Building upon some themes from my last post, I wanted to talk about some concerns that were triggered by another article pertaining to Russia, this time about whether there will be “opportunities” for Russia in connection with climate change.

The article in question takes one supposed benefit of climate change – warmer temperatures in some parts of Russia – and divorces it from the other effects that will likely come from climate change. Of course, this is not how ecology works as the natural world is an interconnected system. Sudden and extreme climate change will, among other things, also bring about new disease outbreaks in humans, animals, trees, and crops. How much will these new disease outbreaks cost Russia? There is no mention of this by the author. Furthermore, the Russian government has recently acknowledged that the effects of climate change are occurring in Russia at a rate that is 2.5 times the global average due to its geographical location. It also admitted that it will take enormous amounts of money to mitigate the likely infrastructure damage that will result in the coming years.

I understand that a lot of us are happy to see any western media articles that provide even a remotely positive characterization of Russia. Unfortunately, this particular article seems to be more in the tradition of trying to put a smiley face on climate change so that people will be lulled into thinking we don’t really have to do much about it, that we won’t have to significantly change our economic system or lifestyle in any meaningful way because scrappy farmers and capitalists will use technology to solve the problem. Corporate interests want people to think like this so we can keep the party that benefits them going as long as possible. As I reiterated in my last post, U.S. corporations are legally organized to maximize profit with no concern for the costs to humanity or the environment. As many articles over the past couple of years show, many climate scientists have stated that the rate and intensity of the problem is worse than they’d thought. This is simply not sustainable. As Einstein once said, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

This reminds me of the concept of progress traps – how new technologies that are supposed to facilitate progress often create several new problems that then have to be addressed, often with more technology, creating a vicious cycle. This was discussed by historian/anthropologist Ronald Wright, in his book A Short History of Progress. In that book, “Wright illustrates how various cultures throughout history have literally manufactured their own end by producing an overabundance of innovation and stripping bare the very elements that allowed them to initially advance.”

Wright discusses the basic principles of his book in the interview below:

This is all to say that I’m deeply skeptical of the idea that the profound challenges of climate change are going to provide real “opportunities” for any country. It is much more likely that it will be a matter of which countries can do better damage control.

In early December, Russian president Vladimir Putin participated in a video conference about the future role of artificial intelligence (AI). During that conference, when prompted with a question about whether AI could run the country someday, Putin said he hoped not and explained the shortcomings of AI. As reported by the private Russian news agency, Interfax, here was his response:

AI has neither a heart, nor soul, nor compassion or conscience, Putin said.

“All these components are extremely important in people who are vested by their citizens with special powers to make and implement decisions to the benefit of the country,” he said.

At times, presidents do have to make decisions which may not seem quite rational at first glance, Putin said. “They have to be based on history, culture, current practices, the aspirations and expectation of the country’s citizens. These social sector decisions sometimes seem irrational in the area of pension security, health care, and other spheres of human activity,” he said.

“For a human president, they seem and are justified, because he makes decisions in the interests of living human beings, not machines,” he said.

AI could be a good helper and teacher for anyone, including the head of state, Putin said.

“The role and significance of AI in public administration will doubtlessly grow. I’m very hopeful, Afina, that your colleagues will make relevant decisions with the realization of their responsibility, should they work with heads of state,” he said.

Putin made some very good points about the limitations and even dangers of AI, which I don’t think are being considered nearly enough. I have heard it stated very succinctly that AI would make the perfect psychopath – having an intellect of sorts but none of the components that most human minds have that serve as potential brakes on destructive behavior.

I had a Lyft driver engage me in a conversation about AI several weeks back. He seemed to be – as many others are – enamored of the potential of AI to perform all sorts of neat tricks in our post-modern world. But he didn’t discuss any of the possible problems. I finally asked him how it would be possible to program empathy or holistic human experience into a machine. He admitted he didn’t know. I also asked him if he thought that human morality was keeping up with the pace of its technological advance. He confessed that he thought it wasn’t.

While it’s never fun to play the role of Debbie Downer, I was glad that I may have chastened his enthusiasm for AI long enough to think the implications through more thoroughly. It’s something that modern humans seem to have a real blind spot about. We’re very good at thinking to our short-term advantage and getting taken in by the bright and shiny and easy gratification, but not so much about the long-term, larger context, unintended consequences, etc. We also have institutions that encourage this kind of poor thinking, such as corporations that are legally structured to maximize profits with little-to-no concern for the long-term human and environmental consequences.

Unfortunately, Putin’s expressed understanding of the problems of AI hasn’t stopped Russia from pursuing AI in the context of war aka killer robots.

Granted, the nature of international military competition and the constant advancing of policies by the U.S. and NATO that unnecessarily increase tensions on Russia’s borders, surely contributes to this policy decision. The U.S. is certainly not shying away from the potential use of killer robots either.

However, the potential dangers of the use of autonomous AI machines by any country in this context should concern us all. Peace and human rights activists sounded the alarm about this in 2014 with an open letter signed by dozens of activists, including numerous Nobel Peace Prize winners, on the eve of a United Nations conference in Geneva, Switzerland that year to discuss the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW), otherwise known as the Inhumane Weapons Convention, stating that the use of such technology in war was “unconscionable.”

