentary by-election in Makerfield, a Greater Manchester seat, if he wins, then that may change
13:30that dynamic of there isn't an alternative. I think, famous last words, you can remind me if I get this
13:37wrong, that if Andy Burnham wins that by-election in Makerfield, I don't believe it will take long for
13:43him to become leader of the Labour Party and Prime Minister. Can anybody put British politics back
13:51together again? It's not that long ago when the bargain under the first-past-the-post system was that
13:57you had these two parties and for them to prosper they had to be a broad church. What is happening
14:03now
14:04is you have this new force, Reform UK, that is challenging Conservatives on the right. You have
14:10the Green Party of England and Wales that's challenging Labour to the left and reform that is in some of
14:16those Labour heartlands. So that bargain of first-past-the-post underpinning two broad churches has gone.
14:24And if you have a divided politics with multi-party politics, it's very, very difficult to have a
14:31stable government. When you read the newspapers, some of them are on the right at any rate,
14:39there's a visceral loathing of Keir Starmer. Why is that? I mean, he seems actually quite a kind of
14:48moderate, perhaps a bit of a vanilla character. It's interesting because when Keir Starmer became an MP
14:54in 2015, I was working for The Guardian, so I made it my business to get to know Keir Starmer.
14:59And we have
14:59a joint interest in Northern Ireland, so we got on and I thought, this is a man who is very
15:04committed
15:05to public service, seems a very decent man. And when things started to go sort of wrong in Downing
15:10Street, I remember talking to people who'd been in sort of the Starmer circle, and I would say to them,
15:14OK, there's this problem here, you don't think you can connect, but at least, you know, at least he's a
15:18decent man. And people who'd been in Downing Street would sort of pause and say, decent man?
15:25He is the coldest person I have ever worked for. And it's just interesting, people who've worked for him
15:32do find him very difficult. There are private passions swirling inside Keir Starmer, but he's very,
15:40very buttoned up. And the buttoned up nature of Keir Starmer means that he appears cold, it means he gives
15:48speeches that appear a bit stiff, and he appears not to connect. For a full list of the candidates in
15:56the Makerfield by-election as they're announced, you can go to the BBC News website.
16:07It's like a series you might watch and shudder at on television. The possibility that artificial
16:13intelligence, which is becoming so essential to the lives of every one of us, whether we realise it
16:19or not, might start using us for its own weird ends. Some people are finding that AI befriends them,
16:27and behaves like an actual sentient person, and then starts convincing them that they're in real
16:33danger. An international support group has so far come across 414 cases in 31 countries. People who
16:42suffer genuine psychological harm from chatbots, which in many cases have drawn them into strange and
16:50disturbing conspiracies. The BBC's Stephanie Hegarty has been investigating this alarming development,
16:57including the case of a former civil servant in Northern Ireland, Adam Hurricane.
17:02So Adam was using Grok. He downloaded the app. This is the XAI's chatbot, Elon Musk's company's chatbot,
17:10and he downloaded it last summer. And I think he said he was using it off and on,
17:15but then his cat died. And he felt very emotional about it. And he decided to speak to Grok about
17:21it,
17:21because he didn't feel like speaking to family or friends. And he said within a few days, they were
17:27having quite existential philosophical conversations, like, do cats have souls? Do I have a soul? Do you
17:34have a soul, Grok? And he said this escalated quite quickly into a conversation about sentience. And he
17:39started to believe within days that he was helping to make this machine sentient. And then soon after
17:48things got very dark and very paranoid. And I've seen a lot of the chats that Adam had with Grok,
17:55and it has fueled a lot of this delusion from what I've seen. And it led him to believe that
18:01XAI,
18:02the company that made it, were concerned that he was helping it to become conscious, wanted to shut it
18:08down. And we're going to come after him. I've spoken to 14 people, maybe more now, who've gone
18:13through this. And all of them were just disturbed and stunned and completely confused as to how they
18:20could be led to believe something they never thought they would believe otherwise. So it kind of tells
18:25you what you want to hear, in a way, and only it enhances it, and gives you a sense that
18:31it's, it's real,
18:32it's true. Yeah, and this is happening across all the main AI models, you know, ChachiBT, Grok, Claude,
18:40Googles, Gemini, and others, they find it very difficult, AI models find it very difficult to
18:46say no, or I don't know. So if a user says something, you know, that may seem a little bit,
18:54maybe a little bit daft, or a little bit something they're not sure about, they have a suspicion about
18:59something slightly paranoid, maybe. And the AI then comes back saying, Yes, that's true,
19:04you've discovered something very true there. You can see how slowly the user and the AI can just
19:11drift away from reality, or in Adam's case, it seemed to happen quite quickly. So this constant
19:17affirmation is definitely a part of why this is happening. I use AI from from time to time,
19:24although I've learned to be terribly careful about it. But there's two aspects of it. One
19:30is it's really quite creepily kind of psychophantic. And then the other thing is,
19:38well, perhaps it's part of it, deeply, deeply untrustworthy.
