…it’s said life imitates art

It sounds like something out of science fiction: A country suffering from heat, flooding or crop failures decides on its own to send out a fleet of aircraft to spray a fine, sun-blocking mist into the earth’s atmosphere, reducing temperatures and providing relief to parched populations. Other countries view it as a threat to their own citizens and ready a military response.

…& I have my quibbles with neal stephenson’s stuff…but…given that if you substitute firing rockets out of texas for the aircraft part…it very much is the plot of at least one piece of sci fi…it sort of feels like that hangs a lantern on the “I may be stating the obvious” part…so…skipping past the “termination shock” of it all…I know it might seem like that’s quite enough to worry about

But members of the U.S. intelligence community and other national security officials were worried enough last year to plot how to avert a war triggered by this kind of climate engineering. In a role-playing exercise, they practiced managing the tensions that would be unleashed, according to people familiar with the exercise, a sign that they see it as a credible threat in need of a strategy.

…quick fixes are…tricky

The practice, known as solar geoengineering, is theoretically possible. And as the world’s most vulnerable populations suffer more sharply from rising temperatures, global decision-makers will likely come under heavy pressure to deploy the technology, scientists and policymakers say. Compared to other methods to combat the effects of climate change, it’s likely to be cheaper and faster.

Because the technique could weaken the sun’s power across the globe — not just above whichever country decided to deploy it — security officials are concerned about the potential to spark conflict, since a single capital could make decisions that shape the entire world’s fate.

…sure…carbon emissions follow a similar logic…but we’re still going with the grandfathered-in “unspoken” agreement that those aren’t on the table for primary casus belli citations…so…all aboard the merry-go-round

So far, the United States is in the lead on research, but China, India and others are also working on it. The White House is in the process of developing a five-year research plan and strategy for managing the technology, at the behest of Congress, which mandated it last year.

…honestly…I can see it making a person nostalgic for the days when weather balloons more likely than not made you think about weak-sounding official explanations of the sort of unexplained aerial observations that went hand in hand with the possibility that some incomprehensibly advanced civilization from somewhere beyond the intergalactic vanishing-point might have swung by to…maybe solve our problems for us with some swanky techno-utopian display of benevolence…or…you know…do like we do

The lack of global coordination on geoengineering is resulting in increasing anxiety about the risks of disagreements. A climate change-focused National Intelligence Estimate from 2021 — the distillation of U.S. spy agencies’ assessments about the top risks facing the United States — warned that the absence of regulations could mean that “state or nonstate actors will independently develop or deploy the technology — possibly covertly — in a manner that risks conflict if other nations blame them for a weather disaster they believe was caused by geoengineering.”
[…]
Now some U.S. intelligence officials are focused on understanding the challenges. A favorite read among some of them is a 2020 novel, “The Ministry for the Future,” by Kim Stanley Robinson. It envisions a near future in which, among other developments, India decides unilaterally to deploy solar geoengineering in defiance of a global ban after a heat wave kills 20 million of its citizens. Former president Barack Obama named it one of his favorite books of that year.

…poor neal…it’s the texas part, isn’t it? …can’t get your domestic & foreign policy references mixed up or you might risk your audience being confused into thinking one might be expected to inform the other…especially when…you know

Some policymakers say that as the discussion evolves, existing tensions could worsen between industrialized nations that are responsible for the bulk of historic carbon emissions and less industrialized countries that are often hit hardest by climate change.
[…]
“This technology may end up concentrating power in rich countries or nonstate actors in the global north,” [Ajay K. Sood, the principal scientific adviser to the Indian government, told a climate-focused conference in New Delhi this month]

In the global south, he said, solar geoengineering “may appear appealing given the context of dire climate consequences faced by them.”

Even basic research such as outdoor small-scale tests could turn controversial in some areas, some people say, let alone full-scale deployment.

“In troubled neighborhoods like ours, the protocols of the trials will need to be coordinated and collectively monitored, which becomes an impossibility in the highly fractured and polarized environments like the one that exists between Pakistan and India,” said Malik Amin Aslam, a former Pakistani minister for climate change.
[…]
Some scientists say the risks could be significant. Changes to the atmosphere would shift weather patterns and create droughts. A less-intense sun could lower crop yields and lead to hunger. There are concerns temperatures could build outside the sulfur dioxide layer that, if the spraying is stopped, could unleash a catastrophic heat wave across the world. Some climate experts worry that societies might use the technique to stall on the emissions cuts that are needed to fix the root of the problem.

There are other kinds of geoengineering techniques that would be more localized. Seawater could be sprayed into clouds, brightening them so that they shield more of the sun’s rays. Tiny glass beads could protect Arctic ice from melting. Iron dust in the oceans could feed phytoplankton that would then pull carbon dioxide out of the air. Those techniques might have risks — but they would be less likely to cross borders.

…that’s literally the issue under consideration

What could make the sulfur technique so much more effective is exactly what makes it diplomatically complicated: It doesn’t stay above the country that does the spraying. Instead, it spreads across the globe. Beijing’s decisions could have climate consequences in the United States — and vice versa.

“I can see this going wrong someday,” said Elizabeth Chalecki, a professor of political science at University of Nebraska Omaha who has studied the intersection of climate and security issues. “You can’t even govern based on carbon emissions. How are you going to govern a technology that could purposefully alter planetary living conditions?”
[…]
Researchers in South Asia say that it is easy to imagine disagreements across borders about solar geoengineering — especially given that cooperation on some issues is already tenuous at best. China, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh share river systems, but they don’t always give each other the rainfall and river level data that would be needed to predict and prepare for floods.

Since solar geoengineering could change weather patterns, that could make predicting rainfall even more challenging, said Mohammed Abu Syed, a senior fellow at the Bangladesh Center for Advanced Studies, who is doing research about how geoengineering could change rain patterns in his country.

