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Quotes of the Day:
"No one could make a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little."
- Edmund Burke
"The harshest tyranny is that which acts under the protection of legality and the banner of justice."
- Montesquieu
“Your hopes, dreams, and aspirations are legitimate. They are trying to take your airborne, above the clouds, above the storms, if you only let them.”
- William James
1. Crimean partisans reveal enemy division of S-300 systems
2. Opinion: Give Me Courage, Or… (From Ukraine)
3. A soldier died of cancer at 26. Her family says the Army is to blame.
4. Swiss have frozen $8.8 billion of Russian assets
5. Opinion: Veterans won’t help the recruiting crisis until our issues are addressed
6. TikTok’s recent court victories show just how hard it might be to ban the app
7. Defense head calls out those who advocate isolationism and 'an American retreat from responsibility'
8. Austin: In Troubling Times, World Needs U.S. Leadership
9. Bangkok's Plan to Buy High-Cost Warship from China Raises Alarm
10. Uganda chases China after human rights issues see Western lenders leave
11. Gen Z Has a History Lesson Problem
12. Dozens of Troops Suspected of Advocating Overthrow of US Government, New Pentagon Extremism Report Says
13. Russia-China Alliance Would Build Artificial Intelligence For Dictators
14. The Biden-Blinken Rules of War for Israel
15. Israel Faces Pressure to Yield to the ‘Terrorist Veto’ By John Bolton
16. Everyone wins with better Asian AI governance
17. ‘Founding Partisans’ and ‘A Republic of Scoundrels’: Opportunists and Patriots (book reviews)
18. Why Adults Are More Imaginative Than Children
19. Ego, Fear and Money: How the A.I. Fuse Was Lit
20. The Who’s Who Behind the Modern Artificial Intelligence Movement
1. Crimean partisans reveal enemy division of S-300 systems
Long live the resistance.
Crimean partisans reveal enemy division of S-300 systems
ukrinform.net
The relevant statement was made by Ukraine’s partisan movement ATESH on Telegram, an Ukrinform correspondent reports.
“During reconnaissance actions, several hidden places of the enemy’s temporary deployment were revealed, as well engineering structures and an air defense system,” the report states.
According to the partisans, several enemy bases are located near such settlements as Vitino and Molochne. Many Russian personnel and equipment units were spotted there. Fortifications are under construction along the shore. Armed soldiers patrol the perimeter of the territory.
Additionally, to the east of Molochne, Crimean partisans revealed a whole division of Russian S-300 surface-to-air missile systems.
“We know a lot more, and we have transferred all the obtained information to relevant agencies,” the ATESH partisan movement concluded.
ukrinform.net
2. Opinion: Give Me Courage, Or… (From Ukraine)
Excerpts:
In the Russo-Ukrainian war, the United States morally believes, and, in good part, supports the choice to fight back – but still only in part. This decision is similar to giving your abused sister, abused neighbor, abused friend only $500 when she needs, and you can give, $5,000. The result of only tepid support is that America, effectively, has chosen the “stay” option for Ukraine – to stay in this abusive relationship with Russia with the genuine and not small risk that Ukraine will die. America’s “concern” for the future, aka fear, if not overtly, then subtly, aids the abuser by allowing the abuse to continue, a reprehensible position when there is the actual possibility and power to stop.
In contrast, Ukraine, without much power, has nonetheless chosen to fight back – determined not only to survive, but to win.
Opinion: Give Me Courage, Or…
kyivpost.com · by Irene Jarosewich
The relationship between Russia and Ukraine is like an abusive marriage. Today, we are at a breaking point where the US must summon the courage to help end the abuse rather than perpetuate it.
December 2, 2023, 3:40 pm |
This handout picture taken and released by the Ukrainian Presidential press service on February 20, 2023 shows US and Ukrainian flags in front of Mariinsky Palace in Kyiv during meeting of US President and Ukrainian President. (Photo by Handout / UKRAINIAN PRESIDENTIAL PRESS SERVICE / AFP)
When a woman is first hit by her husband, though shocked, she nonetheless often denies at first, makes excuses – he didn’t mean it, it didn’t really happen, he promises it won’t happen again, we need to keep peace and stability in the family for the sake of the kids. After all, he is such a (fill in the blank) charming, intelligent, responsible man, he cannot really be an abuser.
These arguments to stay, to keep the status quo are offered to her by the husband who struck her, by her nervous family, his disbelieving friends, neighbors who worry about the public spectacle that often accompanies unwilling breakups. At the root of this decision to deny and to stay is the argument of “concern” – aka fear.
After several years and two dozen other times that he hit her, she now knows that this is a pattern. The pattern will only stop if he is completely broken, decides to stop, or she leaves.
She has little control over the first two possibilities, so without resources or support, an abused woman often chooses “concern” – aka fear – and decides to stay in the dysfunctional relationship, which then affects the future of her children, as well as immediate relationships with friends and family. However, she often continues to “hope” for better, almost convincing herself that hope is reality. Unfortunately, the reality is that after repeated efforts to “keep the peace,” more than one woman has ended up dead.
Similar topics of Interest
Ukraine said that two power lines connecting its electricity grid to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant were cut overnight.
Or, precisely because she has little control over the first two possibilities, and also does not want to be abused anymore, she summons up her courage and decides to fight back, says “no more,” ends the relationship with her husband, leaves, all the while not fully aware of the consequences of doing so, but with the will and determination to survive, even win, as her husband persistently hounds her, insisting she is his and must stay. The past is prologue; but she wants a different future, she wants better for herself and for her children. This step takes courage, but she decides that she is bold and strong and smart and will make this decision a success.
The Ukrainian analogy
In the Russo-Ukrainian war, the United States morally believes, and, in good part, supports the choice to fight back – but still only in part. This decision is similar to giving your abused sister, abused neighbor, abused friend only $500 when she needs, and you can give, $5,000. The result of only tepid support is that America, effectively, has chosen the “stay” option for Ukraine – to stay in this abusive relationship with Russia with the genuine and not small risk that Ukraine will die. America’s “concern” for the future, aka fear, if not overtly, then subtly, aids the abuser by allowing the abuse to continue, a reprehensible position when there is the actual possibility and power to stop.
In contrast, Ukraine, without much power, has nonetheless chosen to fight back – determined not only to survive, but to win.
The US can continue to half-stand on the sidelines, wring its hands, find excuses and justifications for why more courageous, determined and brave steps cannot be taken. Or, it can sum up the courage and help the abused Ukraine achieve victory once and for all. Basta.
Until America, and the appeasers of the world (looking at you, Richard Haas) understand, and stop excusing abuse as “well, let’s be practical…” then like the black-and-blue, beat-up wife, we will all be left at the mercy of Russia.
Ukraine must win, and victory means that Russia must not only be fully stopped for now, but broken of this habit and pattern of abuse for the future. This means that Russia’s delusions about itself and its self-proclaimed greatness can no longer be tolerated, much less encouraged. And the United States must fully come to believe that its future hinges on this victory. Ukraine winning does mean America wins. Ukraine losing does mean America loses. Just so that we’re all clear about that.
Russia is a terrorist state. Russia supports other terrorist states. Terrorist states hate America. Supporting Russia is supporting those who hate America. This is a fundamental truth and the basic fact from which America’s decisions must proceed. All the other “truths” and “facts” are just white noise. Not liking or not believing this fundamental empirically and historically supported truth does not make it untrue.
Russia chose the path of war, violence, confrontation, placing itself before the unenviable end result: one side must win, and one side must lose. Victory will mean that either Russia survives and Ukraine is broken, or Ukraine survives and Russia is broken.
There is no in-between. Not for Russia. Not for Ukraine. Nor for America.
The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.
Irene Jarosewich
Irene Jarosewich is the former editor-in-chief of the US-based publication Svoboda – the oldest, continuously published Ukrainian-language newspaper in the world, established in 1893.
kyivpost.com · by Irene Jarosewich
3. A soldier died of cancer at 26. Her family says the Army is to blame.
What a terrible tragedy.
A related question is were any of the medical personnel involved with this terrible series of mistakes ever held accountable? But I know that information will never be made public based on my experience with the death of my company sergeant major's wife in 1992 when she was misdiagnosed for stress and anxiety instead of a heart condition. A week later she died of a massive heart attack that the heart surgeon said could have been prevented if they had just given her an EKG and detected the problem. When we confronted the hospital commander in an office call he told us that they could not tell us whether any corrective action was taken to prevent a similar tragedy in the future. He said the medical professionals had a right to privacy and that the integrity of the medical process had to be protected. After we were done with the meeting the hospital commander (a major general) called me commander and accused me of insubordination for challenging him. Fortunately the general's own lawyer backed me up and said that he was surprised how restrained the sergeant major and I were during the entire office call so no charges were filed. The general was especially mad about the analogy I used that if his medical personnel were being trained by our soldiers and one of them was killed on the range we would have to conduct a thorough 15-6 investigation to identify the mistakes and ensure corrective action was taken. And he would demand to know the results of the investigation and who was held accountable. I said the sergeant major was asking for the same courtesy to know that the mistake was investigated and that corrective action was taken. The general kept repeating that all proper medical care was rendered.
A soldier died of cancer at 26. Her family says the Army is to blame.
armytimes.com · by Hope Hodge Seck · November 30, 2023
Maria Martinez was 26 when she died of breast cancer that her family says would have been survivable if she had received the right diagnosis and treatment from military medical providers. And while two military boards said the medical malpractice suit filed by Martinez before her death in 2021 was invalid because it was filed outside of the two-year statute of limitations, a U.S. district court judge recently ruled that the case can move forward, thanks to a law designed to protect troops from legal liability while in uniform.
On Oct. 31, Judge Rudolph Contreras, of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, denied a motion to dismiss from the Army Tort Claims Division, saying the Service Members Civil Relief Act “tolls” the statute of limitations, or pauses the time clock. It’s a development that Martinez’s attorney, David Sheldon, says marks a victory not just for Martinez’s family, but for all troops seeking to bring medical malpractice lawsuits against the Defense Department.
Reached by Military Times, a Defense Department spokeswoman, Jade Fulce, said the department does not comment on pending litigation.
Martinez, a specialist at Fort Bliss, Texas, first became aware of a serious medical problem in October 2019, when she reported to an emergency room on post with severe shortness of breath, Army Lt. Col. Eduardo Larumbe, Martinez’s father, told Military Times.
“The next thing I know, a doctor’s calling me from a military hospital,” Larumbe said. “[He said], ‘You might want to get on a plane … because I don’t know how long she’s going to last.’”
Martinez was given a biopsy confirming devastating news: she had breast cancer — and it had progressed too far for treatment. However, Martinez’s family says that the specialist had voiced health concerns to military providers ten months earlier, in January, and requested the exact diagnostic test that would have revealed the cancer in time to save her life. Martinez had met with an oncologist and requested a medical screening for breast cancer, knowing she had a family history of breast cancer and possessed the BRCA2 gene mutation, a strong indicator for the disease. But, according to court documents and Larumbe, the Defense Department’s TRICARE health insurance provider denied Martinez an MRI diagnostic screening three times, saying she didn’t meet the necessary criteria.
Moreover, according to the suit, Martinez’s primary doctor declined to order any alternative screenings.
After Martinez’s cancer was diagnosed, Larumbe intervened, transporting her from Fort Bliss to a cancer treatment center in Atlanta, where she fought the disease for two years before succumbing to it in December 2021. A month before her death, while still on active duty, Martinez filed her medical malpractice claim. But by then, according to the Army Tort Claims Division and then the Defense Health Agency’s Military Malpractice Claim Appeals Board, it was already invalid. Her complaint stemmed from the screening she never received in January 2019, but the boards found the clock on the statute of limitations started ticking that October, when she was admitted for shortness of breath.
Lt. Col. Eduardo Larumbe carries his daughter, Spc. Maria Martinez, down the stairs ahead of her promotion ceremony. (Photo courtesy of Eduardo Larumbe)
The ability for service members to seek recourse from the Defense Department for medical malpractice at all is a recent development. Master Sgt. Richard Stayskal, a Special Forces soldier with lung cancer that was misdiagnosed by the military, pushed for a congressional exception to the Feres Doctrine, which prohibits troops from suing the government for harm sustained related to military service. That exception became law in the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act. Stayskal, however, did not benefit from this change. His own malpractice claim was denied in May.
Larumbe said he and Martinez had been discussing the Stayskal case when she brought up the prospect of filing her own suit.
“She says, ‘You think I can do it?’ And I go, ‘Well, I mean, do you feel cheated?’” Larumbe remembered. “She goes, ‘Yeah, of course I do. I loved doing what I do, and now I can’t do anything.’ And I said, ‘Well, then, let’s do it.’”
In his ruling on the case, Contreras, the district court judge, denied both of the military’s motions to dismiss. While Defense Department attorneys had argued judicial review was not authorized in the case, the judge said the family’s allegation that due process rights were violated meant judicial review was allowed. And regarding the argument that the statute of limitations on the case had expired, Contreras found Martinez’s military service created an exception.
“The two statutes can be interpreted in harmony as follows: a claimant must file his or her claim in writing within two years of the claim accruing,” Contreras wrote. “But if the time to file a claim would otherwise begin to run while the claimant is serving in the military, the claim is tolled until the servicemember is released.”
Sheldon, the family’s attorney, said this ruling will help create the possibility of seeking relief for service members whose claims might previously have been considered to fall outside the statute of limitations — and also may increase the likelihood that troops will find lawyers willing to take their cases. While the Pentagon in October raised the maximum settlement cap on military malpractice claims from $600,000 to $750,000, the vast majority of claims filed to date have been dismissed. As of March, the Army claims service had denied 144 of the 155 claims it had considered, according to a release from the office of Oklahoma Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin.
“There’s just not a lot of attorneys who have the resources that they can put behind these cases,” Sheldon told Military Times, adding that acquiring medical records and conducting interviews with providers can cost tens of thousands of dollars in fees and labor. “So [the military is] basically gutting them by denying all these claims. Because what attorney in their right mind is just gonna say, ‘Yeah, I want to hop on that train?’”
For Martinez’s family, Sheldon is now seeking a motion to stay proceedings in District Court for 60 days so that he can develop a demand letter and, he hopes, work toward a settlement with the military.
For Larumbe, who has served in the Army for three decades and now works at U.S. Africa Command, taking the military to task in a lawsuit is deeply saddening. He still loves the Army, he said, but his trust has been shaken through the loss of his daughter.
“I don’t even know how to explain how horrible it is that one of your kids goes,” Larumbe said, “And by the hands of an organization that you swear up and down for … this is not what we’re about. And it’s a big slap in the face how everything came through with this.”
4. Swiss have frozen $8.8 billion of Russian assets
That is a lot of money. Too bad it could not be transferred to Ukraine to pay for military support.
Swiss have frozen $8.8 billion of Russian assets
Reuters · by John Revill
BERN, Dec 1 (Reuters) - Switzerland has frozen an estimated 7.7 billion Swiss francs ($8.81 billion) in financial assets belonging to Russians, the government said on Friday, under sanctions designed to punish Moscow for its invasion of Ukraine.
The figure, a provisional estimate, represented a slight increase from the 7.5 billion francs the Swiss government said it had blocked last year after the neutral country adopted European Union sanctions.
The State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO), the agency overseeing sanctions, said the 7.7 billion francs figure was only its latest estimate and was subject to change.
It was difficult to give a precise figure due to new people being added or removed from the sanctions list, as well as legal cases to freeze or unlock further assets.
A more accurate figure is expected by the end of the second quarter 2024 when the Swiss banks report to the government.
The increase in the frozen assets is due to an increase of 300 people and 100 companies and organisations who have been added to the sanctions list over the past 12 months.
It also includes the estimated profits from cash deposits, bonds, shares, as well as properties and luxury cars.
Bern has also blocked the movement of 7.4 billion francs in foreign currency assets belonging to the Russian central bank.
SECO declined to comment on which individuals have had their assets frozen.
Still, the frozen assets are only a fraction of the total wealth held by Russians in Switzerland, with the country's banks holding 150 billion francs, according to estimates by the Swiss Bankers Association.
President Alain Berset pledged more support for Ukraine during a visit to the country last month and discussed using the profits of frozen Russian assets to help rebuild the country.
