Eightieth birthday

 

Eightieth birthday

I can scarcely believe I have recently celebrated my 80^th birthday. When I was young 80 seemed a very advanced age but I can genuinely say that although I have poor stamina, poor balance and deafness I don’t feel hugely old. Through the circumstance that so many of the youngsters have examinations just after my birthday I had an official birthday in July. This enabled Alex and Rajiv to attend. Unfortunately it clashed with the final cadet meeting for Ronnie so he didn’t attend although he has finished his A level exams. It is with great pride that I can report that step grandson Rajiv got a first class degree at Cambridge in his recent finals.

My official birthday was marked by a family gathering. All except Ronnie as mentioned above met here at Beechcroft. This has been our family home for 35 years but we are about to move out so there was also nostalgia for the place alongside the celebration. There were no major events just an evening BBQ although we remembered gatherings here in the past when we hired  a bouncy castle. With Martin and family in N Yorkshire and Alison and family in Surrey family get togethers have become more difficult. Frances in Birmingham is both relatively nearby and in more contact than the others.

The days when we could by squeezing accommodate everyone are long gone. Fortunately Frances has a largish house and Alison’s family were accommodated there. This enabled them to travel up by car and then not leave us until late to travel just to Birmingham. Rajiv has started work at the Home Office in London ( on an unestablished basis ), is living in London and travelled separately by train.

This very pleasant event was marred for me by deafness. On a one to one basis when nearby I’m OK but in general group conversation I find it difficult to hear everything that is said. Some of the family have naturally soft voices and the young people don’t seem to speak at all clearly.

Such an occasion is naturally also a time for reflection. I am very satisfied and fortunate with my family. Children didn’t arrive until after several years of marriage and medical intervention was required. Once safely delivered they have been a great source of interest and enjoyment. This has extended to their children so that I now have eight including two step grandsons. Generally academic standards have been very high with my two daughters both winning first class degrees.

More generally I was fortunate in Annette, my life partner. We met fairly young and in hundred per cent hindsight I spent too much time pursuing her when I should have been exploiting my opportunities in higher education. When I was young the inequitable 11 plus system enabled me to go to grammar school and then on to higher education. At precisely the time that I was following an undistinguished school career there was a national recognition of technological education. This I was able to follow.

I graduated at a time of full employment and indeed as a science graduate I had multiple opportunities. In choosing to join Unilever I made a lucky decision as it offered me scope to progress into a lifetime career in product development and also the opportunity to obtain secondment to study for a higher degree

Financially I was fortunate to step onto the housing ladder just as the tremendous wave of house price inflation was beginning. Also I had benefited from free higher education so I started without debts. I can honestly say I don’t know how young people today manage. Home ownership was very much an affordable goal when we were starting out. It was a goal almost all my contemporaries aspired and achieved.

My career was to have its ups and downs when I was made redundant twice within a year. Luckily the right job came along with Castrol where I had two stints totalling about 11 years in all.

The major setback I suffered was a mild stroke in my fifties. Thanks to strong support from Annette I was able to make a decent recovery. Although I did return to full time work for a couple of years I was able to take early retirement and then work part time with a local company for a further 10 years until a normal retirement age of 65.

I did become involved with local affairs ( parish council, school governor, investment club ) until deafness required these be given up. I have a strong interest in reading and literature and I will be extremely sorry to leave the two book clubs which have been important to me over past years. I’m rather surprised to find I have just over 10 years with one and just under 10 with the second.

Pre Covid we could afford to travel quite a bit but I now think this will be curtailed although to an extent we must wait and see. Annette suffers from arthritis and deafness but I would say these are not too limiting for her. Like me her stamina is much less and daytime naps and early nights feature in both our lives.

Russian invasion of Ukraine 11

 

Russian invasion of Ukraine 11

After 4 months since the Russian invasion we can start to draw some preliminary conclusions. Early on the attack went badly but latterly Russia has adopted a strategy of focused and strong artillery attack. This is slowly grinding forward and it appears they will soon control the Donbas region.

The early attack on capital Kyiv was repulsed and so successfully that there was some rather silly talk of “winning” the war. This Ukrainian success seems to stem mainly from two sources. Firstly there was an astoundingly high morale among the defenders who showed great determination and ingenuity. It would also appear the Russian tactics were poor and equipment not as good as expected. The second factor was that weapons supplies from the West were very successful. In particular the anti-tank missile, the Javelin, performed very well ably supported by the Anglo-Swedish NLAW missile.