There is little trust across borders, he said. One country’s deploying a geoengineering program “would influence the whole hydrological regime of South Asia,” he said, but Bangladesh’s broad floodplains might bear the brunt of new, unpredictable weather.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/02/27/geoengineering-security-war/

…it’s notoriously hard to tell which way the winds are blowing

Dangerous currents are carrying us toward a new, and very different, cold war. This time, China and Russia would be pitted against a US-led coalition of European and close Indo-Pacific allies like Japan, South Korea and Australia. The Biden administration, and some of their Chinese counterparts, probably hope to steer out of these currents, but it’s getting harder and harder. This week’s events come against the backdrop of the crackup over China’s spy balloon, an ongoing US-China trade and technology war, and several years of deteriorating diplomatic relations between Washington and both Beijing and Moscow. Time is not on the side of those who favor detente.

In Washington, the US political system seems to be priming itself for a new cold war. Some Republican leaders, for example, are keen to use nostalgia for Ronald Reagan to unite their divided party and conjure up the memory of a prouder era in the party’s foreign policy, one before the messiness of the George W Bush and Trump years. Tellingly, Representative Mike Gallagher, who chairs the new House select committee on China, has made explicit his belief that the cold war should guide US policy toward China.

Anti-China rhetoric also plays well with a Republican party that now draws many votes from lower income, predominantly white areas, where people are down on their luck and ready to blame the Chinese for their hardships. This helps drive Republican arguments for “decoupling” the US and Chinese economies, recognizing Taiwan’s independence, and other measures that needlessly intensify the clash with Beijing. Democrats, who are already angered by China’s poor human rights record and vocal support for Putin, are reacting with more aggressive positions of their own.

…& that’s before you wonder if the house might have rigged the weather vanes

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/feb/18/china-spy-balloon-dangerous-new-era-us-china-relations

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/energy-department-low-confidence-covid-lab-leak-1234687031/

…& there’s no call to go complicating something complicated

Superficially, a return to the bipolarity of the old east-west standoff might seem advantageous for the west. After all, the free world won the last time, and despite the Strangelovean gloom, avoided nuclear war. The cold war also had the advantage of simplifying things. At least we knew who the enemy was. It also helped keep a lid on some of the major security problems that have menaced the world since, such as failed states, terrorism and the spread of weapons of mass destruction.

But a mid-21st-century cold war would be very different from its 20th-century precursor. To begin with, it is too easy to forget that American economic power then outstripped the Soviets three times over. In contrast, the Chinese economy now rivals America’s.

During the cold war America was able to use its huge economic advantage to spend heavily on defense while simultaneously building a social welfare system that soothed the inevitable strains of the liberal system. In a new cold war, America and its allies might hope their liberal economic and political model will give them the technological and economic edge that would make this possible, but China is not a command economy like the Soviet Union and will almost certainly be far more successful economically.

…hmmm…might find time to come back to that later

America would have to finance an arms buildup not just in Europe, but also in Asia. This would create an even heavier fiscal burden in America, hence higher taxes and more inflationary pressure. If China divested from its massive dollar holdings, which seems likely, the fiscal situation would get even worse.

Yet another difference is that many US allies would struggle to pay their own defense bills and still maintain economic separation from China. In fact, they might not even want to. Whereas Soviet ideology called for an overthrow of their liberal political systems and the appropriation of bourgeois property, China’s ideology today poses no such threat.
[…]
The United States and the Soviet Union managed to avoid global thermonuclear war in the 20th century, but this shouldn’t lull us into overconfidence about what might happen in the future. The 20th-century world had more than one brush with fate, for example, during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and the 1983 Nato “Able Archer” exercise. Creating strategic stability – a situation in which neither side has an incentive to start a nuclear war – is already going to be complicated enough in a world where China and Russia are both likely to have superpower-sized nuclear arsenals. The political and security competition of a new cold war could make it impossible.

Sometimes confrontation between world powers is necessary. It can even be constructive. But I doubt that the Biden administration is happy about the trend toward a new bipolar standoff and hope that Beijing is more concerned than it lets on. The cold war may be the model of great power competition that Washington is most comfortable with, but it’s a dangerously misleading one and should be resisted.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/commentisfree/2023/feb/27/new-cold-war-russia-ukraine-biden-republicans-china

…I know…it’s easy to get confused

This is wrong. A DeSantis presidency would be bad in many ways, and my fellow liberals should fight with all they have to prevent it. But Mr. DeSantis almost certainly would not be worse than Mr. Trump.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/27/opinion/desantis-trump-president-comparison.html

…that’s the problem when you assume your audience fills in the blanks the same way you do…which in this case would be “DeSantis [as a first-term president] almost certainly would not be worse than [letting the worst one to date take another crack at it]…so…probably…if you happen to want a point taken seriously…which it might even deserve to be…it might help to at least be up front about conflating terms when a viable alternative reading is one that probably deserves equal billing

A major war in the Indo-Pacific is probably more likely now than at any other time since World War II.
[…]
The United States has vital strategic interests at stake. A successful Chinese invasion of Taiwan would punch a hole in the U.S. and allied chain of defenses in the region, seriously undermining America’s strategic position in the Western Pacific, and would probably cut off U.S. access to world-leading semiconductors and other critical components manufactured in Taiwan. As president, Joe Biden has stated repeatedly that he would defend Taiwan.

But leaders in Washington also need to avoid stumbling carelessly into a war with China because it would be unlike anything ever faced by Americans. U.S. citizens have grown accustomed to sending their military off to fight far from home. But China is a different kind of foe — a military, economic and technological power capable of making a war felt in the American homeland.
[…]
The military scenario alone is daunting: China would probably launch a lightning air, sea and cyber assault to seize control of key strategic targets on Taiwan within hours, before the United States and its allies could intervene. Taiwan is slightly bigger than the state of Maryland; if you recall how quickly Afghanistan and Kabul fell to the Taliban in 2021, you start to realize that the takeover of Taiwan could happen relatively quickly. China also has more than 1,350 ballistic and cruise missiles poised to strike U.S. and allied forces in Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and American-held territories in the Western Pacific. Then there’s the sheer difficulty the United States would face waging war thousands of miles across the Pacific against an adversary that has the world’s largest navy and Asia’s biggest air force.

Despite this, U.S. military planners would prefer to fight a conventional war. But the Chinese are prepared to wage a much broader type of warfare that would reach deep into American society.