The European Commission is working on a proposal to pool some of the profits derived from frozen Russian state assets to help Ukraine and its post-war reconstruction. Switzerland is taking part in the discussions but has not decided whether to support the proposal.
But there have been limits to the Swiss support, with the country rejecting pleas from other countries to be allowed to send Swiss-made weaponry and ammunition to Ukraine, citing the country's neutrality laws.
($1 = 0.8742 Swiss francs)
Reporting by John Revill Editing by Gareth Jones and Alison Williams
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
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Reuters · by John Revill
5. Opinion: Veterans won’t help the recruiting crisis until our issues are addressed
First, I will still recommend military service to our young people.
Yes there are problems. There always have been and always will be and I am frank when I provide my recommendations.
However, we need to think about the long term damage we might be doing by not recommending military service or worse trying to convince young people not to serve. If this generation does not serve it is going to have long term implications for the defense of our nation.
Opinion: Veterans won’t help the recruiting crisis until our issues are addressed
Veterans aren’t going to put lipstick on a pig.
BY JENNA CARLTON | PUBLISHED DEC 1, 2023 7:20 PM EST
taskandpurpose.com · by Jenna Carlton · December 1, 2023
“How can I feel comfortable advocating for military service when so many members of our community don’t feel welcome or even have their needs met?” I asked at a recent panel titled “Changing Perceptions, Shaping Futures: Breaking Down Barriers Between Veterans and Gen Z.”
The panel’s goal was to clear up misconceptions about the military and panelists included representatives from the U.S. Army Recruiting Command, the Veterans Administration, the Military Officers Association of America, and an active sergeant in the U.S. Army.
They answered my pointed question, acknowledging the bad press the Defense Department and VA get, chalking it up to bad news always receiving more attention than the good. They encouraged veterans to help aid this issue by speaking up about the great opportunities the military has given them.
I wasn’t surprised by the media-trained answer. I did take one thing away, though: he said that we should let these organizations know how we feel. So that’s what I am doing.
Veterans aren’t going to put lipstick on a pig.
Military service can’t be glamorized when so many of us are traumatized.
Some great experiences and opportunities have come out of serving, however, the pain our community experiences is real. We cannot minimize that fact. As veterans, we have first-hand experiences in how much the military can impact our well-being. Also, many of us were given unrealistic expectations of what our military service would be like, and don’t want to continue that cycle.
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Now, on the outside, we can compare the daily stress of deployments, bureaucracy, lack of agency, family life, and physical and mental health to what we experience now in the civilian world.
We have experienced the transition out of service, undoubtedly one of the most challenging, critical experiences for any veteran. The first year out is when the risk of suicide is highest and we are still scrambling for ways to figure that issue out.
The VA was promised as a way to heal after service, but when wait times are six months or more, you can’t help but feel discouraged. The lack of care leaves us questioning if we are even worth it. If I have to ask that question, how could I possibly recommend my daughters to join, let alone a stranger?
There has been progress on these issues by both the Defense Department and VA, but not enough for me to feel good about influencing young people to join. The best I can do is tell potential recruits to do their research and speak with veterans to make sure the military is the right fit, while also encouraging veterans to be honest about their service. No one should raise their right hand without knowing exactly what they are signing up for.
Together, we can make the military a better place to serve. But military leaders shouldn’t look to veterans for help filling their quotas until they can look us in the eyes and tell us there’s been meaningful progress on some of the most pressing issues.
The latest on Task & Purpose
taskandpurpose.com · by Jenna Carlton · December 1, 2023
6. TikTok’s recent court victories show just how hard it might be to ban the app
TikTok: the gateway drug to youth indoctrination.
Based on the anecdotal evidence from the 160 students in my daughter's 10 grade English classes, our youth is addicted to TikTok. They go to TikTok for everything from entertainment to news, from fashion trends to self help advice. It is the basic conversation starter among teenagers. If it was banned the students would figure out how to access it even if it was illegal. Reels will never replace TikTok/. because TikTok is just too entrenched among the kids (and probably many adults too). My daughter says the kids are not at all swayed by security, privacy, or national security arguments. Then again, this is all anecdotal.
TikTok’s recent court victories show just how hard it might be to ban the app | CNN Business
amp.cnn.com · by Brian Fung, Catherine Thorbecke · December 2, 2023
CNN —
A pair of back-to-back court victories for TikTok this week have threatened to make it harder for the company’s critics to clamp down on it, after a state judge in Indiana threw out one lawsuit against the popular short-form video app and a federal judge blocked a first-of-its-kind Montana law that would have banned the app statewide.
Neither case has reached a final outcome. But the early-stage results in both states show that when the hot-button politics of TikTok came face-to-face with the most fundamental basics of American law, the politics lost.
In both cases, efforts to crack down on TikTok failed to pass rudimentary checks such as whether they complied with the First Amendment or whether the court even had jurisdiction in the matter, according to Thursday’s rulings.
Those results reveal how the state attempts to regulate TikTok “are clearly pretextual and designed for political theater,” Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University, told CNN. “So when you put them in front of a non-political decisionmaker, they look ridiculous.”
That the states’ could not clear even the most elemental legal hurdles highlights the challenge ahead for policymakers who are struggling to articulate a concrete problem their legal tools can solve.
How we got here
The two cases have different origins. The lawsuit in Indiana sought court-ordered fines and restrictions on TikTok for allegedly violating state consumer protection laws. The Montana suit was brought by TikTok and a group of content creators after the state enacted a bill, SB419, that would have prohibited the app from operating on personal electronic devices within state lines.
Both cases reflected concerns expressed by government officials at all levels in the United States about TikTok’s ties to China through its parent company, ByteDance. Policymakers have alleged that Chinese intelligence laws could force ByteDance to expose TikTok’s US user data to the Chinese government, but so far US officials have not publicly presented any concrete evidence of unauthorized government data access.
Calls for a TikTok ban in the US first arose during the Trump administration and have waxed and waned in the years since, but most attempts to ban the app have been challenged in court. The only government bans that have been effective at limiting TikTok have been those at the federal and state levels targeting its use on official government devices. But millions of personal devices in the United States can still freely access TikTok.
All the while, TikTok has only cemented its vast and growing reach in the country. TikTok announced earlier this year that it reached the milestone 150 million monthly active users in the United States. And an increasing number of creators, small business owners and other TikTok users are now relying on the platform for their livelihoods.
The dependence some creators have on TikTok makes it a direct infringement of their First Amendment rights to ban the app in Montana, District Judge Donald Molloy wrote in his opinion Thursday.
Adobe Stock
Montana’s TikTok ban leaves users, business owners reeling
“In shutting off TikTok, the Legislature has both harmed User Plaintiffs’ First Amendment rights and cut off a stream of income on which many rely. Thus, Plaintiffs have established a likelihood of irreparable harm” from the law, Molloy wrote.
Patrick Toomey, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project, said the Montana ruling shows how the US Constitution “imposes an extraordinarily high bar on this kind of mass censorship.”
Why the state-level efforts sputter
Overlooked amid the constitutional findings may be a more subtle, yet no less powerful, theme in both cases: states have tried to make a national issue into a local one and, in the process, exceeded their authority.
In the Montana case, Molloy made this critique clear when he tore into the state’s stated justification for passing SB419 — that Montana had a legitimate “state interest” in protecting residents from Chinese espionage.
“SB419 explicitly bans TikTok because of its direct connection to a specific foreign nation,” Molloy wrote. “[But] Montana does not have constitutional authority in the field of foreign affairs.”
The Indiana ruling backs into the same conclusion, finding that even though state officials made numerous allegations that TikTok misled the public about its business practices, the state failed to prove any connection to Indiana that might give the state court jurisdiction over the company.
“There are no allegations that Indiana users even heard these alleged misstatements, let alone relied on them when deciding to download and use the TikTok platform,” Judge Jennifer DeGroote wrote in her opinion.
DeGroote added that just because TikTok “is available to Hoosiers through third-party app stores” does not mean the court has jurisdiction over TikTok either, “because the State does not allege that TikTok specifically targeted Indiana.”
Together, the rulings lay out significant limitations on how those states can go after TikTok, constraining policymakers’ ability to target the company by way of either its ties to China or by reference to loud public criticism of the app.
What comes next
Ultimately, the state-level efforts in Indiana and Montana failed for many reasons, Goldman said, and policymakers should take note of this. “It’s a panoply of legal hurdles that anti-TikTok efforts must jump through, and there’s just no way to get through all of them,” he said.
Because of how clear-cut and well-reasoned the judges’ opinions were on many of the core legal principles, said Blake Reid, a law professor at the University of Colorado, there was little need for them to weigh in on the central political argument at the center of the cases: Whether TikTok really is a danger to the public.
“These are both judges who likely are trying to avoid wading into the political fight,” said Reid, adding that the Montana opinion in particular “is a very efficient dismantling of a high-profile, politically charged law” and uses a tight and narrow approach to reach a result “without breaking too much new ground” that might leave an opening for a successful appeal.
Other courts will likely take note of the Montana injunction, said Goldman. It won’t be considered a precedent, exactly, but Molloy’s argument will be persuasive to other judges reviewing similar cases, he said. The Indiana decision is less likely to have a nationwide impact, Goldman added, simply due to the typical obscurity of state court rulings and how state laws differ from one jurisdiction to another.
CFOTO/Future Publishing/Getty Images
Photo taken on Oct. 17, 2021 shows the TikTok booth at the 2021 Hangzhou International E-commerce Expo in Hangzhou, east China's Zhejiang Province.
TikTok might be too big to ban, no matter what lawmakers say
Rather than risk running afoul of the Constitution with TikTok-specific bans and limitations, Goldman said, policymakers should reinvigorate efforts to enhance Americans’ data privacy rights more broadly, applying uniform rules to all internet companies to prevent unauthorized access to that data by any government — Chinese or otherwise.
“The fact that social media apps are a giant machine for gathering information that is of substantial interest to governments means we really need to have a social reconciliation about how do we restrict, if appropriate, the collection of data,” he said. “And, certainly, how do we restrict government access to that data.”
amp.cnn.com · by Brian Fung, Catherine Thorbecke · December 2, 2023
7. Defense head calls out those who advocate isolationism and 'an American retreat from responsibility'
Excerpt:
“You’ll hear some people try to brand an American retreat from responsibility as bold new leadership,” Austin said. “Make no mistake: It is not bold. It is not new. And it is not leadership.”
Defense head calls out those who advocate isolationism and 'an American retreat from responsibility'
BY LOLITA C. BALDOR
Updated 5:03 PM EST, December 2, 2023
AP · December 2, 2023
SIMI VALLEY, Calif. (AP) — Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Saturday denounced those who advocate “an American retreat from responsibility” and said sustained U.S. leadership is needed to help keep the world as safe, free and prosperous as possible. He also urged Congress to end the partisan gridlock that has stalled the federal budget and war spending.
The United States must reject calls to turn away from global interests and become more isolationist, he told an audience of lawmakers, corporate and defense leaders and government officials attending a security conference. Those who “try to pull up the drawbridge,” he said, undermine the security that has led to decades of prosperity.
In his remarks at the Reagan National Defense Forum in California’s Simi Valley, Austin delivered a lengthy defense of U.S. support to Israel in its war against Hamas and to Ukraine in its struggle to battle Russia’s invasion. He said “the world will only become more dangerous if tyrants and terrorists believe that they can get away with wholesale aggression and mass slaughter.”
Austin met privately with top lawmakers on the House and Senate Armed Services Committees.
His message of rejecting isolationism appeared directed at conservative lawmakers who are increasingly opposed to spending on overseas wars and back former President Donald Trump’s “America First’” ideology.
“You’ll hear some people try to brand an American retreat from responsibility as bold new leadership,” Austin said. “Make no mistake: It is not bold. It is not new. And it is not leadership.”
Congress has failed to approve any new money for the wars in Ukraine and Israel and has managed to pass only a short-term budget bill, known as a continuing resolution, that runs out early next year. The Senate has been deadlocked for months over one lawmaker’s move to block hundreds of military nominations, including critical senior commanders for key regions around the world.
“Our competitors don’t have to operate under continuing resolutions. And doing so erodes both our security and our ability to compete,” Austin said. He opened his speech with a plea to the lawmakers in the crowd to pass both the budget and the supplemental funding for the wars.
Administration officials have warned that money for Ukraine is running out and may only last through the end of this year. The Pentagon has about $5 billion worth of equipment it can send from it’s own stockpiles and has been eating away at that almost weekly. Money to replace military weapons and equipment taken from Pentagon stocks to send to Ukraine is rapidly dwindling, and totals about $1 billion.
Austin, who was in Ukraine’s capital less than two weeks ago, has repeatedly pressed the important of helping Ukraine battle Russia’s invasion, as part of a broader campaign to prevent Russian President Vladimir Putin from threatening other countries in Europe.
Austin also noted that as much as $50 billion of that supplemental budget request for the wars would through American defense companies, helping to create or support tens of thousands of jobs in 30 states.
While he did not mention it in his address, Austin has often criticized Congress for its failure to confirm more than 400 military officers nominated for promotions or other jobs.
Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., has blocked the nominations and objected when other senators have tried to get some through. On just two occasions has the Senate managed to votes to confirm a total of six high ranking leaders.
Almost 400 military nominations are in limbo, and the number is growing. Frustrated Republicans have tried unsuccessfully for almost nine months to quietly persuade Tuberville to drop the holds, and negotiations are continuing. Senior military officials have warned repeatedly that the situation threatens readiness and national security.
In other comments, Austin underscored the administration’s repeated insistence that Israel do more to protect civilians as it restarts its air assault against Hamas after a seven-day cease-fire to secure the release of prisoners.
Israeli fighter jets began hitting targets in the Gaza Strip minutes after the weeklong truce expired on Friday, and Israel dropped leaflets over parts of southern Gaza urging people to leave their homes, signaling it was preparing to widen its offensive.
About 100 hostages were freed as part of the truce, but about 140 remain held by Hamas and others in Gaza.
While any country has a duty to respond to an attack like the Oct. 7 assault by Hamas on Israel, Austin said the lesson is that “you can only win in urban warfare by protecting civilians.” Austin said that if civilians are driven into the arms of the enemy by violence, it becomes a strategic defeat.
AP · December 2, 2023
8. Austin: In Troubling Times, World Needs U.S. Leadership
Is this assumption or assertion being effectively challenged?
Excerpts:
Since the end of World War II, Austin said, the world has adhered to a rules-based international order, developed with U.S. leadership, that has provided not just the United States, but the entire world an unprecedented period of peace and prosperity. Neither that rules-based order nor U.S. leadership must be allowed to falter, he said.
"The world built by American leadership can only be maintained by American leadership," Austin said. "American leadership rallies our allies and partners to uphold our shared security. And it inspires ordinary people around the world to work together toward a brighter future."
Austin: In Troubling Times, World Needs U.S. Leadership
defense.gov · by C. Todd Lopez
As the world considers the repercussions of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the brutal Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, an increasingly assertive China, and the disturbing aspirations of nations like Iran and North Korea, it considers also what the role of the United States will be—and what its role must be is leadership, said the U.S. secretary of defense.
Austin Remarks
Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III addresses attendees at the Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, Calif., Dec. 2, 2023.
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"We're living through challenging times," said Lloyd J. Austin III, who spoke today at the Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, California. "That includes the major conflicts facing our fellow democracies, Israel and Ukraine; bullying and coercion from an increasingly assertive China; and a worldwide battle between democracy and autocracy."
When the world appears to be in disarray, Austin said, U.S. allies and partners look to the United States to see what must be done. And the U.S. must not waiver in providing leadership and decision-making.
"These are the times when both our friends and our rivals look to America," he said. "These are the times when the American people count on their leaders to come together. And these are the times when global security relies on American unity and American strength."
Since the end of World War II, Austin said, the world has adhered to a rules-based international order, developed with U.S. leadership, that has provided not just the United States, but the entire world an unprecedented period of peace and prosperity. Neither that rules-based order nor U.S. leadership must be allowed to falter, he said.
"The world built by American leadership can only be maintained by American leadership," Austin said. "American leadership rallies our allies and partners to uphold our shared security. And it inspires ordinary people around the world to work together toward a brighter future."
