Australian-based VADR Media has announced that its esports-first chess-focused tournament and broadcast platform Checkmate.live has entered into an exclusive long-term partnership with the Arab Esports Federation (ARESF). The strategic partnership sees Checkmate become the Arab Esports Federations official online chess platform, data and broadcast partner.

In September, Checkmate also announced a similar partnership with the Asian Chess Federation, which membership consists of 52 national Chess Federations across Asia, the Middle East and Oceania. Both international partnerships further expand Checkmates reach across Asia, Oceania, the Middle East and Africa.

Read: The Asian Chess Federation, Checkmate partner to scale up online competitive chess

The partnership follows Checkmate recently opening its office in the UAE.

The Arab Esports Federation is the governing body of esports for 18 national esports associations across the Middle East and wider Arab region. The federation with its secretariat in the UAE is headquartered in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and is led by Prince Faisal bin Bandar bin Sultan.

Checkmate is an esports-first competitive chess media company focused on producing and broadcasting linear and online tournaments for a new generation of players. It is an XR-led, international esports series and a skills-based Web3 platform that provides the opportunity to compete for glory, cash, credits and in-game assets. A key feature of the platform is its proprietary AI and computer vision-based Chess anti-cheat, which utilises a players web camera to monitor online match integrity.

The Arab Esports Federation is delighted to partner with Checkmate and whole heartily supports their vision of improving the integrity of the online game and promoting it as both an esport and sport. Online chess is not a sports simulation; its a natural extension of the over-the-board game. A game that brings with it many positive benefits, including higher female participation than esports, cognitive and mental improvements for players, good sportsmanship and brand safety for stakeholders, said ARESF secretary general Hisham Al Taher.

It is estimated globally that up to 700 million people play the 1500-year-old skill-based game, with 420 million of these players being between 18-34, the same demographic that has also seen brands increasingly flock to esports.

We are honoured to partner with the Arab Esports Federation under the leadership of its president, Prince Faisal bin Bandar bin Sultan Al Saud. It is often said that youth own the future, and this is very much the case in the Middle East and Gulf countries where the majority of the 420 million Arabic-speaking population is under 35 who love gaming and chess, said John McRae, managing director of VADR and Checkmate.

The Arab Esports League has been very successful amongst our members. The addition of competitive online chess as an esports series enables greater access for the wider community to participate in a structured innovative and positive experience, said Al Taher. Our strategic alliance with Checkmate allows further opportunity to celebrate the diversity of the gaming community.

Checkmates take on chess will launch in Q1 2023 on Web and Mobile.

See the rest here:

The Arab Esports Federation moves into Web3 and launches online chess platform - Gulf Business

Both Messi and Ronaldo, however, may end up breaking the lone eggs record collectively but to the eggs credit, it never had the marketing push and budget that the chess picture with the two of footballs biggest superstars had.

While paid marketing and the scale of both Ronaldo and Messis popularity did play a big part in the astonishing number of likes the picture has received till now, the timing and content also struck a chord with the fans.

The picture, already being dubbed iconic by many, has made fans of both players set aside their fiery Messi-Ronaldo rivalry debates on social media to appreciate the candid frame of the two together.

The upcoming FIFA World Cup 2022 in Qatar is expected to be the last dance for both the greats and will mark the end of an era, where fans had the opportunity to watch two of the best footballers of all time go head-to-head for records, trophies and various personal honours, week in and week out.

Furthermore, images of both players together, outside of football matches and award ceremonies, are rare.

Additionally, fans have also started to spot a few unconfirmed easter eggs in the picture, which have added to the excitement around the Messi-Ronaldo chess photo.

Fans have dug up pictures from the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia where a Louis Vuitton briefcase was used to present the FIFA World Cup trophy ahead of the opening fixture and the final in Moscow. It resembles the trunk on which Ronaldo and Messi are playing chess on and the picture is a symbolic representation of the battle to ensue, according to some.

Read this article:

Messi and Ronaldo chess picture: Why it went big on Instagram - Olympics

Since chess computer Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, artificial intelligence has held increasing sway over humans in a handful of 'adversarial' games - those in which human interaction plays a limited role. Now, however, a group of researchers have revealed a new AI that's attempting to expand the pool of games that a computer can beat you at.

In a paper (opens in new tab) published this week, researchers unveiled Cicero, an AI trained to win games of Diplomacy, a seven-player board game in which "each turn, all players engage in [...] free-form dialogue with the others during a negotiation period" before taking an action. That discussion phase is what sets Cicero's efforts apart from other AI.

The paper states that "almost all prior AI breakthroughs" have been in "two-player zero-sum" games, in which gaining an advantage for oneself puts the other player at a direct disadvantage. In those games - Chess, StarCraft, Go, and Poker - the AI can learn optimal strategy by playing against itself in a pattern known as 'self-play'. Eventually, it will come up with an approach that can't be beaten in a balanced game. In these examples, the complexity of the game itself isn't important; what matters is that communication isn't a central game mechanic, and that each action strives to set another player back in their goal.

That's not true of Diplomacy, a game in which conversation between players is important (if not entirely crucial), and in which making a gain does not necessarily harm an opponent. Here, self-play "produced uninterpretable language." That was a major obstacle to overcome, as anonymity was key to a fair experiment. Communication between players had to be grounded in the state of the game, or events that had already occurred, and if Cicero slipped up, the likelihood was that it would be found out due to its inability to explain its mistake.

Even more important, however, was the ability to build trust with fellow players. Theoretically, that concept would be alien to Cicero, but to succeed it would need to establish "an ability to reason about the beliefs, goals, and intentions of others" as well as "an ability to persuade and build relationships through dialogue."

To establish Cicero, researchers took a dataset of more than 40,000 dialogue-driven games of Diplomacy from an online version of the game. A base dialogue model was then trained on the Diplomacy chat logs, and then trained to predict messages based on an array of game data. Eventually, Cicero was trained to "exploit" the information in a message when deciding on its next action, while also reasoning what other players might be attempting to do.

Eventually, Cicero was entered anonymously into an online league that ran from August to October, 2022. It played in 40 games, ranking in the top 10% of those who played more than once, and coming second out of 19 players that played more than five games. Overall, Cicero was the tournament winner, with an average score more than double that of some of its 82 opponents.

It might not have been complete annihilation, but it was a tournament-winning effort for an AI laying some significant groundwork for similar, future efforts. For now, it might be limited to Diplomacy, but it strikes me that similar technology to Cicero could one day make its way to games like Settlers of Catan, or even social deduction video games like Town of Salem or Among Us. Now that would be sus.

Need to get some practice in ahead of our new AI overlords? Here are the best board games out there.

Go here to read the rest:

After chess and before our delicious brains, AI is coming for social strategy games and it's winning - Gamesradar

In development since 2012, Project Debater was touted as IBMs next big milestone for AI. Aimed at helping people make evidence-based decisions when the answers arent black-and-white," it doesnt just learn a topic but can debate unfamiliar topics too, as long as these are covered in the massive corpus that the system mines, which includes hundreds of millions of articles from numerous well-known newspapers and magazines. The system uses Watson Speech to Text API (application programming interface). Project Debaters underlying technologies are also being used in IBM Cloud and IBM Watson.