The Ukrainian forces also made a dogged defence to Black Sea coastal cities particularly Mariaupol while retaining control of Odessa. There was a significant victory in the sinking of the Moska, the Russian fleets largest vessel in the Black Sea.

Clearly this necessitated a Russian rethink. Using their vast superiority in artillery they have chosen to focus on a grinding advance westwards through particularly the Donbas region systematically destroying everything they encounter. The Ukrainian cities and towns have been reduced literally to rubble. Major cities are experiencing 90%+ destruction. It appears the majority of civilians have escaped although the toll of civilian life has been high. As people flee for their lives it appears that the vast majority of civilians are refugees  either in western Ukraine or a high proportion in neighbouring countries.

It appears that the Russian advance has been brutal with atrocities found in areas like Bucha near Kyiv which were Russian occupied before their withdrawal. Men shot with their hands tied, women raped and abused. There seems ample evidence that the Russian strategy is to terrorise the population. It also appears this policy is extending beyond the battlefield areas to the recent attack on a shopping centre with many dead or injured. One can only wonder what the previously pro Russian populations of eastern Donbas think.

All the evidence points to what can only be labelled a psychopathic regime. The Russian people are being fed a diet of lies while all the organs of power are corrupt. Indeed one notable feature of the Russian state is the extent of corruption and theft. It is hard to know exactly what power Putin does have. Certainly he has won pseudo elections for over 20 years. Also early on in his leadership he took pains to eliminate oligarchs who dared question his position. We also must remember that the Russian people have been fed statist, anti democratic propaganda for a century with just a short break in the nineties. I remember from visiting St Petersburg at that time that icons of the former regime were still venerated.

In fact looking at Putin’s history it is very clear that he has been a cold war warrior all his life. He has cunningly incorporated nationalist sentiment into his lies. This has been powerful enough to incorporate some Ukrainians in the former breakaway areas.

Insofar as there has been anything positive from the invasion it is that the values of Western freedom have been enhanced after being taken too much for granted. The error of particularly German attempts to coexist with Putin have been exposed. Both Finland and Sweden have been shown the futility of their pseudo neutrality and have applied to join NATO. In practice they are Western nations and have acted as such while pretending to themselves that they are neutral between the West and Putin’s Russia.

The disappointing reaction to the war in the Third World has been very unhelpful. The illusion they can stand aside and dismiss this as a petty European quarrel entirely underestimates the war. There has been the usual claque of dictatorships such as Syria, Venezuela and Cuba who might be expected to applaud. More problematic has been India where they have been quick to buy Russian oil but slow to protest. India’s leader Modi has himself a strong authoritarian streak and doesn’t hesitate to treat his Moslem peoples as enemies of his preferred Hindu section.

While the Ukraine government is far from ideal at least they are making a honest effort to establish a modern democratic nation. It is good to see that the West has rallied round with meaningful support.

The 21^st century is to be one of struggle between free nations and authoritarian ones. At least the dichotomy is being seen rather more clearly now. The West must settle to the long haul, fight where it must, and minimise unnecessary provocation while maintaining a firmness of purpose. The outcome to be hoped for is something similar to the end of the cold war where internal revolution allows freedom  to break through. We must hope that even the psychopathic shy away from a nuclear holocaust.

Artificial Intelligence IV

 

Artificial Intelligence IV

The neural net approach to AI has proven very productive. To reiterate the general idea is to train the AI with lots of examples curated by a human. Thus for example by giving the AI lots of pictures of dogs and saying what type of dog the AI “leans” and can identify the type of dog on an unknown image. This is thought to be the way the brain works by reinforcing pathways which are correct and slimming down those which are not.

The big problem with this approach is that a lot of training data is needed which must be annotated by a human. The good thing about this approach is that it appears completely scaleable  ie. there seems to be no upper limit to the number of examples which is constrained only by the size of the computer. The practical limit is imposed by the size of the training set and the cost of the human describing that set. Big training sets are better but amount of human effort becomes very large and expensive. Computer hardware costs are falling so fast that computer power is not a limiting factor.

A recent development is the self referencing AI. Suppose a text is taken as input. The AI takes a word and tries to estimate what the next word will be. It can check the next word and cycle around until it gets the right answer learning as it goes.. Language contains a lot of redundancy which makes the next word guess much easier. The huge advantage is that the training set doesn’t need the slow and costly human step.

