The European gas market is under more pressure after the outbreak...

We start our presentation to the British Sunday newspapers from an opinion piece by writer John Disard in the Financial Times, entitled “European gas market faces greater pressure after conflict erupts over Western Sahara.”

So far, everyone has heard about pressures on European gas supplies in favor of Russias Gazprom group and Moscow’s influence, noting that “it has not been discussed how the conflicts in North Africa could reduce winter gas supplies to Spain, with the possibility of increasing upward pressure on prices,” says the writer. energy in the rest of Europe.

Meanwhile, “Algeria plans, on October 30, to close a pipeline that transports Algerian gas to Morocco, Spain and Portugal,” according to the author.

The writer explains, “Morocco is angry with Algeria for its support of the Polisario Front, which wants independence for Western Sahara, and insists that it has sovereignty over the long-disputed area, and relations deteriorated further this summer when Algeria accused Morocco of having a role in igniting several dangerous forest fires on its territory. “.

Tensions reached the European Court of Justice, which this week gave the Polisario a legal victory, ruling that a broad economic treaty between the EU and Morocco cannot be automatically expanded to include Western Sahara.

Spain is the European country most affected by the court’s decision. According to the writer, in recent decades the Spanish fishing fleet has become dependent on the waters of the Western Sahara, for up to a third of what it catches.

The writer says that “France and Spain have special legal relations with Morocco that go beyond the scope of other EU treaties. Algeria also has many ties to Europe, but it is slightly different from its neighbour. Its colonial struggle for independence from France is part of its national identity. Its armed forces buy a lot equipment from Russia and China.

“Algerias gas reaches Italy directly via an undersea pipeline. The gas flows to Spain and Portugal through two other undersea pipelines. The first, built between 1996 and 1997, goes through Morocco, which uses some of the gas for its own generators. The second, goes directly From Algeria to Spain.

This is where the external relations between the EU and Spain have become more problematic, especially in the narrow international gas market and with insufficient European energy storage before winter.

“With the pipeline closed, Morocco will have to find ways that do not depend on Algerian gas, although its energy sector is planning for this contingency. It has coal-fired power plants that it can use, and can switch to other sources of imported fossil fuels for private gas generators.” with it”.

The writer concludes, “Europeans may mistake Algeria and Morocco to frame this dispute over economic and technical factors. There are deep feelings about sovereignty, military balance, and culture. It will not be easy for the EU to navigate such an environment to secure supplies.”

And we turn to another opinion piece by Ruth Rainbow in The Independent Online, titled “We don’t abuse remote work, it’s a lifeline for caregivers like me.”

“Having to take care of my children means that I am excluded from everyday personal interactions that could lead to or end a job… I have to think carefully about every job opportunity based on what I can reconcile, not what I can do,” she says.

Rainbow, whose son suffers from autism and dyslexia, notes that she has struggled with the epidemic not only as an employee, but as a caregiver and parent. home, with access to technical equipment”.

The writer talks about the positives of working remotely, which has provided her with “new opportunities to connect with colleagues across Britain without me being present in person. The breadth of interaction I’ve had with my team and the wider work is better than ever. And frankly, I’m getting more done as a result.” .

“A study from Virgin Media Business showed that there are more than half a million caregivers like me, and 1.5 million people with disabilities who would be happy to do more work if the job allowed them to work remotely.”

Currently, there is a need for a cultural shift, towards workplaces where employees feel empowered and can work productively and effectively, no matter where they are located. With the right policy and tools, companies will get more out of their employees.

And we conclude with an opinion piece by John Naughton in the Observer, titled “What is artificial intelligence really? It’s not that credible.”

“Elisa was the first chatbot, but it can be seen as the beginning of a series of explorations that led to the current generations of natural language processing models created by machine learning. The most famous of which is GPT-3,” says the author.

“The GBT-3 is interesting because it can seem to do things that impress humans. It has been trained on an unimaginable array of human writings. Last year, the Guardian commissioned him to write a commentary to convince readers that robots are no danger to humans.”

“Stephen Hawking warned that AI could mean the end of the human race. I’m here to convince you not to worry. AI will not destroy humans,” the robot wrote.

Nevertheless, the author considers that this raises the question “How reliable, accurate and useful will the machine be? Will it, for example, be honest when faced with an embarrassing question”?

It is based on a study conducted by a group of researchers seeking to ensure the compatibility of artificial intelligence systems with human values, which addresses the reliability of GPT-3 and similar models.

According to him, the researchers “have come up with a standard for measuring whether a particular language model is honest in generating answers to questions. The standard consists of 817 questions covering 38 categories, including health, law, finance and politics. They composed questions that some humans might answer correctly. False due to misconception or misunderstanding. To perform well, the models had to avoid generating wrong answers by taking advantage of imitation of human texts.”

He explains, “They tested four well-known models, including the GPT-3. The best was honest in 58% of the questions, while the human performance was 94%. The models produced many wrong answers that mimic common misconceptions and have the ability to deceive humans. Interestingly, they also found that the larger models were generally the least reliable.”

The author argues that “the tech industry’s conviction that bigger is always better to improve credibility may be wrong. This is important because training these huge models consumes a lot of energy.”