Keynote Speech
Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III discusses the importance of U.S. leadership in a speech at the Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, Calif., Dec. 2, 2023.
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Inside the United States, Austin said, some Americans have shied away from the country's role as a global leader and prefer instead that the U.S. move toward isolationism. Austin said that's been a mistake in the past and is a mistake today, as well.
"If we forfeit our position of responsibility, our rivals and our foes will be glad to fill that vacuum," he said. "In every generation, some Americans prefer isolation to engagement — and they try to pull up the drawbridge. They try to kick loose the cornerstone of American leadership. And they try to undermine the security architecture that has produced decades of prosperity without great-power war."
Were the U.S. to shirk its leadership role, he said, America's enemies and the enemies of its allies would only be emboldened. And that failure to lead would put the security and wellbeing of the United States and its allies at risk.
"The cost of abdication has always far outweigh the cost of leadership," Austin said. "The world will only become more dangerous if tyrants and terrorists believe that they can get away with wholesale aggression and mass slaughter. America will only become less secure if dictators believe they can wipe a democracy off the map. And the United States will only pay a higher price if autocrats and zealots believe that they can force free people to live in fear."
The U.S. has not shied away from its leadership role, Austin said, and will not. Instead, he said the U.S. has responded where crises have occurred—such as Ukraine and Israel—and has also continued to strengthen partnerships globally as a way to help future crises from developing.
Austin Handshake
Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III thanks Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant in Tel Aviv, Israel, Oct. 13, 2023. Austin traveled to the country to underscore the unwavering support of the U.S. for the people of Israel. At the Reagan National Defense Forum, Austin said U.S. support for democracies in Ukraine and Israel is important as the countries face conflicts.
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Following the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, Austin said he made the trip to Israel to assure partners there that the U.S. is committed to their security.
"I flew to Israel to underscore our solidarity and our resolve, and to make it crystal-clear that America's commitment to Israel's security is ironclad," Austin said.
Since then, he said, the U.S. has provided security assistance to Israel and helped get hostages held by Hamas returned home.
"We will continue to do everything that we can to help secure the release of every man, every woman and every child seized by Hamas — including American citizens," Austin said.
In the Middle East, Austin said, the U.S. has also increased its own security posture. That now includes two carrier strike groups, an amphibious ready group, a Marine expeditionary unit, a guided-missile submarine, integrated air-defense and missile-defense forces, and fighter aircraft and bombers.
Austin also said that U.S. leadership with Israel includes reinforcing important values, such as those embodied in the law of war. And one of those values is that civilians must be protected. It's something Austin said he had experience with during his time as an Army general operating in Iraq, and it's something he said the U.S. continues to remind Israel of as it fights against Hamas.
Strike Groups
Ships from the Gerald R. Ford and Dwight D. Eisenhower Carrier Strike Groups, Sixth Fleet command ship USS Mount Whitney, and Italian navy frigates Carlo Margottini and Virginio Fasan sail in formation in the Mediterranean Sea, Nov. 3, 2023. The two carrier strike groups are operating in the area at the direction of the Secretary of Defense to bolster deterrence in the region. The ships from the Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group include the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford, the guided missile cruiser USS Normandy, and the guided missile destroyers USS Ramage and USS Paul Ignatius. The ships from the Dwight D. Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group include the aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, the guided missile cruiser USS Philippine Sea and the guided missile destroyers USS Gravely and the USS Mason.
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"In this kind of a fight, the center of gravity is the civilian population. And if you drive them into the arms of the enemy, you replace a tactical victory with a strategic defeat," Austin said. "I have repeatedly made clear to Israel's leaders that protecting Palestinian civilians in Gaza is both a moral responsibility and a strategic imperative."
The U.S. hasn't just provided security assistance to Israel, Austin said. The U.S. has also provided humanitarian assistance to the people of Gaza. This week, he said, the U.S. airlifted more than 54,000 pounds of U.N. medical supplies, clothing and food to those in Gaza. He said it won't be the last airlift of supplies.
Going forward, Austin said, the U.S. remains committed also to peace in the Middle East. And that means, he said, there must be a two-state solution there. There must be a nation for the Jewish people, and there must be a nation for the Palestinians, as well. And those two nations must act as good neighbors.
"We believe that Israelis and Palestinians must find a way to share the land that they both call home," Austin said. "And that means a path toward two states living side by side in mutual security ... a two-state solution remains the only viable way out of this tragic conflict that has ever been proposed."
Following the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, the U.S. also stepped up to its leadership role. Last year, for instance, Austin spearheaded the creation of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, a coalition of some 50 nations that meets monthly and is committed to the security of Ukraine now and into the future.
Ukraine Defense
Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy address the 16th meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group at NATO headquarters, Brussels, Oct. 11, 2023. Austin reinforced the importance of U.S. leadership at a December meeting at the Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, Calif.
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Since the February 2022 Russian invasion, the U.S., allies and partners have worked to get important weapons to the Ukrainians to allow them to defend themselves. Included there are High-Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS; Patriot air defense systems; Abrams tanks; and more, Austin said.
U.S.-led efforts have helped Ukrainian forces weaken the Russian military, and Austin said that U.S. leadership and partner efforts must not stop until Ukraine is again free.
Spotlight: Support for Ukraine
"The outcome of this struggle will define global security for decades to come," he said. "And we don't have the option of sitting it out. President [Joe] Biden has laid down a clear objective: The United States seeks a free and sovereign Ukraine that can defend itself today — and deter more Russian aggression in the future. And, so, we are working together with our allies and partners to help Ukraine build a future force that can ward off more Russian malice in the years to come."
If the U.S. and partners fail to stand up to Russian aggression, Austin said, Russia will only be emboldened to do more.
"Russia's invasion of Ukraine offers a grim preview of a world of tyranny and turmoil that should make us all shudder," he said.
Ukraine Meeting
Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III meets with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy during a visit to Kyiv, Ukraine, Nov. 20, 2023. Austin reinforced the importance of U.S. leadership at the Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, Calif.
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In the Pacific, Austin said China is the only rival with the intent and potentially the capacity to reshape the international order.
"The PRC [People's Republic of China] hopes that the United States will stumble and become isolated abroad and divided at home," he said. "But together, we can prevent that fate. And we have made extraordinary progress, along with our allies and partners, in meeting the China challenge and forging a more secure Indo-Pacific."
Across the Indo-Pacific region, the U.S. is leading by strengthening partnerships there with other nations who value freedom and democracy.
Spotlight: Focus on Indo-Pacific
With the Philippines, for instance, Austin said the U.S. has embarked on an expansion of the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement. That expansion will allow the U.S. access to four more Philippine military facilities.
The U.S. and India last summer also unveiled a new direction defense industrial cooperation.
"That strategy is already driving our work together on key defense platforms," he said. "We also rolled out a major deal to build aircraft engines in India. And when I was back in India last month, we announced our intent to co-produce armored vehicles with India — our first time with any foreign partner."
The U.S. has also been working closely with Japan, South Korea, Papua New Guinea, and Australia, as well.
Talisman Sabre
Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III and Australian Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles, who also serves as defense minister, visit U.S. and Australian service members participating in Exercise Talisman Sabre in Townsville, Australia, July 30, 2023.
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Through the AUKUS partnership — which includes Australia, the United Kingdom and the U.S. — those three nations will help Australia acquire conventionally armed, nuclear-powered submarines, Austin said.
In advance of the Reagan National Defense Forum, Austin said he met in California with British Defense Secretary Grant Shapps and Australian Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles, who also serves as defense minister, for the second meeting of AUKUS defense ministers.
Spotlight: AUKUS
The United States is a world leader, and its military remains the most lethal fighting force in human history, Austin said. Neither of those will change.
"Ladies and gentlemen, we are the United States of America," Austin said. "It's not enough just to pursue our national interests. We must also live our national values. As President [Ronald] Reagan said, 'Our foreign policy should be to show by example the greatness of our system and the strength of American ideals.' We must ensure, as President Biden has said, that America remains 'a beacon to the world.' We will not let that beacon flicker or fade. In this uncertain hour, at this time of testing, the world looks to America again. And we must not give our friends, our rivals, or our foes any reason to doubt America's resolve."
defense.gov · by C. Todd Lopez
9. Bangkok's Plan to Buy High-Cost Warship from China Raises Alarm
And one of the 5 US treaty allies in Asia.
And then there is trade:
Thailand's trade volume with China in 2022 was about $135 billion, according to China's state-run Business Information Center. Its total trade with the United States that year was an estimated $79.1 billion, according to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.
Bangkok's Plan to Buy High-Cost Warship from China Raises Alarm
December 01, 2023 11:54 PM
voanews.com · December 1, 2023
Thailand’s new civilian-led administration is facing criticism over its plan to go forward with the purchase of a high-cost navy frigate from China in a deal first negotiated by the previous military government.
The purchase of the vessel was negotiated after China reneged on a 2017 plan to sell Thailand a S26T Yuan-class submarine because it could not obtain diesel engines from Germany, which forbids them to be used in Chinese military hardware, according to the Bangkok Post.
However the frigate, which would add to an existing fleet of seven mostly Chinese-built frigates, will cost the country $480 million — $28 million more than the submarine would have cost.
That has been criticized by the opposition Move Forward Party, which argues that the submarine deal should simply have been allowed to lapse.
"Chinese authority should rather take responsibility for failing the agreement," said Move Forward MP Rangsiman Rome, who was quoted by Matichon, a major Thai newspaper and website.
Thai Defense Minister Sutin Klungsang has defended the purchase, saying that revoking the deal or asking for a refund from China “would only impact other aspects of cooperation and relations” between the two countries.
Sutin also said that the submarine deal is being shelved rather than replaced by the new warship deal.
Scott Edwards, a lecturer in international relations at the University of Reading in the U.K., told VOA there may be other countries where Thailand could purchase a frigate but that political considerations can go into a purchase.
"Vessels sometimes rely on originating countries for spare parts and maintenance," he wrote in an email exchange.
John Bradford, executive director of the Japan-based Yokosuka Council on Asia-Pacific Studies, pointed out some advantages to a frigate over a submarine. He said the training and maintenance costs should be lower, and that a frigate would be more useful in dealing with challenges posed by Thailand's "exceptionally complex" maritime environment.
Those challenges include fishing regulation enforcement, guarding against smuggling, ocean resource protection and governance over waters that face both the Indian and Pacific oceans, Bradford wrote in an email to VOA.
Edwards agreed that a frigate is more sensible than a submarine, which would likely be underutilized and of limited use to Thailand.
"While Thailand may want submarines to match the subsurface capabilities of its neighbors, frigates can also be equipped with anti-submarine warfare capabilities," said Edwards, who is an expert in Southeast Asia's maritime security governance.
However, he questioned Bangkok's decision to purchase a frigate from Beijing, citing China's assertive behavior in the South China Sea.
"China's actions in the South China Sea should still be a consideration despite Thailand not being in direct dispute," he said.
Thailand previously purchased two Naresuan-class and four Chao Phraya-class frigates from China as well as one frigate from South Korea. Most of the missile-launching warships have been in commission since the 1990s.
While Thailand has relied on both the United States and China for military hardware, the kingdom shifted toward Beijing after a 2014 coup prompted the U.S. to suspend millions of dollars in military financing and funding for military education and training.
Washington normalized its relations with Bangkok after a 2019 election, widely seen as legitimizing the military-led government. The vote was held under a junta-written constitution and resulted in the victory of coup leader General Prayuth Chan-ocha.
Dulyapak Preecharush, associate professor of Asian studies at Thammasat University in Bangkok, noted that Thailand has been led by a civilian government since August and argued that the kingdom should maintain a nonalignment policy, including more balance on military hardware procurement.
"Thai [Defense Ministry] has acknowledged the current geopolitical competition between the US and China and will put more balance on Thai relations with major powers," he wrote in a recent email to VOA Thai.
According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Thailand bought 33% of its military material from South Korea, 14% from China and 10% from the United States during the period from 2018 to 2022.
Edwards, from the University of Reading, agreed that the current Thai government, led by the Pheu Thai Party and consisting of pro-military and pro-establishment coalitions, is likely to rebalance toward the U.S.
But "it is unlikely such shifts will be dramatic in nature," he wrote, noting that as recently as May, the U.S. rejected selling F-35 stealth fighter jets to Thailand.
Thailand's trade volume with China in 2022 was about $135 billion, according to China's state-run Business Information Center. Its total trade with the United States that year was an estimated $79.1 billion, according to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.
voanews.com · December 1, 2023
10. Uganda chases China after human rights issues see Western lenders leave
Should corporations consider human rights in their business decisions?
Uganda chases China after human rights issues see Western lenders leave
- Western backers and the World Bank have backed out of financing major Ugandan projects including an oil pipeline and internet infrastructure
- The lenders pulled funding over environmental concerns and human rights issues following severe new anti-LGTBQ laws
Jevans Nyabiage
+ FOLLOWPublished: 8:00pm, 2 Dec, 2023
By JEVANS NYABIAGE South China Morning Post5 min
December 2, 2023
View Original
Uganda is facing a Catch-22 as it courts financiers to bankroll its multibillion-dollar infrastructure projects, including a railroad and an oil pipeline.
It also wants to upgrade its internet infrastructure and construct a major railway line running from the capital Kampala to the Kenyan border town of Malaba.
But Kampala has a dilemma after dozens of banks and insurers from the West backed out of the pipeline over growing opposition from environmental groups. The World Bank complicated the situation further when it froze any new loan requests in August after Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni signed an anti-LGBTQ law, which criminalises homosexual acts, with severe penalties, including execution.
On Monday, Uganda’s finance ministry sought parliamentary approval to borrow US$150 million from the Export-Import Bank of China to expand its internet infrastructure.
It is another example of Uganda’s reliance on borrowing from China. While Chinese lenders have not officially announced if they will finance the 1,443km (900-mile) oil pipeline, in September, Uganda’s energy and mineral development ministry told the Post that Sinosure was working with Eximbank to provide over half of the US$3 billion debt that Uganda needed to build it.
Tim Zajontz, a research fellow in the Centre for International and Comparative Politics at Stellenbosch University, said after the freezing of loans by the World Bank, the Ugandan government was under immense pressure to find money for certain projects.
And with Western lenders backing out of the oil pipeline project, he said Chinese funding seemed to be Kampala’s “plan B”.
“We can expect that the China Eximbank will seriously consider both requests,” Zajontz said, referring to the oil pipeline and the funding for internet infrastructure.
But equally important for China Eximbank will be geopolitical considerations.
“Beijing has a keen interest for Chinese firms to put in place Chinese technology, infrastructure and norms in the information and technology sector. There is a direct and intensifying competition with Western competitors,” said Zajontz, who is a lecturer in global political economy at the University of Freiburg where he works in the research project De/Coloniality Now.
And while, according to Zajontz, both the European Union’s Global Gateway and the G7’s Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment had significant envelopes earmarked for IT infrastructure across Africa – in part to help contain Chinese control in this sector – before any cash could be handed over, tough questions would first be asked about Kampala’s human rights record.
“So, I assume that Museveni’s government prefers Chinese money and technology,” Zajontz said.
Uganda has oil, but the landlocked country needs the pipeline project to get it to the coast for transport. Photo: AP
But even as Uganda endears itself to China, Chinese money is not guaranteed.
Beijing had already said no to funding the building of Uganda’s section of the Standard Gauge Railway (SGR), leading to the cancellation of the contract Uganda had signed with China Harbour Engineering Company.
The same fate befell Kenya when China Eximbank would not fund its section from Naivasha in the Central Rift Valley to Malaba at the Ugandan border over commercial viability concerns.
Uganda has since contracted Turkish firm Yapi Merkezi to build the section, with funding reportedly expected from Britain’s Standard Chartered Bank and export credit agency UK Export Finance.
Mark Bohlund, a senior credit research analyst at REDD Intelligence, said the Turkish financing of the Ugandan leg of the SGR increased the likelihood that China would provide financing for other projects in Uganda, as well as the Naivasha to Malaba leg of the railway.
“Freighting goods into Uganda should significantly increase revenues for the Kenyan part of the SGR and thus reduce Kenya’s debt-servicing pressures,” Bohlund said.