In the jargon of area the coefficient ( weight )  applied to different calculations is called a parameter. To experimenters surprise models with a large number of parameters showed improvements above simply scale. For example through text analysis an AI could correctly interpret a simple addition when that was expressed as a human might as two plus two rather than symbolic 2+2.

Because much larger models with more parameters are more easily possible it is becoming easier to combine into less specialist tasks. These are known as foundation models. Previously AI’s were useful for specific tasks. An AI trained to identify types of dog would be of little use for anything else although excellent and far better than a human in its particular area.. It wouldn’t exhibit enough intelligence to know if it was presented with the image of a cat.

Adding many more and different parameters makes the AI far more generalist. As the number of parameters increases( and we are talking billions ) so the AI increasingly becomes intelligent in a human sense This seems to be improving faster than just linearly with the number of parameters.

One famous test of computer intelligence is the Turing test, named after computer scientist Alan Turing. This imagines a situation where a human communicates with an unseen device by teletype. If the human cannot see any difference between a computer or a human then the Turing test is passed. Quite how flexible AI’s become remains to be seen..

It seems clear that this point is very near. It perhaps needs to be admitted there have been false dawns before and it could turn out this is another., There are many issues and hurdles along the way. If there are problems with the training data  hideous issues can occur. This seems to hark back to the old computer GIGO joke, garbage in, garbage out.

I’m adding a minor personal note. I usually take my comments on science and technology from the specialist press. I try and keep abreast of current developments both in science generally and in particular areas of technology in which I’m interested. In this case however my information comes from a longer article published in the “Economist”. I’m finding that AI is  not being covered very well in the specialist press. The “Economist” has an honourable tradition of specialist “in depth “ reporting  which is in both a weekly science section and a quarterly review devoted to technology. However in this case the item on AI appears as a stand alone article not within its specific sections and I have not seen it reported upon elsewhere.

A curious footnote is that an AI scientist at Google has apparently claimed that a chatbot on which he was working is sentient. His employer disclaims this and his view is not held by other scientists. His mistake is suggested to be because of the human tendency to anthropomorphise ( attribute human characteristics to )  inanimate inventions such as cartoon characters. Pet owners commonly attribute human like characteristics to their pets.

Artificial Intelligence 111

 

Artificial Intelligence 111

To put a context around this technology the term embraces a fundamental change in computer programming. To date computer programming has been based around a detailed understanding of the process to be computerised and a step by step translation into instructions for the computer. The general word for this is that an algorithm is constructed. This is a fancy way of saying that the problem is precisely understood and a solution can be developed.

An example would be the calculation on the interest paid at 2.5% on a principal of £1500 over 2years and 7 months. This is a precise calculation which can only give one answer and the way of calculating it is also known precisely.

Back when I was a student this was contrasted with heuristics where the precise solution is unknown but human intuition based perhaps on analogy can lead towards a solution. Heuristics can lead to rules, by which are really meant generalisations. Heuristics often doesn’t give one precisely correct answer but rather a series of options depending on the precise nature of the question

An example might be a controller of traffic lights at a multi way junction. If the lights can detect vehicles then one might say release traffic until all vehicles have passed on the major route, Conversely only stop the major route in both directions if a vehicle approaches on a minor route. Then suppose we want the lights to behave differently at rush hour. Different rules might be say let the first 50 vehicles pass on the major route before switching. So far an algorithm could be applied but then suppose some more general conditions were applied such as requirement for the lights to perform in the most optimal manner reducing vehicle delays to a minimum. Then a precise solution would be unlikely and heuristics would be needed ( Incidentally I would like to see this no doubt hideously expensive solution used )

Artificial intelligence is fundamentally different. It is based upon the study of the brain and how it works. Essentially the brain consists of neurons connected to others in what can be thought of as layers. When we learn the pathway from neuron to neuron is strengthened for a right answer and not strengthened if the answer is wrong. Artificial intelligence uses a brain like structure often called a neural net. This network can be many layers deep. As it stands the network knows nothing but is trained by giving examples. Suppose a neural net is asked to say when given a picture whether it is a cat or a dog. Many thousands of pictures are presented and the trainer tells the net whether it is a cat or a dog. If a dog then connections are reinforced in one way, if a cat then reinforced in another.

Subsequently if presented with an unknown image the net can respond either down the dog route or the cat route depending on where the neuron connections have been reinforced. The power of AI is that the network can interpolate, ie observing that the image is ( say ) dog like but not cat like. Generally AI cannot extrapolate very well.

