Putin’s current demand—clearly provocative and unrealistic—is for NATO to remove its military infrastructure from states that joined after the 1997 agreement.

a Russia-NATO agreement signed by his predecessor Boris Yeltsin in May, 1997

(Moscow, short on cash and presiding over a collapsing empire, was in desperate need of the fifteen billion Deutsche marks that it received in order to withdraw Soviet forces from East Germany); Western confidence and ambition (“To hell with that,” Bush had told Kohl at Camp David, dismissing the Soviets’ efforts to dictate Germany’s future relationship with NATO. “We prevailed and they didn’t”); and bungling negotiating on the part of Gorbachev (“This carelessness will take its revenge on us,” Valentin Falin, a top Soviet official and expert on Germany, remarked).

In September, 1990, Gorbachev signed off on the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany

as a sign that the secretary had only been test-driving one potential option of many.”

Soviet leaders would rather see Germany anchored in a multilateral alliance than left on its own.

the West should lock in as many gains as it could before the political climate shifted yet again and Moscow’s position became more entrenched

“An extension of NATO’s territory to the east, that is, nearer to the borders of the Soviet Union, will not happen,” he said in one address, as Sarotte recounts.

the context of the moment

the truth looks to be somewhere in between.”

Did the West, led by the U.S., promise to limit NATO expansion eastward?

The phrase “not one inch” is a reference to a statement made by U.S. Secretary of State James Baker, in 1990

“ ‘Not one inch to the East,’ they told us in the nineties. So what? They cheated, just brazenly tricked us!”

have different interpretations of history

Why Washington Can’t Learn

Only if Americans abandon their fealty to the idea of American Exceptionalism and the militarism that has sustained it, might it be possible to conclude that the wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan served some faintly useful purpose.

Almost certainly, the North Vietnamese would have succeeded in uniting their divided country with much less bloodshed. And Taliban control of Afghanistan would in all likelihood have continued without interruption in the years following 2001, with the Afghan people left to sort out their own destiny. Yet, despite immense sacrifices by U.S. troops, a vast expenditure of treasure, and quite literally millions of dead in Southeast Asia and Afghanistan, that’s exactly how things turned out anyway.

too few Americans are willing to confront the disaster that has befallen the United States as a consequence of our serial misuse of military power.

Reliance on conscription to raise the force that fought in Vietnam spurred widespread popular opposition to that war. Reliance on a so-called volunteer military to carry the burden of waging the Afghan War allowed ordinary Americans to ignore what was being done in their name, especially when field commanders devised methods for keeping a lid on U.S. casualties.

It’s time to substitute a narrative describing an American military enterprise that began when the first U.S. combat troops came ashore in South Vietnam and persisted until the last American soldier departed Kabul in defeat some 56 years later.

Subsuming them, however, was the concept of American exceptionalism.

While these events unleashed a torrent of self-congratulation in the U.S., the passing of the Cold War did not substantively modify the aspirations or expectations of the American people. For decades, the United States had exerted itself to uphold and enhance the advantageous position it gained in 1945. Its tacit goal was not only to hold the communist world in check but to achieve ideological, economic, political, and military primacy on a global scale, with all but the most cynical American leaders genuinely persuaded that U.S. supremacy served the interests of humankind.

Among the things it left fully intact was a stubborn resistance to learning in Washington that poses a greater threat to the wellbeing of the American people than communism or terrorism ever did.

That war was destined to continue for 20 years. By the time it ended, many observers had long since begun to compare it to Vietnam. The similarities were impossible to miss. Both were wars of doubtful strategic necessity. Both dragged on endlessly. Both concluded in mortifying failure. To capture the essence of the war in Afghanistan, it didn’t take long for critics to revive a term that had been widely used to describe Vietnam: each was a quagmire. Here was all you needed to know.

The Global War on Terror now became the organizing principle for American statecraft, serving a function comparable to the Cold War during the second half of the prior century.