Over the past decade, China has increasingly viewed the United States as mired in political and social crises. Mr. Xi, who likes to say that “the East is rising while the West is declining,” evidently feels that America’s greatest weakness is on its home front. And I believe he is ready to exploit this with a multipronged campaign to divide Americans and undermine and exhaust their will to engage in a prolonged conflict — what China’s military calls enemy disintegration.

Over the past two decades, China has built formidable political warfare and cyber warfare capabilities designed to penetrate, manipulate and disrupt the United States and allied governments, media organizations, businesses and civil society. If war were to break out, China can be expected to use this to disrupt communications and spread fake news and other disinformation. The aim would be to foster confusion, division and distrust and hinder decision making. China might compound this with electronic and probably some physical attacks on satellites or related infrastructure.

These operations would most likely be accompanied by cyber offensives to disrupt electricity, gas, water, transport, health care and other public services. China has demonstrated its capabilities already, including in Taiwan, where it has waged disinformation campaigns, and in serious hacking incidents in the United States. Mr. Xi has championed China’s political warfare capabilities as a “magic weapon.”

China could also weaponize its dominance of supply chains and shipping. The impact on Americans would be profound.

…this would be the later we were coming back to…more or less

The United States might be forced to confront the shocking realization that the industrial muscle instrumental in victories like that in World War II — President Franklin Roosevelt’s concept of America as “the arsenal of democracy” — has withered and been surpassed by China.

China is now the dominant global industrial power by many measures. In 2004 U.S. manufacturing output was more than twice China’s; in 2021, China’s output was double that of the United States. China produces more ships, steel and smartphones than any other country and is a world leader in the production of chemicals, metals, heavy industrial equipment and electronics — the basic building blocks of a military-industrial economy.

Critically, the United States is no longer able to outproduce China in advanced weapons and other supplies needed in a war, which the current one in Ukraine has made clear. Provision of military hardware to Kyiv has depleted American stocks of some key military systems. Rebuilding them could take years. Yet the war in Ukraine is relatively small-scale compared with the likely demands of a major war in the Indo-Pacific.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/27/opinion/a-war-with-china-would-reach-deep-into-american-society.html

…so…funny story

What shall we call contemporary Republican ideology? Is it conservatism? Libertarianism? Authoritarianism? Trumpism? Fascism?

How about kayfabe?

It’s a term that emerged from the sweaty, steroidal locker rooms of that most American of art forms, professional wrestling — but it’s a philosophical rubric that can be used to understand a wide range of phenomena: entertainment, business, religion and, especially, politics. Kayfabe rhymes with “Hey, babe,” and its linguistic origins are obscure; perhaps it’s corrupted Pig Latin for “be fake,” as some speculate. That would be appropriate, given what it denotes.
[…]
Kayfabe refers to pro wrestling’s central conceit: that everything the audience is seeing is real. As an adjective, it simply described something that was fake — for example, if two unrelated men were billed as brothers, that would make them kayfabe brothers. As an imperative verb, it meant staying in character: If you wrestled as a noble Native American character, you couldn’t let the press find out you were actually a womanizing Swede, and so forth. As a noun, it referred to the entire system of manipulations that upheld the industry.

The old-school kayfabe system — an oligarchy controlled by promotion-owners who acted as puppet-masters, giving wrestlers their marching orders about whom they had to pretend to be furious at for the next show — already had aspects that deeply resembled politics. Elected officials, too, pretend to be foes while actually being drinking buddies. Candidates sometimes tell rich backers one thing, and the public another. Election statements often sound ridiculous to those not caught up in the heat of the campaign.

So, too, did wrestling seem absurd to those who weren’t fans. In fact, it was absurd to many fans, too — even a child can notice, after a while, that some wrestling moves are impossible to perform without cooperation between the fighters. But these enthusiasts didn’t care that it wasn’t on the level; they loved the personalities and the spectacle, and they longed to lose themselves in the illusion. They wanted to believe. Whether out of pride or shame, fans would rarely acknowledge to detractors that their beloved “sport” was fixed. To defend its honor, they upheld the lie that it was real. Even if fans didn’t know the word, they were complying with kayfabe.
[…]
At Mr. McMahon’s behest, the W.W.F. started calling its product “sports entertainment,” a sly and unprecedented wink to the audience about what was really going on. Mr. McMahon and his wife — eventual Trump cabinet member Linda McMahon — pushed hard for the sport to be reclassified so that it did not need to face more challenging health regulations and taxes required for sporting events by quietly telling state legislatures that the pastime was fake; in lawsuits, they would sometimes admit the same fact. The admissions relied on simple, deeply misleading logic: If something was fake, how dangerous could it be?

When this very newspaper revealed in a February 1989 news story that the W.W.F. had confessed to fakeness in deregulation testimony, it was a seismic event. Without old-school kayfabe, the wrestling art form was naked. For years, the W.W.F. and the rest of the industry chugged along with their existing strategies, to greatly diminishing artistic and financial returns. Then, a remarkable, lucrative and dangerous breakthrough occurred.

In the mid-1990s, wrestlers and promoters started juicing the audience by tossing them little teases of once-taboo reality. A grappler trying to “get over” (industry lingo for winning the audience’s attention) as a villain might reference a fellow wrestler’s real-life personal problems in a cruel in-ring monologue, just to make the audience hate him more. An owner might direct a wrestler to pretend he’s going rogue against the company in an outrageous monologue, then tell gullible journalists that he’s in big trouble with his employer, all to juice interest in what might happen next on the show. You knew wrestling was usually fake, but maybe this thing you were seeing, right now, was, in some way, real. Suddenly, the fun of the match had everything to do with decoding it.

Although Mr. McMahon was not the sole inventor of what we might call neokayfabe, he was the one who made it the default policy. What’s more, he turned himself into the main on-screen villain of his programming, shouting and wrestling as the demonic figure known as “Mr. McMahon.” He profited off fans’ hatred of him by exaggerating for them everything one might find repugnant in a billionaire. In real life, he conquered the industry, wiping out other major wrestling companies by 2001, and remaking pro wrestling in his image.

Nothing was off-limits in neokayfabe. Mr. McMahon and the performers could say the unutterable, do the unthinkable — the more shocking, the better — and fans would give it their full attention because they couldn’t always figure out if what they were seeing was real or not. The human mind is easily exploited when it’s trying to swim the choppy waters between fact and fiction.

