Category: The Conversation

Source: The Conversation – UK – By David Stupples, Professor of Electrical and Electronic Engineering and Director of Electronic Warfare Research, City St George’s, University of London

For over a century, the ocean has been the ultimate refuge for those who wished to disappear. From the U-boats of the first world war to the nuclear-powered leviathans that glide through today’s deep waters, the submarine has thrived on one simple principle: stealth.

Sound waves travel further and faster in water than light or radar waves. This means sound is the most effective way to detect underwater objects. Modern anti-submarine warfare (ASW) is an ongoing cat-and-and-mouse game of detecting, tracking and deterring enemy submarines. With sound as the ocean’s only reliable language, ASW has primarily been a contest of listening.

But the game is changing. Advances in artificial intelligence (AI), sensor networks, and autonomous vehicles are eroding the acoustic monopoly that submarines once enjoyed.

A new generation of tireless, networked and increasingly intelligent machines is beginning to patrol the seas. This promises a future where even the quietest submarine will find it harder to remain unseen.

As the ocean’s soundscape becomes more crowded, navies are increasingly turning to non-acoustic methods. These technologies detect the effects of a submarine rather than its noise. Satellites equipped with synthetic aperture radar can detect subtle ripples and temperature gradients on the sea surface caused by subsurface movement.

Until recently, magnetometers, which can measure the minute disturbances a submarine creates in Earth’s magnetic field, were constrained by physics and sensitivity limits. The magnetic anomaly detectors used for ASW could only operate effectively at low altitude and at short range.

Emerging quantum magnetometers, which make use of the strange science of quantum mechanics, promise orders-of-magnitude improvements in sensitivity. They could, in theory, detect the presence of a steel hull tens of kilometres away, especially when deployed in swarms aboard uncrewed aircraft or sea surface vessels.

A technique called distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) could turn ordinary undersea cables – primarily used for internet traffic – into vibration sensors. It works by measuring subtle changes in strain in the cables’ optical fibres.

Through DAS, a single transoceanic cable could, in effect, become an enormous underwater microphone (hydrophone). In principle, this would allow a submarine crossing a major ocean basin to be detected by subtle pressure waves recorded in the fibres beneath it.

Autonomous vessels

At the heart of the revolution in ASW are uncrewed surface vehicles (USVs). These autonomous vessels range from small, solar-powered craft to large, long endurance ships capable of spending weeks or months at sea.

Unlike crewed ships, USVs can be built cheaply and in large numbers. Armed with sonar, radar, magnetometers and communications links, they are the mobile nodes of an ocean-scale sensor network that can listen, learn and adapt in real time.

The US Navy’s Sea Hunter, an autonomous trimaran, has demonstrated its ability to track a diesel-electric submarine for extended periods without human intervention. In the UK, the Royal Navy’s Cetus project and its experimental uncrewed fleet at Portsmouth are exploring similar ideas.

But it is the integration of AI with autonomy that reshapes the picture. A single USV, even a sophisticated one, can only observe a small patch of ocean. A swarm of hundreds, each communicating via satellite, laser, or acoustic link, can share information and act cooperatively.

AI is a game changer

AI does things that human operators and legacy systems cannot. It fuses data from multiple sources into a coherent picture. A single acoustic anomaly may mean little, but when combined with other data, it may form a high confidence detection.

AI operates continuously and without fatigue. Persistence is vital when hunting for the fleeting signature of a submarine designed to operate silently for weeks.

And by learning how submarines navigate, avoid detection, and exploit environmental features, algorithms can forecast likely positions and movements. This could prompt ASW to move from being primarily reactive to predictive – a shift comparable to how meteorology evolved from observation to forecasting.

Through these capabilities, AI could move from simply assisting detection to orchestrating it.

Humans are not leaving the loop, however. The role of human operator is shifting from hands-on detection to oversight, strategy, and what’s known as trust management.

Trust is a key challenge: in this context, it’s about ensuring human decision makers understand what AI is doing and why it recommends certain actions.

Navies are therefore investing heavily in explainable AI – systems that can account for their decisions – and robust communications systems that allow human operators to intervene when needed.

A connected ocean

By the 2030s, the world’s oceans may become as transparent to sensors as the skies became to radar in the 20th century. With help from AI, multiple transmitters and receivers – mounted on ships, aircraft and USVs – will be able to triangulate the positions of submarines in real time.

Swarms of autonomous underwater vehicles – relatively small robotic drones – will patrol close to shore, relaying data to surface craft. Satellites will flag anomalies for local sensor networks to investigate. And the fibre-optic infrastructure that spans the seabed may double as a global array of undersea microphones.