When President Richard Nixon visited “Red” China in 1972, the Cold War morphed into something quite different. With the nation’s most prominent anticommunist taking obvious delight in shaking hands with Chairman Mao Zedong in Beijing, the war effort in Vietnam became utterly inexplicable — and so it has remained ever since.

In history, context is everything.

"Entanglement forging essentially enables you to cut up a larger circuit into smaller circuits that we can execute on smaller hardware

Entanglement forging could markedly expand the computational power of quantum systems

Entanglement forging, it turns out, involves the use of a classical computer to capture quantum correlations and effectively split the problem in half, making it possible to separate the 10 spin-orbitals of the into two groups of five that could be processed separately. This doubles the size of the system that can be simulated on quantum hardware.

would speed technological innovation

bring even more vendors into the wireless industry, by allowing companies to hyperspecialize.

In its most ambitious version, Open RAN would split the RAN into smaller components beyond the radio and the baseband unit.

“Ericsson is probably in the party that's fighting back the most against Open RAN, because they will probably have the most to lose."

disaggregation

The surest way to avoid such a disaster is to stick with the same vendor from one end of the network to the other, thus avoiding any possibility of mismatched interfaces.

companies that can provide cutting-edge end-to-end networks. It's now just three: Ericsson, Nokia, and Huawei.

the tweaks primarily take the form of vendors defining radio parameters that were intentionally left blank in 3GPP standards for future development.

there is nothing preventing a vendor from “complementing" a standardized interface with additional proprietary techniques.

Unfortunately, the long and short of it is usually: the more qubits you have the more errors you get. The new research hopes to alleviate that by creating a new way to handle qubit operations, thus allowing gate-based quantum computer systems to scale.

each team was able to build a distinct, silicon-based, two-qubit quantum computing system capable of operating with greater than 99% accuracy

e are not seeing to splinter the internet

defected

defectio

incorporating diverse stakeholder views

While the initial call to action and the ultimate Alliance would consist of governments, ultimately the Alliance would also include a substantial multi-stakeholder component,

exceptions such as blocking illegal content and/or specified national security exemption

pen and interoperable access for software and apps

nondiscrimination among Alliance members in domestic regulation in the internet secto

a commitment to use only trustworthy providers for core information and communications technologies network infrastructure.

echnical and non-technical security standards

a plan to develop a charter of operational principles and commitments over the course of 2022 and 202

his year, Chinese researchers have produced more AI-related papers than any other nation, with the country having 27.68% of the global share of research papers in the field of AI and becoming the global lead in our Research in AI papers indicator, boosting its score in the Human Capital dimension.

Indonesia and Vietnam have both released na-tional AI strategies in the time since our 2020 index was compiled

This reflects the country’s Vision dimension score (it has a National AI Strategy), its commitment to addressing ethics in AI as shown in its Artificial Intelligence Governance Framework,

he country recently published its National AI Strategy with strategic priorities for the period 2021-2025.

In 2020, the Ethiopian Council of Min-isters established an artificial intelligence (AI) re-search and development centre.

Kenya has de-veloped an AI taskforce (consisting of 11 experts from relevant government agencies, the private sector, academia and other stakeholders)

Mauritius has developed an official National AI Strategy, which sets out a plan from 2018-2022 to guide progress in this area. Although South Africa is yet to launch a national AI strategy, it has established a Presidential Commission on Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Qatar and Saudi Arabia unveiled their National AI Strat-egies. Qatar’s National Artificial Intelligence Strat-egy focuses on six main pillars: education, data access, employment, business, research, and ethics. Additionally, the strategy aligns with the overarching Qatar National Vision 2030, which identifies artificial intelligence as a central compo-nent in the country’s transition from an oil-based economy to a knowledge-based economy. Simi-larly, Saudi Arabia released its National Data and Artificial Intelligence Strategy, with six goals

the largest range of scores

Ukraine, in fact, released its national AI strategy in Decem-ber 2021,

four new national AI strategies in Eastern Europe: Bulgaria, Slovenia, Hungary, Latvia.

he number of AI and non-AI technology unicorns rise from 43 to 62 in the region

those countries in Western Europe who are not developing national AI strategies (Iceland and Switzerland) are not EU member states.