It can be seen there are two fundamental steps. Firstly setting up the neural net and second training it on external data of known type. This process is totally different from trying give instructions to the computer which enables it  to differentiate between cats and dogs.

This a grossly oversimplified description of AI but the principle is always the same. AI needs a lot of training data. This explains why such data is so valuable. An AI system may be able to see patterns in data which a human cannot. On the other hand an AI has no common sense. Even a well trained AI can look at a dog and see something entirely different.

One intriguing way in which an AI system can be used is to unleash it on a system and just tell it when its right or wrong. The AI can slowly learn the system and may even spot hitherto unknown possibilities. AI’s are particularly good at games which have precise rules but give rise to very many possibilities like chess. A good AI can beat a chess master.

One heavily publicised possibility is self driving vehicles. As this is written there are prototypes on roads. Often this is within particular boundaries such as the City of Phoenix in the USA. Such prototypes usually have manual supervision. Tesla cars have an extremely advanced version which has the objective of only using camera “eyes” and capable of driving anywhere. Vehicles have been made available in beta test to the public but are not generally available. The self driving AI continues to be tweaked

It is important to realise that AI’s are not intelligent in the way a human is. Humans bring a lot of general learning to tasks and generally avoid the kind of silly mistakes that an AI can make. For example if a human looks at an animal picture with the name tag “Tiiddles” round its neck then the human can probably guess the animal is a cat without any more information from the picture. This is the kind of intelligence which an AI would find difficult.

Some eminent technologists are concerned about the future. They worry that an AI could invent a better version of itself and that this could escalate into a super intelligence far outstripping humans.

One doesn’t go very far without coming across the “Three laws of robotics” Conceived in science fiction by the eminent writer Isaac Asimov they are sometimes seen as the basis of a “thought experiment” when AI has advanced far enough.

The laws are-

1 A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2 A robot must obey instructions given to it by a human being unless this conflicts with First Law

3 A robot must protect its own existence unless this conflicts with First or Second Law.

Although a fictional device these laws are very widely quoted. There have been various efforts to pronounce in advance ethical principles for robotics. Incidentally it should be noted these are for self mobile robots while all existing examples of AI are static “brains”

An immense amount of money and brain power are being invested in AI and the field is moving fast. After previous false dawns it does seem as though exciting tools are on the verge of development. There has been some over excited speculation of mass unemployment. All previous technological developments tell us this is highly unlikely; more leisure hopefully, but also different jobs made possible by AI tools.

On becomimg eighty

 

On becoming eighty

It is often said that particular dates are just that; dates arbitrarily allocated in the river of time. For all that we give particular dates a great symbolic importance. So it is that I give importance to passing my eightieth birthday.

When I was young eighty was extreme old age. I don’t think I had any relatives who were over eighty. I don’t think that I thought of my life as a whole and if I ever did I certainly never thought about reaching this grand old age. In general in this blog I haven’t written much about myself. I have tended  more to write about subjects which interest me and about which I know something which I hope is of some interest to others. So at this milestone in my life I hope I can be excused for devoting myself to my life.

The first thing to say is that I don’t particularly feel eighty. I am conscious of slowing down and becoming quite a bit physically restricted. My balance is poor and led to a recent incident where I lost my balance, fell and suffered a minor injury. This was while visiting my bookclub co-ordinators house. I struck my head, suffered a minor scalp wound which bled quite copiously as head wounds do. A colleague in the group was alarmed, called emergency services and quite convinced them I was seriously injured.  She was so convincing that an ambulance came from Wolverhampton to Lichfield by which time the bleeding had stopped and, although shaky, I was relatively OK. In fact I was quite embarrassed by all the fuss. I was checked over, my wife collected me, and I felt no particular ill effects.

This incident does reinforce my caution about falling. It was a fall while visiting Camberley about 15 years ago which led to a broken hip and prolonged issues I do not wish to repeat. To add to my fears my cousin, recently deceased ,suffered two bad falls separated by a couple of years which led firstly to her being housebound and then hospitalised before she died. Although well into her nineties this was an unhappy time for her.

Thinking about relatives she was the last surviving cousin on my mothers side. I was the youngest but this is a sobering thought.. My children are now middle aged; it gives me a shock to hear my son at fifty looking  into early retirement and changing direction.

In terms of changing direction I have been persuaded by Annette that our present house is now far too large and that we should move to what was our holiday flat This means moving from a substantial house into a two bedroom flat. The effect is not of moving a quart into a pint pot bur rather into a thimble. I have been a hobbyist and collector ( Annette says a hoarder! ) and in preparation for moving we are brutally slimming down.