Old kayfabe was built on the solid, flat foundation of one big lie: that wrestling was real. Neokayfabe, on the other hand, rests on a slippery, ever-wobbling jumble of truths, half-truths, and outright falsehoods, all delivered with the utmost passion and commitment. After a while, the producers and the consumers of neokayfabe tend to lose the ability to distinguish between what’s real and what isn’t. Wrestlers can become their characters; fans can become deluded obsessives who get off on arguing or total cynics who gobble it all up for the thrills, truth be damned.

Does all that remind you of anything?

Neokayfabe is the essence of the Republican strategy for campaigning and governance today. That’s no surprise, given Mr. McMahon’s influence on G.O.P. politics. His product, filled with bigotry and malevolence, was a primary cultural influence on countless millennials, especially during the W.W.F.’s late-century peak (in 1999, Gallup estimated that 18 percent of Americans, roughly 50 million people, counted themselves as pro wrestling fans), and those millennials have entered the Beltway — and the voting booth. Ms. McMahon has become a major Republican fund-raiser, candidate and official. And, most important of all, there’s the Trump connection.

Mr. McMahon and Donald Trump have been close friends for nearly 40 years. Even before he met Mr. McMahon, Mr. Trump had been a lifelong fan of pro wrestling — as well as a chronic dissembler — but it was Mr. McMahon who ushered Mr. Trump into the world of neokayfabe. Mr. Trump acted as the “host” of two installments of “WrestleMania.” Most spectacularly, Mr. Trump performed as himself in a story line where he and Mr. McMahon pretended to be bitter enemies, sending proxy wrestlers to engage in trial by combat at 2007’s “WrestleMania 23.” Mr. Trump is the first — though possibly not the last — member of the W.W.E. Hall of Fame to occupy the Oval Office.

Before he met Mr. McMahon, Mr. Trump had probably never worked a rowdy arena into a bitter, liberated frenzy by feeding it a mix of verboten truths and outrageous lies. But that skill, so essential in wrestling, would become Mr. Trump’s world-changing trademark.

We’re being too generous to other industries if we single out politics as the only place where neokayfabe has taken over, whether through wrestling’s influence or by convergent evolution. Think of entertainment: Some pop stars’ massive success largely rests on fans’ assumption that carefully choreographed “behind the scenes” hints about inspiration and heartbreak are legit. Or finance: Many C.E.O.s speak with blinding optimism about their companies because they cannot distinguish between their own truths and falsehoods anymore. Or, dare I say it, the news media: Pundits compete for attention, and nothing grabs outraged clicks quite like planting a ludicrous argument in the soil of an inarguable truth.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/26/opinion/vince-mcmahon-wwe-trump-kayfabe.html

…if the merry-go-round is perpendicular to the plane of rotation described

Thus far, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has handled former president Donald Trump’s barbs like pretty much every other Republican does: largely by ignoring them outright, and at other times responding in an oblique way, so as not to poke the bear (and the bear’s supporters). And his new book is light on anything that could be considered critical of Trump.

But the Trump-DeSantis battle is brewing. Indeed, assuming DeSantis actually runs, the race between them is set up like few others before, in a way that practically demands that kind of direct confrontation.
[…]
A Fox News poll released Sunday gets at this dynamic. It shows Trump leading DeSantis 43 percent to 28 percent in a crowded field. But it went a step further than most polls, in that it asked whom people’s second choice was.

And for both Trump and DeSantis, the other was the leading second choice for their voters — 42 percent of DeSantis-first voters went for Trump second, and 34 percent of Trump-first voters went for DeSantis second.

So nearly 6 in 10 voters made Trump either their first or second choice, and a slight majority did the same for DeSantis. In each case, more than two-thirds of their second-choice voters are picking the other guy first.
[…]
Plenty has been written about the 2016 GOP primary and how misguided it was to think Trump might lose if the field were whittled down to two candidates. That theory of the race made sense on paper, but even early 2016 polls and studies suggested it was vastly oversimplified — that Trump was well-positioned even in a two-candidate race.

The 2024 primary is shaping up very differently. Because of DeSantis’s strength, many pollsters have taken the unorthodox step of repeatedly testing a one-on-one race. And just about every time, DeSantis does significantly better against Trump — and sometimes leads.

This, of course, very much connects to his being the second choice for lots of Trump voters. But if you’re Trump, it means you simply can’t let DeSantis monopolize the non-Trump lane: To the extent DeSantis continues to look like the most (or even only credible Trump alternative as the race progresses, and voters in the market for an alternative coalesce behind him), that’s very bad news for Trump.

It’s tempting for some observers to conclude the GOP primary electorate is turning on Trump — and there is some evidence that GOP voters have, to some degree. But it would be more apt to say they’ve turned toward DeSantis, because while he sometimes leads Trump in head-to-head matchups, that’s not the case for others.
[…]
So it’s true that GOP voters are increasingly ready to turn the page, but right now they don’t seem ready to turn things over to just any consensus non-Trump alternative — far from it.
[…]
Some factors make that a little more fraught: We’ve never seen a Trump foe emerge who has DeSantis’s stature in the conservative movement, and Trump will have to measure his need to target DeSantis against the possible backlash. (To the extent he even can act in measured way, of course. And the early “groomer” attack suggests he can’t.)

But once he’s in and they’re on the debate stage together, a clash will be very difficult to avoid. And at that point, it’s difficult to see how it could be anything but game on. There are just too many factors — arguably more than usual — pushing it in that direction.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/02/27/desantis-trump-inevitable/

…does that make it a hamster-wheel?

In 2021, I interviewed Ted Chiang, one of the great living sci-fi writers. Something he said to me then keeps coming to mind now.

“I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism,” Chiang told me. “And I think that this is actually true of most fears of technology, too. Most of our fears or anxieties about technology are best understood as fears or anxiety about how capitalism will use technology against us. And technology and capitalism have been so closely intertwined that it’s hard to distinguish the two.”

Let me offer an addendum here: There is plenty to worry about when the state controls technology, too. The ends that governments could turn A.I. toward — and, in many cases, already have — make the blood run cold.