You might also like

How the new bill aims to protect your personal data

5 charts tell the story of tech layoffs

This could be India's biggest Series A funding round

This Mumbai couples 860 sq ft flat is the biggest theyve rented so far

Interestingly, a year later at Think 2019 in San Francisco, IBM's Project Debater lost an argument in a live, public debate with a human champion, Harish Natarajan. They were arguing for and against the resolution, We should subsidize preschool". Both sides had only 15 minutes to prepare their speech, following which they delivered a four-minute opening statement, a four-minute rebuttal, and a two-minute summary. The winner of the event was determined by Project Debater's ability to convince the audience of the persuasiveness of the arguments. But even though Natarajan was declared the winner, 58% of the audience said Project Debater "better enriched their knowledge about the topic at hand, compared to Harishs 20%" ().

Raising the bar

Meta (formerly Facebook) appears to have gone a step further. On Tuesday, it announced that CICERO is the first AI "to achieve human-level performance in the popular strategy game Diplomacy". CICERO demonstrated this by playing on webDiplomacy.net, an online version of the game, where it achieved more than double the average score of the human players and ranked in the top 10% of participants who played more than one game. Marcus Tullius Cicero was a Roman writer, orator, lawyer and politician all bundled in one.

Meta explains that unlike games like Chess and Go, Diplomacy requires an agent to recognize that someone is likely bluffing or that another player would see a certain move as aggressive, failing which it will lose. Likewise, it has to talk like a real person, displaying empathy, building relationships, and speaking knowledgeably about the game, failing which it won't find other players willing to work with it. To achieve these goals, Meta used both strategic reasoning as used in agents that played AlphaGo and Pluribus, and natural language processing (NLP), as used in models like GPT-3, BlenderBot 3, LaMDA, and OPT-175B.

Meta has open-sourced the code and published a paper to help the wider AI community use CICERO to "spur further progress in human-AI cooperation".

How CICERO works

CICERO continuously looks at the game board to understand and model how the other players are likely to act, following which it uses this framework to control a language model that "can generate free-form dialogue, informing other players of its plans and proposing reasonable actions for the other players that coordinate well with them". Meta started with a 2.7 billion parameter BART-like language model that is pre-trained on text from the internet and fine-tuned on over 40,000 human games on webDiplomacy.net. It also developed techniques to automatically annotate messages in the training data with corresponding planned moves in the game. The idea is to control dialogue generation while persuading other players more effectively. In short, Cicero first makes a prediction of what everyone will do; Second, it refines that prediction using planning; Third, it generates several candidate messages based on the board state, dialogue, and its intents; and fourth, it filters messages to reduce gibberish and unrelated comments.

AI-powered machines are being continuously pitted against humans in the last decade. IBMs Deep Blue supercomputing system, for instance, beat chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1996-97 and its Watson supercomputing system even beat Jeopardy players in 2011.

In March 2016, Alphabet-owned AI firm DeepMinds computer programme, AlphaGo, beat Go champion Lee Sedol. On 7 December 2017, AlphaZero modelled on AlphaGo took just four hours to learn all chess rules and master the game enough to defeat the worlds strongest open-source chess engine, Stockfish. The AlphaZero algorithm is a more generic version of the AlphaGo Zero algorithm. It uses reinforcement learning, which is an unsupervised training method that uses rewards and punishments. AlphaGo Zero does not need to train on human amateur and professional games to learn how to play the ancient Chinese game of Go. Further, the new version not only learnt from AlphaGo the worlds strongest player of the Chinese game Go but also defeated it in October 2017.

A year later, in July 2018, AI bots beat humans at the video game Dota 2. Published by Valve Corp., Dota 2 is a free-to-play multiplayer online battle arena video game and is one of the most popular and complex e-sports games. Professionals train throughout the year to earn part of Dotas annual $40 million prize pool that is the largest of any e-sports game. Hence, a machine beating such players underscores the power of AI. AI bots, though, lost to professional players at Dota 2, which has been actively developed for over a decade, with the game logic implemented in hundreds of thousands of lines of code. This logic takes milliseconds per tick to execute, versus nanoseconds for Chess or Go engines. The game is updated about once every two weeks.

What it means for humans

The approach of IBM's Project Debater and Meta's CICERO, though, lies in the fact that they involve predicting and modeling what humans would actually do in real life. This implies that they cannot be just relying on supervised learning, where the agent is trained with labeled data such as a database of human players actions in past games. Meta explains that CICERO runs an iterative planning algorithm called piKL, which "balances dialogue consistency with rationality".

CICERO, as Meta acknowledges, is a work in progress. As of now, it only capable of playing Diplomacy. However, the underlying technology is relevant to many real-world applications, Meta suggests. "Controlling natural language generation via planning and RL (reinforcement learning), could, for example, ease communication barriers between humans and AI-powered agents. For instance, today's AI assistants excel at simple question-answering tasks, like telling you the weather, but what if they could maintain a long-term conversation with the goal of teaching you a new skill? Alternatively, imagine a video game in which the non-player characters (NPCs) could plan and converse like people do understanding your motivations and adapting the conversation accordingly to help you on your quest of storming the castle.

It's clear from these developments that this is not the last we're hearing from AI-powered machines. The game will continue, and so will mutual learning.

Elsewhere in Mint

In Opinion, Raghuram G. Rajan says deglobalisation poses a climate threat. Vivek Kaul tells the reason why Twitter can't die. Madan Sabnavis calls for caution over India's title of the fastest-growing economy. Long Story says the slowed-down motorcycle is an eloquent sign of India's downturn.

See more here:

AI now not only debates with humans but negotiates and cajoles too - Mint

The new gods are running into a bit of trouble. From the soap opera playing out at Twitter HQ, the too-big-to-fail bankruptcies in the cryptocurrency space, to mass tech layoffs, the past month has seen successive headlines declaring a litany of woes facing the bullish tech boyos in Silicon Valley and beyond.

The minute-by-minute coverage of Elon Musks escapades and the global levels of interest in the FTX collapse both go well beyond what youd expect from a business story. Im willing to gamble a few Bitcoins that the popular fixation has little to do with any particular interest in successful software engineering; rather it is the personalities who inhabit these spaces, and the philosophies that propel them in their godlike ambition. What is their end goal, we wonder. What drives them, beyond the pursuit of growth? It is easy to assume that money is all that motivates the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Musk and Jeff Bezos. Except, when you start to examine the mindsets of these men, its clear that cash is far from the whole story.