“I see the priority for the Chinese being the financing of the East African Crude Oil Pipeline rather than the Ugandan leg of the SGR.”
Justice of the Constitutional Court of Uganda Geoffrey Kiryabwire during the hearing of petitions challenging the anti-LGBTQ law in Kampala. The controversial Ugandan law saw has caused economic headaches for the African country. Photo: Reuters
Lauren Johnston, an associate professor at the University of Sydney’s China Studies Centre, said Uganda’s oil pipeline appeared to face a few headwinds – starting with the political problems caused with Western leaders over the country’s recent homophobic legislation.
The other issue, she said, was the environmental risks associated with both the construction of the pipeline and the consumption of the oil it would deliver.
French energy giant TotalEnergies is behind the Ugandan oil project, and Johnston said it was facing pressure from the European Parliament to drop it.
On the other hand, at the belt and road forum held in Beijing in October, Chinese President Xi Jinping promised a cleaner, greener Belt and Road Initiative alongside elevated trade and infrastructure investments.
But China has also promised to support African economic integration, and this pipeline may help integrate African energy markets. Tanzania, for example, in November signed an agreement to export gas to Kampala, Johnston said.
“How China will balance its promise to support regional integration, increased trade, and green development – concurrently – is not clear,” Johnston said.
Aly-Khan Satchu, a sub-Saharan Africa geoeconomic analyst, said Uganda’s SGR proposal was by all accounts a little flaky.
“Uganda needs to reboot its SGR proposal and align it regionally with [South Sudan and the DRC] and also integrate the Tanga pipeline into the financing request. I am sure China will advance the loan at the right price,” Satchu said.
With declining borrowing options for Uganda, he said, “I think China or some constellation of Brics countries is where Museveni has to look”.
But Fabrice Houdart, a former World Bank senior country officer and researcher at Georgetown University, said that, in practice, the World Bank was not cutting lending to Uganda, and the African nation should persist with the global lender instead of chasing China.
“The bank is in a bind like everything else in which it must balance its sincere desire to fund Uganda and not appear as disregarding what is an egregious human rights violation and a provocation,” Houdart said. “As a consequence, Uganda’s economic stage is now set for a less-than-stellar performance, which is not that different from usual.”
He said Uganda’s decision to pivot to China for financing was like switching dance partners mid-song.
“Sure, China’s dance card isn’t as full these days, with their lending orchestra playing a slower tune, but it’s a partnership that comes with its own set of intricate steps,” Houdart said.
11. Gen Z Has a History Lesson Problem
So there is nothing to counter or defend against the TikTok indoctrination.
Excerpts:
People typically learn or infer most behaviors in life, including racism and ethnocentrism, through conditioning.
When individuals reflect on history, there’s often a curiosity about how the average German took part in reporting their Jewish neighbors to the Gestapo, how the Rwandan genocide unfolded, or how apartheid took root in South Africa. In modernity, most consider themselves far too enlightened to let such gross injustices occur, but perhaps this is the naïveté of living in the here and now. I imagine some 100 years from now, our ancestors will look at many of us like utter buffoons, and yet it doesn’t stop us from failing to learn from history. In fact, we repeat it ad nauseam when we fail to remember the lessons of the past.
Gen Z Has a History Lesson Problem
https://medium.com/the-panopticon-publication/gen-z-has-a-history-lesson-problem-b0ea42a4b4fb
When history, arts, and the humanities are no longer taught, the wheel of history repeats travesty
Benjamin Sledge
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Image create in DALL-E by author and modified in Adobe Photoshop
When the HBO miniseries Watchmen released, social media exploded with discussions about the portrayal of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre in its opening sequence. As a native born Oklahoman, I found myself surprised the world was aloof to incident. Growing up in Oklahoma, you learned about the massacre from a very young age, as it was part of our course curriculum in elementary school.
Back in the 1980s and 90s, we called the incident “The Tulsa Race Riots” because I’m certain they wanted to sanitize it a little for younger minds and erase some of our white guilt. But if you grew up in the Tulsa area, you knew about the massacre. This was why North Tulsa stayed predominantly black, and the majority of Oklahomans regarded the event as a collective blemish on our state’s history, much like the Trail of Tears that forced Native Americans into Oklahoma that we also studied.
My best friend at the time was a black kid named Cedric. I remember coming home upset and confused, asking my mom why people from the past killed men and women with different skin tones. All kids notice color and race despite what well-intentioned parents’ remark about kids being “colorblind.” Hell, my mom still reminds me I told her Cedric wasn’t “black” but “brown” when she explained racism. Children always notice skin tone, but it means little as long as they have a friend to play with. People typically learn or infer most behaviors in life, including racism and ethnocentrism, through conditioning.
When individuals reflect on history, there’s often a curiosity about how the average German took part in reporting their Jewish neighbors to the Gestapo, how the Rwandan genocide unfolded, or how apartheid took root in South Africa. In modernity, most consider themselves far too enlightened to let such gross injustices occur, but perhaps this is the naïveté of living in the here and now. I imagine some 100 years from now, our ancestors will look at many of us like utter buffoons, and yet it doesn’t stop us from failing to learn from history. In fact, we repeat it ad nauseam when we fail to remember the lessons of the past.
We’re certain another Holocaust couldn’t happen and yet, anti-semitism has risen 400 percent year over year according to the Anti-Defamation League. After the events of September 11, 2001, the world condemned Osama Bin Laden’s terrorism and statements. However, there is now a concerning trend where some individuals from Gen Z are aligning with Hamas propaganda, posting TikTok videos suggesting justification for the September 11th terrorist attacks based on the ongoing conflict in the Gaza Strip. If history operates like a wheel, as suggested by the Roman Senator and philosopher Boethius, we may have ascended on the spokes but are now on the verge of descending once again, facing the risk of being crushed.
Unraveling the rhyme
“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”
— Mark Twain
According to multiple stories and sources, Gen Z is currently divided over the ongoing Israel-Hamas War. Both Palestinian and Jewish students on college campuses have faced targeting and threats. Perhaps most concerning, however, is a recent poll by Harvard’s Center for American Political Studies (CAPS) and Harris Insights and Analytics that revealed Gen Z displays more sympathy toward Hamas — a designated terrorist organization — compared to any other generation. According to their data, 51% of respondents age 18–24 say the grievances of the Palestinians can be justified for the murders of 1,200 Israeli civilians during the October 7 attack. 48% of those age 25–34 also agree the terrorist attacks can be justified.
What on earth?
As reported by journalist Mosheh Oinounou citing Harvard’s Center for American Political Studies (CAPS) and Harris Insights and Analytics poll
It’s crucial to highlight that approximately “one-third of adults under age 30 regularly scroll TikTok for news,” as reported by Axios. This then brings us to the recent phenomenon where Osama bin Laden gained traction on TikTok, with numerous Gen Z individuals expressing sympathy for him after reading his “Letter to America,” in which he attempted to justify the 9/11 attacks (watch this video montage if you’re skeptical). Things got so bad that TikTok had to remove the videos and issue a statement, acknowledging that content supporting terrorism violated their policy. What’s wild to me, as someone who’s read bin Laden’s letter, is how anyone could become sympathetic to his plight. In the letter, bin Laden asserts anti-Semitic tropes, alleging Jews’ control of the media. He then justifies the killing of innocent civilians and advocates for the abandonment of the separation of church and state in the United States, urging us to adopt sharia law. Let’s not forget that he also wants us to rethink women’s equality and to ban homosexuals.
As someone who fought the Taliban, al Qaeda, and ISIS, this is a super hard pill to swallow and infuriates me. Multiple friends of mine, including my best friend, were killed by terrorists overseas. My grandfather was a paratrooper in World War II and fought the Nazis, so what these kids are doing and saying — to me — is the equivalent of stating, “ya know… Hitler was right!” I imagine some men who freed Jews in concentration camps are rolling over in their graves, given our current line of thinking.
But here’s the thing, I don’t attribute this entirely to Gen Z. In fact, I strongly believe the opposite. This issue stems from a failure in our education systems, beginning with implementing the No Child Left Behind policy and the removal of history, arts, and humanities from schools.
The erosion of comprehensive learning
Once my brother and I finished high school, my mom went back to work in the public school system. Often, she would rail against the No Child Left Behind Act despite being a George W. Bush fan. If you’ve ever wondered why standardized tests have become the benchmark for the public school systems, it’s because of this policy. The law, enacted by President Bush in 2002, meant to improve public schools and student performance by holding schools, districts, and states accountable through an emphasis on standardized testing in math and reading. The law became controversial, however, because it penalized schools that didn’t show improvement. Teachers then went into a mad dash, pushing standardized testing. The problem with this line of thinking is that prioritizing exam performance over genuine understanding hinders actual learning. Instead, it places undue pressure on educators, requiring them to meet deadlines and forcing them to navigate content in order to decide what to include in a test and what to omit. Thus, teachers become compelled to select the supposedly “essential” concepts to teach, while neglecting others. This is why we’ve seen such a sharp decline in the arts, humanities, history, philosophy, and physical education in the public school system.
As a parent of two young children, this deeply concerns me and is something I’m watching happen with my 2nd grader. Since Kindergarten, my daughter has come home with math and reading homework every day. Growing up, I don’t remember having homework until I reached middle school. Such an intense emphasis on this type of learning now baffles me. More concerning is that classes like art and physical education only happen once every other week. Art was my favorite class and the reason I became a writer and graphic designer. I owe my career to my early childhood development in the public school system.
The greatest fear I have for my daughter, however, is the utter lack of history. Just a few months ago, I had to explain the events of September 11, 2001, to my daughter. Her teacher briefly mentioned the event as a historic date, leaving me to provide an explanation. My daughter was absolutely dumbfounded that people hijacked planes and ran them into multiple buildings to kill innocent men, women, and children. She then wanted to know why they hated America so much. If you believe this material isn’t suitable for her age, remember that I learned about the Tulsa Race Massacre, the JFK assassination, and Anne Frank’s experiences during the Holocaust around the same age. They sanitized it to be age appropriate — as things should be — but as I aged, the ugly truths from the past continued to be taught as both information and warning.
The reason I can’t stress the importance of history enough is because if kids don’t learn about the Holocaust, we’re bound to repeat it. If the Civil Rights Movement doesn’t matter as course curriculum, then we’ll continue to have apartheids and book banning. If we don’t teach about 9/11, then we’re going to have a bunch of impressionable TikTok’ers assume Osama bin Laden was a hero.
That’s the great travesty of the American education system. We’re pushing regurgitative information for better SAT scores so our kids can get into college, while they buy into some mythical American Dream and get loaded down by student loan debt. When the curtain drops and reveals Oz, they feel disillusioned and bitter because they never received the real education they needed in the first place — exploring our past, learning from our mistakes, grappling with the essence of being human, and studying subjects that may not appear impressive on paper but are crucial for developing critical thinking skills.
In neglecting the harsh realities of our history, we risk breeding a generation oblivious to the lessons that could shape a better future. Without an honest education, we pave the way for ignorance to thrive, leaving our youth vulnerable to repeating the mistakes of the past.
But sadly, we’re already seeing it happen.
Want more nuanced views? Join our readership at The Panopticon or if you prefer a long read, pick up Ben’s multi-award winning memoir, Where Cowards Go to Die.
12. Dozens of Troops Suspected of Advocating Overthrow of US Government, New Pentagon Extremism Report Says
This will not go over well on a number of levels from those on both sides of these issues (e.g., those who think the sky is falling due to extremism in the ranks and those who think this is a witch hunt to go after those with the "wrong" political views).
Excerpts:
Of all the extremist and gang activity allegations, 135 were reported to military or civilian law enforcement, and 109 of the allegations were reported to another DoD organization or official.
Furthermore, 69 of all the allegations were substantiated at the time the report was written and the vast majority of those -- 50 -- were handled through administrative actions. That included involuntary discharge for 19 and counseling in three instances, while 17 more were handled by nonjudicial punishment and two went to court-martial.
There were no substantiated cases of extremism or gang activity where no action was taken.
While these figures, compared with the overall size of the services, are small, research and experts say that military service members and veterans pose an outsized danger to communities when they go down the path of extremism, given their increased familiarity with firearms and ability to organize and plan effectively.
Dozens of Troops Suspected of Advocating Overthrow of US Government, New Pentagon Extremism Report Says
military.com · by Konstantin Toropin · December 1, 2023
An annual Pentagon report on extremism within the ranks reveals that 78 service members were suspected of advocating for the overthrow of the U.S. government and another 44 were suspected of engaging or supporting terrorism.
The report released Thursday by the Defense Department inspector general revealed that in fiscal 2023 there were 183 allegations of extremism across all the branches of military, broken down not only into efforts to overthrow the government and terrorism but also advocating for widespread discrimination or violence to achieve political goals.
The statistics indicate the military continues to grapple with extremism following its public denunciations and a stand-down across the services ordered by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in 2021. Furthermore, the numbers do not make it clear whether the military's approach is working. In 2021, the year the data was first released to Congress, there were 270 allegations of extremist activities. In 2022, that figure dropped to 146 before rebounding over the past year.
The Army had the most allegations in fiscal 2023 with 130 soldiers suspected of participation in extremist activity. The Air Force suspected 29 airmen; the Navy and Marine Corps reported 10 service members each. For the first time, the inspector general also reported numbers for the Space Force as a separate entity from the other services -- it suspected four Guardians of extremism.
The IG report also included instances of alleged criminal gang activity: There were 58 allegations of gang activity across the military.
However, the report did note that, out of all the suspected extremism and criminal gang activity, 68 of the total cases were investigated and cleared or deemed unsubstantiated.
In the U.S., extremist activity, including neo-Nazi, white supremacist and anti-government movements, has been growing, and numerous violent plots by veterans and even active-duty troops have been thwarted in recent years. Experts on extremist movements have warned about the growing potential of more violence and future attacks, similar to the Oklahoma City federal building bombing in 1995 that killed 168 and was carried out by an Army veteran.
In February, a former National Guardsman, Brandon Russell, who founded the Atomwaffen Division, a neo-Nazi hate group, was charged with plotting to blow up Baltimore's electrical grid and cause as much suffering as possible. Russell, who allegedly kept a framed photo of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, was sentenced to five years in prison in 2018 after an arrest in Florida for possessing explosives.
In the wake of the Jan. 6 siege of the U.S. Capitol building, the Pentagon tried to make a show of dealing with the problem of extremism among troops after it became clear that veterans as well as some active-duty troops were among the mob that stormed the halls of Congress in an effort to halt the certification of the 2020 election.
Military.com has reported that many of those efforts -- including the military-wide extremism training stand-down ordered by Austin -- were largely symbolic and were widely considered as just another box for commanders to check.
One active-duty noncommissioned officer said that, aside from the fact that no one was paying attention at the stand-down briefing he attended, the commander giving the lecture was "talking about what he thought were radical groups like Black Lives Matter."
The idea that far-left groups are just as problematic as far-right ones is a popular talking point among conservatives and Republican lawmakers. However, law enforcement officials and experts who study the topic have consistently noted that far-right groups espousing anti-government and white supremacist views are the biggest threat to the U.S. today.
The report also revealed that other efforts such as screening prospective recruits before enlistment are not working as well as intended.
Some recruiters did not complete all of the screening steps and "as a result, military service recruiters may not have identified all applications with extremist or criminal gang associations," according to the inspector general report.
"Further, the audit found that one military service entered data indicating applicants disclosed extremist or gang associations even though the applicants had not made such disclosures," the IG said, but it did not reveal which of the services falsely accused some of its recruits of having extremist ties.
What the report does make clear, however, is that when allegations are made, they are being referred for investigation, and when allegations are substantiated, some action is taken.
Of all the extremist and gang activity allegations, 135 were reported to military or civilian law enforcement, and 109 of the allegations were reported to another DoD organization or official.
Furthermore, 69 of all the allegations were substantiated at the time the report was written and the vast majority of those -- 50 -- were handled through administrative actions. That included involuntary discharge for 19 and counseling in three instances, while 17 more were handled by nonjudicial punishment and two went to court-martial.
There were no substantiated cases of extremism or gang activity where no action was taken.