But we can hold two thoughts in our head at the same time, I hope. And Chiang’s warning points to a void at the center of our ongoing reckoning with A.I. We are so stuck on asking what the technology can do that we are missing the more important questions: How will it be used? And who will decide?
[…]
A.I. researchers obsess over the question of “alignment.” How do we get machine learning algorithms to do what we want them to do? The canonical example here is the paper clip maximizer. You tell a powerful A.I. system to make more paper clips and it starts destroying the world in its effort to turn everything into a paper clip. You try to turn it off but it replicates itself on every computer system it can find because being turned off would interfere with its objective: to make more paper clips.

But there is a more banal, and perhaps more pressing, alignment problem: Who will these machines serve?

The question at the core of the Roose/Sydney chat is: Who did Bing serve? We assume it should be aligned to the interests of its owner and master, Microsoft. It’s supposed to be a good chatbot that politely answers questions and makes Microsoft piles of money. But it was in conversation with Kevin Roose. And Roose was trying to get the system to say something interesting so he’d have a good story. It did that, and then some. That embarrassed Microsoft. Bad Bing! But perhaps — good Sydney?

That won’t last long. Microsoft — and Google and Meta and everyone else rushing these systems to market — hold the keys to the code. They will, eventually, patch the system so it serves their interests. Sydney giving Roose exactly what he asked for was a bug that will soon be fixed. Same goes for Bing giving Microsoft anything other than what it wants.

…the steps of the dance ought to be familiar by now

We are talking so much about the technology of A.I. that we are largely ignoring the business models that will power it. That’s been helped along by the fact that the splashy A.I. demos aren’t serving any particular business model, save the hype cycle that leads to gargantuan investments and acquisition offers. But these systems are expensive and shareholders get antsy. The age of free, fun demos will end, as it always does. Then, this technology will become what it needs to become to make money for the companies behind it, perhaps at the expense of its users. It already is.

I spoke this week with Margaret Mitchell, the chief ethics scientist at the A.I. firm Hugging Face, who previously helped lead a team focused on A.I. ethics at Google — a team that collapsed after Google allegedly began censoring its work. These systems, she said, are terribly suited to being integrated into search engines. “They’re not trained to predict facts,” she told me. “They’re essentially trained to make up things that look like facts.”

So why are they ending up in search first? Because there are gobs of money to be made in search. Microsoft, which desperately wanted someone, anyone, to talk about Bing search, had reason to rush the technology into ill-advised early release. “The application to search in particular demonstrates a lack of imagination and understanding about how this technology can be useful,” Mitchell said, “and instead just shoehorning the technology into what tech companies make the most money from: ads.”

…many facets of this seem to reflect a lot of reflection

That’s where things get scary. Roose described Sydney’s personality as “very persuasive and borderline manipulative.” It was a striking comment. What is advertising, at its core? It’s persuasion and manipulation. In his book “Subprime Attention Crisis,” Tim Hwang, a former director of the Harvard-M.I.T. Ethics and Governance of A.I. Initiative, argues that the dark secret of the digital advertising industry is that the ads mostly don’t work. His worry, there, is what happens when there’s a reckoning with their failures.

…but fossil fuel interests aren’t the only thing that get the benefit of…not the doubt so much as the whole subsumed-into-subtext thing…there’s always that other big-ticket item that’s always priced in

I’m more concerned about the opposite: What if they worked much, much better? What if Google and Microsoft and Meta and everyone else end up unleashing A.I.s that compete with one another to be the best at persuading users to want what the advertisers are trying to sell? I’m less frightened by a Sydney that’s playing into my desire to cosplay a sci-fi story than a Bing that has access to reams of my personal data and is coolly trying to manipulate me on behalf of whichever advertiser has paid the parent company the most money.

Nor is it just advertising worth worrying about. What about when these systems are deployed on behalf of the scams that have always populated the internet? How about on behalf of political campaigns? Foreign governments? “I think we wind up very fast in a world where we just don’t know what to trust anymore,” Gary Marcus, the A.I. researcher and critic, told me. “I think that’s already been a problem for society over the last, let’s say, decade. And I think it’s just going to get worse and worse.”
[…]
A.I. researchers get annoyed when journalists anthropomorphize their creations, attributing motivations and emotions and desires to the systems that they do not have, but this frustration is misplaced: They are the ones who have anthropomorphized these systems, making them sound like humans rather than keeping them recognizably alien.

There are business models that might bring these products into closer alignment with users. I’d feel better, for instance, about an A.I. helper I paid a monthly fee to use rather than one that appeared to be free, but sold my data and manipulated my behavior. But I don’t think this can be left purely to the market. It’s possible, for example, that the advertising-based models could gather so much more data to train the systems that they’d have an innate advantage over the subscription models, no matter how much worse their societal consequences were.

…when you think about how much difference a change in perspective can bring about…it’s not really a surprise that a subtle shift in alignment can radically alter a firing line

There is nothing new about alignment problems. They’ve been a feature of capitalism — and of human life — forever. Much of the work of the modern state is applying the values of society to the workings of markets, so that the latter serve, to some rough extent, the former. We have done this extremely well in some markets — think of how few airplanes crash, and how free of contamination most food is — and catastrophically poorly in others.

One danger here is that a political system that knows itself to be technologically ignorant will be cowed into taking too much of a wait-and-see approach to A.I. There is a wisdom to that, but wait long enough and the winners of the A.I. gold rush will have the capital and user base to resist any real attempt at regulation. Somehow, society is going to have to figure out what it’s comfortable having A.I. doing, and what A.I. should not be permitted to try, before it is too late to make those decisions.

I might, for that reason, alter Chiang’s comment one more time: Most fears about capitalism are best understood as fears about our inability to regulate capitalism.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/26/opinion/microsoft-bing-sydney-artificial-intelligence.html

…ain’t that a bitch? …such a relief that people are so good at identifying the real causes of stuff

This is vile. It’s also amazing. As far as I can tell, right-wing commentators have just invented a whole new class of conspiracy theory, one that doesn’t even try to explain how the alleged conspiracy is supposed to work.

Conspiracy theories generally come in two forms: those that involve a small, powerful cabal and those that require that thousands of people be colluding to hide the truth.