For now, such a vision remains technically ambitious. The ocean is extraordinarily complex: temperature gradients, salinity layers, and seabed topography all distort signals and confound algorithms. But with every incremental improvement in AI modelling and computational power, those obstacles shrink.

As detection grows more sophisticated, so too will the submarines. The future may see submarines using propulsion systems and materials in their hulls that leave minimal thermal or acoustic signature. Decoy drones could be used to confuse detection systems.

Some analysts predict that submarines will operate deeper and slower to evade wide-area surveillance. A shift towards autonomous undersea drones that can saturate defences through sheer numbers is also possible.

The strategic implications are profound. Submarines have long been the cornerstone of nuclear deterrence and covert power projection. Their ability to vanish beneath the waves gave nations second-strike capability (the ability to retaliate after absorbing a nuclear attack) and freedom of manoeuvre.

The result of AI-driven transparency could be greater stability – reducing incentives for surprise attack – or, paradoxically, new instability as nations race to preserve secrecy.

The submarine will remain a formidable weapon, but it will no longer move unseen. The ocean, once humanity’s final hidden frontier, is becoming transparent to the eyes of machines.

David Stupples does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. AI, drone ships and new sensors could leave submarines with few places to hide in the ocean – https://theconversation.com/ai-drone-ships-and-new-sensors-could-leave-submarines-with-few-places-to-hide-in-the-ocean-266973

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Richard Whittle, University Fellow in AI and Human Decision Making, University of Salford

Some of the world’s biggest tech firms have soared in value over the last year. As AI evolves at pace, there are hopes that it will improve lives in ways that people could never have imagined a decade ago – in sectors as diverse as healthcare, employment and scientific discovery.

OpenAI is now worth US$500 billion (£373 billion), compared with US$157 billion last October. Another firm, Anthropic, has almost trebled its valuation. But the Bank of England has now warned of a possible rapid “correction” due to its concerns about these staggering valuation rises.

The question is whether these values are realistic – or based on hype, excitement and unfounded optimism for the potential of AI. Put simply, is AI’s value today a product of what AI will do in future or what people hope it may do? Ultimately, we will only really know if it’s a bubble if it bursts – though the warning signs are evident today.

With hindsight, many things that happen in a bubble may sound exceedingly optimistic. If you take many headlines and replace the word AI with the word computers it often sounds a lot more naive.

But, predicting the path of technological change is hard. Back in 2000 the Daily Mail declared the internet could be a passing fad. Just a few months earlier the dotcom boom had peaked.

A burst bubble may not change the end of the journey. The internet was not a passing fad. However, bubbles are extremely disruptive and affect people in very real ways. Stocks fall, pensions suffer, unemployment rises and investment is wasted. Real potential is crowded out in the hype and mania to focus all investment in a small number of stocks and firms.

Right now, we have the first sign of a bubble – a rapid rise in valuations. If these correct and fall we will have a bubble. If these valuations continue to rise we could be seeing a new sustained market that is focused on the technology of the future.

Of course, it might be that these valuations plateau. What happens then depends on whether people have invested in the belief that prices will always rise.

Consider a situation where people believe – as the Bank of England does – that AI firms’ valuations may be “stretched”. It’s helpful to consider what these valuations are based on. Investment is simply a bet that AI increases profitability for the firms involved. These massive valuations are bets that AI will hugely increase future profitability.

In some cases these are bets that AI will improve in capabilities towards some kind of “artificial superintelligence” that can do everything a human can do – or more. This could raise the living standards of everyone on Earth. Leading computer scientist Stuart Russell estimates the value of that at US$14 quadrillion – investors are buying a claim on that outcome too.

If investors begin to fear that AI profits won’t materialise then they will try to get their money back. This realisation can appear quite suddenly and can be prompted by seemingly minor events. It doesn’t require a big needle to pop a bubble.

A US article published in March 2000 warned that internet companies were fast running out of money. This caused many people to rethink their investments

At this stage of the bubble, investment excitement had spread to everyday investors. These regular people balanced their fear of missing out with a fear that they were investing in something new that they didn’t know much about. For many, an article in a popular magazine suggesting they may have made a mistake tipped the scales towards caution. They began to sell their dotcom stocks.

In search of profit

It may come as a surprise to some that, despite its increasing valuations, OpenAI does not yet make a profit. It may require ten times more revenue to do so.

A US$500 billion valuation is quite something for a company that reportedly lost US$7.8 billion in the first half of this year. Some of this value appears to flow from a new deal between OpenAI and Nvidia where Nvidia will invest in OpenAI and OpenAI will buy Nvidia chips. This circular financing keeps everything afloat for now, but at some point investors will need to see returns.