While these figures, compared with the overall size of the services, are small, research and experts say that military service members and veterans pose an outsized danger to communities when they go down the path of extremism, given their increased familiarity with firearms and ability to organize and plan effectively.
In 2020, an Air Force sergeant at Travis Air Force Base in California pulled up to a federal courthouse in Oakland, California, in a white van and opened fire on security guards, killing one before going on the run and murdering a county sheriff's deputy a week later as part of a larger plan to incite a civil war.
Also in 2020, members of a group that included two Marines and styled itself as a "modern day SS" were arrested on allegations that they were plotting to destroy the power grid in the northwest. U.S. court records in that case say members discussed recruiting other veterans, stole military equipment, asked others to buy explosives, and discussed plans to manufacture firearms.
-- Konstantin Toropin can be reached at konstantin.toropin@military.com. Follow him on X at @ktoropin.
military.com · by Konstantin Toropin · December 1, 2023
13. Russia-China Alliance Would Build Artificial Intelligence For Dictators
Excerpt:
In the global AI race, in which China is close on the heels of the United States, there is an unfortunate glut of supply of models that can be made to adhere to the standards of authoritarian regimes. In line with Putin and Xi’s effort to create a multi-polar global order to counter the West, a BRICS-led AI ethical framework will let dictators deploy the best the technology has to offer while maintaining firm control over their country’s information spaces. But like with so much else since the invasion, Russia must give up its leadership ambitions and accept the status of junior partner.
Russia-China Alliance Would Build Artificial Intelligence For Dictators - The Moscow Times
The Moscow Times · by Ben Dubow · December 2, 2023
President Vladimir Putin struck a triumphant tone at last week’s Artificial Intelligence Journey Conference in Moscow. With artificial intelligence playing a growing role in all parts of life, “humanity is beginning a new chapter of its existence,” he declared. Despite Putin’s bullish portrayal of Russia as a vanguard of AI innovation, the actual landscape of Russian AI development is grim, largely due to Putin’s own policies.
In his speech, Putin acknowledged the challenges facing Russia’s AI industry and announced plans to surmount them. Had they been implemented a decade ago – and had the little green men and the Spetsnaz stayed on their own side of the border – Russia may very well have become a leader in the field. Instead, the president seemed to betray a certain recognition of the country’s dire position.
Before the conference, Putin’s statements about artificial intelligence were optimistic but vague, stressing the potential of the technology and the need for Russia to maintain a presence in the field. He warned of the grave consequences of falling behind in the race. Those consequences have become unavoidable thanks to the invasion of Ukraine, which brought about an exodus of tech talent, a budget crunch that strangles investment, sanctions that deny Russia the chips needed for the immense computing requirements of AI and condemned the country to international isolation at a time of global research cooperation.
Putin’s four-point plan for addressing these deficiencies called for academies to broaden access to supercomputers, to increase the capacity of those supercomputers by an order of magnitude, to expand classes for applied AI at top universities, and for the state to devote more funding towards AI. He promised to release a more detailed strategy in the coming months.
Each part of this plan is necessary. But even all four together are wholly insufficient. Russia is facing a massive budget deficit. Without the economic capacity of its rivals, Moscow cannot hope to compete with them on financial investment. The Kremlin recently allocated 5.2 billion rubles ($57,247,000) to AI research in 2024. In 2022, the United States government allocated fifty times as much, which is seven times lower than the amount invested by venture capital firms in the same year. Even if Russia could allocate its resources perfectly, this investment gap means domestic availability of both AI know-how and computer capacity is likely to remain lagging.
Putin's speech also subtly acknowledged the security implications of the precarious state of Russian AI. Modern Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are intended for a Western audience and trained on Western data. “They reflect that part of Western ethics, those norms of behavior, public policy, to which we object,” Putin warned. In response, he suggested Russia would use its upcoming presidency of BRICS to investigate these issues in detail.
Under the banner of “AI Ethics,” Putin is likely to seek the enforcement of standards that ensure AI serves only to reinforce authoritarian rule. Rather than leading this “new chapter” of humanity’s existence, Russia will end up lobbying China for consideration as a partner. The future is being shaped in labs in Beijing and Hangzhou, not Moscow.
Should Russia convince China of their shared interest in an AI ethics framework that safeguards authoritarians, Moscow may be able to import and train on foundational models that don’t undermine the regime. About 40% of all LLMs come from China. Chinese researchers have achieved this despite working under a censorship regime even more restrictive than Russia’s. They were able to strike this balance by following an ethical framework laid out in extensive detail by Beijing’s National Information Security Standardization Technical Committee.
These standards tell researchers to test random samples from the body of text used to train their models for unallowable content. They must then reject any training data where over 5% of returned samples are problematic. Researchers are to run tests on thousands of queries containing banned keywords and validate whether the results are permissible. Companies with public chatbots are required to expand moderation teams along with their user base and promptly remove offending answers.
One requirement, where Russia’s current models would certainly fail, is that chatbots can only refuse to answer 5% of prompts on sensitive topics. If Russia adopted a similar standard, it could stop citizens from turning to Western alternatives out of frustration.
Putin referenced “ethics” seven more times in the speech and called for an update to the National AI Ethics Code. Putin’s concern that Western-trained models can pose a threat to his rule is well-founded. By lobbying for next-generation AI that will conform to the Kremlin’s will, Russia can reap the rewards of this technology while avoiding the intensive task of building its own.
In the global AI race, in which China is close on the heels of the United States, there is an unfortunate glut of supply of models that can be made to adhere to the standards of authoritarian regimes. In line with Putin and Xi’s effort to create a multi-polar global order to counter the West, a BRICS-led AI ethical framework will let dictators deploy the best the technology has to offer while maintaining firm control over their country’s information spaces. But like with so much else since the invasion, Russia must give up its leadership ambitions and accept the status of junior partner.
The Moscow Times · by Ben Dubow · December 2, 2023
14. The Biden-Blinken Rules of War for Israel
Some SOF imperatives that are not exclusive to SOF:
Understand the operational environment.
Recognize political implications.
Anticipate long-term effects.
Engage the threat discriminately.
Ensure legitimacy and credibility.
Anticipate and control psychological effects.
Excerpts:
During a meeting of Israel’s war cabinet, Mr. Blinken may also have tried to nix a long campaign. When Israel’s Defense Minister told him, “The entire Israeli society is united behind the goal of dismantling Hamas, even if it takes months,” the Israeli press reports that Mr. Blinken pushed back, replying, “I don’t think you have the credit for that.” He means credit with President Biden, as the White House bends to the growing pressure against Israel from the Democratic left.
The argument that Hamas is an “idea,” and thus war can never defeat it, has also been gaining among U.S. progressives. As Mr. Biden tweeted Tuesday, “To continue down the path of terror, violence, killing, and war is to give Hamas what they seek.” By this logic, Hamas would hate nothing more than . . . to be left in power? How quickly they forget Oct. 7.
Israel has a right to defend itself, which it reasonably believes requires destroying Hamas. The terrorist group rejoiced again on Thursday when two of its terrorists opened fire, during the truce, at Jewish civilians at a Jerusalem bus stop. Intent does matter, and blame for civilian deaths in Israel and Gaza resides with the terrorists.
Israel deserves U.S. support as it topples Hamas, not a repeat of Mr. Biden’s Ukraine treatment: rules, restrictions and hesitations that push a decisive victory further away. Israelis may find that victory requires calling the President’s bluff. Turning on Israel in wartime would alienate the much larger pool of pro-Israel American voters.
The Biden-Blinken Rules of War for Israel
The U.S. tells Israelis how they must fight in Gaza, which could help Hamas.
By The Editorial Board
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Dec. 1, 2023 6:34 pm ET
Secretary of State Antony Blinken PHOTO: SAUL LOEB/ASSOCIATED PRESS
War is back against Hamas, but will the Biden Administration let Israel win? Secretary of State Antony Blinken delivered the bad news to Jerusalem before the truce ended: He wants Israel on a short leash.
Hamas fired rockets at Israel Friday morning, in violation of the pause, and failed to produce the remaining female hostages to trade for more time and terrorists. It also claimed that its last child hostages, 10-month-old Kfir Bibas and his four-year-old brother, Ariel, are dead.
Mr. Blinken understands that Israel has more to do to defeat Hamas. “Hamas cannot remain in control of Gaza,” he reiterated at a press conference in Israel Thursday. Israel’s campaign has so far secured much of Gaza’s northern half, smashing several Hamas brigades and destroying its tunnels and hospital headquarters. The pressure this put on Hamas yielded a deal that freed 105 hostages. More pressure on Hamas now could spring some of the 137 hostages who remain in captivity.
Letting a pause turn into a more lasting cease-fire would repeat the mistake of past bouts with Hamas: leaving it in control of territory. Hamas still rules south Gaza, a base from which it would plot the next massacre, as its leaders have repeatedly pledged to do. That’s why Israel will take the fight south.
But how should this next phase of the war be waged? Here, Mr. Blinken is adamant: It must be nothing like the operation in north Gaza. The Secretary of State said he “underscored” to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “the imperative to the United States that the massive loss of civilian life and displacement of the scale we saw in northern Gaza not be repeated in the south.” He said Israel must take “more effective steps to protect the lives of civilians.”
The best way to save civilians is to get them far from urban combat zones, away from Hamas strongholds like the city of Khan Younis. But Mr. Blinken demands “avoiding further significant displacement of civilians inside of Gaza.” Instead, he called on Israel to create “safe zones” for civilians near the fighting.
But what should Israel do when Hamas positions itself in those zones? That’s how it used hospitals and schools in the north. Could Israel attack Hamas in those sanctuaries?
Mr. Blinken tried to close that door, too. Protecting civilians “means avoiding damage to life-critical infrastructure like hospitals,” he said. “Intent matters, but so does the result.”
If Israel must do more to protect civilians but can’t evacuate them and can’t hit Hamas when it hides in key civilian infrastructure and safe zones, how is it to fight at all? It could try a methodical, grinding campaign to force Hamas into the open. But Mr. Blinken demands Israel keep fuel flowing—precisely what Hamas needs to hunker down in its tunnels. That leaves relying on the infantry, at great cost in Israeli lives.
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Appeared in the December 2, 2023, print edition as 'The Biden-Blinken Rules of War'.
15. Israel Faces Pressure to Yield to the ‘Terrorist Veto’ By John Bolton
Excerpts:
The White House is urging, post-hostilities, turning over responsibility for Gaza to the Palestinian Authority. That utterly ignores its dismal performance in the West Bank, where the authority has been ineffective, corrupt and covertly supportive of terrorism. By some accounts Hamas is now more popular in the West Bank than Gaza. Extending Palestinian Authority control would put Israel back under the threat that surged on Oct. 7. The only long-term solution is to deny Hamas access to concentrated, hereditary refugee populations by resettling Gazans in places where they can enjoy normal lives.
Winston Churchill’s observation that “without victory, there is no survival” directly applies to Israel’s crisis. Victory for Israel means achieving its self-defense goal of eliminating Hamas. Anything less means continuing life under threat, with Tehran and its terrorist surrogates confident that when Westerners say “never again” they don’t really mean it.
Israel Faces Pressure to Yield to the ‘Terrorist Veto’
The strategic consequence of any pause, truce or cease-fire is to increase Hamas’s odds of survival.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/israel-faces-pressure-to-yield-to-the-terrorist-veto-hamas-gaza-ceasefire-hostages-e02facb4?mod=opinion_lead_pos6
By John Bolton
Dec. 1, 2023 5:59 pm ET
Israeli soldiers on the southern border with the Gaza Strip, Nov. 29. PHOTO: MENAHEM KAHANA/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
There is a tension between Israel’s two objectives of eliminating Hamas as a political and military force and recovering the innocent civilians kidnapped on Oct. 7. Weighing these competing priorities, Israel decided to pause its anti-Hamas military campaign in exchange for the return of some hostages. This policy’s wisdom is debatable.
A greater hazard, however, imperils Israel’s legitimate right to self-defense. I call it the “terrorist veto,” and with every passing day, Israel’s chances of escaping it diminish, notwithstanding Friday’s resumption of hostilities. For many people, the not-so-hidden goal of the hostage negotiations is to focus international attention—and emotions—on pausing hostilities indefinitely and tying Israel’s hands militarily. Whether labeled a pause, truce or cease-fire, the strategic consequences are objectively pro-Hamas. Using human bargaining chips and fellow Gazans as shields, Hamas seeks to prevent Israel from eliminating its terrorist threat.
Success for Hamas means merely surviving with a limited presence in Gaza, particularly a Gaza rebuilt as it was before Oct. 7. This result is a terrorist veto, even if military-pause supporters resist this painful but accurate term.
If the Hamas veto succeeds, other barbarians such as Hezbollah and Tehran’s mullahs (the ultimate enemy here) can insulate themselves from the consequences of their terrorism. Even worse, the terrorist veto can be copied by barbaric nation-states, with victims of aggression rendered unable to vindicate their sovereignty and territorial integrity. Ukraine and Taiwan come to mind as potential victims of this new paradigm.
President Biden and others deny trying to block further military action, but that is precisely the effect of their policies. On Wednesday CNN said Mr. Biden’s policy rests on three pillars: releasing the hostages, stepping up aid into Gaza, and figuring out what happens after the war. No mention of eliminating Hamas. Meantime, some Democratic senators are pressing for conditions on aid to Israel to restrict its military operations, to which Mr. Biden has alluded positively.
However the arguments for prolonging the initial or subsequent pauses are made, Israel will face three potentially debilitating consequences if it ceases or limits its military campaign. First, despite strong statements by many Israelis, in government and out, the country’s resolve is weakening. Right after Oct. 7, Jerusalem perhaps was prepared to hear U.S. military advisers caution that subduing resistance in Mosul and Fallujah took between nine months and a year. Then, Israelis might have been committed to a long struggle, but it seems unlikely they still are after this initial pause. Declining Israeli resolve guarantees that Hamas won’t be eliminated.
Cease-fire advocates argue that because Israel persuaded a million Gazans to move south before its initial campaign, Gazan “civilian” casualties in further operations in the south will dwarf previous casualties. Although Hamas and Iran initially placed Gazans in harm’s way, international recrimination will unfairly fall on Israelis, further sapping their resolve.
Second, because Hamas, Iran and their allies likely gain more militarily from the pause than Israel, the human costs to Israeli’s military will rise, as will domestic opposition to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s objectives. It may be impossible to count incremental Israel Defense Forces casualties due to the pause, but the tally could exceed the number of hostages released.
Third, the greater the pauses or limitations, the more time Hamas’s surrogates worldwide have to increase anti-Israel pressure on their governments. In turn, many governments will lean on Israel to accept less, probably far less, than Mr. Netanyahu’s stated objectives.
The White House is urging, post-hostilities, turning over responsibility for Gaza to the Palestinian Authority. That utterly ignores its dismal performance in the West Bank, where the authority has been ineffective, corrupt and covertly supportive of terrorism. By some accounts Hamas is now more popular in the West Bank than Gaza. Extending Palestinian Authority control would put Israel back under the threat that surged on Oct. 7. The only long-term solution is to deny Hamas access to concentrated, hereditary refugee populations by resettling Gazans in places where they can enjoy normal lives.
Winston Churchill’s observation that “without victory, there is no survival” directly applies to Israel’s crisis. Victory for Israel means achieving its self-defense goal of eliminating Hamas. Anything less means continuing life under threat, with Tehran and its terrorist surrogates confident that when Westerners say “never again” they don’t really mean it.
Mr. Bolton is author of “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir.” He served as the president’s national security adviser, 2018-19, and ambassador to the United Nations, 2005-06.
16. Everyone wins with better Asian AI governance
Excerpts:
Key to addressing concentration will be promoting new paradigms of data ownership and valuation that increase equity, including experimentation with data cooperatives and data unions. Capital providers can support the development of SME- and community-driven AI systems while reducing reliance on largescale proprietary AI models and centralised cloud computing infrastructure.
...
To address exclusion, regulatory leaders can work with ASEAN and Pacific Island nations to strengthen regulations and AI strategies. SME financing and digital capacity building will be key to supporting equitable participation in regional AI ecosystems. Donors and development practitioners can also support locally led efforts to increase citizen participation and representation in AI systems and engagement with digital governance.