Italy has taken a similar approach with its three-year Strategic Program for Artificial Intel-ligence, released in November 2021,

the Caribbean Artificial Intelligence Initiative led by UNESCO, which seeks to create a sub-regional strategy on the responsible, inclusive and human adoption of AI in the Caribbean

In 2020, the Colombian government launched the National Policy for Digital Transformation (AI Strategy) and recently created an AI Task Force comprising government officials and sub-ject matter experts.

the fAIr initiative led by the

the launch of national AI frameworks by the governments of Chile and Brazil has been one of the main events in the subcontinent

The top four countries in the region (in order, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Uruguay

Latin America and the Caribbean had a region-al average score of 41.26 — the third lowest globally after the Middle East & North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa.

China tops the Number of research papers published in AI, and the country outperformed the USA for the first time in 2020 in terms of the number of times an academic article on AI is cited by others.

Sub-Sa-haran Africa and Central & South Asia

evident divide within re-gions, with the greatest range of scores seen in East Asia and Middle East and North Africa

The index unearths clear inter-regional and in-tra-regional inequalities.

East Asian countries make up one quarter of the top 20 ranked coun-tries.

USA tops the global rankings, in large part thanks to the unrivalled size and maturity of its technology sector. Singapore ranks sec-ond as a result of its institutional strength and government digital capacity. The other countries in the top 5 are Western European (United King-dom, Finland, and the Netherlands)

The senior administration official said basic human rights and freedoms have been “core to any affirmative vision of the internet” from the beginning.

encourage any splintering of the internet”

Asking governments around the world to root out any internet infrastructure made by Chinese companies like Huawei as a barrier to entry into the alliance struck Pielemeier,

including a pledge “to use only trustworthy providers” in core internet infrastructure — a stipulation that freaked out some digital rights advocates and called to mind the “clean network” initiative that began under the Trump administration.

In the future, 3GPP and O-RAN are going to co-exist and share a number of key technological features, at the same time that they complement and compete with each other. Operators have and should continue to have the freedom to choose, and suppliers should need no permission from policy makers to make their choices and place their bets.   Therefore, market-based competition ­– where merits of technical performance and the competitiveness of different solutions and architectures decide market outcomes – should be ensured. The freedom of the market should prevail and not be taken away from commercial players’ ability to make their investment choices. This means that different approaches can compete on technical merits, price, security, flexibility and functionality.  Presence of market forces, innovation and open interfaces are meant to ensure that competition prevails and delivers end-user and societal benefits.   Therefore, policy makers should not pick winners, but continue to ensure the following outcomes:  Open markets for competition while letting the market decide   Technology-neutral regulation, not mandating any architecture  Technology-neutral fixed broadband and wireless roll-out subsidies, which only target geographies where commercial, market-driven investments are not a viable option to ensure digital inclusion. 

Amarna Letters

Writing as the key ancient diplomatic ‘technology’

The United States

Maybe we make our decisions on the basis of vastly complex processes that bear very little resemblance to the explanations we give for our decisions. Maybe all or nearly all explanations are just post-hoc rationalisations.

translate them into reasoning a human can understand.

giving the student an approximate rule and advising them that there are exceptions.

experiencing a poem means experiencing something too complicated to be explained systematically. I see this as having kinship with the conceptual richness problem, although it’s not quite the same thing.

Poetry criticism:

Partly the answer is a judgment call- I think that the statistics I gave were, broadly speaking, very fair.

But that question contains a series of thick concepts- e.g “unusually bad period”, “economically speaking” “American working class”.

“has the American working class had an unusually bad period, economically speaking, in the last 55+ years”.

I would object to this objection that it was fairer on the whole just to look at the aggregate if we are to assess the position of the working class qua working class.

