At least 49 civilians have been reported killed by Islamist militants, after an attack on a river boat in north-eastern Mali, the interim government says, after another attack on an army camp, where 15 soldiers, were also killed in an exchange that also saw to the death of more than 50 of the militants.

The military government in the country, who declared three days of national mourning, said on social media that the boat had been attacked around 1100 GMT by “armed terrorist groups,” while the boat operator, Comanav, was quoted as saying that the vessel had been targeted by at least three rockets aimed at its engines, while an official reportedly said that the vessel was immobilised on the river and the army went in to evacuate passengers.

Despite the huge popular support for the junta when it seized power after mass protests against then-President Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta, following the buildup of palpable anger over economic uncertainty, a disputed election and chronic insecurity, the new military government had made little progress in its fightback against Islamists who control parts of the country.

The insurgency groups linked to al-Qaeda and Islamic State of West African Province (ISWAP), which has been on campaign in West African country, have since spread its operations from the North, where they initially camped in 2012 to other locations in the country and the entire Sahel region to coastal West African nations.

To underscore the danger humanity faces in future, Geoffrey Hinton, regarded as the godfather of Artificial Intelligence (AI), has resigned his position with Google, citing fears that further work into the new trend in technological development, could get out of hand and lead to calamity.

Hinton, who reportedly handed over his resignation to the global hi-tech organisation, was quoted by The New York Times Monday, to have said in a statement that he now regretted his work after 11 years of huge inroads since donning his research suits alongside two of his graduate students at the University of Toronto in 2012 to create the technology that became the intellectual foundation for AI systems.

Hinton, who in recent comments on the advancements in the field, informed of how tech companies were racing toward danger with their aggressive campaign to create products based on generative AI, the technology that powers popular chatbots like ChatGPT.

“I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have. It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things,” the Times quoted him as saying.

Elaborating on his latest position, he told the BBC in a a separate interview on Tuesday, that the situation was a nightmare, adding: “This is just a kind of worst-case scenario, kind of a nightmare scenario. You can imagine, for example, some bad actor like [Russian President Vladimir] Putin decided to give robots the ability to create their own sub-goals.

“I’ve come to the conclusion that the kind of intelligence we’re developing is very different from the intelligence we have. We’re biological systems and these are digital systems. And the big difference is that with digital systems, you have many copies of the same set of weights, the same model of the world.

“And all these copies can learn separately but share their knowledge instantly. So it’s as if you had 10,000 people and whenever one person learnt something, everybody automatically knew it. And that’s how these chatbots can know so much more than any one person.”

Expressing fears that AI systems could soon become more intelligent than humans and warned that there was a need to worry, he was quoted as saying: “Right now, they’re not more intelligent than us, as far as I can tell. But I think they soon may be. Right now, what we’re seeing is things like GPT-4 eclipses a person in the amount of general knowledge it has and it eclipses them by a long way. In terms of reasoning, it’s not as good, but it does already do simple reasoning.

“And given the rate of progress, we expect things to get better quite fast. So we need to worry about that.”

The twin issues of growing global trade fragmentation, evolving second Cold War, have become a source of worry to the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF).

Kristalina Georgieva, Managing Director said Thursday, urged that the two phenomenon must be checked on time so that the world would not have to grapple with their consequences in the coming year.

She told reporters during a press conference at the official start of the World Bank and IMF’s spring meetings: “I am among those who know what are the consequences of a Cold War: it is loss of talent and contribution to the world. I don’t want to see that repeating.”

“The world should rationally accept there will be some cost, there will be some fragmentation, but keep these costs low,” Georgieva was born and raised in Bulgaria, a former Soviet satellite state, added, stressing that multilateral institutions like the World Bank and IMF had an important role to play in preventing the world from splintering into different blocs with severe economic consequences.

“If we fail to be more rational, then people everywhere will be worse off,” she said against the backdrop of an IMF report earlier this week, which predicted that growing trade fragmentation resulting from events like Brexit, the US-China trade war and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, could make the global economy as much as seven percent smaller than it otherwise would have been.