Global Headlines Roundup | The Atlantic Says Fake Video Will Destroy Our Sense of Reality; Hawking's Last Paper Is Published

Global Headlines is a new QDaily column for 2018, still in its trial run. As always, it's here to help you know more.

What the Agenda-Setters Are Talking About

The Atlantic: The Age of Fake Video Has Begun, and It Will Destroy Our Sense of Reality

What digital technology can now do to video will probably make today's "fake news" era look quaint.

Someone recently built an AI program that can graft the faces of stars from Game of Thrones or Harry Potter onto pornographic videos with almost no effort. The inventor even wants to put the program in the public's hands, so that anyone can finish the swap in a few steps — dropping the object of their own sexual fantasy into a video, say.

The internet has always carried the seeds of a postmodern hell. From clickbait headlines to Russian troll armies to Facebook's News Feed, manipulation at scale has become mainstream media fare. Identity has turned illusory; anonymity has bred crudeness and confusion. That piece of software neatly sums up the internet's history so far — and it is nothing next to what is coming.

We used to believe that seeing was believing, and the scandals that broke were usually cases of someone caught on tape. Those moments have mattered in democratic life: the bartender who happened to record Mitt Romney saying that "47 percent of Americans are incapable people living off the government"; the tape of Donald Trump bragging about groping women that surfaced before the election. From the security-camera footage of an NFL player beating his partner, to a police shooting of a Black civilian livestreamed by his girlfriend — these videos did what written reports and statistics could not. They set off society-wide attention and argument about things that had been ignored.

So here is the question. People naturally trust their senses. In the coming age of manipulated video, how will they decide what is true? Some will profit from the forgeries. More important, fake video will make us doubt everything we see, and politicians and public figures are likely to use that doubt — claiming a video is fake even when it has caught them in the act. (Trump has already suggested that the tape of his remarks about groping women may not be him.)

In other words, doctored video destroys the last and strongest trust we had left in reality.

The collapse of reality began long ago. In a series of LSD experiments starting in the 1960s, researchers tried to reproduce the effects of psychedelics with machines; computers, too, began to tear a hole in reality, letting people retreat into a more absorbing state of mind. Fake video is not the end of that journey. The perfect example is probably VR, whose basic aim, after all, is to give people the illusion of being somewhere else. Put on the goggles and gloves, and it can fool your senses and carry you into another story.

Once the VR industry grows up, its power to manipulate consumers will grow with it. Researchers have warned that "the all-encompassing quality of VR opens up entirely new opportunities to manipulate people's minds and bodies, especially since commercial, political, religious and government interests so often lie behind its creation. No medium has ever held such beautiful potential while coming so close to creepiness."

It is getting harder and harder for any one person to tell true from false, and our best option may be to outsource the problem — to restore the credibility of cultural authorities such as newspapers and universities. Big technology companies should also recognize their part in this (they can take a doctored video down easily), but for now they still refuse the responsibility.

The 24-Hour News Machine

Cambridge Analytica and its parent company, SCL Group, have shut down and begun bankruptcy proceedings.

Cambridge Analytica, the political consultancy at the center of the Facebook data-"sharing" scandal, has shut down. After The New York Times and The Guardian broke the story in a series of special reports, the firm was accused of obtaining information for political clients by improper means, of using a quiz app to harvest the private data of 87 million Facebook users, and of ultimately shaping the outcome of the US presidential election and the UK's Brexit referendum.

Company spokesman Clarence Mitchell said: "Despite the company's unshaken confidence that its employees acted lawfully and properly, the siege by the media has drained it of every client and every resource. That has finally led us to conclude that continuing to operate is not viable."

The company has begun bankruptcy proceedings in both Britain and the United States. Its American staff have already left the office on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, and its British staff start clearing out today.

Even though CEO Alexander Nix described the company's data-driven influence work, and its secrecy, to undercover reporters, the company itself denies any wrongdoing. Dr. Aleksandr Kogan, who built the quiz app, revealed last month that they had used the data of only 30 million American citizens, and that it was not used to manipulate the election. He believes he was made the scapegoat: "Honestly, we thought what we were doing was completely fine. We thought we were doing something very ordinary."

The Financial Times interviewed an anonymous source claiming to be a former employee, who said they were sure the firm would come back "in another form." The core team has reportedly founded a new company called Emerdata, with Nix conspicuously listed among its directors.

What Else Happened in the World

North Korea has reportedly released three American prisoners ahead of a planned meeting with Trump. The three were arrested last year and sent to labor camps; several recent reports say they have been freed and taken to Pyongyang for medical treatment. Experts say the move is meant to bring the two countries' leaders together as soon as possible.

An IT error may have cost as many as 270 women their lives after they missed breast cancer screenings. UK Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt admitted that a fault in a computer system meant roughly 450,000 women aged 68 to 71 were never sent invitations for breast screening between 2009 and 2018, and that as many as 270 of them may have died because their treatment came too late.

Stephen Hawking's final paper has been published in the Journal of High Energy Physics. After 20 years of work, Hawking and Thomas Hertog, a physics professor at KU Leuven in Belgium, concluded that the so-called multiverse is finite.