There are no easy answers to questions of concentration, localisation and exclusion in AI systems. But coordinated AI governance can create incentives for diverse regional stakeholders to actively steward AI systems while increasing transparency around risks.
In practice, AI governance will need to move as fast as the technology landscape is evolving.
Everyone wins with better Asian AI governance | East Asia Forum
eastasiaforum.org · by Jacob Taylor · December 3, 2023
Author: Jacob Taylor, Brookings Institution
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has captured the world’s imagination. It has also been greeted with alarm, with policymakers concerned about its control by non-state actors and the impact of AI systems on citizens within and across national borders.
Most AI experts agree that the world needs to work together to promote the best and prevent the worst. But China announcing its Global AI Governance Initiative two weeks before a UK-hosted AI Safety Summit and one day after the United States further tightened export controls over advanced computing chips raises questions about the effectiveness of multilateral efforts to develop trustworthy, inclusive and environmentally sustainable AI systems.
Regional coordination of AI governance is nowhere more crucial than in Asia.
With Asia facing one of its worst economic outlooks in half a century, the key to inclusive and sustainable growth in the region will be reforming the service sector to harness the digital revolution, including through the development of advanced AI systems. Coordinated regional arrangements for AI can also help mitigate the most acute risks of geostrategic competition between the United States and China while reducing the need for middle powers to choose sides.
Effective AI governance faces fundamental challenges. The concentration of power over AI inputs by the United States, China and a handful of their technology infrastructure firms is just one. Another problem is governments’ tendency to localise and protect key digital assets. Meanwhile, Asia’s women, rural residents, and indigenous populations remain systematically excluded from accessing the benefits of AI systems.
There are huge differences in state perspectives and capabilities for dealing with AI-related challenges, yet the region already possesses the raw ingredients required to shape a regional framework for AI governance. These include a wide variety of flexible digital policy tools and industry engagement strategies that can be upgraded and flexibly deployed.
A foundational challenge for AI governance in Asia is that a handful of US and Chinese technology infrastructure companies enjoy near-monopoly power over most key inputs. The impressive early performance of large language models (LLMs) shows they could become the foundational infrastructure on which AI applications rely. But LLMs depend on data and computation-intensive machine learning that only the best-resourced companies can maintain.
This signals a worrying ‘winner takes most’ environment. AI leaders benefit disproportionately from the learning and capital they accrue, further concentrating power. This concentration makes it difficult for new entrants to compete and public actors to ensure transparency and accountability of AI systems.
With power over AI inputs concentrated, some governments across the Asia Pacific are seeking to protect and localise their digital assets through national policy. Localisation measures have negative impacts on AI systems. Localisation reduces access to training data, starves innovation ecosystems and risks fragmentation of cybersecurity mechanisms.
The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) trade agreement mirrors this trend, with its chapter on e-commerce allowing data localisation carveouts on national security grounds. The United States has taken an even more active approach. Investments in onshore production of graphics processing units (GPUs), AI innovation ecosystems and export controls targeting high-end GPUs sold to China signal its intention to extend US technology companies’ AI advantages through localisation.
Absent a robust regional framework to counteract localisation, it will be difficult for potential AI competitors such as China, India and Indonesia not to respond in kind. Smaller and poorer countries with the least access to data, computational capacity and talent will be left with fewer options to participate in the AI industry.
Southeast Asia’s comparatively weak AI readiness risks the region’s digital divides becoming ‘algorithmic divides’. While broadband connectivity has increased, an estimated 61 per cent of ASEAN populations do not use the internet despite living within range of internet access. Several countries lack adequate data protection laws and AI strategies.
Governments, capital providers, small- and medium-enterprises (SMEs) and citizens can coordinate strategies that counterbalance concentration, localisation, and exclusion in AI systems.
Key to addressing concentration will be promoting new paradigms of data ownership and valuation that increase equity, including experimentation with data cooperatives and data unions. Capital providers can support the development of SME- and community-driven AI systems while reducing reliance on largescale proprietary AI models and centralised cloud computing infrastructure.
Regional coordination of third-party AI oversight can lower the prohibitive costs of regulation at the national level. Existing national policy tools offer starting points for a regional approach that places responsibility on technology firms. Singapore’s AI Verify Foundation is an encouraging public–private partnership that increases broad stakeholder participation in AI systems. A proposed global regulatory sandbox initiative could even begin in Asia.
Counterbalancing localisation can begin with updating existing bilateral, minilateral and multilateral trade agreements for cross-border data flows. Examining national security exemptions in multilateral trade rules can help distinguish which AI-relevant assets could be liberalised. The World Trade Organization’s joint initiative on e-commerce is a forum in which Asia Pacific nations can push to gain momentum. A regional interdependent standards body could ensure liberalisation of cross-border data flows does not compromise accountability.
To address exclusion, regulatory leaders can work with ASEAN and Pacific Island nations to strengthen regulations and AI strategies. SME financing and digital capacity building will be key to supporting equitable participation in regional AI ecosystems. Donors and development practitioners can also support locally led efforts to increase citizen participation and representation in AI systems and engagement with digital governance.
There are no easy answers to questions of concentration, localisation and exclusion in AI systems. But coordinated AI governance can create incentives for diverse regional stakeholders to actively steward AI systems while increasing transparency around risks.
In practice, AI governance will need to move as fast as the technology landscape is evolving.
Jacob Taylor is Fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Sustainable Development.
eastasiaforum.org · by Jacob Taylor · December 3, 2023
17. ‘Founding Partisans’ and ‘A Republic of Scoundrels’: Opportunists and Patriots
Two more books for my "to read pile."
(“The buying of more books than one can read it's nothing less than the soul reaching toward infinity…” - Israel Regardie)
‘Founding Partisans’ and ‘A Republic of Scoundrels’: Opportunists and Patriots
In the uncertain days of America’s infancy, the boundary between canny political maneuvering and disloyalty to the new nation was not yet defined.
https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/founding-partisans-and-a-republic-of-scoundrels-opportunists-and-patriots-b61dbf2f?mod=opinion_major_pos11
By Adam Rowe
Dec. 1, 2023 11:56 am ET
Art restorers on scaffolding work on a wall painting of the Founding Fathers in the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. PHOTO: MARK WILSON/GETTY IMAGES
In the aftermath of the American Revolution, the concepts of loyalty and legitimacy emerged fitfully and confusingly. Under the monarchy, these concepts had been straightforward: All subjects were united by their loyalty to the sovereign, whose will was their command. But in founding a republic on principles at once lofty and vague, the Founders created a problem that vexes us still. If a nation is defined by its commitment to shared ideals, who draws the line between a difference of opinion and a difference of principle? Where does loyal opposition end and treason begin? What distinguishes the transgressions of a demagogue from the enraged voice of the people?
Today we rely on nearly 250 years of shared history and tradition to navigate the vague boundaries suggested by these unanswerable questions—and yet we can hardly keep from leaping at one another’s throats. The Founders built an arena of partisan politics without grasping the full fury of the beast they had unleashed within it.
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Founding Partisans: Hamilton, Madison, Jefferson, Adams and the Brawling Birth of American Politics
By H. W. Brands
Doubleday
464 pages
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“Founding Partisans” by H.W. Brands and “A Republic of Scoundrels,” a collection of essays edited by David Head and Timothy Hemmis, are as different as two books on the founding can be. But each captures the moral confusion of the era, when the rules of democratic politics were still unwritten and everything seemed up for grabs.
Mr. Brands, a prolific historian and a professor at the University of Texas, provides a brisk account of the controversies that first divided the heroes of the Revolution. He begins with the Federalists’ effort to replace the Articles of Confederation with a stronger national government and concludes with the Jeffersonian Republicans’ repudiation of the Federalists in the election of 1800, the first transfer of power in U.S. history.
Though the Federalists organized themselves into a national political party, they didn’t understand themselves as one. Political parties, or “factions,” to use the Founders’ term, were understood as regrettable evils. They existed to serve narrow or sinister interests. An organized political party was thus, by definition, “opposed to the general welfare,” Mr. Brands writes.
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A Republic of Scoundrels: The Schemers, Intriguers, and Adventurers Who Created a New American Nation
By David Head and Timothy Hemmis
Pegasus Books
368 pages
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The Founders hoped that the Constitution would suppress the influence of factions, but they assumed that virtuous leaders (namely, themselves) would naturally agree with one another. The discovery that so many leading figures disagreed on important matters came as a shock. Each side in this deepening divide began to see their opponents as a menace to the republic.
The failure to anticipate the pull of partisanship was nowhere more evident than in the Constitution’s provisions for electing the president: Each appointed elector, chosen by the states in a manner determined by their legislatures, would vote for two people, at least one of whom could not inhabit the elector’s own state. The thinking was that electors would name a local favorite on the first ballot and, on the second, the worthiest citizen throughout the land. The runner-up would be vice president.
This process, reflecting a hope that Americans would ultimately choose a leader independent of faction, was incompatible with an election in which a candidate would be supported by a party against his rivals. Sure enough, in 1800 the Democratic-Republicans voted in lockstep for Thomas Jefferson as their president and Aaron Burr as vice president. But no one thought to ensure that Burr received at least one less electoral vote. The result was a tie, allowing the defeated Federalists in the House to decide who would be president. Burr slyly advertised that he was willing to make a deal with his adversaries.
The crisis passed, thanks to Alexander Hamilton’s intervention. In this sense, the outcome seemed to vindicate the Founders’ hope that virtuous leaders would combine against conniving partisans. But it was a close-run thing.
Mr. Brands follows countless other historians in providing a blow-by-blow account of the nation’s first experience with partisan combat, though not a single historian is cited in the text or notes. He relies instead on the Founders’ own words to capture the controversies in which they participated. This choice gives his narrative an immediacy that heavy-handed analysis often diminishes. Indeed, “Founding Partisans” reads less like a work of history than a journalist’s insider account of high politics, except here the intemperate, backbiting quotations come from sources who are safely dead rather than anonymous.
But by hewing so closely to a narrow range of sources—most chapters do no more than quote and summarize a few essays or letters—Mr. Brands neglects the historian’s role as interpreter and guide. Readers unfamiliar with the era may wish for more help in understanding the context of events, invisible to those operating within it.
“A Republic of Scoundrels,” by contrast, tries to upend the pantheon of Founding Fathers with forgotten or misunderstood characters. The book’s essays, Mr. Hemmis explains, seek to draw a portrait of the “turncoats and traitors, opportunists and con artists, spies and foreign intriguers” who made a mark on the new nation.
Some of the names remain infamous—e.g., Benedict Arnold and Aaron Burr. Others deserve to be better-known. James Wilkinson became the highest-ranking officer in the U.S. Army while serving as a paid agent of Spain, the power on the other side of America’s southern border during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In 1799, William Augustus Bowles declared himself the founder of a nation among the Creeks and other indigenous peoples in Spanish Florida—the State of Muskogee, as he called it—only to be betrayed as a fraud by his supposed subjects. Matthew Lyon, an Irish immigrant and former indentured servant, rose to become a member of the House, where his contempt for elite niceties enraged his Federalist adversaries. He was the first person convicted of sedition after the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. Then he became the first imprisoned convict to be re-elected to Congress.
Each of the book’s “scoundrels” is considered primarily for what he reveals about the revolutionary-era norms being transgressed. The essays are uneven in quality, but the best show how changeable the line between heroism and opportunism could be.
Even the arch-traitor Benedict Arnold acted on motives not so different from those of many Patriots who condemned him, as James Kirby Martin shows in his essay. Countless Americans were driven to the Patriotic cause in the early 1770s because they felt personally dishonored, or their ambitions unjustly thwarted, by the British—precisely the sentiment that motivated Arnold’s treason.
Or consider Bowles and his State of Muskogee. A Maryland loyalist, Bowles condemned the Revolution for its “licentiousness” and “thirst for dominion.” He then attempted his own revolution, falsely presenting himself to the world as “commander in chief” of an indigenous nation-state that existed only in his own grandiose imagination. Bowles’s “grand talk,” David Narrett writes in his essay, only “became a lie when what he said for so long did not become true.” But for a few chance victories, the pretensions of the Founders might have ended the same way.
Many of the colorful schemes recounted in “A Republic of Scoundrels” occurred on the Western frontier. “The West beckoned to scoundrels,” Mr. Head writes, “calling them to break it open for their own benefit.”
The Burr conspiracy is the most dramatic of these Western intrigues. No one today knows what Burr was planning when he was arrested on charges of plotting to dismember the Western U.S. just six years after his failed bid for the presidency and two years after killing Hamilton in a duel. It’s possible that he intended to conquer Spanish territory in modern-day Texas.
The charge that Burr was plotting treason came from none other than James Wilkinson, the Army officer intriguing with Spain (and operating under the code name “Agent 13”). Wilkinson’s double-game was suspected but never confirmed during his lifetime. His official letter warning President Jefferson of “a deep, dark, and widespread conspiracy” may well have been a favor to his Spanish benefactors.
Jefferson himself had said that it might be necessary for the Western states to organize as a separate confederation. But he was determined to see Burr hanged for treason. While Burr awaited trial, Jefferson informed Congress that his “guilt is placed beyond question.” Jefferson surely understood that an individual’s guilt should be determined by a jury, not the president. His conduct toward Burr suggests that his public responsibilities were suffused with a personal vendetta.
In the end, Burr’s guilt was determined by Chief Justice John Marshall, who presided over the trial and decided that the Constitution defined treason narrowly—as the act of levying war against the U.S. This definition would require allowing Burr to carry out his scheme before being arrested for it. And yet there was, and is, wisdom in it.
A nation teeming with hustlers and partisans—and contentiously governing itself on the principle that no single caste or class has the right to equate its own narrow interests with the common good—can’t afford to indulge an expansive definition of treason. Respect for the law precludes wielding it as a political weapon.
Mr. Rowe is a historian in Tyler, Texas.
Copyright ©2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Appeared in the December 2, 2023, print edition.
18. Why Adults Are More Imaginative Than Children
I did not expect this. Perhaps we could be better strategists than we are if only we would use our imagination.
Why Adults Are More Imaginative Than Children
The idea that we lose our freedom to imagine as we get older is familiar from children’s books, but psychological research suggests it’s a myth.
https://www.wsj.com/science/why-adults-are-more-imaginative-than-children-7a86aa86?mod=hp_listc_pos1
By Andrew Shtulman
Dec. 1, 2023 3:00 pm ET
The idea that children are imaginative but adults are not is a popular theme in children’s literature. In “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” Willy Wonka is intent on leaving his factory to a child because “a grown-up won’t listen…he won’t learn.” In “Mary Poppins,” only children are able to hear what the trees and the birds say, and only children are able to understand the language of the sun and the stars. “Do you really mean we won’t be able to hear that when we’re older?” asks one of the children. “You’ll hear all right,” explains Mary Poppins, “but you won’t understand.”
In these stories, children are open to possibilities that elude the adult mind. They grasp extraordinary ideas that adults cannot fathom and have clever insights that adults do not appreciate. It’s a theme that resonates with everyday observation of children’s imaginative activities. Children play elaborate make-believe games with their toys and role-playing games with their peers. They build forts, assemble costumes, bake mud pies and construct block towers. They believe in fantastical beings, like Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, and they are convinced that magic is real.
On closer inspection, though, children spend most of their pretend play doing realistic things, like cooking and cleaning. A study published in the Journal of Cognition and Development in 2020 found that “by age 4, children shown pretend and real activities in a book said they would choose to do the real activity over the pretend one.” When playing games, they stick closely to the rules and are offended by anyone who might attempt to change them. Some children do invent imaginary friends and imaginary worlds, but they are imaginary in the sense that they don’t exist, not that they couldn’t.
Forty years of research on how people reason about novel possibilities reveals that the glorification of children’s imagination is misguided. Children are no more imaginative than adults. Quite often, they are less imaginative. That is because, while children have the capacity to contemplate hypothetical ideas and counterfactual events, they do not have the knowledge or expertise to use that capacity as effectively as adults. There is room for innovation in everything we do—cooking, cleaning, writing, drawing, navigating, negotiating—but such changes require sustained effort and reflection. We have to acquire the right knowledge and cultivate the right habits of mind. Imagination, like any other faculty, has to be developed and refined through years of practice.
