The hurricane is expected to bring heavy rainfall along with strong winds from Sunday, August 20, through Monday, August 21

One year after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade and ended the enshrined right to seek an abortion, Christian conservatives convened in Washington DC to size up the GOP’s leading 2024 candidates. The Faith and Freedom Coalition held its Road to Majority conference at the Washington Hilton over the weekend, where every major Republican 2024 candidate appeared to try to win over the crucial evangelical wing of the party. Former president Donald Trump closed out the event on Saturday evening; former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, former vice president Mike Pence; former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, Sen Tim Scott (R-SC), Florida Gov Ron DeSantis and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy also made their case to social conservatives. Last year’s Dobbs v Jackson decision has caused a split among Republicans. Some have said that the Supreme Court’s decision likely cost Republicans the opportunity to win the majority in the Senate as the GOP failed to flip a single seat, and Republicans only won a narrow majority in the House of Representatives. An NBC News poll showed that 61 per cent of Americans disapprove of the Dobbs decision, with 80 per cent of women between the ages of 18 and 49 and two-thirds of suburban women saying that they disapproved of it. But Republican candidates did not reflect any anxiety about the decision in their remarks to the crowd of Christian conservatives who consider abortion to be murder. “We have to start with tomorrow’s anniversary and thank God Almighty for the Dobbs decision,” Mr Scott said in his speech. “We are creating a culture of life in America, and that’s a really good thing.” Mr Pence, an ardent social conservative, said Dobbs was only the beginning. “Now some you will hear from at this very podium will say that the Supreme Court returned to the issue of abortion only to the states and nothing could be done at the federal level,” he said. He also criticised Republicans for saying some abortion legislation was “too harsh.” “Some have even gone on to blame the overturning of Roe v Wade for election losses in ‘22,” he said. “But let me say from my heart, the cause of life is the calling of our time and we must not rest and must not relent until we restore the sanctity of life to the center of American law in every state in this country.” In turn, Mr Pence called for passing a national 15-week abortion ban. But many attendees said they preferred to leave abortion to the states. “It’s a state issue, I think it ought to stay a state issue,” Gay Dillard told The Independent. Ms Haley called herself “unapologetically pro-life,” but said that people needed to not “demonise” the issue.” Ms Haley said she thought there was a place for a federal law restricting abortion, but noted it would require a House majority and 60 Senate seats to overcome a filibuster. As a result, she talked about reducing late-term abortions, focusing on adoption and foster care. “We have one goal: To save as many babies as possible and protect as many mothers as possible,” she said, something Ms Dillard repeated. “We need to just make sure we have enough support, emotionally, physically, financially, to support women who do choose,” she said. “So it’s not just about having, not having an abortion, it’s about if they keep their baby. We have to embrace them and help and help surround them.” Max Fisher, a candidate for state legislature in Virginia, said that the focus should be on increasing options. “So make sure that adoption is an option on the table and make sure that people have the information that they need to make sure that they’re not doing, like, you go to a bar and get drunk and then you make bad decisions,” he said. “It’s the same reason why you can’t get a tattoo when you’re drinking. Make sure that you have all of the information that you have available in order to make a well-educated choice for yourself from whether that’s adoption, whether or not as another decision, but that’s entirely up to the individual.” Despite the fact that Mr Trump nominated three of the Supreme Court justices in the majority on Dobbs, the former president has at times not fully embraced the anti-abortion decision. The “too harsh” criticism that Mr Pence cited was how Mr Trump characterised Mr DeSantis’s six-week abortion ban in Florida. In fact, Mr Trump refrained from supporting any new abortion restrictions during his closing address to the conference, but instead focused on attacking Democrats. “I will continue to stand proudly for pro-life policies just as I did for four strong years,” he said. “They are the radical extremists.” Ken Cuccinelli, who runs the Never Back Down Super PAC that supports Mr DeSantis, said the Florida governor is more sufficiently pro-life. “Well, for one, he has a central core belief system that supports faith and, and you can see it reflected in policies like his pro-life stance,” he told The Independent, noting how Mr DeSantis supported abortion restrictions as a member of Congress and implemented them as governor. “He signed the heartbeat bill, while the resident is condemning it. And that’s still the biggest issue here to these voters. And then the cultural battle that these voters care about.” But Mr Trump mentioned that his actions with judges will give Republicans more power. “You have tremendous negotiating power now,” he said. “We've now given pro-life people tremendous power to negotiate something that will be happy, that will be good for everybody and you have power for the first time.” Read More Trump news – live: Trump’s legal team handed over tapes to Jack Smith as MAGA loyalists turn on each other Trump takes credit for overturning of Roe v Wade while raising questions about DeSantis’ six-week ban Chris Christie defiant as conservative crowd boos Trump criticism Trump quietly changes political fundraising site to funnel funds toward legal woes Trump celebrates anniversary of anti-abortion ruling as he tells religious crowd ‘I’m getting indicted for you’ The religious right used to be uneasy about Trump – but his dominance is now complete

