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The video opens with a violent rush of water, Wow! Water! Nolan, a MrBeast minion screamed. Dreams do come true after all. The Africans could be seen arranged in a questionably perfect assemblage of kids. They had just gotten something they always wished they had but may have never had access to. Clean water. Very benevolent of this white, rich young man to provide them with this opportunity the luxury of tasting clean water. He then turned to the camera saying, Youre going to love this video, with the creepiest smile Ive ever seen in my 19 years of life.

The obligation he felt to civilize Africa by building wells and giving water is something that fascinates me greatly the white mans burden the idea that it is the white mans sole responsibility to uphold or bring rural regions to civilization. This should not be confused with philanthropism or humanitarianism; if he truly wanted to help, his camera would have had absolutely no business recording those folks in probably their highest state of vulnerability. Vulnerability is a very big thing that this video portrayed; we mostly see women and children. That was done intentionally to portray these people as innocent and harmless in an attempt to justify the validity of white supremacy.

MrBeast first shows us the really bad side of Kenya which he generally refers to as Africa. He shows the bad roads, the unsafe drinking water, the underdeveloped buildings all in an attempt to exhibit the stereotypical Africa. As soon as his point was made, he then began to explain how African kids lives are so limited, how their lives and health are in danger, just so that we feel a meticulously crafted amount of sympathy coupled with a sense of superiority.

MrBeast then continues the video by showing us how much progress his presence had brought to the continent. They showed water splashing in abundance (make it rain), women and children celebrating. They showed clean water and spigots this was done deliberately to prove the white mans effect on the continent, the idea that orderliness, cleanliness and civilization is affiliated with the white man.

The video also reduces Africa, physically and socially. We spent time building spigots, so that all the people of Africa can have water to drink, MrBeast said. This was an attempt from MrBeast to reduce Africa into a much smaller population and continent. He only built spigots in Kenya but he claimed that they would provide for all of Africa. He constantly repeats this behavior throughout the video, referring to individual countries as the African continent this may not seem like a big deal, but this plays a huge role in stereotyping. Many people will now, because of this video, only see Africa as a continent filled with thirsty black women and children. This is a method of essentializing and reducing the African continent into a singularity. They only show highlights of countries in the continent and proceed to reduce Africa to that single, in most cases negative, light. For a reason similar to this, Africa is always depicted as a smaller continent on world maps. Louis Fenech, a UNI professor said, This reduction of the continent in maps is done purposefully to project Africa as a not-so-powerful, not so important piece of savage land that fails to meet world criteria.

The power of this racism and imperialism lies in its ability to hide itself in our everyday lives.

In Joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness, Marlow said, We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness. This was a sentence describes his journey further into the depths of Africa (AKA darkness). In this same likeness, MrBeast explains that as he moved deeper into Africa, things only got more difficult and dark. He shows kids walking miles to fetch water from a polluted stream, he explains how villagers walk long miles to school still essentializing the continent into only vulnerable and needy people. MrBeasts nonchalance during this video was also absolutely disgusting. He makes really unfunny and unhealthy jokes throughout the video. He even makes a joke about a well in his boots to mock the Africans need for water.

In summary, as long as this benevolence had to be recorded and shown to millions of people (mostly non- Africans), its quite obvious that this is not philanthropism or humanitarianism.

Its arguable that this was done for self-interest rather than to actually help the needy. This whole project of rich white guys going to Africa with their camera to save the Africans only gives hints of passive-aggressive supremacy and honors the acts of colonialism and imperialism.

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'The white man's burden' Northern Iowan - Northern Iowan

Generative AI has become firmly entrenched in the culture zeitgeist, and everyone from computer scientists to social media mavens is tuned in, looking ahead to the next great leap: the singularity, the moment when artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligenceand escapes human control.

Before the mainstream adoption of generative AI, and broadening worries about the dangers of the technology, experts and theorists have speculated that the singularity is decades away, giving humans time to prepare for a world transformed by artificial intelligence and supercomputers. But Ben Goertzel, CEO of AI and blockchain developer SingularityNET, believes the advent of artificial general intelligence (AGI) is years, not decades away.