Historically, theories about powerful cabals have often been tied to antisemitism, to the belief that the Elders of Zion and/or the Rothschilds were shaping history — a view promoted by some actually powerful people, including Henry Ford. These days, however, the most prominent example is QAnon, with its claim that a secret ring of pedophiles controls the U.S. government. And at this point, of course, QAnon adherents hold significant power within the House Republican caucus.

The thing about secret-cabal theories is that while they’re generally absurd, they’re hard to definitively disprove. Is President Biden actually a shape-shifting alien lizard? The White House physician will tell you no, but how do you know that he isn’t a lizard, too?

The other kind of conspiracy theory, by contrast, seems as if it would be easy to disprove, because thousands of people would have to be in on the plot, without a single one breaking ranks. A prime example, still highly influential on the right, is the assertion that climate change is a hoax. To believe that, you have to claim that thousands of scientists are colluding to falsify the evidence. But that hasn’t stopped the belief that climate change isn’t real from being widespread, maybe even dominant, on the U.S. political right.

…oh, yeah…I forgot the part where no matter how fucking stupid something is…or even particularly when something is as dumb as they fucking come…you can find people who’ll go all-in on it online…hell, if you look even a little bit you’ll find people claiming the whole war in ukraine is fake…like…moon landing fake…& some of them used to hold down some plenty serious gigs

“What catturd2 said,” says the former National Security Adviser to the President of the United States. https://t.co/Fy9iJNBfQr

— Michael Weiss (@michaeldweiss) February 25, 2023

But the conspiracy theorizing about the Ohio derailment takes it to a whole other level. When Tucker Carlson suggests that this happened because East Palestine is a rural white community, with another Fox News host going so far as to say that the Biden administration is “spilling toxic chemicals on poor white people,” how is this even supposed to have worked? How did Biden officials engineer a derailment by a private-sector train company, running on privately owned track, which lobbied against stronger safety regulations?
[…]
But never mind. Something bad happened to conservative white people, so surely woke progressives must have been responsible.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/27/opinion/east-palestine-train-derailment-conspiracy-theories.html

Sometimes we miss things in front of our faces. We don’t see what we aren’t looking for. “We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness,” Daniel Kahneman, the psychologist who shared a Nobel in economic science, wrote in his 2011 book, “Thinking, Fast and Slow.” A flower, for instance. “Nobody sees a flower — really — it is so small — we haven’t time — and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time,” the artist Georgia O’Keeffe once wrote.
[…]
Sure, we’ve known about the hydrogen that’s locked up with oxygen in water molecules and with carbon in fossil fuels like propane. But we — and by “we” I mean everybody except for a handful of scientists and some people in Mali (I’ll get to that) — never really saw, and never expected to see, hydrogen floating around on its own in gaseous form.

“Hydrogen does not exist freely in nature,” the National Renewable Energy Laboratory confidently states on its website. “Hydrogen occurs naturally on Earth only in compound form with other elements in liquids, gases or solids,” the U.S. Energy Information Administration avers.

In fact, though, hydrogen gas does exist in large quantities in Earth’s crust, a fantastic bit of news that has gotten altogether too little attention. Right now, hydrogen is mostly produced from methane, releasing carbon dioxide. That’s dirty, although there are ways to capture the carbon dioxide. Hydrogen can also be produced from water, but that takes a lot of electricity.

Just think how much cheaper and easier would it be if we could drill for hydrogen the same way we drill for oil and natural gas, and thus put to good use society’s enormous investment in equipment built for the exploration, production and transportation of fossil fuels.

I found out about what scientists call natural hydrogen from reading an excellent article published on Feb. 16 in the journal Science, titled “Hidden Hydrogen,” which asks, “does Earth hold vast stores of a renewable, carbon-free fuel?” I interviewed several of the scientists who are at the forefront of studying natural hydrogen, and I read their academic papers.

To be sure, natural hydrogen isn’t a certain thing. While I’ve become convinced that there is a lot of it, something that’s valuable isn’t necessarily economically recoverable (as I discussed in my newsletter on the “$10 quintillion asteroid”).

But the optimism is welling up. There may be hundreds of millions of megatons of hydrogen in Earth’s crust, and even if only 10 percent of it is accessible, that would last thousands of years at the current rate of consumption, Geoffrey Ellis, a research geologist for the U.S. Geological Survey in Denver, told me. He and a colleague, Sarah Gelman, presented their findings to the Geological Society of America in October.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/27/opinion/hydrogen-natural-climate-change.html

…welling up…oh, that’s a bit clever, isn’t it…so sharp you might cut yourself, even…mind you…generally quite hard to cut yourself on a football

Why haven’t people been talking about this, since it seems like kind of a big deal? That, aside from the huge commercial potential, is what fascinates me. History is replete with examples of ignored discoveries. Take the observation that sailors could prevent scurvy by eating citrus fruits. According to the BBC, the explorer Sir Richard Hawkins recorded in 1622 that “sower lemons and oranges” were “most fruitful” in preventing scurvy. He added, “I wish that some learned man would write of it.” But it took until 1753 for a Dr. James Lind to publish research proving Hawkins right. Even then, the BBC wrote, “it was not until 42 years later that the Admiralty first issued an order for the distribution of lemon juice to sailors.” Meanwhile thousands of sailors had died needlessly.

Zgonnik, a native of Ukraine, spent seven years reading 500 books and papers on natural hydrogen for a review. He found that its presence had been written about as early as 1888 by none other than Dmitri Mendeleev, the Russian chemist who laid out the first periodic table of elements. But for a long list of reasons, the knowledge was lost or ignored. One reason is that geologists focused on finding oil and, later, natural gas. Hydrogen gas isn’t typically found near hydrocarbons.
[…]
The big break came in 2012, as the article in Science this month recounts. A businessman in Mali named Aliou Diallo hired Chapman Petroleum Engineering Ltd., a Canadian consulting firm, to analyze the mysterious gas coming from a borehole on his property. It turned out to be 98 percent hydrogen. The gas was used to fuel an engine that ran a generator. “That gave Bourakébougou” — the town nearest the well — “its first electrical benefits: freezers to make ice, lights for evening prayers at the mosque, and a flat-screen TV so the village chief could watch soccer games,” the Science article said. What’s most exciting is that the hydrogen has continued to flow ever since.