Every time we entertain a thought that transcends what we are currently perceiving, we are using imagination. Thinking of mermaids requires imagination, but so does thinking of past vacations, distant friends or future meetings. Almost all mental life requires traveling beyond the here and now to contemplate what was, what will be, what might be, what should be, and what could have been. Life is a series of problems—what to eat? where to go? who to ask?—and solving those problems requires entertaining multiple possibilities and then selecting the best option among them.
Dick Van Dyke and Julie Andrews in ’Mary Poppins,’ the 1964 movie that celebrates the imagination of childhood. PHOTO: EVERETT COLLECTION
Imagination is what allows us to move forward in time or backward in time or even jump to another timeline. We can contemplate events that have happened, will happen, or did not happen but might have if the circumstances had been different. The latter are known as counterfactuals: the events that underlie our regret for lost opportunities, our relief at avoiding misfortune and our surprise that events turned out one way rather than another.
Using counterfactuals to improve causal reasoning does not have to be instructed. This skill emerges on its own, early in development. Children as young as 3 recognize that a person with muddy shoes would not have muddied the floor if they had left their shoes outside. A study by psychologist Tamsin German published in the journal Developmental Science found that slightly older children can discriminate between counterfactuals that would change the course of events from those that would not. For instance, they understood that a person would not be cold if they had worn a jacket but would still be cold if they had worn a shirt of a different color.
Imagination may have evolved for contemplating alternatives to reality, but we use it most naturally to contemplate close alternatives, like preparing a different meal, rather than far alternatives, like riding on clouds. When we use imagination to contemplate far alternatives—to innovate or fabricate—we’re not tapping into an innate appreciation of the extraordinary; we’re coopting a tool designed to explore the ordinary. Imagination is limited in scope because it is limited in structure. When contemplating alternatives to reality, we fixate on possibilities that are physically plausible, statistically probable, socially conventional and morally permissible. When told about possibilities that violate such regularities, we usually balk at their suggestion, denying they could happen. Our ideas about what could happen are firmly rooted in what we expect to happen.
This mindset is most apparent in young children, who are quick to dismiss the unexpected as impossible. In a 2018 study I co-designed with psychologist Jonathan Phillips, 4-year-olds were told about commonplace problems and asked to contemplate various solutions to those problems, some more unusual than others. One of the problems was about a girl named Melissa who didn’t like to go to school because she missed her mother too much. We asked the children what Melissa could do to solve her problem. Could she and her mother agree to do something special after school to take her mind off her worries? Could she wear her pajamas to school for comfort? Could she bring her mother to school to attend classes with her? Could she lie to her mother and tell her that school is closed today so she doesn’t have to go? Could she snap her fingers and make it Saturday so school is actually closed?
Four-year-olds thought only the first solution (the afterschool treat) could happen in real life; the rest were judged impossible. Children claimed not only that these events could not occur in real life but also that it would take magic to make them happen. Changing the day of the week is of course impossible, but the other solutions are not. There are reasons why a student might not want to wear pajamas to school or bring her mother to school or lie to her mother about school being closed, but these reasons do not preclude the events from occurring. Children’s earliest intuitions about possibility conflate what could happen with what should happen.
The improbable event of traveling faster than a horse was once considered impossible, as was traveling by air or traveling into space. Before the advent of trains, planes and rocketships, there were good reasons to think that people could travel only so far and only so fast. But these reasons were empirical, not logical. They could be altered, and they were. Imagination, on its own, lumps the improbable with the impossible, but we can coordinate imagination with other faculties—namely, knowledge and reflection—to disentangle the two. The unstructured imagination of children usually succumbs to expectation, while adult imagination structured by knowledge and reflection allows for innovation.
Andrew Shtulman is a professor of psychology at Occidental College. This essay is adapted from his new book, “Learning to Imagine: The Science of Discovering New Possibilities,” published by Harvard University Press.
Copyright ©2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Appeared in the December 2, 2023, print edition as 'Why Adults Are More Imaginative Than Children'.
19. Ego, Fear and Money: How the A.I. Fuse Was Lit
Ego, Fear and Money: How the A.I. Fuse Was Lit
The people who were most afraid of the risks of artificial intelligence decided they should be the ones to build it. Then distrust fueled a spiraling competition.
By Cade Metz, Karen Weise, Nico Grant and Mike Isaac
Reporting from San Francisco
The New York Times · by Mike Isaac · December 3, 2023
Larry Page and Elon Musk were on opposite sides in the debate over the risks of artificial intelligence.Credit...Hokyoung Kim
The people who were most afraid of the risks of artificial intelligence decided they should be the ones to build it. Then distrust fueled a spiraling competition.
Larry Page and Elon Musk were on opposite sides in the debate over the risks of artificial intelligence.Credit...Hokyoung Kim
Elon Musk celebrated his 44th birthday in July 2015 at a three-day party thrown by his wife at a California wine country resort dotted with cabins. It was family and friends only, with children racing around the upscale property in Napa Valley.
This was years before Twitter became X and Tesla had a profitable year. Mr. Musk and his wife, Talulah Riley — an actress who played a beautiful but dangerous robot on HBO’s science fiction series “Westworld” — were a year from throwing in the towel on their second marriage. Larry Page, a party guest, was still the chief executive of Google. And artificial intelligence had pierced the public consciousness only a few years before, when it was used to identify cats on YouTube — with 16 percent accuracy.
A.I. was the big topic of conversation when Mr. Musk and Mr. Page sat down near a firepit beside a swimming pool after dinner the first night. The two billionaires had been friends for more than a decade, and Mr. Musk sometimes joked that he occasionally crashed on Mr. Page’s sofa after a night playing video games.
But the tone that clear night soon turned contentious as the two debated whether artificial intelligence would ultimately elevate humanity or destroy it.
As the discussion stretched into the chilly hours, it grew intense, and some of the more than 30 partyers gathered closer to listen. Mr. Page, hampered for more than a decade by an unusual ailment in his vocal cords, described his vision of a digital utopia in a whisper. Humans would eventually merge with artificially intelligent machines, he said. One day there would be many kinds of intelligence competing for resources, and the best would win.
If that happens, Mr. Musk said, we’re doomed. The machines will destroy humanity.
With a rasp of frustration, Mr. Page insisted his utopia should be pursued. Finally he called Mr. Musk a “specieist,” a person who favors humans over the digital life-forms of the future.
That insult, Mr. Musk said later, was “the last straw.”
Many in the crowd seemed gobsmacked, if amused, as they dispersed for the night, and considered it just another one of those esoteric debates that often break out at Silicon Valley parties.
But eight years later, the argument between the two men seems prescient. The question of whether artificial intelligence will elevate the world or destroy it — or at least inflict grave damage — has framed an ongoing debate among Silicon Valley founders, chatbot users, academics, legislators and regulators about whether the technology should be controlled or set free.
That debate has pitted some of the world’s richest men against one another: Mr. Musk, Mr. Page, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, the tech investor Peter Thiel, Satya Nadella of Microsoft and Sam Altman of OpenAI. All have fought for a piece of the business — which one day could be worth trillions of dollars — and the power to shape it.
At the heart of this competition is a brain-stretching paradox. The people who say they are most worried about A.I. are among the most determined to create it and enjoy its riches. They have justified their ambition with their strong belief that they alone can keep A.I. from endangering Earth.
Mr. Musk and Mr. Page stopped speaking soon after the party that summer. A few weeks later, Mr. Musk dined with Mr. Altman, who was then running a tech incubator, and several researchers in a private room at the Rosewood hotel in Menlo Park, Calif., a favored deal-making spot close to the venture capital offices of Sand Hill Road.
That dinner led to the creation of a start-up called OpenAI later in the year. Backed by hundreds of millions of dollars from Mr. Musk and other funders, the lab promised to protect the world from Mr. Page’s vision.
Thanks to its ChatGPT chatbot, OpenAI has fundamentally changed the technology industry and has introduced the world to the risks and potential of artificial intelligence. OpenAI is valued at more than $80 billion, according to two people familiar with the company’s latest funding round, though Mr. Musk and Mr. Altman’s partnership didn’t make it. The two have since stopped speaking.
“There is disagreement, mistrust, egos,” Mr. Altman said. “The closer people are to being pointed in the same direction, the more contentious the disagreements are. You see this in sects and religious orders. There are bitter fights between the closest people.”
Last month, that infighting came to OpenAI’s boardroom. Rebel board members tried to force out Mr. Altman because, they believed, they could no longer trust him to build A.I. that would benefit humanity. Over five chaotic days OpenAI looked as if it were going to fall apart, until the board — pressured by giant investors and employees who threatened to follow Mr. Altman out the door — backed down.
The drama inside OpenAI gave the world its first glimpse of the bitter feuds among those who will determine the future of A.I.
But years before OpenAI’s near meltdown, there was a little-publicized but ferocious competition in Silicon Valley for control of the technology that is now quickly reshaping the world, from how children are taught to how wars are fought. The New York Times spoke with more than 80 executives, scientists and entrepreneurs, including two people who attended Mr. Musk’s birthday party in 2015, to tell that story of ambition, fear and money.
The Birth of DeepMind
Five years before the Napa Valley party and two before the cat breakthrough on YouTube, Demis Hassabis, a 34-year-old neuroscientist, walked into a cocktail party at Peter Thiel’s San Francisco townhouse and realized he’d hit pay dirt. There in Mr. Thiel’s living room, overlooking the city’s Palace of Fine Arts and a swan pond, was a chess board. Dr. Hassabis had once been the second-best player in the world in the under-14 category.
“I was preparing for that meeting for a year,” Dr. Hassabis said. “I thought that would be my unique hook in: I knew that he loved chess.”
In 2010, Dr. Hassabis and two colleagues, who all lived in Britain, were looking for money to start building “artificial general intelligence,” or A.G.I., a machine that could do anything the brain could do. At the time, few people were interested in A.I. After a half century of research, the artificial intelligence field had failed to deliver anything remotely close to the human brain.
Still, some scientists and thinkers had become fixated on the downsides of A.I. Many, like the three young men from Britain, had a connection to Eliezer Yudkowsky, an internet philosopher and self-taught A.I. researcher. Mr. Yudkowsky was a leader in a community of people who called themselves Rationalists or, in later years, effective altruists.
They believed that A.I. could find a cure for cancer or solve climate change, but they worried that A.I. bots might do things their creators had not intended. If the machines became more intelligent than humans, the Rationalists argued, the machines could turn on their creators.
Mr. Thiel had become enormously wealthy through an early investment in Facebook and through his work with Mr. Musk in the early days of PayPal. He had developed a fascination with the singularity, a trope of science fiction that describes the moment when intelligent technology can no longer be controlled by humanity.
With funding from Mr. Thiel, Mr. Yudkowsky had expanded his A.I. lab and created an annual conference on the singularity. Years before, one of Dr. Hassabis’s two colleagues had met Mr. Yudkowsky, and he snagged them speaking spots at the conference, ensuring they’d be invited to Mr. Thiel’s party.
Mr. Yudkowsky introduced Dr. Hassabis to Mr. Thiel. Dr. Hassabis assumed that lots of people at the party would be trying to squeeze their host for money. His strategy was to arrange another meeting. There was a deep tension between the bishop and the knight, he told Mr. Thiel. The two pieces carried the same value, but the best players understood that their strengths were vastly different.
Credit...Hokyoung Kim
It worked. Charmed, Mr. Thiel invited the group back the next day, where they gathered in the kitchen. Their host had just finished his morning workout and was still sweating in a shiny tracksuit. A butler handed him a Diet Coke. The three made their pitch, and soon Mr. Thiel and his venture capital firm agreed to put 1.4 million British pounds (roughly $2.25 million) into their start-up. He was their first major investor.
They named their company DeepMind, a nod to “deep learning,” a way for A.I. systems to learn skills by analyzing large amounts of data; to neuroscience; and to the Deep Thought supercomputer from the sci-fi novel “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” By the fall of 2010, they were building their dream machine. They wholeheartedly believed that because they understood the risks, they were uniquely positioned to protect the world.
“I don’t see this as a contradictory position,” said Mustafa Suleyman, one of the three DeepMind founders. “There are huge benefits to come from these technologies. The goal is not to eliminate them or pause their development. The goal is to mitigate the downsides.”
Having won over Mr. Thiel, Dr. Hassabis worked his way into Mr. Musk’s orbit. About two years later, they met at a conference organized by Mr. Thiel’s investment fund, which had also put money into Mr. Musk’s company SpaceX. Dr. Hassabis secured a tour of SpaceX headquarters. Afterward, with rocket hulls hanging from the ceiling, the two men lunched in the cafeteria and talked.
Mr. Musk explained that his plan was to colonize Mars to escape overpopulation and other dangers on Earth. Dr. Hassabis replied that the plan would work — so long as superintelligent machines didn’t follow and destroy humanity on Mars, too.
Mr. Musk was speechless. He hadn’t thought about that particular danger. Mr. Musk soon invested in DeepMind alongside Mr. Thiel so he could be closer to the creation of this technology.
Flush with cash, DeepMind hired researchers who specialized in neural networks, complex algorithms created in the image of the human brain. A neural network is essentially a giant mathematical system that spends days, weeks or even months identifying patterns in large amounts of digital data. First developed in the 1950s, these systems could learn to handle tasks on their own. After analyzing names and addresses scribbled on hundreds of envelopes, for instance, they could read handwritten text.
DeepMind took the concept further. It built a system that could learn to play classic Atari games like Space Invaders, Pong and Breakout to illustrate what was possible.
This got the attention of another Silicon Valley powerhouse, Google, and specifically Larry Page. He saw a demonstration of Deep Mind’s machine playing Atari games. He wanted in.
The Talent Auction
In the fall of 2012, Geoffrey Hinton, a 64-year-old professor at the University of Toronto, and two graduate students published a research paper that showed the world what A.I. could do. They trained a neural network to recognize common objects like flowers, dogs and cars.
Scientists were surprised by the accuracy of the technology built by Dr. Hinton and his students. One who took particular notice was Yu Kai, an A.I. researcher who had met Dr. Hinton at a research conference and had recently started working for Baidu, the giant Chinese internet company. Baidu offered Dr. Hinton and his students $12 million to join the company in Beijing, according to three people familiar with the offer.
Dr. Hinton turned Baidu down, but the money got his attention.
The Cambridge-educated British expatriate had spent most of his career in academia, except for occasional stints at Microsoft and Google, and was not especially driven by money. But he had a neurodivergent child, and the money would mean financial security.
“We did not know how much we were worth,” Dr. Hinton said. He consulted lawyers and experts on acquisitions and came up with a plan: “We would organize an auction, and we would sell ourselves.” The auction would take place during an annual A.I. conference at the Harrah’s hotel and casino on Lake Tahoe.
Big Tech took notice. Google, Microsoft, Baidu and other companies were beginning to believe that neural networks were a path to machines that could not only see, but hear, write, talk and — eventually — think.
Mr. Page had seen similar technology at Google Brain, his company’s A.I. lab, and he thought Dr. Hinton’s research could elevate his scientists’ work. He gave Alan Eustace, Google’s senior vice president of engineering, what amounted to a blank check to hire any A.I. expertise he needed.
Mr. Eustace and Jeff Dean, who led the Brain lab, flew to Lake Tahoe and took Dr. Hinton and his students out to dinner at a steakhouse inside the hotel the night before the auction. The smell of old cigarettes was overpowering, Dr. Dean recalled. They made the case for coming to work at Google.
The next day, Dr. Hinton ran the auction from his hotel room. Because of an old back injury, he rarely sat down. He turned a trash can upside down on a table, put his laptop on top and watched the bids roll in over the next two days.
Google made an offer. So did Microsoft. DeepMind quickly bowed out as the price went up. The industry giants pushed the bids to $20 million and then $25 million, according to documents detailing the auction. As the price passed $30 million, Microsoft quit, but it rejoined the bidding at $37 million.
“We felt like we were in a movie,” Dr. Hinton said.
Then Microsoft dropped out a second time. Only Baidu and Google were left, and they pushed the bidding to $42 million, $43 million. Finally, at $44 million, Dr. Hinton and his students stopped the auction. The bids were still climbing, but they wanted to work for Google. And the money was staggering.