I would say now, three to eight years is my take, and the reason is partly that large language models like Meta's Llama2 and OpenAI's GPT-4 help and are genuine progress, Goertzel told Decrypt. These systems have greatly increased the enthusiasm of the world for AGI, so you'll have more resources, both money and just human energymore smart young people want to plunge into work and working on AGI.

Goertzel is a prominent figure in AI, having spent years articulating the concept of artificial general intelligence (AGI). He holds a Ph.D. in mathematics from Temple University and has contributed to various fields, including AI, cognitive science, and complex systems. Since 2010, Goertzel has served as Chairman and Vice Chairman of Humanity+ and the Artificial General Intelligence Society, respectively.

In 2017, Goertzel co-founded the AI and Blockchain company SingularityNET with David Hanson of Hanson Robotics, developers of the Sophia, Grace, and Desdemona robots.

The technological singularity is a hypothetical future point where technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, leading to drastic unforeseeable changes in human civilization.

Detractors and skeptics may balk at the idea of computers becoming as intelligent or even more intelligent than humans. Still, Geortzel says that developing AGI comes from the same drive that led to other human advancements, such as the shift from a hunter-gatherer society to an agricultural one. And such shifts are not always for the better.

Why did we develop agriculture and towns and cities instead of living in a stone age style? he asked. "According to some metrics life has improved since Stone Age times, but according to other metrics, life has gotten worseyou didn't have neuroses and mental illness like we do now.

Another factor pushing the development of AI, Goertzel said, is humanitys restlessness, adding that while the development of AI appears to be based on individual motives, it's building towards a greater goal.

The why for AI initially was partly curiosity, but probably militarythe US military funded AI, from the '50s up to the turn of the century, Goertzel said. So initially, the why was national defense.

Now the why is making money for companies, but also interestingly, for artists or musicians, it gives you cool tools to play with, he continued.

Beyond the brain

AGI describes artificial intelligence that can learn and perform any intellectual task a human can. Unlike specialized AI, which excels at one task, AGI has a broader understanding of the world, much like a human brain. However, achieving AGI is a challenging and so-far unfulfilled goal.

Those pursuing AGI include Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who launched xAI in July with the goal of an unbiased and transparent AGI. The company's first chatbot, named Grok, entered early public testing this past weekend.

The overarching goal of xAI is to build a good [artificial general intelligence] with the overarching purpose of understanding the universe, Musk said at the time. The safest way to build an AI is to make one that is maximally curious and truth-seeking.

AGI is one of the key mileposts on the road to the singularity.

Our vision is to drive towards a positive, beneficial, benevolent singularity for the benefit of all humankind, SingularityNET COO Janet Adams told Decrypt in an August interview. As Adams explained, robotics is essential in advancing toward the singularity.

While AI developers have pushed to instill human values in generative AI models, Goertzel cautioned that values change with time.

We don't want AI to do exactly what we think is right today, because what we think is right 20 years from now won't be what we think is right today, Goertzel said.

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.

View original post here:

The Singularity Is Less Than 10 Years Away, Says AI Veteran - Decrypt

To build an advanced artificial intelligence, you must first invent the wheel.

AI systems like OpenAIs ChatGPT are the end result of thousands of years of progress, with each great leap building upon the last so that the pace of advancement increases each year.

There could come a day when someone builds an AI smarter than any human, which can improve its code to make a smarter version, which can improve its code to make a smarter version ad infinitum until the AI far exceeds human understanding.

This concept is known as the technological singularity, a point in time when technological advancement leaves human hands, in the blink of an eye making todays most sophisticated technology look like a cavemans sharpened stick.

Georgia lawmakers wrestled with this idea Wednesday at a joint hearing of the Senate Science and Technology and Public Safety committees dedicated to discussing future AI legislation.

My granddaddy used to have a saying about people that he would deal with, said Sen. Russ Goodman. He said, you got to watch out for that fella because you cant outfigure him. Were dealing with something we cant outfigure.

The Cogdell Republican listed several near-term concerns he has with the potential misuse of AI, ranging from deepfaked images being used for blackmail and bribery to terrorist cells using the technology to carry out massive attacks.