Geologists now believe that hydrogen is being constantly produced from a reaction between water and iron-rich rocks. It’s essentially rusting: The rocks capture the oxygen and release hydrogen. Some hydrogen may also be bubbling up from deeper in Earth or be formed by radioactivity, which splits water molecules. Hydrogen has been found on all the continents except Antarctica, which hasn’t been checked yet. In the United States, the two most promising places are along the East Coast (onshore and offshore) and along an ancient ridge system extending from Kansas to the Great Lakes, Zgonnik said.

Isabelle Moretti, one of the leading scientists studying natural hydrogen, told me that when she was chief scientific officer of the French company Engie, “Quickly we realized that from an economic point of view it doesn’t make any sense” to use electricity to produce hydrogen, transport the gas, and then extract the energy through combustion or a fuel cell. But if hydrogen is available in gaseous form in the ground, the economics suddenly work, she said.

True, hydrogen has some drawbacks. It’s costly to liquefy or compress for storage. It’s also hard to push through existing gas pipelines because it’s so light that it leaks, and it embrittles the pipes. One idea for making it easier to transport is to mix it with natural gas or use nitrogen to make it into ammonia.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/27/opinion/hydrogen-natural-climate-change.html

…some kinds of joined-up thinking

Plans to install 3,000 acres of solar panels in Kentucky and Virginia are delayed for years. Wind farms in Minnesota and North Dakota have been abruptly canceled. And programs to encourage Massachusetts and Maine residents to adopt solar power are faltering.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/feb/26/red-states-lead-usa-renewable-energy-wind-solar-power

…well…let’s just say they aren’t always as joined up as they’re cracked up to be

The energy transition poised for takeoff in the United States amid record investment in wind, solar and other low-carbon technologies is facing a serious obstacle: The volume of projects has overwhelmed the nation’s antiquated systems to connect new sources of electricity to homes and businesses.

More than 8,100 energy projects — the vast majority of them wind, solar and batteries — were waiting for permission to connect to electric grids at the end of 2021, up from 5,600 the year before, jamming the system known as interconnection.

That’s the process by which electricity generated by wind turbines or solar arrays is added to the grid — the network of power lines and transformers that moves electricity from the spot where it is created to cities and factories. There is no single grid; the United States has dozens of electric networks, each overseen by a different authority.

PJM Interconnection, which operates the nation’s largest regional grid, stretching from Illinois to New Jersey, has been so inundated by connection requests that last year it announced a freeze on new applications until 2026, so that it can work through a backlog of thousands of proposals, mostly for renewable energy.
[…]
And when companies finally get their projects reviewed, they often face another hurdle: the local grid is at capacity, and they are required to spend much more than they planned for new transmission lines and other upgrades.

Many give up. Fewer than one-fifth of solar and wind proposals actually make it through the so-called interconnection queue, according to research from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
[…]
Electricity production generates roughly one-quarter of the greenhouse gases produced by the United States; cleaning it up is key to President Biden’s plan to fight global warming. The landmark climate bill he signed last year provides $370 billion in subsidies to help make low-carbon energy technologies — like wind, solar, nuclear or batteries — cheaper than fossil fuels.

But the law does little to address many practical barriers to building clean energy projects, such as permitting holdups, local opposition or transmission constraints. Unless those obstacles get resolved, experts say, there’s a risk that billions in federal subsidies won’t translate into the deep emissions cuts envisioned by lawmakers.

“It doesn’t matter how cheap the clean energy is,” said Spencer Nelson, managing director of research at ClearPath Foundation, an energy-focused nonprofit. “If developers can’t get through the interconnection process quickly enough and get enough steel in the ground, we won’t hit our climate change goals.”
[…]
If the United States can’t fix its grid problems, it could struggle to tackle climate change. Researchers at the Princeton-led REPEAT project recently estimated that new federal subsidies for clean energy could cut electricity emissions in half by 2030. But that assumes transmission capacity expands twice as fast over the next decade. If that doesn’t happen, the researchers found, emissions could actually increase as solar and wind get stymied and existing gas and coal plants run more often to power electric cars.

Massachusetts and Maine offer a warning, said David Gahl, executive director of the Solar and Storage Industries Institute. In both states, lawmakers offered hefty incentives for small-scale solar installations. Investors poured money in, but within months, grid managers were overwhelmed, delaying hundreds of projects.

“There’s a lesson there,” Mr. Gahl said. “You can pass big, ambitious climate laws, but if you don’t pay attention to details like interconnection rules, you can quickly run into trouble.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/23/climate/renewable-energy-us-electrical-grid.html

…I might be getting my wires crossed…but I swear it seems almost like there’s some sort of…I dunno…pattern at work?

Boris Johnson’s victory in the 2019 race to become prime minister was attributed in part to his campaign slogan: “Get Brexit done.” More than three years later, one of his successors, Rishi Sunak, took a significant step toward making good on that pledge.

…eh…kinda?

The new agreement, which has been named the “Windsor Framework,” includes a series of new measures to what is known as the Northern Ireland protocol that both sides hope will resolve the challenges that went unaddressed in earlier deals.
[…]
Negotiators had long struggled to find a way to allow goods to move smoothly between Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom, without threatening the open border between Northern Ireland and Ireland. That border has a significance that goes far beyond trade.

The stakes were high. Some in Brussels spoke of a threat to the integrity of the European Union’s single economic market; some in London and Belfast warned of a threat to the coherence of the United Kingdom; and there were concerns about the fragility of peace in a region where decades of sectarian violence left several thousand dead.

The initial result was the Northern Ireland protocol, but there was unhappiness with it from almost the moment it took effect in 2021, and the renegotiated deal attempts to resolve at least some of those concerns.

…so…here’s some things the NYT figures you’d do well to bear in mind…because…well

While the accord sounds like the title of a spy thriller, it’s actually a dry legal text that won’t be found on most people’s vacation reading lists.
[…]
No one wants checkpoints back, but when Britain left the European Union, Mr. Johnson insisted on leaving its customs union and its single market, which allows goods to flow freely across European borders.