In 2017, a high-ranking U.S. military general testified before the U.S. Senate that such weapons should be limited in warfare. Common Dreams reported at the time:

Gen. Paul Selva spoke about automation at his confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, saying that the “ethical rules of war” should be kept in place even as artificial intelligence (AI) and drone technology advances, “lest we unleash on humanity a set of robots that we don’t know how to control.”

The Defense Department currently mandates that a human must control all actions taken by a drone. But at the hearing, Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) suggested that by enforcing that requirement, which is set to expire this year, the U.S. could fall behind other countries including Russia.

Of course, General Selva ran with the Russia-as-bogeyman framing and suggested that other countries didn’t necessarily have the same moral compass that the U.S. did in such matters. While the U.S.’s track record in foreign and military matters for decades makes this notion tragically laughable. it is refreshing to hear a military man say that there should be limits on the use of this technology: “‘I don’t think it’s reasonable for us to put robots in charge of whether or not we take a human life,” Selva told the committee.”

Around the same time, Elon Musk also publicly sounded the alarm about this technology before a meeting of U.S. state governors:

Days before Gen. Selva’s hearing, Musk spoke at the National Governors Association about the potential for an uncontrollable contingent of robots in the future.

The inventor acknowledged the risks AI poses for American workers, but added that the concerns go beyond employment. “AI is a fundamental existential risk for human civilization, and I don’t think people fully appreciate that,” Musk said.

He urged governors throughout the U.S. to start thinking seriously now about how to regulate robotics—before AI becomes an issue that’s out of humans’ control.

The very concept of AI arose out of the reductive idea of thinking about the human mind as an information processing unit or a computer. The problems with this framing of the human mind were discussed by Professor Theodore Roszak in a 1986 book called The Cult of Information. Roszak was a professor of psychology at Cal State Hayward (now called Cal State East Bay).

I graduated from Cal State Hayward and my father before me studied psychology there and took a class with Roszak in the 1970’s, which is how I came to be introduced to his work – which also included the development of the field of eco-psychology. Roszak was a brilliant but underrated thinker and in the video below he discusses the problems with using the model of a computer or information processing unit to understand the human mind. He makes some interesting and prescient comments about AI as well as this technology potentially having control of our nuclear arsenal.

Putin held his annual end of the year press conference by video on Thursday. Putin took questions on a number of issues, from the Covid pandemic to how US-Russia relations might fare with the incoming Biden administration. You can read the transcript at the Kremlin website or you can read the highlights from TASS here.

By Negar Mortazavi and Sina Toossi, Middle East Eye, 12/7/20

“My young cousin passed away last week,” an Iranian Twitter user recently lamented. “She needed medication for her cancer that doctors said can’t be found.”

The tweet tragically went on: “Maybe she’d be alongside her little daughter now if she had this medicine and not under a pile of cold dirt.”

These heartbreaking words are from journalist Katayoon Lamezadeh, one of thousands of Iranians who have taken to social media to speak of how sanctions have upended their lives. Their stories reflect the devastating human costs of US economic sanctions that are often ignored by Washington’s foreign policy elite and largely unknown to the American public.

The assassination of Iranian scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh is the latest in a long-running pressure campaign against Iran by the US and its allies such as Israel. However, in the case of sanctions, it is ordinary Iranians who are paying the biggest price. 

The onslaught of sanctions and covert actions on Iran during the Trump era has not elicited concessions from the Iranian government, but it has caused immense pain inside Iran. Today, Iran’s population is being crushed by the twofold blows of US sanctions and the Covid-19 crisis, all while under the yoke of an increasingly repressive government.

Read the full article here.

I’m not as optimistic as Wertheim is but this was an interesting conversation from a mainstream news program, considering that Wertheim is with the Quincy Institute – a think tank that advocates for a more restrained foreign policy.

I’ve heard good things about Wertheim’s book, Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of US Global Supremacy. It has been added to my ever-expanding to-read list. I’m not sure when I will get to it but, in the meantime, here are some excerpts from a review of the book by Daniel Larison at The American Conservative:

The U.S. embarked on a program of global supremacy eighty years ago, and American political leaders and policymakers chose this path much earlier than is commonly believed. To that end, they invented a myth of an “isolationist” America during the 1920s and 1930s, and that myth has been used ever since as the justification for dominance. In the earliest days of WWII before the attack on Pearl Harbor, U.S. policy planners were already imagining a world order with the U.S. at its apex, and they made sure to redefine internationalism so that it applied only to supporters of this new strategy.

Wertheim’s account of this period is compelling and insightful. It is a short volume, but it is very rich in detail. Policy planners were already discussing a U.S. role in terms of supremacy and domination in late 1940. Even before the U.S. was formally at war with the Axis, U.S. planners were drawing up proposals for what one analyst simply described as “world domination by the United States and the British Empire acting in close and continuous collaboration.” The blueprint for America’s postwar role was already being drafted before the U.S. entered the war. The objective, as Wertheim says, was “to maintain armed primacy,” and this was already the goal in 1941 before Japan attacked. This is very different from the standard interpretations of the period, as he makes clear: “Rather than react defensively and belatedly to an objective threat, as most narratives of this period presuppose, U.S. elites did almost the opposite. They expanded their definition of national security, deeming the United States to possess an overriding interest in avoiding ‘isolation’ within the Western Hemisphere.”

Global supremacy was not the logical or inevitable culmination of American history. It was the result of a series of contingent decisions that U.S. policymakers made during the 1940s that laid the foundations for U.S. foreign policy thereafter, and it required the complete reimagining of America’s place in the world.