Its almost like a little bit of the Book of Revelations playing out in front of our eyes when we get to talking about some of this stuff, thats my biggest concern, how do we stop this from being used for evil? he said.

AI advancements need to come with ethical rules, said Carrollton Republican Sen. Mike Dugan, but thats easier said than done.

Even in this room right here, where I have the highest regard for everybody sitting here, every one of our ethics is going to be different, he said. And if we do ethics based off governance, whose governance? Its not a Georgia thing, its not a U.S. thing, its not a North American thing, its a world thing.

Should we not have, as much as we possibly could, safety nets on the front side? he added.

Rogue AI has been a favorite villain for sci-fi writers for decades, from 2001: A Space Odysseys HAL 9000 to Terminators Skynet.

Artificial superintelligence is what Terminator 2 is about, said Peter Stockburger, autonomous vehicle practice co-lead at Dentons law firm. The singularity, the final act of where AI is smarter than human beings, can actually rewrite its own code to perform its own tasks in the most efficient way. This is often the fear about a nuclear attack, is that AI figures out that the most efficient path forward is to move forward without human beings.

Stockburger said hes more optimistic than Terminator 2: Judgement Day director James Cameron.

I dont think AI is gonna end up being this singularity, he said. Its not gonna be a single entity that controls everything. Its actually gonna be an ecosystem of connected AI, smaller AIs throughout the entire environment, physical, digital.

This could present its own challenges for lawmakers, he said.

The challenge is that we cant govern AI the same way that we govern humans, he said. And so our traditional way of lawmaking, our traditional way of developing regulation does not actually fit this mold. And thats because machines dont respond to punishment or the traditional incentives of human beings, and theyre also not bound by our own empathy and our own ethical concerns.

Dealing with that starts with creating technical standards that guide how AIs act with each other and the physical world. He gave the example of a car wreck signaling all of the other autonomous vehicles nearby to automatically take alternate routes so that firefighters and ambulances could get there more quickly.

States could play a major role by passing laws ensuring that any AI-powered system in that state would be able to communicate with all other AIs using the same language. Laws will also need to be written in a way that machines can understand, he said.

Those socio-technical controls, they prevent it from outfiguring us, Stockburger said. Because if you as the state control the network, if you say AI cant operate in the state of Georgia unless its on this protocol on this network. As the state of Georgia, you could set that low bar very low, and you could say were only going to allow AI thats very simple, not very sophisticated.

California may take a different approach, but that allows each state to adopt their own approach, and those two AIs can communicate with each other, be interoperable, which is the key.

Georgias hearing came the day after President Joe Biden signed a sweeping executive order on AI. It creates reporting requirements for AI developers and contains provisions intended to boost privacy, safety and justice concerns.

In a statement, Biden called it the most significant action any government has ever taken on AI safety, security, and trust.

Stockburger said it is important to create guardrails around AI, but the executive order is not the end of the story, and governments need to impose technical standards quickly before AI becomes impossible to rein in.

A lot of the public discussion around the executive order is the devils in the details, he said. How is that actually going to get implemented? Whos going to roll that out? Whos going to adopt that?

This traditional idea around lawmaking, really, our position is that it will hit a ceiling, he added. It may not be this year, maybe not next year, but it will hit a ceiling because the technology will advance. I personally am a techno-optimist. I think were all going to figure it out. I think its going to be used primarily for good, so long as theres controls in place.

Stockburger also promoted something called the Prometheus Project, a public private sandbox for you as legislators to test laws around AI in real time in a sandbox to see how those would be machine -readable and executable by AI built to use proposed standards.

Imagine as legislators, you can come up with a proposal and say, were going to draft a law that says you cannot do X with your AI system, he said. What if you could simulate that a million times in a simulator with real-world digital twins of the city, of the intersection, and you find out, well, those two million simulations that we just ran, 80% of the time theres an accident, because somebody always turns left unprotected based on the data that our city has on traffic patterns.

In Greek mythology, Prometheus brought fire to mankind in defiance of the gods. He was punished by being strapped to a stake and having his liver ripped out by an eagle over and over again for years.