AI firms more generally do not appear to be profitable at the moment. Investors are not putting their money into today’s losses – they are betting on an AI future.

It is of course perfectly feasible that AI firms will develop business models to increase their profitability. OpenAI is exploring advertising options and allowing chatbots to recommend products.

Using AI to deliver these messages is a viable option, though they will have to avoid the tricks and manipulations associated with online platforms, such as when hotel websites announce that rooms are about to sell out. We believe that AI can increase the power of these manipulations and we wonder how persuasive chatbots may be in their recommendations.

However, the big four – Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft and Amazon – are this year spending the equivalent of the GDP of Portugal on AI infrastructure. This is not investment in new targeted ads, it is investment in an AI future. The bubble will burst if and when this future is in doubt.

Richard Whittle receives funding from several standard sources including UKRI and Research England. No funders are likely to benefit from, or influence this work

Stuart Mills does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. What could burst the AI bubble? – https://theconversation.com/what-could-burst-the-ai-bubble-267136

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Colin Alexander, Senior Lecturer in Political Communications, Nottingham Trent University

The Nobel peace prize is rarely awarded to the most humble, modest or compassionate nominee. Instead, it all-too often ends up in the hands of high-profile figures who want it.

US president Donald Trump has said several times that he thinks he is deserving of it. And calls for him to win the award have only intensified since Israel and Hamas signed off on the first phase of Trump’s peace plan for Gaza.

The predicament is that, if the Nobel committee were to give the prize to Trump, they would be awarding it to a man whose administration has armed Israel’s continuing aggression in Gaza. This has led to devastating loss of life and, as confirmed by UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher, the area suffering famine.

Still, he has managed to engineer at least a ceasefire, which after two years of bitter conflict feels like a significant achievement.

But as a political communications analyst, I often worry that the Nobel peace prize committee has been too hasty to judge. I also worry that, while the institution might want to claim it is fully independent and works on the principle of group consensus, the reality is that its decision is often a political one.

Indeed, many previous recipients of the Nobel peace prize have, like Trump, not been the most peace-loving of people either.

High-profile controversies

In Nobel’s more than 120 years of awarding its prize, one of its most controversial decisions came in 1973. The award that year was given to Henry Kissinger, the then-US secretary of state. It is a decision that still divides opinion today.

Kissinger had been instrumental in the withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam in 1973. But he had also spent much of his political and academic career advocating for the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the development of a smaller “battlefield” range – Kissinger’s thesis that nuclear weapons could be used and were not just for deterrence.

He was a key decision-maker in the US’s “secret war” in Laos, which ran parallel to its operations in Vietnam, and in the US military’s invasion of Cambodia in 1970. More broadly, though, Kissinger’s political philosophy of realpolitik – politics based on practical objectives rather than ideals – appeared to have had little care for individual human life and saw global politics as a game between superpowers.

Kissinger was a man of great ego – the epitome of someone who wanted his own actions to be important and remembered.

Four decades later, the 2013 Nobel peace prize was awarded to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). When the announcement was made, it seemed a fitting acknowledgement for an organisation that had been trying to do good in the world.

It felt like an apt award at a time when western political leaders and news media had roundly condemned the use of chemical weapons in Syria’s civil war. A gas attack in the Ghouta suburb of Damascus in August 2013 was widely condemned on the international stage.

However, the credibility of the OPCW has come under scrutiny since then. In 2019, British journalist Peter Hitchens published several articles about how the OPCW had suppressed the findings of its own staff to support its conclusion that the regime of Bashar al-Assad had used chemical weapons in an attack on the Syrian city of Douma.

Hitchens and others who sought to bring this to public attention, most notably a small group of academics called the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media, were targeted by a smear campaign in which they were called “war crime deniers” and “apologists for Assad”.

But the Nobel committee’s most controversial decision has perhaps not been in who to award the prize to, but in who it did not award one to. From the 1920s until his assassination in 1948, Mohandas “Mahatma” Gandhi’s philosophy of non-violent civil disobedience against British colonial rule in India inspired many around the world. It led to his imprisonment on several occasions.

As I have detailed in my own work on the end of colonial rule in India, many British administrators privately acknowledged their deep admiration of Gandhi despite the extent to which his methods threatened their power. Gandhi is surely the individual most deserving of a peace prize who did not receive one.

Colin Alexander does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. The Nobel peace prize has a record of being awarded to controversial nominees – https://theconversation.com/the-nobel-peace-prize-has-a-record-of-being-awarded-to-controversial-nominees-267152

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Keith Rochfort, Assistant Professor, School of Biotechnology, Life Sciences Institute, Dublin City University

As colder months set in, respiratory infections begin to climb: everything from the common cold and flu to COVID. It’s a time when healthy lungs matter more than ever. Yet the very tissue that lets oxygen pass from air to blood is remarkably delicate, and habits such as vaping can weaken it just when protection is most needed.