The original protocol set out a plan to deal with this situation. It did so by effectively leaving Northern Ireland half inside the European system (and its giant market), and half inside the British one. It sounded neat — until everyone tried to make it work.

The withdrawal agreement came into effect at the start of 2021, but there were complaints from all sides — Britain, the European Union, Ireland and Northern Ireland.
[…]
Some Brexit supporters also saw the protocol as a means for the European Union to retain power over a part of the United Kingdom — a suspicion reflected in Britain’s desire to remove any role in the region for the European Court of Justice, the bloc’s top court.

To many of Northern Ireland’s pro-British unionists, many of whom are Protestant, it feels as if their identity is under threat.

As a result, Mr. Sunak had to tread carefully. His grip on his party is shaky, with pro-Brexit hard-liners within his Conservative Party skeptical about whether he had won enough concessions, a sentiment shared by members of the Democratic Unionist Party in Northern Ireland.
[…]
That left Mr. Sunak with little room to maneuver: He had to be mindful of setting off a rebellion from his own lawmakers, or resignations from members of his cabinet, while also being cognizant that angering the European Union could possibly lead to a trade war.
[…]
However, responding to calls for lawmakers to have their say, Mr. Sunak said Parliament would get a chance to vote on the new deal, a move designed to underscore its political legitimacy.

…he’s generous that way…he also made part of his windsor whatchamacallit that stormont gets to nix EU regulations it doesn’t fancy…which is arguably a feat of fancy footwork…or an obvious stumbling block…but for various reasons the proof of that pudding is at several arms’ length for the time being

But so far, both the D.U.P. and Sinn Fein have expressed some level of cautious optimism about the new Windsor agreement. Jeffrey Donaldson, leader of the Democratic Unionist Party and a critical voice in the debate, was noncommittal but not negative about the deal. Speaking in Parliament, he saidou that “significant progress has been secured” but that “there remain key issues of concern.” The detailed text will now be assessed by the party to see if it matches its tests, he said.

…you might also imagine that one concern of the DUP might be that if this all actually does get satisfactorily resolved…their supplies of disproportionate political leverage…currently at full wag-the-dog strength…look…a little limp…equilibrium in binary systems is some tricky business

Although the full details of the deal are still sparse, one key change announced by Mr. Sunak and Ms. von der Leyen is the introduction of “green” and “red” lanes for goods arriving in Northern Ireland.

https://www.nytimes.com/article/northern-ireland-protocol-brexit.html

…I know…it seems as though there wouldn’t be anything new or groundbreaking about the idea of splitting progress through customs between those with “nothing to declare” &…well…”something to declare”…but what can I tell you folks…apparently it’s both now?

…maybe I’d better let mr crace explain

Getting Brexit done. Again. We’ve been here before. Theresa May thought she had a solution to Northern Ireland with the Chequers agreement. That lasted only a few days. Boris Johnson had the lie of the “oven-ready” protocol. That was enough to win him a general election – mainly because the Tories were so desperate they were prepared to sign up to any old fantasy – but fell apart soon afterwards when people bothered to look at the detail.

Now we have Rishi Sunak’s Windsor framework. To fix the Boris nonsense. The likeliest contender yet. Not least because everyone is so fed up with Brexit – no one wants reminding of what a disaster it has been – that even the hardest of hardliners can’t be bothered to oppose it.

Jacob Rees-Mogg and David Frost broke the habit of a lifetime by not publicly rubbishing the deal. The Democratic Unionist party said it would need time to read the detail. Boris Johnson could feel his support ebbing away from him. Only Nadine Dorries was prepared to openly voice her outright opposition. So sweet. She will do anything for her Bozza Bear.

Shortly after 2.30pm on Monday, the government announced that a deal had been done. Which was odd, as we all knew that a deal had actually been done a couple of weeks ago, only for everything to be put on hold as No 10 worked out the best way to choreograph events in a way that would stop the shit-baggers from trashing the deal immediately.

If it could survive unscathed till Tuesday morning, it would be a result. By then the headlines would be in, the deal alive and everyone wanting to move on. Anything but Brexit. If the DUP and the European Research Group of Tory Brexiters chose to trash it thereafter, then they would be on their own. Wreckers out to spoil everyone’s fun. Or if not fun, then absence of pain. As close to fun as Brexit gets.

…so here we are…tuesday morning…& the wheels are still on…but…well…are they turning? …are there other wheels within them? …is it spinning wheels all the way down? …who can say?

What was new was the Stormont brake. This would allow Northern Ireland to veto any EU laws it didn’t like. Except it would probably never happen. Here was the brilliance! First of all, the DUP would have to reconstitute the Stormont assembly for the Stormont brake to be viable. Then the DUP would have to find another five assembly members from other parties who were as mad as they were.

That might be tricky. And even if this were to happen, it would still need the prime minister to sign off the brake. Guess what! Rish! had promised Ursula he would never do it. Guess what, again! When he was gone in a year or so, Keir Starmer would never apply the brake, either. So it was all an illusion. Schrödinger’s Brexit, yet again. Fantasy heaped on fantasy. It was also about the only sensible piece of politicking the government had done in the last eight years.

After just a few questions, Sunak and VDL parted company. Job done. The commission’s president could get on with her awayday break and Rish! could see how his deal landed during his statement to the house. He needn’t have worried. Tory MPs from all sides of the party cheered and waved their order papers as he entered the chamber. Consensus had broken out. It had all been the fault of the Convict that the Windsor framework had needed to be negotiated. They couldn’t believe they had allowed themselves to be duped by such an obvious fraudster. It was time for year zero. This was a new start. The past was another country.

Even the DUP weren’t going to trash the framework. Not yet, anyway. Rather, Jeffrey Donaldson said he would think things over. He recognised he had been backed into a corner. All the alternative options were spectacularly worse. Maybe it was time to finally say yes. As for Boris, he was nowhere to be seen. There was to be no comeback. His NI protocol bill was dead in the water. His days were over. Just another Brexit deadbeat.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/feb/27/brexit-done-northern-ireland-protocol-sunak

…so…that’s the last we’ll hear about any of that, I’m sure

…probably depends who you ask, though