The concept of effective altruism has had its day in court after FTX, the worlds second largest cryptocurrency exchange announced that, oops, it was mysteriously short of $8bn and would be filing for bankruptcy, post haste. As the dust and fraud allegations settle, the personal guiding principles of FTXs millennial chief executive, Sam Bankman-Fried, have come to the fore. Bankman-Fried ostensibly was driven into crypto by an adherence to the effective altruism movement. Originally espousing giving as much targeted time and money to philanthropy as possible, EA has been morphed by its most prominent practitioners into getting very, very rich and then spending that money on projects that better the human race. This earn-to-give philosophy is dependent on data-driven analysis of what causes offer the best returns of betterment. Its utilitarianism with a god complex.

Since Bankman-Frieds spectacular fall from grace, it seems as if this doctrine may be doomed to the same downward spiral as its most famous disciple. Its hard to argue that you possess the best instincts to improve the prospects of the human race when you cant even keep your own affairs or billions in customer funds in order.

Then there was the allegation last week by the Insider journalist Julia Black that Musk, along with other billionaires, appear to be engaged in their own personal eugenics programme via a movement called pronatalism. Black writes that pronatalism an ideology centred on having children to reverse falling birthrates in European countries, and prevent a predicted population collapse is taking hold in wealthy tech and venture-capitalist circles, with the aid of hi-tech genetic screening.

Musk has championed pronatalist ideas publicly. Privately the Tesla co-founder is, in his own words, doing my part; he has 10 children known to the public, two of whom are twins he fathered with an AI expert who serves as an executive for his Neuralink company. But the ideas go beyond Musk and into the canyons of Silicon Valley; the worlds richest and most powerful people see it as their duty, Black claims, to replicate themselves as many times as possible.

Blacks subjects also namecheck effective altruism, longtermism (which prioritises the distant future over the concerns of today), and transhumanism (the evolution of humanity beyond current limitations via tech), as complementary philosophies. The concept of legacy is key to understanding our tech pioneers. As one interviewee tells Black, The person of this subculture really sees the pathway to immortality as being through having children. Given that Musks genius business record is one of multiple near-bankruptcies before he even arrived at Twitter, this rather undermines the theory that the future will be safe only if populated by mini-Musks.

These companies believe that in order to make visions ideas a reality, they require total control of the landscape around them. In his 2017 book World Without Mind, Franklin Foer wrote that Facebook now Meta was founded on the concept of radical transparency a belief that sharing every facet of our lives will somehow result in social good. The metaverse, in which we dont just share our lives on social media but conduct them within it, is this ideas logical conclusion. It has already lost the company $9.4bn.

Silicon Valley and its missionary outposts are dominated not only by the pursuit of growth, which is a means to an end. The underlying raison detre tying these various tech titans together is their fervour for enacting their own personal theological outlooks in supposed service of the wider world. To do this, they must dominate and monopolise remake society in their image, platform by integrated platform.

When we view these monoliths as businesses like any other, or allow them to claim global monopolies, we fail to realise that they are competing for more than our attention or our cash: they are competing for the right to dictate what our societies look like. So it matters a great deal when that vision falters, or fails altogether. Its the stuff of myth and folktale played out via forums and Wall Street Journal tip lines; the emperors slowly shedding their clothes. We are watching would-be gods shrink back to being men once more.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

See more here:
The gods of Silicon Valley are falling to earth. So are their warped visions for society - The Guardian

This month, the 8 billionth child entered the world. Demographers believe that the worlds population is moving towards 10 billion. But at some point, the curve will begin to move downwards. Families will shrink. People everywhere (except sub-Saharan Africa) will become older and older, leading to huge burdens on government social services.

The problem is that most countries have birth-rates below replacement level. And no one knows how to coax women into having more children, as China has discovered, to its dismay. It moved from a one-child policy, to a two-child policy, to a three-child policy and fertility has edged even lower.

What is to be done? A solution comes from an improbable source wealthy, geeky, tech and venture-capitalist pro-natalism activists.

Chapter 1: Elon talks about it

The eccentric billionaire Elon Musk has been married twice but now describes himself as single. He has had at least nine children with a combination of wives, girlfriends, and surrogates. Here are some of his recent tweets.

Chapter 2: Malcolm and Simone do something about it

Malcolm and Simone Collins radiate powerful self-confidence. As a married couple they have operated companies on five continents that collectively pulled in US$70 million every year; raised a private equity fund; directed strategy at top, early-stage venture capital firms; written three best-selling books; served as managing director of Dialog, an elite retreat for global leaders founded by Peter Thiel; and earned degrees in neuroscience, business, and technology policy from St Andrews, Stanford, and Cambridge.

Before marrying, they committed to having between 7 and 13 children. Since Simone was older, she had to ensure that her age would not be a barrier to their plans for an expanding family. In 2018, which they call the Year of the Harvest, they produced and froze as many embryos as possible. They already have three children: Octavian, Torsten, and Titan Invictus.

The evolutionary logic associated with transhumanism is an important theme in their plans. On the population level, whole cultures are in danger of extinction like the Japanese or Armenians or Catalans. This would represent a tragic loss of cultural diversity. We are about to experience the largest cultural mass extinction since the colonial period, they write. Their Project Ark is to save as many cultures as possible by promoting higher birth rates.

On a family level, their proposals involve tinkering with embryos to ensure that their children have good genes. Their critics call this eugenics. They prefer to call it common sense. What we advocate for is fairly vanillaif aggressivetranshumanism: Improving and transforming the human condition with technology. Be against transhumanism all you want, but dont call it eugenics.

Chapter 3: Learn all about population implosion at pronatalist.org

From their home in rural Pennsylvania, this highly-connected couple is preaching the gospel of pro-natalism, the latest fad amongst the super-rich in Silicon Valley. For the past 20 or so years, billionaires have been obsessed with longevity increasing lifespans to hundreds of years. Research on that continues, but some are turning their minds to demography. The person of this subculture really sees the pathway to immortality as being through having children, says Simone.

Pronatalist.org, a website created by Malcolm and Simone, alerts readers to the crisis:

Birth rates are falling precipitously around the world in both developed and developing countries. If dramatic action is not taken, we will witness the extinction of entire societies, expansion of totalitarian governments, and an unchecked rise of tribalism.

South Koreas birth-rate is about 0.81, far below replacement level. The Collinses call this genocide by inaction. They have a knack for presenting the consequences of population decline in vivid analogies: This is equivalent to a disease that wipes out 94% of the population. We need radical solutions to save endangered ethnic groups.

They even see contemporary politics through a demographic lens:

If you have ever wondered why different ideological factions in politics seem to be able to agree on less and less as time goes on, why they are becoming more authoritarian, and why tribalism seems to be increasing: You are witnessing the invisible hand of demographic collapse at work.

Population numbers will eventually rebound within a few hundred years, but progress the world has made in terms of womens rights, freedom of speech, environmentalism, racial equality, gay rights, etc. runs the risk of systematic erasure if we fail to intervene.

Whats the answer? Only a profound cultural change will save us, they argue. Tax credits and baby bonuses are just tinkering around the edges:

Only cultures with a strong external motivation to have kids are well above repopulation rate at the moment; all others will enter the dustbin of history. Essentially, every world culture that does not have strong religious convictions or educate and treat women as equals is being systematically deleted.