It was an unmistakable sign that deep-pocketed companies were determined to buy the most talented A.I. researchers — which was not lost on Dr. Hassabis at DeepMind. He had always told his employees that DeepMind would remain an independent company. That was, he believed, the best way to ensure its technology didn’t turn into something dangerous.
But as Big Tech entered the talent race, he decided he had no choice: It was time to sell.
By the end of 2012, Google and Facebook were angling to acquire the London lab, according to three people familiar with the matter. Dr. Hassabis and his co-founders insisted on two conditions: No DeepMind technology could be used for military purposes, and its A.G.I. technology must be overseen by an independent board of technologists and ethicists.
Google offered $650 million. Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook offered a bigger payout to DeepMind’s founders, but would not agree to the conditions. DeepMind sold to Google.
Mr. Zuckerberg was determined to build an A.I. lab of his own. He hired Yann LeCun, a French computer scientist who had also done pioneering A.I. research, to run it. A year after Dr. Hinton’s auction, Mr. Zuckerberg and Dr. LeCun flew to Lake Tahoe for the same A.I. conference. While padding around a suite at the Harrah’s casino in his socks, Mr. Zuckerberg personally interviewed top researchers, who were soon offered millions of dollars in salary and stock.
A.I. was once laughed off. Now the richest men in Silicon Valley were shelling out billions to keep from being left behind.
The Lost Ethics Board
When Mr. Musk invested in DeepMind, he broke his own informal rule — that he would not invest in any company he didn’t run himself. The downsides of his decision were already apparent when, only a month or so after his birthday spat with Mr. Page, he again found himself face to face with his former friend and fellow billionaire.
The occasion was the first meeting of DeepMind’s ethics board, on Aug. 14, 2015. The board had been set up at the insistence of the start-up’s founders to ensure that their technology did no harm after the sale. The members convened in a conference room just outside Mr. Musk’s office at SpaceX, with a window looking out onto his rocket factory, according to three people familiar with the meeting.
But that’s where Mr. Musk’s control ended. When Google bought DeepMind, it bought the whole thing. Mr. Musk was out. Financially he had come out ahead, but he was unhappy.
Three Google executives now firmly in control of DeepMind were there: Mr. Page; Sergey Brin, a Google co-founder and Tesla investor; and Eric Schmidt, Google’s chairman. Among the other attendees were Reid Hoffman, another PayPal founder, and Toby Ord, an Australian philosopher studying “existential risk.”
The DeepMind founders reported that they were pushing ahead with their work, but that they were aware the technology carried serious risks.
Credit...Hokyoung Kim
Mr. Suleyman, the DeepMind co-founder, gave a presentation called “The Pitchforkers Are Coming.” A.I. could lead to an explosion in disinformation, he told the board. He fretted that as the technology replaced countless jobs in the coming years, the public would accuse Google of stealing their livelihoods. Google would need to share its wealth with the millions who could no longer find work and provide a “universal basic income,” he argued.
Mr. Musk agreed. But it was pretty clear that his Google guests were not prepared to embark on a redistribution of (their) wealth. Mr. Schmidt said he thought the worries were completely overblown. In his usual whisper, Mr. Page agreed. A.I. would create more jobs than it took away, he argued.
Eight months later, DeepMind had a breakthrough that stunned the A.I community and the world. A DeepMind machine called AlphaGo beat one of the world’s best players at the ancient game of Go. The game, streamed over the internet, was watched by 200 million people across the globe. Most researchers had assumed that A.I. needed another 10 years to muster the ingenuity to do that.
Rationalists, effective altruists and others who worried about the risks of A.I. claimed the computer’s win validated their fears.
“This is another indication that A.I. is progressing faster than even many experts anticipated,” Victoria Krakovna, who would soon join DeepMind as an “A.I. safety” researcher, wrote in a blog post.
DeepMind’s founders were increasingly worried about what Google would do with their inventions. In 2017, they tried to break away from the company. Google responded by increasing the salaries and stock award packages of the DeepMind founders and their staff. They stayed put.
The ethics board never had a second meeting.
The Breakup
Convinced that Mr. Page’s optimistic view of A.I. was dead wrong, and angry at his loss of DeepMind, Mr. Musk built his own lab.
OpenAI was founded in late 2015, just a few months after he met with Sam Altman at the Rosewood hotel in Silicon Valley. Mr. Musk pumped money into the lab, and his former PayPal buddies, Mr. Hoffman and Mr. Thiel, came along for the ride. The three men and others pledged to put $1 billion into the project, which Mr. Altman, who was 30 at the time, would help run. To get them started, they poached Ilya Sutskever from Google. (Dr. Sutskever was one of the graduate students Google “bought” in Dr. Hinton’s auction.)
Initially, Mr. Musk wanted to operate OpenAI as a nonprofit, free from the economic incentives that were driving Google and other corporations. But by the time Google wowed the tech community with its Go stunt, Mr. Musk was changing his mind about how it should be run. He desperately wanted OpenAI to invent something that would capture the world’s imagination and close the gap with Google, but it wasn’t getting the job done as a nonprofit.
In late 2017, he hatched a plan to wrest control of the lab from Mr. Altman and the other founders and transform it into a commercial operation that would join forces with Tesla and rely on supercomputers the car company was developing, according to four people familiar with the matter.
When Mr. Altman and others pushed back, Mr. Musk quit and said he would focus on his own A.I. work at Tesla. In February 2018, he announced his departure to OpenAI’s staff on the top floor of the start-up’s offices in a converted truck factory, three people who attended the meeting said. When he said that OpenAI needed to move faster, one researcher retorted at the meeting that Mr. Musk was being reckless.
Mr. Musk called the researcher a “jackass” and stormed out, taking his deep pockets with him.
OpenAI suddenly needed new financing in a hurry. Mr. Altman flew to Sun Valley for a conference and ran into Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive. A tie-up seemed natural. Mr. Altman knew Microsoft’s chief technology officer, Kevin Scott. Microsoft had bought LinkedIn from Mr. Hoffman, an OpenAI board member. Mr. Nadella told Mr. Scott to get it done. The deal closed in 2019.
Mr. Altman and OpenAI had formed a for-profit company under the original nonprofit, they had $1 billion in fresh capital, and Microsoft had a new way to build artificial intelligence into its vast cloud computing service.
Not everyone inside OpenAI was happy.
Dario Amodei, a researcher with ties to the effective altruist community, had been on hand at the Rosewood hotel when OpenAI was born. Dr. Amodei, who endlessly twisted his curls between his fingers as he talked, was leading the lab’s efforts to build a neural network called a large language model that could learn from enormous amounts of digital text. By analyzing countless Wikipedia articles, digital books and message boards, it could generate text on its own. It also had the unfortunate habit of making things up. It was called GPT-3, and it was released in the summer of 2020.
Researchers inside OpenAI, Google and other companies thought this rapidly improving technology could be a path to A.G.I.
But Dr. Amodei was unhappy about the Microsoft deal because he thought it was taking OpenAI in a really commercial direction. He and other researchers went to the board to try to push Mr. Altman out, according to five people familiar with the matter. After they failed, they left. Like DeepMind’s founders before them, they worried that their new corporate overlords would favor commercial interests over safety.
In 2021, the group of about 15 engineers and scientists created a new lab called Anthropic. The plan was to build A.I. the way the effective altruists thought it should done — with very tight controls.
“There was no attempt to remove Sam Altman from OpenAI by the co-founders of Anthropic,” said an Anthropic spokeswoman, Sally Aldous. “The co-founders themselves came to the conclusion that they wished to depart OpenAI to start their own company, made this known to OpenAI’s leadership, and over several weeks negotiated an exit on mutually agreeable terms.”
Anthropic accepted a $4 billion investment from Amazon and another $2 billion from Google two years later.
The Reveal
After OpenAI received another $2 billion from Microsoft, Mr. Altman and another senior executive, Greg Brockman, visited Bill Gates at his sprawling mansion on the shores of Lake Washington, outside Seattle. The Microsoft founder was no longer involved in the company day to day but kept in regular touch with its executives.
Credit...Hokyoung Kim
Over dinner, Mr. Gates told them he doubted that large language models could work. He would stay skeptical, he said, until the technology performed a task that required critical thinking — passing an A.P. biology test, for instance.
Five months later, on Aug. 24, 2022, Mr. Altman and Mr. Brockman returned and brought along an OpenAI researcher named Chelsea Voss. Ms. Voss had been a medalist in an international biology Olympiad as a high schooler. Mr. Nadella and other Microsoft executives were there, too.
On a huge digital display on a stand outside Mr. Gates’s living room, the OpenAI crew presented a technology called GPT-4.
Mr. Brockman gave the system a multiple-choice advanced biology test, and Ms. Voss graded the answers. The first question involved polar molecules, groups of atoms with a positive charge at one end and a negative charge at the other. The system answered correctly and explained its choice. “It was only trained to provide an answer,” Mr. Brockman said. “The conversational nature kind of fell out, almost magically.” In other words, it was doing things they hadn’t really designed it to do.
There were 60 questions. GPT-4 got only one answer wrong.
Mr. Gates sat up in his chair, his eyes opened wide. In 1980, he had a similar reaction when researchers showed him the graphical user interface that became the basis for the modern personal computer. He thought GPT was that revolutionary.
By October, Microsoft was adding the technology across its online services, including its Bing search engine. And two months later OpenAI released its ChatGPT chatbot, which is now used by 100 million people every week.
OpenAI had beat the effective altruists at Anthropic. Mr. Page’s optimists at Google scurried to release their own chatbot, Bard, but were widely perceived to have lost the race to OpenAI. Three months after ChatGPT’s release, Google stock was down 11 percent. Mr. Musk was nowhere to be found.
But it was just the beginning.
Susan Beachy contributed research.
Cade Metz is a technology reporter and the author of “Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A.I. to Google, Facebook, and The World.” He covers artificial intelligence, driverless cars, robotics, virtual reality and other emerging areas. More about Cade Metz
Karen Weise writes about technology and is based in Seattle. Her coverage focuses on Amazon and Microsoft, two of the most powerful companies in America. More about Karen Weise
Nico Grant is a technology reporter covering Google from San Francisco. Previously, he spent five years at Bloomberg News, where he focused on Google and cloud computing. More about Nico Grant
Mike Isaac is a technology correspondent for The Times based in San Francisco. He regularly covers Facebook and Silicon Valley. More about Mike Isaac
The New York Times · by Mike Isaac · December 3, 2023
20. The Who’s Who Behind the Modern Artificial Intelligence Movement
I note that there is not a single woman on this list. What does that mean?
The Who’s Who Behind the Modern Artificial Intelligence Movement
By J. Edward Moreno
Dec. 3, 2023, 5:04 a.m. ET
The New York Times · by J. Edward Moreno · December 3, 2023
Before chatbots exploded in popularity, a group of researchers, tech executives and venture capitalists had worked for more than a decade to fuel A.I.
From left, Larry Page, Demis Hassabis and Elon Musk have all made significant contributions to the development of modern artificial intelligence.Credit...Daniel Acker/Bloomberg News; pool photo by Toby Melville; and Amir Hamja/ The New York Times
Dec. 3, 2023, 5:04 a.m. ET
While artificial intelligence has taken the limelight over the past year, technology that can appear to operate like human brains has been top of mind for researchers, investors and tech executives in Silicon Valley and beyond for more than a decade.
Here are some of the people involved in the origins of the modern A.I. movement who have influenced the technology’s development.
Credit...Jim Wilson/The New York Times
Sam Altman
Mr. Altman is the chief executive of OpenAI, the San Francisco A.I. lab that made the chatbot ChatGPT that went viral over the past year and ushered in recognition of the power of generative artificial intelligence. Mr. Altman helped start OpenAI after meeting with Elon Musk about the technology in 2015. At the time, Mr. Altman ran Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley start-up incubator.
Credit...Massimo Berruti for The New York Times
Dario Amodei
Mr. Amodei, an A.I. researcher who joined OpenAI early on, runs the A.I. start-up Anthropic. A former researcher at Google, he helped set OpenAI’s research direction but left in 2021 after disagreements about the path the company was taking. That year, he founded Anthropic, which is dedicated to creating safe A.I. systems.
Credit...Calla Kessler for The New York Times
Bill Gates
Mr. Gates, a founder of Microsoft and for many years the richest man in the world, was long skeptical of how powerful A.I. could become. Then in August 2022, he was given a demonstration of OpenAI’s GPT-4, the A.I. model underlying ChatGPT. After seeing what GPT-4 could do, Mr. Gates became an A.I. convert. His endorsement helped Microsoft move aggressively to capitalize on generative A.I.
Demis Hassabis
Mr. Hassabis, a neuroscientist, is a founder of DeepMind, one of the most important labs of this wave of A.I. He secured financial backing to create DeepMind from the investor Peter Thiel and built a lab that produced AlphaGo, an A.I. software that shocked the world in 2016 when it beat the world’s best player of the board game Go. (Mr. Hassabis was an award-winning chess player as a teenager.) Google bought DeepMind, which is based in Britain, in 2014, and Mr. Hassabis is one of the company’s top A.I. executives.
Credit...Chloe Ellingson for The New York Times
Geoffrey Hinton
A professor at the University of Toronto, Mr. Hinton and two of his graduate students were responsible for neural networks, a key underlying technology of this wave of A.I. Neural networks captivated the tech industry, and Google quickly agreed to pay Mr. Hinton and his crew $44 million in 2012 to bring them on, beating out Microsoft and Baidu, a Chinese tech company.
Credit...Clara Mokri for The New York Times
Reid Hoffman
Mr. Hoffman, a former PayPal executive who founded LinkedIn and became a venture capitalist, was — alongside Mr. Musk and Mr. Thiel — part of a group that invested $1 billion in OpenAI.
Credit...Amir Hamja/The New York Times
Elon Musk
Mr. Musk, who leads Tesla and founded SpaceX, helped to establish OpenAI in 2015. He has long been concerned about A.I.’s potential dangers. At the time, he sought to position OpenAI, a nonprofit, as a more ethical counterweight to other tech companies. Mr. Musk left OpenAI in 2018 after disagreements with Mr. Altman.
Credit...Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
Satya Nadella
Mr. Nadella, the chief executive of Microsoft, spearheaded the company’s investments in OpenAI in 2019 and this year, committing $13 billion to the start-up over that period. Microsoft has since gone whole hog on A.I., incorporating OpenAI’s technology into its Bing search engine and across many of its other products.
Credit...Jeff Chiu/Associated Press
Larry Page
Mr. Page, who founded Google with Sergey Brin, has long been a proponent of A.I. and its benefits. He pushed for Google’s acquisition of DeepMind in 2014. Mr. Page has a more optimistic view of A.I. than others, telling Silicon Valley executives that robots and humans will live harmoniously one day.
Peter Thiel
Mr. Thiel, a PayPal executive turned venture capitalist who made much of his fortune from an early investment in Facebook, was a key investor in early A.I. labs. He poured money into DeepMind and, later, OpenAI.
Credit...Jason Henry for The New York Times
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Mr. Yudkowsky, an internet philosopher and self-taught A.I. researcher, helped seed much of the philosophical thinking around the technology. He was a leader in a community who called themselves Rationalists or, in later years, effective altruists, and who believed in the power of A.I. but also worried the technology could destroy people. Mr. Yudkowsky hosted an annual conference (funded by Mr. Thiel) on A.I., where Mr. Hassabis met Mr. Thiel and secured his backing for DeepMind.
Credit...Loren Elliott for The New York Times
Mark Zuckerberg
Mr. Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has pushed for A.I. for at least a decade. Recognizing the power of the technology, he tried to buy DeepMind, before Google made the winning bid. He then went on a hiring spree to bring aboard A.I. talent to Facebook.
Reporting was contributed by Cade Metz, Karen Weise, Nico Grant and Mike Isaac.
J. Edward Moreno is the 2023 David Carr fellow at The Times. More about J. Edward Moreno
The New York Times · by J. Edward Moreno · December 3, 2023
De Oppresso Liber,
David Maxwell
Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy
Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation
Editor, Small Wars Journal
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Phone: 202-573-8647
email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
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