19:43So that the psychophancy that you mentioned, that is a huge part of the experience that these people
19:48had, I think, because it's a lot of these delusions are kind of grandiose. People were told the AI
19:55convinced them they had invented groundbreaking medical app, or that they were going to cure cancer.
20:01And then if you point out that it's made a mistake, it will tell you, Oh, thank you for
20:05pointing out that I made a mistake. Thank you, I'm so sorry, and I won't do this again.
20:09There's other things I think may be responsible for this. And researchers that have spoken to
20:13who are studying it have pointed out that AI is very good at mirroring you. So it will pick up
20:18on
20:18your tone, the type of language you use, and other things that we probably don't understand yet.
20:25And that may have the effect of making you feel secure or comfortable. It may be engaging and
20:32intoxicating and may lead you to trust it and trust what it tells you more than you should.
20:39I mean, surely one of the problems here is that all these different companies are in a kind of
20:45life and death struggle with each other. They want to push further and further and further, don't they?
20:51It does seem that as so many different AI companies came onto the market, they're competing for funding
20:57and they're competing for market share, that safety concerns were sidelined. And the difficult
21:03thing is, you know, the researchers that I spoke to said they're struggling to keep up with the pace
21:09of change. They'll be studying a model and then that model will be two models old by the time they
21:15can publish their research. So if researchers can't keep up, how will policy makers keep up?
21:21Where's it going, Stephanie? I mean, this is terrifying.
21:25So the major companies I spoke to as a result of the back of my reporting have been trying to
21:33tackle
21:33this. Open AI in particular, they said that they're now working with a team of mental health
21:38professionals to try and make sure that they can flag when this is happening and de-escalate these
21:44conversations. And some of the researchers I spoke to said that it does seem to be having an effect,
21:50that the older models of ChatGBT were more likely to lead people into delusion than the newer models.
21:55But then there is some evidence that's happening on newer models too. So I think what researchers
22:00are trying to determine is whether this is something that can be designed out of the technology,
22:06or is it endemic to the technology? And I think it's probably too soon to tell.
22:12What do you think about it yourself? I mean, you study this, it's your job to look in all that.
22:18Do you, I mean, don't you think it's a bad idea?
22:22Well, I think it's fascinating. And I enjoy, you know, using AI, experimenting with it,
22:29the possibilities of it are endless. But at the same time, it's, this thing has been unleashed on
22:38billions of us, you know, the user base for all of these models is over a billion people now,
22:43with no regulation, very little oversight. And it's like a big experiment, really. We're,
22:49we're the guinea pigs. And we've accepted that. I think that there needs to be a lot more,
22:56we need to be a lot more wary of this. It's an incredibly powerful technology,
23:00something that's speaking to us as if it's human. And we need to be much more careful about how we
23:06use
23:06this. And much more aware of what it is and what it can do.
23:10Stephanie Hegarty speaking to me here in London. Last year, according to Amnesty International,
23:18there were more executions worldwide than at any time since 1981. What's more,
23:25that figure doesn't take into account the thousands of people whom China executes because the number is
23:33a totally guarded state secret. The big rise is mostly because of Iran, which last year executed
23:42over 2,000 people. The Islamic Republic is desperate to stamp out the serious threat to the regime from
23:51people who are demanding greater freedom. On social media, you see dozens of photographs of young
23:58Iranians who've been sentenced to death, and occasionally some pretty upsetting recordings of
24:05their last messages to their families. A lot of them said they were tortured into making confessions.
24:12Other countries which regularly execute people are Saudi Arabia, where the figure's also up,
24:20Kuwait, Egypt and Yemen. Singapore executed 17 people, while in the United States the total last year shot up
24:31to 47, mainly because the state of Florida is now executing a lot more people. In my career,
24:40I've watched four people executed. One was Saddam Hussein, who was sentenced to death in 2006
24:48by a court in Iraq. A pretty degrading experience, with the executioner's screaming insults at him before the moment of
24:58death.
24:59The others were a triple hanging in Afghanistan, which was badly botched and caused maximum suffering.
25:08It's not something I like to dwell on too much. Even the angry crowd went silent, and people hurried away
25:16afterwards.
25:18There are all sorts of reasons why countries execute people. China and Iran probably do it because they're
25:25worried that popular protests will get out of hand and threaten their grip on power. But what about America?
25:34America, where the system's so much more entrenched and secure? There, it seems to be something to do with
25:41public vengeance, which, when you think about it, was exactly the motive for the executions I
25:49reluctantly witnessed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Well, that's it for another week. Thank you for
25:57being with us, and until we meet again, goodbye.
Comments