A single family having eight kids that successfully passes that practice to their own children can save their entire ethnic group. (One family having eight kids for ten generations leads to over a billion descendants.)

Chapter 4: Malcolm and Simone have a survival plan

The best-known groups with high fertility are all religious. About a quarter of Israels population will be Haredi Jews by 2050, according to a recent estimate. In 1980, they were an insignificant minority of 4 percent. The American Amish may have the worlds highest birthrate; one demographer joked that in 200 years, all Americans will be Amish.

Of course, Malcolm and Simone are not conventionally religious. If pressed, they describe themselves as secular Calvinists. They are not Sunday church-goers but they are hard-working, hard-driving, abstemious, frugal souls on a mission from Evolution.

Their unconventionally religious stand is to encourage fans to create family cultures which welcome children. Were trying to create a playbook for people who want to work their values and morals into durable cultures that are far more likely to endure intergenerationally (rather than go extinct due to low birth rates), Simone explained in an email to MercatorNet. One can create a durable culture from scratch, without any religious element, or one can reinforce an existing religion or culture to make it durable (capable of lasting intergenerationally).

They have nearly finished writing another book which sketches their philosophy of the intertwined themes of demography, evolution, family structure, and religion, called The Pragmatists Guide to Crafting Religion. At its core, they write, this book is a meditation on how we can intentionally construct a culture/religion that will be evolutionarily successful and spread.

They have a Sisyphean job ahead of them. As they observe wryly: It may be easier to coax a caged panda to reproduce than it would be to convince a cosmopolitan progressive to raise their own kid.

Malcolm and Simone describe themselves as conservative Republicans, although in some ways, they are fully-paid-up progressives. They will be attending the LGBT-friendly Log Cabin Republican shindig at Mar-a-Lago in mid-December. They endorse experimental family structures, and their views on moral issues would disconcert traditional Christians.

But beneath the hipster veneer, they really are the secular Calvinists they claim to be. They are not shy of expressing stern and judgemental views about pop culture which offers sex, power, acceptance, prestige, wealth, and the life of Riley without hard work. They take a dim view of the cultural super virus which is how practicing secular Calvinist hipsters describe woke culture.

As an aside, they are nonchalant about woke lunacies. From an evolutionary perspective, they contend, bad ideas literally go extinct. That cultural super virus is a sterilizing disease and almost none of its husks reproduce above repopulation rate, hence our grandkids likely wont have to deal with them.

And on family dynamics, they are astonishingly conventional. They point out in their book that the best motivation for the next generation to have kids is a happy home life as a child:

If a young girl grows up and sees her mom and people like her overburdened, unloved, and ignored by society, why would she choose to have kids herself? Why would she aspire to that? While we cant fix this at the societal level, we can address this problem intentionally-designed cultures. If you want to create a durable culture for your family and inspire your children to have kids of their own, one of the best things you can do is ensure you have a strong relationship with your spouse.

For our family, this means ensuring daughters see their mothers glorified, appreciated, and even deified within family culture for the sacrifices they make while also demonstrating that none of those sacrifices require foregoing a career or stepping back from public life.

In some respects, they may be even sterner than their God-fearing Calvinist forebears. Child-bearing is natural for women, they write in their book. Theres no reason to exaggerate its difficulties:

In our House, having kids is just part of the yearly routine. While Simone is appreciated for it, she never hints that it would be justified for her to use pregnancy or childbirth as an excuse to step back from work. The productive glorification of motherhood requires never giving into societys tendency to conflate gratitude and approval with justification to winge, whine, indulge, or lean out.

No way that these guys have been infected by the cultural super virus!

Chapter 5: networking for pro-natalism

The Collinses want you to join them. We are actively building a diverse network of families with the grit to make it through this maelstrom, they say on the website. If you are committed to a high birth rate and building a healthy culture for your family, we want to talk!

Read more:
The power couple on a mission to save the world from demographic disaster - MercatorNet

Most of us dont think of power-hungry killer robots as an imminent threat to humanity, especially when poverty and the climate crisis are already ravaging the Earth.

This wasnt the case for Sam Bankman-Fried and his followers, powerful actors who have embraced a school of thought within the effective altruism movement called longtermism.

In February, the Future Fund, a philanthropic organization endowed by the now-disgraced cryptocurrency entrepreneur, announced that it would be disbursing more than $100m and possibly up to $1bn this year on projects to improve humanitys long-term prospects.

The slightly cryptic reference might have been a bit puzzling to those who think of philanthropy as funding homelessness charities and medical NGOs in the developing world. In fact, the Future Funds particular areas of interest include artificial intelligence, biological weapons and space governance, a mysterious term referring to settling humans in space as a potential watershed moment in human history.

Out-of-control artificial intelligence was another area of concern for Bankman-Fried so much so that in September the Future Fund announced prizes of up to $1.5m to anyone who could make a persuasive estimate of the threat that unrestrained AI might pose to humanity.

We think artificial intelligence is the development most likely to dramatically alter the trajectory of humanity this century, the Future Fund said. With the help of advanced AI, we could make enormous progress toward ending global poverty, animal suffering, early death and debilitating disease. But AI could also acquire undesirable objectives and pursue power in unintended ways, causing humans to lose all or most of their influence over the future.

Less than two months after the contest was announced, Bankman-Frieds $32bn cryptocurrency empire had collapsed, much of the Future Funds senior leadership had resigned and its AI prizes may never be rewarded.

Nor will most of the millions of dollars that Bankman-Fried had promised a constellation of charities and thinktanks affiliated with effective altruism, a once-obscure ethical movement that has become influential in Silicon Valley and the highest echelons of the international business and political worlds.

Longtermists argue that the welfare of future humans is as morally important or more important than the lives of current ones, and that philanthropic resources should be allocated to predicting, and defending against, extinction-level threats to humanity.

But rather than giving out malaria nets or digging wells, longtermists prefer to allocate money to researching existential risk, or x-risk.

In his recent book What We Owe the Future, William MacAskill a 35-year-old moral philosopher at Oxford who has become the public intellectual face of effective altruism makes a case for longtermism with a thought experiment about a hiker who accidentally shatters a glass bottle on a trail. A conscientious person, he holds, would immediately clean up the glass to avoid injuring the next hiker whether that person comes in a week or in a century.

Similarly, MacAskill argues that the number of potential future humans, over many generations for the duration of the species, far outnumbers the number currently alive; if we truly believe that all humans are equal, protecting future humans is more important than protecting human lives today.

Some of longtermists funding interests, such as nuclear nonproliferation and vaccine development, are fairly uncontroversial. Others are more outlandish: investing in space colonization, preventing the rise of power-hungry AI, cheating death through life-extension technology. A bundle of ideas known as transhumanism seeks to upgrade humanity by creating digital versions of humans, bioengineering human-machine cyborgs and the like.

