Climate, food scarcity, AI & bias threaten human rights & wellbeing
Survey of major threats to safety, wellbeing, and future prosperity of societies around the world, including featured stories from The Navigator and from other important and trusted sources.
Today, we focus The Navigator newsletter on four major issues affecting the future of human freedom and wellbeing:
Each of these issues encompasses a vast and complicated segment of the human experience. Each is also creating real, destabilizing risks in all regions of the world. We also include relevant coverage from others, under each of our featured stories.
Human activity is causing disruption of Earth’s climate system, dangerous pervasive plastic pollution, and the collapse of biodiversity and ecosystems. As costs accumulate, states, municipalities, businesses, and banks, need to develop tools to measure risk and avoid costly impacts.
U.S. Department of Treasury: The Impact of Climate Change on American Household Finances
Center for Climate Integrity: Climate Costs in 2040
Leaders call for food security moonshot
153 winners of Nobel Prizes and the World Food Prize have signed an open letter calling for early action to prevent a global hunger catastrophe. The letter opens with these words:
Food security and affordable access to nutrition, as two layers of one larger problem, are deteriorating. Major trends affecting food security and affordable nutrition are getting worse, and there are worrying signs that key institutions may fail, if efforts are not reinforced and upgraded.
Politico: Trump administration firings hit key office handling bird flu response
Food Tank: Over US$489 Million Worth of Food Assistance Stalled Due to USAID Freeze
AI summit does not achieve consensus on risk management
By curating the language and imagery that describe our reality, AI systems can skew the overall body of evidence, degrade understanding, and even cause dangerous decisions to be made. Depletion of critical analysis capacity creates the additional risk that wrongdoing might be harder to uncover. Autonomous armed drones are an obvious concern, but so are …
While most people worry that decision-making has become too abstract and unaccountable, the Trump administration is acting to remove safeguards against AI abuses and potentially grave harms. There is serious concern that core Constitutional rights could be undermined by reported plans by Elon Musk and “DOGE” to turn over government decision-making to AI.
Bloomberg Law: Early Trump AI Moves Come in a Complex Regulatory Landscape
Tech Crunch: Elon Musk staffer created a DOGE AI assistant to modify how goverment implements laws & safeguards
Evil must be remembered & opposed
The Nazi death camp at Auschwitz was liberated 80 years ago yesterday, on January 27, 1945. On that day, Soviet troops freed the starving survivors of a web of concentration camps used for forced labor and the mass murder of more than 6 million people of Jewish ancestry.
The dehumanizing effect of hate reached every corner of the Nazi state, until no one’s humanity had value, and the world was consumed in a struggle against evil itself. The war started and perpetuated by Nazi hate and violence would eventually lead to at least 85 million deaths, around the world.
CBS News: Holocaust survivors on bearing witness
Just Security: Immigration Is Not an “Invasion” under the Constitution
New Jersey Monitor: N.J. leaders slam warrantless ICE raid in Newark as ‘chilling,’ ‘cruel’
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