The actual day started with my card from Annette being a photo collage from childhood to the present day. One was a photo where I’m with childhood friends and also a rather mysterious older girl ( Rachel Quimby ? ). I think its possible she was baby sitter for my friends who were second cousins Janet and Susan. An unexpected pleasure was a card from my niece, Clare. I’m very pleased that I’m the person in our family to keep in touch with her as she is estranged from her father who has mental health issues.

In the evening I attended our Hopwas book club. To my surprise they knew it was my birthday ( from Facebook ) and had brought a sponge cake which we had with our coffee. It was pleasant to see they were surprised that I was eighty

The day after, on Saturday ,we met up for a high tea with Frances and family. Frances had bought a balloon saying 80, a box of chocs and something in a bottle which was as she put it “ a balloon anchor “. The tea was too much and we got a “doggie bag” of uneaten cake for Ben. Since we lived in our  Oxford house,  just travelling back at weekends, when Frances was a teenager we have a special link from that time  I was working for Castrol at Pangbourne. It is hard to imagine that she is nearing her silver wedding. I’m still slightly puzzled that her daughter Alice has now decided to call herself Jaden on Whatsapp.

I feel very fortunate to have such wonderful children and grandchildren. My daughters are both very capable managers after strong academic backgrounds, both got firsts at university. My son successfully battled cancer as a student but just managed a degree. He has been working remotely as an IT networks specialist for about ten years. He managed a very successful family transition  to North Yorkshire and our move will be about five miles away to our former holiday flat in Whitby.

I would be less than honest if I didn’t admit to doubts about our move. Annette is keen to leave what has become far too large a property.  We came here 35 years ago when our circumstances with the children still at school were totally different. We will be making an entirely new type of life and I’m hoping we have the flexibility and resilience to be successful.

Black Holes

 

Black Holes

In describing Black holes it would be as well to first describe the structure of the universe. Our planet Earth is circling the sun along with 8 other planets. The sun is a star which may be described as a big concentration of ( mainly ) hydrogen gas which is so big that the pressure and temperature at its core enables fusion reactions to take place. These fuse hydrogen atoms together producing helium along with huge amounts of energy. This is the same process as a hydrogen bomb although happening at an immense scale and continuously.

The sun is one of many millions of stars grouped together in our home galaxy. Throughout the universe are very many millions of galaxies. The universe is very big and modern measurements suggest it is expanding. It is important to grasp the universe is not expanding into anything. There is nothing, no space, no time. The analogy often used for the expanding universe is that the universe is a bit like a balloon with galaxies on its surface. As the balloon inflates it expands and the galaxies on its surface grow further apart. This is happening in three dimensions. The effect is that we are finding other stars are becoming more distant although even at big distances the effect is still quite small.

First a largely theoretical concept Black holes became important when it was realised that a large one existed at the centre of our galaxy. Our galaxy is shaped rather like a disc with a bulged centre and spiral arms like a giant Catherine wheel. Our sun is positioned out along a spiral arm. When we look up on a clear night we see a great concentration of stars in a overhead band, the Milky Way. Indeed our galaxy is called the Milky Way and the effect arises because we are looking in from the side of the disc.

The spiral arms are rotating around the centre at high speed, so high that it became apparent that only the gravity of something very large at the centre stopped stars like the sun from flying away into space. That something is a Black hole. A Black hole is something where the gravity is so strong that even light cannot escape; it is quite literally black because nothing can escape. The Black hole has at its centre some form of matter of fantastic density, so dense that something the size of earth is only the size of a suitcase.

Before this seems impossible it is as well to know that ordinary matter, the atoms of which we are made, is almost entirely space with a small nucleus of protons and neutrons with electrons orbiting around at large distances away. This is a very simple view of an atom which is more complex but gives  the idea that an atom is mostly space. Under Black hole conditions that space disappears and a very large density is obtained. A minute bit of such matter would weigh millions of tons.

Astronomers have just seen and photographed this Black hole at the centre of the Milky Way Black holes vary in size and this has the mass of many suns. There is an immediate question- a Black hole is black, totally black, so in fact what we see is a halo of hot gas in the process of being ingested with a silhouette of nothing in the middle. In fact this halo isn’t symmetrical but rather blobby as the Black hole spins .This irregularity may be an artefact of the way the observations were made. One slight puzzle is that it was expected we would see the hole side on rather than face on as is actually observed.