People like the futurist Ray Kurzweil and his adherents believe that biotechnology will soon enable a union between humans and genuinely intelligent computers and AI systems, Robin McKie explained in the Guardian in 2018. The resulting human-machine mind will become free to roam a universe of its own creation, uploading itself at will onto a suitably powerful computational substrate, and thereby creating a kind of immortality.

This feverish techno-utopianism distracts funders from pressing problems that already exist here on Earth, said Luke Kemp, a research associate at the University of Cambridges Centre for the Study of Existential Risk who describes himself as an EA-adjacent critic of effective altruism. Left on the table, he says, are critical and credible threats that are happening right now, such as the climate crisis, natural pandemics and economic inequality.

The things they push tend to be things that Silicon Valley likes, Kemp said. Theyre the kinds of speculative, futurist ideas that tech billionaires find intellectually exciting. And they almost always focus on technological fixes to human problems rather than political or social ones.

There are other objections. For one thing, lavishly expensive, experimental bioengineering would be accessible, especially initially, to only a tiny sliver of humanity, Kemp said; it could bring about a future caste system in which inequality is not only economic, but biological.

This thinking is also dangerously undemocratic, he argued. These big decisions about the future of humanity should be decided by humanity. Not by just a couple of white male philosophers at Oxford funded by billionaires. It is literally the most powerful, and least representative, strata of society imposing a particular vision of the future which suits them.

Kemp added: I dont think EAs or at least the EA leadership care very much about democracy. In its more dogmatic varieties, he said, longtermism is preoccupied with rationality, hardcore utilitarianism, a pathological obsession with quantification and neoliberal economics.

Organizations such as 80,000 Hours, a program for early-career professionals, tend to encourage would-be effective altruists into four main areas, Kemp said: AI research, research preparing for human-made pandemics, EA community-building and global priorities research, meaning the question of how funding should be allocated.

The first two areas, though worthy of study, are highly speculative, Kemp said, and the second two are self-serving, since they channel money and energy back into the movement.

This year, the Future Fund reports having recommended grants to worthy-seeming projects as various as research on the feasibility of inactivating viruses via electromagnetic radiation ($140,000); a project connecting children in India with online science, technology, engineering and mathematics education ($200,000); research on disease-neutralizing therapeutic antibodies ($1.55m); and research on childhood lead exposure ($400,000).

But much of the Future Funds largesse seems to have been invested in longtermism itself. It recommended $1.2m to the Global Priorities Institute; $3.9m to the Long Term Future Fund; $2.9m to create a longtermist coworking office in London; $3.9m to create a longtermist coworking space in Berkeley; $700,000 to the Legal Priorities Project, a longtermist legal research and field-building organization; $13.9m to the Centre for Effective Altruism; and $15m to Longview Philanthropy to execute independent grantmaking on global priorities research, nuclear weapons policy, and other longtermist issues.

Kemp argued that effective altruism and longtermism often seem to be working toward a kind of regulatory capture. The long-term strategy is getting EAs and EA ideas into places like the Pentagon, the White House, the British government and the UN to influence public policy, he said.

There may be a silver lining in the timing of Bankman-Frieds downfall. In a way, its good that it happened now rather than later, Kemp said. He was planning on spending huge amounts of money on elections. At one stage, he said he was planning to spend up to a billion dollars, which would have made him the biggest donor in US political history. Can you imagine if that amount of money contributed to a Democratic victory and then turned out to have been based on fraud? In an already fragile and polarized society like the US? That would have been horrendous.

The main tension to the movement, as I see it, is one that many movements deal with, said Benjamin Soskis, a historian of philanthropy and a senior research associate at the Urban Institute. A movement that was primarily fueled by regular people and their passions, and interests, and different kinds of provenance attracted a number of very wealthy funders, and came to be driven by the funding decisions, and sometimes just the public identities, of people like SBF and Elon Musk and a few others. (Soskis noted that he has received funding from Open Philanthropy, an EA-affiliated foundation.)

Effective altruism put Bankman-Fried, who lived in a luxury compound in the Bahamas, on a pedestal, as this Corolla-driving, beanbag-sleeping, earning-to-give monk, which was clearly false, Kemp said.

Soskis thinks that effective altruism has a natural appeal to people in tech and finance who tend to have an analytical and calculating way of thinking about problems and EA, like all movements, spreads through social and work networks.

Effective altruism is also attractive to wealthy people, Soskis believes, because it offers a way to understand the marginal value of additional dollars, particularly when talking of vast sums that can defy comprehension. The movements focus on numbers (shut up and multiply) helps hyper-wealthy people understand more concretely what $500m can do philanthropically versus, say, $500,000 or $50,000.

One positive outcome, he thinks, is that EA-influenced donors publicly discuss their philanthropic commitments and encourage others to make them. Historically, Americans have tended to regard philanthropy as a private matter.

But theres something which I think you cant escape, Soskis said. Effective altruism isnt premised on a strong critique of the way that money has been made. And elements of it were construed as understanding capitalism more generally as a positive force, and through a kind of consequentialist calculus. To some extent, its a safer landing spot for folks who want to sequester their philanthropic decisions from a broader political debate about the legitimacy of certain industries or ways of making money.

Kemp said that it is rare to hear EAs, especially longtermists, discuss issues such as democracy and inequality. Honestly, I think thats because it is something the donors dont want us talking about. Cracking down on tax avoidance, for example, would lead to major donors losing both power and wealth.

The downfall of Bankman-Frieds crypto empire, which has jeopardized the Future Fund and countless other longtermist organizations, may be revealing. Longtermists believe that future existential risks to humanity can be accurately calculated yet, as the economist Tyler Cowen recently pointed out, they couldnt even predict the existential threat to their own flagship philanthropic organization.

There must be soul-searching, Soskis said. Longtermism has a stain on it and Im not sure when or if it will be fully removed.

A billionaire is a billionaire, the journalist Anand Giridharadas wrote recently on Twitter. His 2018 book Winners Take All sharply criticized the idea that private philanthropy will solve human problems. Stop believing in good billionaires. Start organizing toward a good society.

Go here to see the original:
Power-hungry robots, space colonization, cyborgs: inside the bizarre world of longtermism - The Guardian

KPMG has appointed software engineer and tech entrepreneur Alyse Sue as its new head of metaverse future, with the goal of creating a multimillion-dollar business based on metaverse technology and cryptocurrency over the next two years.

Sue rejoined the Big Four firm after working as a senior consultant on the KPMG Innovate team between 2012 and 2015 before focusing on her own startup projects. Sue co-founded Transhumanism Australia and cryptocurrency Transhuman Coin, which are both dedicated to funding research and development of technologies that enhance human biology, and Genomix, a data machine-learning startup that identifies genetic variations associated with long life spans.

Previously head of Web3 for software development and innovation consultancy firm Palo IT, Sue will now report to James Mabott, a partner at KPMG Futures.