In the ‘Unfinished Fable of the Sparrows’, a group of small birds come up with a plan to capture an owl egg and raise the chick as their servant. “How easy life would be,” they say, if the owl could work for them, and they could live a life of leisure. Despite warnings from members of their flock that they should first figure out how to tame an owl before they raise one, the sparrows devote all their efforts to capturing an egg. This tale, as its title suggests, does not have an ending. Its author, Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom, deliberately left it open-ended as he believes that humanity is currently in the egg hunting phase when it comes to superhuman AI. In his seminal work on artificial intelligence, titled Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, the Oxford University professor posits that AI may well destroy us if we are not sufficiently prepared. Superintelligence, which he describes as an artificial intelligence that “greatly exceeds the cognitive performance of humans in virtually all domains of interest”, may be a lot closer than many realise, with AI experts and leading industry figures warning that it may be just a few years away. On Monday, the creator of ChatGPT echoed Professor Bostrom’s 2014 book by warning that the seemingly exponential progress of AI technology in recent years means that the imminent arrival of superintelligence is inevitable – and we need to start preparing for it before it’s too late. OpenAI boss Sam Altman, whose company’s AI chatbot is the fastest growing app in history, has previously described Professor Bostrom’s book as “the best thing I’ve seen on this topic”. Just a year after reading it, Mr Altman co-founded OpenAI alongside other similarly worried tech leaders like Elon Musk and Ilya Sutskever in order to better understand and mitigate against the risks of advanced artificial intelligence. Initially launched as a non-profit, OpenAI has since transformed into arguably the leading private AI firm – and potentially the closest to achieving superintelligence. Mr Altman believes superintelligence has the potential to not only offer us a life of leisure by doing all the majority of our labour, but also holds the key to curing diseases, eliminate suffering and transforming humanity into an interstellar species. Any attempts to block its progress, he wrote this week, would be “unintuitively risky” and would require “something like a global surveillance regime” that would be virtually impossible to implement. It is already difficult to understand what is going on inside the ‘mind’ of AI tools currently available, but once superintelligence is achieved, even its actions may become incomprehensible. It could make discoveries that we would be incapable of understanding, or take decisions that make no sense to us. The biological and evolutionary limitations of brains made of organic matter mean we may need some form of brain-computer interface in order to keep up. Being unable to compete with AI in this new technological era, Professor Bostrom warns, could see humanity replaced as the dominant lifeform on Earth. The superintelligence may then see us as superfluous to its own goals. If this happens, and some form of AI has figured out how to hijack all the utilities and technology we rely upon – or even the nuclear weapons we possess – then it would not take long for AI to wipe us off the face of the planet. A more benign, but similarly bleak, scenario is that the gulf in intelligence between us and the AI will mean it views us in the same way we view animals. In a 2015 conversation between Mr Musk and scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson, they theorised that AI will treat us like a pet labrador. “They’ll domesticate us,” Professor Tyson said. “They’ll keep the docile humans and get rid of the violent ones.” In an effort to prevent this outcome, Mr Musk has dedicated a portion of his immense fortune towards funding a brain chip startup called Neuralink. The device has already been tested on monkeys, allowing them to play video games with their minds, and the ultimate goal is to transform humans into a form of hybrid superintelligence. (Critics note that even if successful, the technology would similarly create a two-tiered society of the chipped, and the chipless.) Since cutting ties with OpenAI, the tech billionaire has issued several warnings about the imminent emergence of superintelligence. In March, he joined more than 1,000 researchers in calling for a moratorium on the development of powerful AI systems for at least six months. That time should then be spent researching AI safety measures, they wrote in an open letter, in order to avert disaster. It would take an improbable consensus of leading AI companies around the world, the majority of which are all profit-seeking, in order for any such pause to be impactful. And while OpenAI continues to spearhead the hunt for the owl’s egg, Mr Altman appears to have at least heeded the warnings from Professor Bostrom’s fable. In a 2016 interview with the New Yorker, he revealed that he is a doomsday prepper – specifically for an AI-driven apocalypse. “I try not to think about it too much, he said, revealing that he has “guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water [and] gas masks” stashed away in a hideout in rural California. Not that any of that will be much use to the rest of us. Read More 10 ways AI will change the world – from curing cancer to wiping out humanity Photoshop unveils ‘extraordinary’ AI that transforms your pictures with a text prompt ChatGPT creator issues stark warning on AI ‘RIP photoshop’: New AI can alter any photo with the click of a mouse

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