The US state of Iowa has passed the strictest abortion law in the country, banning abortion once a fetal heartbeat can be detected. Opponents say this means many women will lose the option before they even realize they are pregnant.

Bus drivers in Japan's Okayama Prefecture staged a mass strike: the routes ran as usual, but the drivers refused to take fares from passengers.

Ukraine has stopped cooperating with Special Counsel Robert Mueller, for fear of retaliation by the Trump administration. "We will avoid provoking senior US officials by any means possible." The United States gives Ukraine $600 million in aid a year and sells it weapons.

Someone Said

"We thought about this for a long time, and we felt it was the best way to see the change we have been hoping for. This isn't something that only helps right now — given time, we'll see real change."

Donte Robinson said this. On April 19 he and his friend Rashon Nelson were sitting in a Philadelphia Starbucks, waiting for someone. They had ordered nothing, were refused the use of the restroom, and were then arrested by police. Once the incident came to light it escalated fast, social networks exploded, and Starbucks eventually decided to close all of its company-owned US stores for three hours on May 29 for anti-bias training.

On May 2 the two men reached a settlement with the city of Philadelphia. Each asked for only $1 in symbolic damages, but they required the city to commit $200,000 to a grant program for young entrepreneurs — the person they had been waiting for at Starbucks that day was, as it happens, a business partner.

Philadelphia's mayor said the two approached the city themselves, hoping an ugly episode could end well. The grant program will be aimed at students in the city's public high schools.

"Since the employees have already agreed to the terms of their contracts and signed an additional agreement with their employer, the question of reinstatement is not open for discussion."

To bring staff pay up to the target Putin set six years ago, Russia's Tomsk National Research Center demoted 167 nurses to "cleaners" on paper. The remark above came from a regional prosecutor.

After taking office in 2012, Putin issued the "May Decrees," ordering medical, educational and research institutions to raise wages across the board by 2018. But Russian media found that at the end of 2017 pay at all three kinds of institution still fell short. Then, a few months before this year's presidential election, universities, hospitals and research institutes suddenly received large, "illogical" bonuses, and staff pay jumped above Putin's target — at the top end, it tripled. Other institutions, Tomsk among them, found a different route to the same result: demote the employees.

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In Africa, 600 million people still have no electricity. The World Bank reported in 2014 that 600 million Africans could not get power. A few days ago it quietly updated that report with data from 2016: the number of people living in complete darkness fell from 612 million to 591 million, which still rounds to 600 million, so the situation has not improved much. Urban electrification rose from 72% to 74% and rural electrification from 16% to 23%. There is progress, but clearly not enough.

Electrifying everyone is hard and expensive. A grid connection costs anywhere from $250 to $2,500, and hooking a home up to a mini-grid still costs $500 to $1,500. When 60% of the population lives in the countryside, the job gets harder still. By 2030, an estimated 240 million Africans will still be without power.

Scientists cured veterans of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) in a matter of weeks using ecstasy. The study, published in The Lancet Psychiatry, covered 22 veterans, three firefighters and one police officer, all diagnosed with PTSD. Doses of 30mg, 75mg and 125mg were given according to how severe each case was. After two rounds of treatment, 86% of the 75mg group, 58% of the 125mg group and 29% of the 30mg group no longer met the criteria for a PTSD diagnosis. The researchers believe that in moderate doses the drug can bring on feelings of insight and compassion, which makes patients more open to conventional psychotherapy.

Therapy dogs are not being worn down by the stress of the job.

Therapy dogs keep growing in popularity, and academics already recognize what they achieve in keeping company with terminally ill patients, people with dementia and people with mental illness. But are the dogs enjoying the work? A recent paper in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science finds that therapy dogs are not stressed by their work, and in most cases seem to enjoy it.

In the largest study of its kind, researchers visited five hospitals across the United States and observed about a hundred patients and 26 dogs, measuring the dogs' cortisol (a hormone released in response to stress) in different situations to see whether they were under strain. But the stress that produces cortisol can be good or bad — dogs release cortisol while playing fetch, too — so the researchers also analyzed dog behaviors, which sorted into three groups: friendly, mildly stressed and badly stressed. In the end they found no difference in cortisol between the dogs' working and non-working hours. Therapy dogs do not find the job stressful.

On This Day

On May 3, 1927, Warner Bros. released The Jazz Singer, the first sound film in the history of cinema.

On May 3, 1946, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East opened its trial of Japanese war criminals including Hideki Tojo and Kenji Doihara. The trial ended two years later, on April 16, with all 28 defendants found guilty. But the Tokyo Trials also left a gaping hole — the emperor was never held to account — which has directly fueled political conflict in modern Japanese society.

On May 3, 1979, Margaret Thatcher became the first woman prime minister of Britain, and of Europe.

On May 3, 1991, the UN General Assembly declared May 3 World Press Freedom Day, meant to raise awareness of press freedom and to remind governments to respect and advance the right to free expression.

On May 3, 1994, the world's first genetically modified rice was created in Hefei, Anhui.

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