"My role at KPMG is to use metaverse technology to create new business models for the firm," said Sue. "I am primarily interested in blockchain metaverses such as crypto, Horizons 2 and 3 mix realities. We would like to encourage more businesses to move toward this model, and we believe that the way we work will considerably change by 2030, because metaverse adoption is driven by B2B. "

According to the KPMG website, Metaverse Future is about reflecting a continuously evolving world by developing new business models and adapting to changes in technology. The firm believes that by 2030, synthetic data generated from simulated realities could allow robots to problem-solve and replace humans for high-risk tasks. However, Meta's Reality Labs unit, which develops virtual and augmented reality technologies set to support the metaverse, reported a cumulative operating loss of $9.1 billion since Q3 2021.

While KPMG's main source of revenues relies on consulting or advisory-based services, Sue explains that an increasing number of banks and fashion companies are currently experimenting with crypto and NFTs, and that the company aims to attract this new category of clients by investing in new technologies. Sue says the metaverse would be the product of quantum computing, artificial intelligence and blockchain technologies. While some of those models are not well-developed yet, KPMG expects them to play a significant role on the tech stage by 2030.

"We could bring advances to AI and quantum, and use simulations in different environments and scenarios," said Sue. "Those simulations could help us determine what is the best business strategy, driven by blockchain technology."

The four fields of research Sue is most interested in are payments, standards, security and tokenization, which refers to physical assets being represented on a digital blockchain. She says that Metaverse Future is about finding new areas of growth and exploring new technologies such as cryptocurrency, NFTs, decentralized autonomous organizations, as well as VR and AR.

However, Chainanalysis data revealed the average price of NFT sales has dropped by 92% since May, and KPMG may need to consider these complications for its future investments. Currently, Metaverse Future counts 90 team members whose work focuses on AI and quantum computing, in addition to the metaverse. The firm also launched KPMG Origins, a blockchain-based track-and-trace service that helps businesses navigate increasingly complex supply chains with an independent data-sharing platform.

"The metaverse is not a passing fashion and companies are all looking at how they can engage customers in new ways," said Sue. "The numbers are increasing, and some people are already spending more money on their avatar than on their actual wardrobes. It is an exciting space to be in, and if you're part of it, you've already become part of the future."

Sue says that KPMG regularly organizes one-on-one meetings with its clients to understand their problems and come up with a product that will meet their needs. As a result, Metaverse Future is currently working on ways to protect its users' privacy and guarantee a swift transition from Web 2.0, which is the current version of the internet, to a third version of the World Wide Web.

According to Sue, Metaverse Future is ultimately all about clients and explaining to them how metaverse technology is going to look in the next few years. Sue says that people want to know how new technologies are going to change the landscape of business, and KPMG believes its new initiatives may revolutionize employee, client and third-party interactions.

"The best way to learn for companies to explore these new technologies is to dive in and play around with NFTs," declared Sue. "They should read about the theory, run experiments and wonder how they can help customers better solve their problems."

KPMG is not the only CPA firm to make a few moves toward the metaverse. In December 2021, PwC Hong Kong purchased a LAND site in the popular Sandbox metaverse, a blockchain-based gaming platform. In January, Prager Metis also became the first CPA firm to open up a metaverse headquarters as part of a joint venture with metaverse studio Banquet LLC.

Continued here:
KPMG Australia appoints first-ever head of metaverse future - Accounting Today

Check out the on-demand sessions from the Low-Code/No-Code Summit to learn how to successfully innovate and achieve efficiency by upskilling and scaling citizen developers. Watch now.

Ive been enjoying the peek into our metaverse future that Amazon Prime Video is delivering each week with airings of The Peripheral streaming show.

As I noted when the series debuted, its an example of how the world is science fiction is becoming more science and less fiction. And the recent sixth episode of the show feature the addition of Alexandra Billings, a trans actress who plays the inspector Ainsley Lowbeer in the show.

The show is Prime Videos top show, and, to paraphrase the first line from Herman Narulas book Virtual Society, I believe that one day it will be watched by a person without a body. Thats because The Peripheral depicts what its like to move between different worlds and to inhabit the bodies of others.

And for a trans actress like Billings, this brings to mind the notion that your physical body may not matter in a future where digital and physical seamlessly interact. Billings has been a trailblazer for LGBTQ+ representation, and she recently made history when she starred on Broadway as Madam Morrible in Wicked, the first time a trans actress has portrayed a traditionally cis female role.

Intelligent Security Summit

Learn the critical role of AI & ML in cybersecurity and industry specific case studies on December 8. Register for your free pass today.

I talked to her about the significance of the role in The Peripheral, where she plays a trans person in the future. The show is based on a novel by William Gibson, who coined the term cyberspace, and it was produced by Westworld creators Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan. Its a complicated story that moves around in time and explores whether the digital world is real or not. And the show is different from the book, as it uses Gibsons story as a jumping off point for ideas about our future. And that gives Billings some interesting leeway to play Lowbeer as a trans person in the show.

Lowbeer is a character who polices the border between a physical reality and the virtual world. And she is like a messenger from the future for us. And she can teach us how to think about topics like transhumanism. Lowbeers character is pretty unique, and I think anyone thinking about the metaverse should consider watching The Peripheral.

Heres an edited transcript of our interview.

VentureBeat: It sounds like an exciting role for you.

Alexandra Billings: Yes, it is. Its super fun, and it was super exciting.

VentureBeat: Did you view this as a kind of ground-breaking role?

Billings: Oh, yeah, sure, absolutely. Its rare that you have a transgender character thats written as a trans person. Meaning, a trans person doesnt come into a show and have to change a cis character into a trans experience, but that its specifically written for us. Also, that her transness isnt the central part of her being. It takes a backseat to who she is and what she does. That itself is pretty extraordinary.

VentureBeat: I think you maybe could get to a place where your head kind of explodes, because transhumanism in the future should be quite possible. Given the technology in the show, its a reality that people can swap bodies. They can be whoever they wish to be at any given moment. It feels quite relevant.

Billings: Youre exactly right, and thats very astute, because the queerness of this show happens all the way through it. Flynne becomes a man, because the Peripherals are actually justI want to say robots, but thats not sort of true. Theyre vessels, really. They present in one particular gender, but your particular gender doesnt necessarily have to do with the Peripheral that you climb into.

It was really fascinating. That actually didnt sink into my little pea brain until I was watching it. I thought, This is queer as heck! Its really stunning. From the very beginning the whole thing screams trans. Its fascinating.

VentureBeat: I also feel like some of this is not really presentI mean, I read through the first book. It doesnt seem like it is a theme of the first book at all. Its just there. But it sounds like the fiction of the show can actually show this more.

Billings: I think youre right, yes. I think thats exactly right. What the books did was hint at it and put it in the world. What the TV show did was just allow it to blossom a bit more. And again, it doesnt hit you over the head. But it is there. It is present. Its so great. I mean, thank God thats true. Because how else do we normalize but by just putting our stories in the center?

VentureBeat: Is there some creativity you feel like you can bring to this role, then, because its not sticking to the text as canon? Its interesting that its using the text as a jumping-off point to express a lot of different things.