Sen. John Albers, chairman of the Public Safety Committee, promised at least one additional hearing before the next legislative session scheduled to start in January.

I will tell you that it is my belief that in our lifetime, this is going to be the single biggest demarcation of time and innovation that were going to see, he said. And it is going to change almost everything in our lives now, moving forward, especially for our children, our grandchildren, and beyond.

In conversation with AI experts, lawmakers on the panel provided some insight into topics they would like to see discussed during the session.

Albers questioned Fred Miskawi, vice president at CGI Technology and the AI Innovation Expert Services in CGIs AI Enablement Center of Excellence about businesses incorporating AI to prepare budgets and teachers incorporating artificially intelligent tutors for students who may need extra help or who are ready to move to more advanced material faster than their classmates.

Youve got a one-to-one tutor for the individual that can take the student to the next layer of capacity, to an AP class level, he said. And then because this is used across the classroom, youre gonna have data, a deeper understanding of where the class is and the type of difficulties that they have.

There might be a particular concept that the educator covered, but the way it was covered just clearly did not resonate for the students, he added. An AI model can help compensate for that and realize that this is a problem across the class and help not only those bottom four students, but also the entire class.

Riverdale Democratic Sen. Valencia Seay said her biggest concern is helping seniors, who may be slower to embrace the technology and vulnerable to fraud, which may include scammers using AI to duplicate a loved ones voice and likeness and using that fake person to ask for money.

Albers advised his colleagues to come up with a safe word for their families to help protect them from such digital doppelgangers.

Sen. Harold Jones, an Augusta Democrat, asked about AI taking over jobs with the example of a solicitor who kept his case count down. An AI could use data collected from that solicitor to help train others.

You wouldnt necessarily have to bring me back in as a consultant to talk about how to prioritize cases, he said. So I give you all this data, but youre gonna extrapolate out and know how I would do it to help new solicitors, keep their cases down. Am I gonna be paid for that information?

Jones also floated the idea of AI courts, presided over by human judges specialized in AI law.

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Georgia lawmakers explore threats, wonders of AI technology with ... - Georgia Recorder

Most people are familiar with the concept of a

The same scientific theory that predicted the existence of black holes also predicts the existence of white holes, the opposite of black holes in almost every respect. Whereas black holes are endless takers of matter and energy, white holes (hypothetically) ceaselessly blast energy out into the universe. And since nothing can escape a black hole, nothing should be able to enter a white hole.

While black holes are tough to spot due to their lack of emissions, white holes should be bright fountains of radiation and, theoretically at least, should be difficult to miss. Yet, so far, astronomers havent been able to find any.

But that hasnt deterred many prominent physicists, such as Italian theoretical physicist and science communicator Carlo Rovelli, from positing their existence. This shouldnt be too surprising. After all, general relativity has a good track record of theoretically predicting aspects of the universe well before they are discovered including black holes, gravitational waves, and the deviation of light known as gravitational lensing (which is used by instruments like the James Webb Space Telescope to see objects in the early universe).

Yet, white holes stubbornly remain the unfulfilled prediction of general relativity.

You cant get into white holesif youll excuse the punwithout first thinking about Albert Einsteins magnum opus theory of gravity, general relativity.

General relativity was first introduced to the physics community in 1915 as Einsteins geometric theory of gravity, and it caused quite a stir. Up until then, the best description of gravity was that by Isaac Newton, which still works just fine on small scales but always had considerable failings when it came to explaining physics on massive scales.

The major difference between Einsteins formulation of gravity and that of Newton was whereas the latter saw space and time as the stages upon which the events of the universe played out, general relativity posited that the united four-dimensional entity of spacetime is an active player in this cosmic production.

That is because general relativity suggests that when an object of mass sits in spacetime, it causes its very fabric to warp. The more massive the object, the greater the warp in spacetime it causes, and gravity arises from this warping. That explains why the sun has a bigger gravitational influence than Earth: its warping of spacetime is more extreme. This warping then tells energy and matter how it should move through space.

An illustration of a black hole warping spacetime.