The lungs are often pictured as two simple balloons, but their work is far more intricate. They act as a finely tuned exchange system, moving oxygen from inhaled air into the bloodstream while releasing carbon dioxide produced by the body’s cells.

At the centre of this process lies the blood–air barrier: a paper-thin layer where tiny air sacs called alveoli meet a dense network of hair-thin pulmonary capillaries. This barrier must remain both strong and flexible for efficient breathing, yet it is constantly exposed to stress from air pollution, microscopic particles and infectious microbes.

Vaping can add another layer of strain, and growing evidence shows that this extra pressure can damage the surface that makes every breath possible.

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The cloud from an e-cigarette carries solvents such as propylene glycol, flavouring chemicals, nicotine (in most products) and even trace metals from the device itself. When this cocktail reaches the lungs it doesn’t stay on the surface. It seeps deeper, irritating the endothelium – the thin layer of cells lining the blood vessels that mesh with the air sacs.

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What’s in vapes? Toxins, heavy metals, maybe radioactive polonium

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Healthy endothelium keeps blood flowing smoothly, discourages unnecessary clotting and acts as a selective gatekeeper for the bloodstream – controlling which substances, such as nutrients, hormones and immune cells, can pass in or out of the blood vessels while blocking harmful or unnecessary ones.

Studies show vaping can disrupt these defences, causing endothelial dysfunction even in young, otherwise healthy people. Controlled human exposure experiments reveal rises in endothelial microparticles – tiny cell fragments released when vessel linings are under stress.

My own research group has linked these changes to surges in inflammatory signals and stress markers in the blood after exposure to vaping aerosols. Together these findings indicate that the endothelium is struggling to maintain its protective role.

Laboratory work shows that vaping aerosols (even without nicotine) can loosen the tight seal of pulmonary endothelial cells. When the barrier leaks, fluid and inflammatory molecules seep into the alveoli. The result: blood–gas exchange is disrupted and respiratory infections become harder to fight.

COVID is usually thought of as an infection of the airways, but the SARS-CoV-2 virus also injures blood vessels. Doctors now describe the condition as causing endotheliopathies – diseases of the blood-vessel lining. In severe cases, capillaries become inflamed, leaky and prone to clotting. That helps explain why some patients develop dangerously low oxygen levels even when their lungs are not full of fluid: the blood side of the barrier is failing.

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How COVID-19 damages lungs: The virus attacks mitochondria, continuing an ancient battle that began in the primordial soup

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The virus exploits a key protein called ACE2, normally a “thermostat” that helps regulate blood pressure and vessel health. SARS-CoV-2 uses ACE2 as its doorway into cells; once the virus binds, the receptor’s protective role is disrupted and vessels become inflamed and unstable.

Vaping and COVID: a dangerous combination

My team is using computer models to investigate how vaping may affect COVID infections. Evidence already shows vaping can increase the number of ACE2 receptors in the airways and lung tissue. More ACE2 means more potential entry points for the virus – and more disruption exactly where the blood–air barrier needs to be strongest.

Both vaping and COVID drive inflammation. Vaping irritates and inflames the blood-vessel lining while COVID floods the lungs with pro-inflammatory molecules. Together they create a “perfect storm”: capillaries become leaky, fluid seeps into the air sacs and oxygen struggles to cross the blood–air barrier. COVID also raises the risk of blood clots in the lung’s vessels, while vaping has been linked to the same, compounding the danger.

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Is lung inflammation worse in e-cigarette users than smokers, as a new study suggests?

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Vaping can also hinder recovery after a bout of COVID. Healing the fragile exchange surface requires every bit of support the lungs can get. Vaping adds extra stress to tissues the virus has already damaged, even if the vaper feels no immediate symptoms. The result can be prolonged breathlessness, persistent fatigue and a slower return to pre-illness activity levels.

The blood–air barrier is like a piece of delicate fabric: it holds together under normal wear but can tear when pushed too hard. Vaping weakens that weave before illness strikes, making an infection such as COVID harder to overcome. The science is still evolving, but the message is clear: vaping undermines vascular health. Quitting, even temporarily, gives the lungs and blood vessels the cleaner environment they need to heal and to keep every breath effortless.

Keith Rochfort receives funding from Research Ireland.

– ref. How vaping primes the lungs for COVID damage – https://theconversation.com/how-vaping-primes-the-lungs-for-covid-damage-266162