Billings: I think thats right. The writers are the ones in charge of the direction, but they have meetings with all of us and ask us, What do you think? Where should we go? What interests you? What doesnt interest you? Because the writers are cis, when I got the role I told them, When you write Lowbeer, you must come to me. You have to talk to me. And they were more than willing to do that. They were actually very grateful. They said, Were really appreciative of your voice. I said that it needs to be infiltrated into the storyline and into Lowbeer, so that her transness comes from a lived experience, and not one that is writing about a lived experience.

VentureBeat: Where are some interesting places this is going that you might hint at? Im sure you dont want to spoil anything, but

Billings: Thats so hard. Its such a hard question, because I dont want to get fired. And also I feel likeone thing I can tell you is that weve had conversations about what has never been done on television, and also what would be interesting to the story, to the world itself, and how Lowbeer can add to the story. Thats what matters to me the most. The fact that Im in it is representation enough. I dont think we need to browbeat people. But the conversations that weve had have been about, how do we keep the story interesting? How do we keep it buoyant? Thats all I can tell you.

VentureBeat: One thing I can think of is that the times and maybe the acceptance of trans people would be different in Flynnes age than in the future. You can see that change has happened, maybe.

Billings: I think thats right. Also, because the show is a reflection of this global experience were all going through right now, I think it would behoove the show to have people that are still stuck in the 1950s. You talk about relevance. We still have Candace Cameron talking about traditional marriage as if its an actual thing. Shes going to make these movies about traditional marriage, which isnt a thing. Theres no such thing as traditional marriage. Thats not a category of marriage. It doesnt make any sense. What shes saying is, Im going to make these films that are exclusionary. Thats what Im going to do. Im going to make films about this experience only when we talk about marriage. Which doesnt make any sense.

Having those kinds of people, even in the Peripheraltheyre never going to go away. Thats the thing. Were not going to get rid of them. Theyre not going to disappear. We always have to have that balance. Nobody is a one and nobody is a 10. We have to have the ideas of that scale in order to keep ourselves balanced. I think having some of those kinds of people in the PeripheralI think that matters.

VentureBeat: It might be interesting from your point of view to be a messenger from the future for our real world today.

Billings: Thats a great idea. Id love to be a message from the future.

VentureBeat: What are some things you would say?

Billings: You know, I think Id saylisten, its probably the stuff I say now, which is that I really believe, as long as we keep going forward, things are going to change. But we have to keep moving. We can take breaks, but we cant rest. We cant take a nap. That cant be true. We can allow ourselves some space from the revolution, but we have to keep moving. Otherwise people like this sad woman whos living a very delusionary worldwhat we have to do is instead of saying, Youre wrong and youre a terrible person, we move forward into education. Thats what the future holds.

VentureBeat: Its something liketechnology changes for sure, but humanity changes as well.

Billings: Thats right. Listen, humanity is technology. Technology doesnt exist as a thing unless were the ones who program it. A computer doesnt know anything else besides what we tell it. It doesnt get smarter. We get smarter. Thats what we have to remember. We are technology. One of the reasons social media is so interesting is because its us. Its humanity condensed into your phone.

VentureBeat: Its interesting, tootranshumanism seems like a popular science fiction idea. It seems almost like an ideal state to a lot of people. Ive never heard people say its unacceptable. Ive basically heard people say its acceptable. I would think that then maybeits interesting to compare that to trans people.

Billings: I would agree with you. Especially, adding the word humanism to our community normalizes and allowsI have no desire to assimilate. I never have. My transness was neveryou know, I never wanted to be the same. People called me a weirdo my whole life and I thought, Fabulous! That was never a thing for me. That was never a trigger. But I did want to be able to come into society, to be able to be a part of the thing. Not to be the same as, but to bring my otherness into society. I think adding the word humanism to our community helps do that.

VentureBeat: I did remember another science fiction story that envisioned a future version of YouTube that would put you in VR, in a body suit, and let you feel what its like to be somebody else. Walk a mile in the shoes of an LGBTQ person.

Billings: That is a great idea. I fear, though, that just because you spend one day, one week, or even one year walking in my skin, you still dont get the full vision of my history. You dont know what its like to have spent day after day after day as a seven-year-old transgender person. Im 60 years old now. This is back in the late 1960s. To spend day after day as a trans child and not have a word for what you are. Thats very different than walking around the planet as a 50-, 40-, or 30-year-old trans person. I think its a great idea in theory, but we need to be very mindful that the queer experience is historical. It doesnt exist moment by moment only. We have a culture.

VentureBeat: Where do you hope this all goes, your opportunities related to the show?

Billings: Listen, I hope the Peripheral runs for 150 years. I do. I think it should run as long aswhat was that other thing? I never watched it. The dragons show. Im a terrible person. I never watched it. But I think the Peripheral literally can reflect the state of the human experience as long as we continue to change. Lets hope it never ends. Lets hope theres never any happily ever after. Theres alway just a continuum.

VentureBeat: Lets hope we get past the Jackpot.

Billings: Thats right!

GamesBeat's creed when covering the game industry is "where passion meets business." What does this mean? We want to tell you how the news matters to you -- not just as a decision-maker at a game studio, but also as a fan of games. Whether you read our articles, listen to our podcasts, or watch our videos, GamesBeat will help you learn about the industry and enjoy engaging with it. Discover our Briefings.

Here is the original post:
Why a trans actress in The Peripheral is a messenger from our future | The DeanBeat - VentureBeat

A few of the things were thankful for in 2022.Image: Various

Thanksgiving is here. A day to sit back, reflect, and think about all the good things in your life. Family, friends, your healththose are all worthy. But what about shows, movies, and comics?

Each year, the io9 staff writes about the pop culture were thankful for. The entertainment that has brought us joy over the past 11 months. Things that weve not only liked, but that have been so transformative or impactful, were actually thankful they exist. So sit back, grab a turkey leg, and see what the io9 staff is thankful for in 2022. (Or, if you want, look back at 2020 and 2021.)

Image: Sunrise/Crunchyroll

I absolutely love Gundam, but with the first mainline series on the horizon this year since Iron Blooded Orphans, I was still filled with a sense of trepidation about The Witch From Mercury. Very little of the franchise in the 21st century has grokked with the things I love most about Gundam as a conceptand the messages that resonate most clearly throughout the earlier works in ithave existed in entries like SEED, Reconguista in G, or the aforementioned Orphans. Would Witch From Mercury follow suit? Had Gundam forgotten how to be Gundam outside of nostalgic retreads of its original self?