As theoretical physicist John Wheeler astutely put it: Matter tells space how to curve, and space tells matter how to move.

Just a year after the introduction of general relativity, to the surprise of Einstein, physicist and astronomer Karl Schwarzschild found a solution to the complex field equations that define it. Within this solution was the singularity that represents the heart of a black hole, making this development the theoretical birth of the concept of black holes.

In 1960, mathematician Martin David Kruskal expanded on the Shwartzschild solution to consider a version of spacetime that lacks edges, creating what has become known as the Maximaly Extended Version of Schwarzschild Metric. This included creating a reflection of the singularity at the heart of a black holethe interior of a white holethough it would be Soviet cosmologist Ivor Novikov who realized the significance of this four years later in 1964.

Very simply, a white hole could be considered a black hole that runs backward in time. White holes would have some things in common with black holes: they would possess the characteristics of mass, angular momentum or spin, and electric charge.

Like black holes, because they have mass, white holes would attract matter toward them, at least at first. The difference is that when matter and light pass the event horizonthe point at which the gravity is so strong, the escape velocity exceeds the speed of lightof a black hole, it would never actually be able to reach the anti-event horizon of the white hole. It is possible that matter that approaches the anti-event horizon of a white hole could be whipped away with an incredible amount of force.

Space, light, and time are warped by the strong gravity of a black hole, forming an accretion disk of matter on the event horizon.

The major difference between black holes and white holes is their formation. We know, thanks to the work of J. Robert Oppenheimer and collaborators, that when a massive star undergoes a complete gravitational collapse at the end of its nuclear fuel-burning life, its outer layers are blasted away in a supernova explosion while its core collapses to birth a black hole.

Yet if these death throes could somehow be rewound like a cosmic VCRbreaking all the laws of cause and effect in the processthat would not result in a white hole as the mathematics of Kruskal or Novikov surmise. Instead, this cosmic rewind button would just give us back a star on the brink of death.

That means there is actually no physical process in the universe that we know of that could create a white hole.

While considering the possibility of black holes leaking radiation, Stephen Hawking postulated that they would come to a thermal equilibrium, which has an interesting consequence for white holes.

A state of thermal equilibrium is time-reversal invariant, which means that the same laws of physics should apply to a body in thermal equilibrium whether time is running backward or forward. If white holes are just time reversals of black holes, that meant to Hawking that black holes and white holes are reciprocal in structure.

The leaking of this radiation, which would later be termed Hawking radiation, would cause black holes to gradually evaporate, ironically throwing a lifeline to the white hole concept. This is because there is a rule in quantum mechanics that says information cant be destroyed. That means all the information that is carried into a black hole must be preserved.

If black holes live forever, no problem; that information sits in the singularity in perpetuity. But if black holes leak and shrivel like a cosmic paddling pool before finally exploding as Hawking thought, then what happens to the information they harbor? It cant be carried away by Hawking radiation, as thermal radiation cant be encoded with information. It isnt allowed to get back out past the event horizon, since no signal is permitted to do this. So where does it go?

One possibility is that black holes are connected through spacetime to white holes. Matter entering a black hole could come gushing out of the white hole at the other side somewhere else in the universepossibly in an entirely different galaxy. The connective tissue between the black holes entrance and the white holes exit would be an Einstein Rosen Bridge, more commonly known as a wormhole, a tunnel through spacetime connecting two seemingly disparate points possibly millions of light years apart.

An illustration of a wormhole.

However, the lack of white holes detected in the universe could suggest that wormholes are actually something much more profound than simply a tunnel from one distant galaxy to another.

The seeming lack of white holes in our universe could mean that if a multiverse of universes exists, there could be a universe populated entirely by white holes with a complete absence of black holes.

That could be because time is a one-way system in each universe in the multiverse. In our universe, time can only run forwardthe future is infiniteand that forbids the creation of a white hole. Meanwhile, in our multiverse counterpart, time can only play backwardthe past stretches into infinityand that forbids the existence of black holes while allowing white holes.

An illustration of the multiverse, with entire universes existing alongside each other.