The above description of a Black hole is rather limited. Einstein has shown that gravity is the result of a curvature in space-time. In a Black hole  the curvature has become so great that nothing can emerge. The above description of density of matter is a gross approximation of a phenomena which is beyond the scope of present day physics. There is a useful cop-out which says that a Black hole proceeds to a singularity; in other words to something we don’t understand. In fact what we know and can observe is that at some point in space the gravity around the Black hole is so intense that any matter will fall into the hole. This line around the hole is called the event horizon.

The observation of the Black hole was made with the Event Horizon Telescope which is several radio observatories at different places in the world working together.

It is thought that Black holes can be very large indeed. The one at the centre of our galaxy is much smaller than the only other previous visualisation which is several billions of suns in size. Very small Black holes are thought possible and there was some alarming speculation that the Large Hadron Collider could produce them. Physicists were confident this was not the case and so it proved.

For all practical purposes matter falling into a Black hole has left the universe.

Authoritarian Advance

 

Authoritarian Advance

The world is dividing into two fundamentally different governing philosophies. Broadly speaking one hand are the authoritarian mainly Russia, China plus places like Cuba, Venezuela, N Korea,Iran. On the other are the liberal democracies, most of Western Europe, UK, US plus such as Japan, S Korea.

Authoritarian countries espouse the idea of a strong leader who brooks no opposition and citizens are expectedly to do as they are told. Their citizens are subject to surveillance and their behaviours proscribed. Government propaganda replaces objective information. Authoritarian countries often pay lip service to democracy without any real attempt to obey its norms; indeed subvert it to achieve the leaders aims. Most worrying of all authoritarian countries tend to be aggressive, unhesitating to bully, threaten and even attack others who disagree. They have contempt for the rule of law in any meaningful way seeing it as another way to exert control.

In contrast liberal democracies have a free press and economy, apply democracy and have a functioning and objective legal system. In general liberal democracies have also more religious and social freedoms.

The aggression of authoritarian systems is being tragically shown in the Russian attack on Ukraine. In a steady manner Ukraine was moving from the previous Soviet control towards becoming a typical Western nation. This was an imperfect change but transitioning from the Soviet style to a Western one was always going to be slow.

There has been reporting of Russian objectives which we can dismiss as a fairy story only for the extremely gullible. There has also been a speculation about the real motives. Putin was brought up in the Soviet era. He became, as a KGB agent, into an important and prestigious role. He seeks to go back to that era.

The prime authoritarian government is in China. The secretive rulers loudly proclaim communism and maintain the most rigid control. Their aggression is shown by their imposition of tight control in Hong Kong despite solemn agreements not to do so. They maintain that Taiwan belongs to them and unhesitatingly bully all who attempt to maintain diplomatic contacts. The state control over media is absolute including internet control through a massive firewall insulating Chinese people from the cacophony of full internet use. Any information which the leadership doesn’t like is blocked.

Outside the two major counties Russia and China there are others who are authoritarian. Most often this is in an effort to maintain existing rulers. The playbook is drearily familiar; wangle power then manipulate to maintain that power whether by election rigging or by avoiding elections completely. Motivations are sometimes ideological but just as often it is a wish to enjoy wealth and power by corrupting state institutions.

One of the tragedies of democracy is that electorates can be persuaded to vote leaders into power not realising they will never have any opportunity to vote them out. Once in power the state can be manipulated. Key is to keep the armed forces or police sweet and use them to keep the population in line. Popular uprisings can occur but it takes great courage and any leader willing to be ruthless can withstand popular pressure. An example was Belarus where Lukashenko put down an uprising successfully.

In countries without any of the attributes of a modern society this is surprisingly easy. Even a country with a strong tradition of freedom such as the US can show an authoritarian streak as in denying freedom to abortion. Despite a clear majority in favour of full freedom it is possible for dedicated campaigners to use state controls to impose their views.

Religious or pseudo religious intolerance is still found in countries like Iran or Afghanistan. Purportedly Islamic rules appear more to reflect a strong cultural bias. It is a great tragedy that Afghanistan has been allowed to step back to a point where women are subject to such a misogynistic life.

Nothing lays a country open to abuse as shear incompetence of its rulers. Sri Lanka is a recent example where a “strong man” proved utterly incompetent. Sadly all to often those leaders who see themselves in strong man role find favour with authoritarian regimes. They may aspire to be a Putin themselves. Even countries with at least some semblance of a liberal society may find themselves with leaders of this type such as Bolsanario in Brazil and AMLO in Mexico.