Thankfully, I was blown away from episode 1 of G-Witch, as its become affectionately known. Not just for the potential sapphic vibes between its female protagonists Suletta and Miorine, nor the incredible design and action of its primary mecha, the Aerial. Witch From Mercury built out a new Gundam world that explored anime tropes that the franchise has not really touched beforemostly a high school settingwith explorations of transhumanism, bio-tech, the future of capitalism, the military-industrial complexs relationship with class warfare, and more, with the hallmarks and bite I love about Gundams core ideals. Finally, theres a modern series that feels reverent of what Gundam was when it first began, without just directly aping or rehashing it. While theres plenty of opportunities for Witch From Mercury to fall apart as it continues, for now, Im grateful for Suletta Sundays having become the highlight of my week over the past few months. - James Whitbrook

G/O Media may get a commission

Interview with the Vampire.Image: AMC

This year feels like weve really turned a corner in queer representation in media. No longer relegated to side stories and three-second editable clips, queer stories are finally getting the limelight. From Our Flag Means Death to Interview With the Vampire, even sprinkling in Guillermo de la Cruzs coming out story on What We Do in the Shadows and the very lesbian-coded Gundam: Witch from Mercury (see above), I feel like I can finally think to myself, I want to watch a show focused on messy queers, and I have a plethora of stories to choose from. Theres under-the-radar shows like The Bastard Son & the Devil Himself and childrens animated shows like The Owl House and Paranormal Park that are also doing an amazing job at delivering fully-rounded characters and deeply queer stories. To say nothing of the books that have come out this year. I might not have cared for Nona the Ninth, but in between Taz Muirs Locked Tomb sapphics, Freya Marskes horny witches, the Burning Kingdoms magical disaster sequel The Oleander Sword, and the final installment of the orc/sorcerer romance of the century The Thousand Eyes, the lesbians ate well in 2022. At the end of the year Im just grateful that I can see myself, my stories, my friends, and my romances somewhere on screen, depicted in a way that centers the characters themselves and not just the challenges of being queer. - Linda Codega

Ive never had a theatergoing experience like RRR. Ive seen the film five times and each feels like the first. The epic historical fantasy musical and bromance with blockbuster action from director S.S. Rajamouli is a life-changing cinematic experience like no other. The audience gets on their feet, cheers, laughs, quotes along, and even has a dance-off. Ive been chasing that movie-audience high ever since and no film this year can compare. N. T. Rama Rao Jr. and Ram Charan are instant starsequally charismatic romantic leads and action heroes. I refuse to watch RRR on Netflix until the streamer offers it in its original Telegu language, but if its the only way you can watch, just do it, especially since there is a sequel in the works! Give it all the awards. - Sabina Graves

Nothing against knowing what you like and choosing to stick within those boundaries, whether its a show within the Marvel or Star Wars universe, a prequel to a show you once liked but with many more dragons, or a fourth season of a show about raunchy vampires. But 2022 had a particularly high rate of this show sounds cool, dont know much about it but guess Ill take a chance sorts of genre titles that ended up rather majestically rewarding the viewer. Just to name a few, but Our Flag Means Death, Archive 81, The Resort, and Severance all found their niches quickly with characters we couldnt stop thinking about, and plots that made us cheer when second seasons were announced (or sigh sadly when the opposite happened). That these sorts of shows exist at all gives us hope that creativity is still alive in Hollywood, and makes the existence of all those freaking streaming services feel a little more justified. - Cheryl Eddy

When the pandemic first hit in 2020, and through much of 2021, movie studios made the right call in delaying films until such a time when seeing them in the theater would be a safe endeavor, both financially and for moviegoers. Even though were far from out of the pandemic woods, plenty of movies have come out this year (for better or worse) with the intonation of only in theaters.

And you know what? For many of the movies that Ive seen in theaters this year, it really has felt like Theaters are Back. And it helps that theres been some films worth seeing in theaters: The Batman, Nope, Ambulance, and The Woman King are all crowdpleasers and Movie-Ass Movies, experiences that absolutely hit on the big screen. Top Gun: Maverick takes the top Movie-Ass Movie experience for the year, with a close second being Prey. Yes, its strictly on Hulu and will likely never see a theatrical release in its life, but it feels like it was made to be watched in a theater. For those who are vaccinated and feel safe enough to step into a theater again, heres hoping we get more of these types of films in 2023. - Justin Carter

I have to jump off Justins pick here but for a different reason. First, I want to fully acknowledge that Top Gun: Maverick isnt an io9 movie. But part of why I love it and am thankful for it does apply to the movies we cover. You see, so often these days sequels are made to films we loved growing up. Sequels we never, ever thought would happen, be it a seventh Star Wars, a third Ghostbusters, you get the idea. And almost always, those movies do not compare to the originals. How could they? At best theyre solid remakes.

But Top Gun: Maverick was different. Over the years of waiting, the team created a movie thats almost certainly better than the original. A film that works as a pure action movie, but works even better with that icing of nostalgia. I first saw the original Top Gun when it was released in 1986 with my late grandfather so watching this one brings back all the feels. Probably why Ive watched this new movie almost a dozen times since its release, both in theaters and at home. - Germain Lussier

Weve spoken about how charming the BBC sitcom Ghosts is before, and youd be forgiven if you decided to give the American version a try. But its such classic TV comfort food that CBSs Ghosts standsor at least apparatesjust as strongly to its source material. When Samantha (iZombies Rose McIver) discovers shes the owner of a dilapidated Victorian mansion in New England, her excitement to turn it into a bed-and-breakfast with her husband Jay (Pitch Perfects Utkarsh Ambudkar) is tempered somewhat when she falls down the stairs, is clinically dead for a minute, and wakes up to find the house is inhabited by a variety of ghosts from different time periods in U.S. history, from an 11th-century Viking to a 1990s finance bro. Its the sort of show that would have absolutely had a laugh track back in the day, but the classic structure only augments the warmth and heart Ghosts still has under its incorporeal chest. Robert Bricken

Ive been recommending people check out the uber-popular manga One Piece pretty much since it was first published in 1997. Its a job thats only gotten harder as it has crept up in length, now running more than 1,000 issues. But Im not fully insane; the reason I want people to spend one million hours of their lives reading One Piece is because its that good, and is better than any other series about rewarding long-term fans. This year saw the epic end of the massive Wano storyarc, followed by an expositional lore dump so massive and mind-blowing its made my head spin. Calling One Piece a story about pirates is technically true, but its also about history, mythology, science fiction, samurai, dragons, robots, mythical creatures, destiny, monsters, world culture, and so much more. Hey, those 1,000+ issues had to be filled with something. Robert Bricken

Lord of the Rings: The Rings of PowerImage: Amazon

For going on two decades, television has been getting better and better. And while huge geek shows like Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead brought that to a whole new level, it feels like 2022 has taken that up even another notch. This year we got a show based on Lord of the Rings, a new Game of Thrones in House of the Dragon, an Obi-Wan Kenobi show, soon well get a Willow show, then theres Andor, She-Hulk, and the list goes on and on. Not only are these all really good genre shows, they almost universally feel like shows that, 20 or 30 years ago, would have been made as movies. And yet, in 2022, we get to watch them in the comfort of our own homes. Massive-scale, big-budget genre movies extended into full TV shows. What a world. (And yes, I do realize this is in opposition to Cheryls equally good pick above.) - Germain Lussier

Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, whats next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about James Camerons Avatar: The Way of Water.

Read more from the original source:
9 Pieces (and One Piece) of Pop Culture io9 Is Thankful For - Gizmodo