Scientists like Roger Penrose suggest this could mean that there is a universe in the multiverse all the cosmic junk from our universes black holes spills into. Think of it like a multiverse equivalent of the trash compactor scene from Star Wars: A New Hope minus Han, Luke, Chewy, Leia, and a tentacled monster (probably).

Some theoretical physicists also consider that maybe our universe had just one white hole, a tremendous one, right at its very beginning.

The Big Bang certainly sounds a little like a time-reversed black hole, if you consider the rapid expansion of space as being like a sudden eruption of matter at the beginning of the universe. And the forward-flow-of-time rule wouldnt apply if that white hole was here at the very start, before time started rolling forward. Perhaps every universe in the multiverse starts with matter that flows out of a parent universe through a black hole connected to a white hole via a wormhole.

Whatever the case, since black holes have an event horizon that prevents accessing the information sealed behind it, well likely never be able to see into another universe through a white hole even if the two are linked.

Whether they are doorways to other regions of space or other universes entirely, or sealed exits, scientists are not set to stop speculating about white holes any time soon, meaning they will always be a doorway to the imagination.

Robert Lea is a freelance science journalist focusing on space, astronomy, and physics. Robs articles have been published in Newsweek, Space, Live Science, Astronomy magazine and New Scientist. He lives in the North West of England with too many cats and comic books.

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What Is a White Hole, and Do White Holes Really Exist? - Popular Mechanics

Imagine if every time a belligerent wanted to kill civilians or bomb a hospital, all they had to do to be absolved from culpability was to send a text message beforehand? This is effectively what Israeli President Isaac Herzog and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken proposed in a press conference on 3 November.

The press conference was designed to convince the public that the Israeli army was conducting its military campaign in Gaza run by the armed Palestinian group Hamas in line with international law. But this idea is simply not true: Texting civilians before you bomb them doesnt make targeting civilians any less of a war crime. In the context of Israels bombardment of Gaza, it is an effort by powerful nations and entities to skirt their obligations, and to misrepresent these obligations to the general public. Beyond Gaza, this places anyone in any conflict zone anywhere in the world at incredible risk.

For the general public, the idea of laws of war might seem a little incomprehensible. If war is itself an indication that the law has failed, how can such a failure be itself regulated by law? But for people who interact consistently with fighters technically referred to as belligerents or for communities affected by war, these laws are a lifeline.

At their simplest, the laws of war are a complex system of ideas and beliefs, some of which are explicitly written or codified in documents like the Geneva Conventions and the Convention on the Rights of Refugees, and some of which are based on traditional, religious, or cultural practices.

The most well-known formal documents, the First and Second Geneva Conventions, are two of very few international instruments that have been accepted by every single country in the world. As such, these are believed to apply in their entirety to every single conflict in the world.

The concept of laws of war can be simplified as the expression of a global agreement that those who are not party to a conflict either civilians or those who are no longer fighting because they are prisoners of war or injured should be protected from the worst of its negative consequences.

Civilian deaths in conflict are not unprecedented, but the startling death rate of civilians and particularly children during Israels bombardment of Gaza a response to Hamas attacks that Israeli officials say killed 1,400 people, the majority of them civilians is a painful reminder of why these rules exist.

According to Palestinian health officials, as of 6 November at least 10,000 people about half of them children have been killed in bombing that has destroyed schools, hospitals, and plenty of civilian infrastructure.

Several UN experts have sounded the alarm. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the custodian of the Geneva Conventions and what is known as international humanitarian laws that apply during conflicts, is a neutral organisation. Despite its repeated warnings that hostage taking alongside the bombing of hospitals, schools, and civilian infrastructure are direct violations of the Geneva Conventions, the bombing continues.

Various UN agencies, beginning with the UN secretary-general and the directors general of the World Health Organization and the United Nations Refugee Works Agency (UNRWA) that oversees UN work in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, have warned that the IDF is systematically undermining the laws of war by targeting the civilian infrastructure in Gaza.

Global experts are warningthat, based on the language of senior Israeli politicians, Palestinians are facing the risk of genocide. These warnings seem to be landing on deaf ears. The weeks of expert alarm culminated in the press conference in Tel Aviv that added more confusion about what international law demands from those who engage in it.

Its tempting to look at this situation and think that these rules are therefore pointless. However, they serve an important function that must be reinforced by anyone who has power.

They are providing a baseline for judging conduct that has in the past been too easily swept under the rug of politics. They are giving us a basis on which to categorically declare that the targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure is a moral wrong, without having to get into long-winded and frankly distracting debates that dont help us get any closer to saving peoples lives.

These laws are allowing governments and institutions that are not directly involved in a conflict to gauge an appropriate diplomatic response. They are necessary, but insufficient to protect civilian life. That threshold of sufficiency can only be achieved if those who hold power within global politics react to warnings, in this case by demanding a ceasefire.

Given how slow this action has come, we are already witnessing an alarming erosion of the idea of international law well beyond Gaza.

In Sudan, for example, the two main belligerents in the civil war have accelerated their attacks on civilians, taking advantage of the inability of global actors to pay attention to more than one thing at a time.

Those in Omdurman the countrys second largest city who did not have money or the opportunity to evacuate are trapped in their homes as food runs out because of heavy bombing within the city: the use of starvation as a weapon of war is forbidden in international law. In El Geneina, the Rapid Support Forces that were once implicated in the genocide in Darfur are rounding up and killing civilians again almost at will: The list of war crimes committed there in the last week alone is difficult to summarise in a single sentence.

At its simplest, international law in war is an agreement between those who wield power on behalf of nations and armed groups that they will not allow their animosity to descend into anarchy in which everyone and everything is a target.

This is the vexing puzzle at the heart of the international legal system. We cant pick and choose the moments in which it will apply without undermining the validity of the entire structure.

All societies have ideas about how they should treat those who are captured or not directly involved in the fighting. Some of these ideas are that everyone is fair game and a target; others explicitly caution that those who are not directly fighting should be spared.

At its simplest, international law in war is an agreement between those who wield power on behalf of nations and armed groups that they will not allow their animosity to descend into anarchy in which everyone and everything is a target. There is an international criminal court that is supposed to work as an enforcer of the rules, but even that is dependent on the good faith cooperation of the countries that signed its treaties.

International law is a network of reciprocity and relation that depends on the participation of all nations and communities. It doesnt require 100% compliance almost no law, domestic or international, does but it does require a critical mass of the worlds countries to willingly comply with a critical mass of its requirements, or, at the very least, not to undermine them.

The current formal body of international law represents not just the dominance of Western thought, but also the fact that some of the most devastating international wars fought in history were fought by Western nations.

These laws began as their mutual agreement to stop being so terrible towards each other. The rest of the world opted in because being less terrible during war made sense. Which raises the question so many people are asking: Given how publicly countries like the United States and various European nations have undermined the very idea of international law in defence of Israel in the past month, how are people in Sudan and elsewhere supposed to demand belligerents already disconnected to any other global system of accountability and sanction stand down? If Western nations act in ways that are destructive to structures that so many nations have opted into, doesnt that mean the very notion of international law itself must be abandoned?

I think not. I think it is a moment for the exact opposite reinforcing and rallying around the idea that being less terrible to each other during war is a universal good that must be emphatically defended. The idea that civilians should not be dragged into war should survive this moment of global failure and shame.

Wars are often fought in the context of nationalist or ethnonationalist passion, fuelled by national myths of singularity and led by politicians and generals who will never know what it is to be on either side of a gun or a bomb. The secondary impacts of conflict the physical destruction of so many bodies, not to mention the psychological harm on those who survive are almost never part of the calculus.

The idea of having laws of war is that this heated context can somehow be contained so that only those who actively choose to participate as soldiers or in politics should suffer the consequences. That idea must survive.

The question for those of us imagining a post-colonial, egalitarian future is what form that law should take so that it is no longer so intimately connected to the choices of powerful and indeed, Western nations. International law cannot and should not be abandoned to the vagaries of Western liberalism.

And in case youre still wondering, texting civilians before dropping bombs on them doesnt make dropping bombs on civilians okay. Its still a war crime.

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International law matters even when the West abandons it - The New Humanitarian