The right often maintains that the law here is clear, and it is not the job of judges to legislate from the bench- even where the law will lead to tragedy as in this case.

no Schelling point of literalism

everyone in the room is interpreting the law in terms of policy goals and ethical values to some degree.

So does this case break down into a Sophie’s choice between going with the law and going with morality?

This is why sentiments like “the law is the law” are so silly

Laws are designed as far as is possible to create socially desirable flexibility while avoiding socially undesirable uncertainty.

it undermines the rule of law

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on who you ask) because law cannot be turned into an algorithim we often face what contemporary legal scholars call legal indeterminacy- a situation in which there is no single right answer to many important legal questions.

the Drefyus critique.

at dealing with certain kinds of toy problems

Symbolic AI tried to capture intelligence through explicit representations, operations using rules, etc.

Philosophical work (e.g. Wittgenstein’s metaphor of family resemblance as a replacement for the idea of necessary and sufficient conditions) has informed many psychologists working on concepts in turn.

the apparent impossibility of finding necessary and sufficient conditions

Even this ‘simple’ term, understood well enough that just about any native speaker could check whether a given use was right, wrong or dubious, cannot be turned into an algorithm.

compact lists of necessary and sufficient conditions-.

Maybe by teasing out the transdisciplinary nature of the problem, we’ll encourage cross-pollination, or at least that’s my hope.

The conceptual richness problems are problems of trying to cope with thick concepts, either by (quixotically) trying to spell them out in all their detail and creating an algorithm, or by finding an alternative to having to spell them out.

A thick concept is a concept for which we can check whether any given instance falls under that concept relatively easily.

[A]spects of how to build AI systems such that they will aid rather than harm their creators.

The problem is that if you give a super-powerful entity a goal- a value function- and it follows it literally- bad things can happen.

Two little things forced them together: history and geography.

illusion of permanence

One of the many things Brexiters could never understand is this notion that the supposedly oppressive EU could be, for small nations, a route out of domination by bigger neighbours.)

one of profound and deeply rooted animosity, the other of intense cooperation

made it clear the British state had no interest in acknowledging what had happened

Only by updating our understanding of theirgeopolitical power can we make better sense of this brave new digitalworld.

no longer tenable to talk about big technology companies aspawns their government masters can move around on a geopoliticalchessboard

the techno-utopians will usetraditional companies and decentralized projects, such as Ethereum, toexplore new frontiers in digital space, such as the metaverse, or newapproaches to providing essential service

e. e Chineseglobalists will argue that the CCP’s ability to sustain robust growth—andtherefore domestic legitimacy—will ride on whether China can establishitself as a hub of global innovation.

ey will also press for greater decoupling,arguing that their vital work needs maximum protection from adversarialhacking.

If they manage to establishthemselves as “the indispensable companies”

e United States believes that its foremostgeopolitical imperative is to prevent its displacement by its techno-authoritarian rival. China’s top priority is to ensure that it can stand onits own two feet economically and technologically before a coalition ofadvanced industrial democracies sties its further expansion.

the Internet was that itwould accelerate the globalization that transformed economics andpolitics in the 1990s.

people are so accustomed tothinking of the state as the principal problem-solving actor.

Facebook substitutes forthe public square, civil society, and the social safety net, creating ablockchain-based currency that gains widespread usage

drawing citizens into a digital economy that disintermediates the state.

give Europe achance to reassert itself as a savvy bureaucratic player capable ofdesigning the rules that allow technology companies and governments toshare sovereignty in digital space.

In the case ofWashington, that means pulling back from an industrial policy designedto convince companies that they can thrive as national champions; forBeijing, it means preserving the independence and autonomy of theprivate sector.

. eirworst fear is that the United States and China will continue to decouple,forcing them to choose sides in an economic war that will raise barriersto their attempts to globalize their business

Tencent is also a globalist butcooperates far more deeply with China’s internal security apparatus thanAlibaba.

Apple and Google would arguably have the most to gain from thisoutcome.

will harm innovation and,ultimately, governments’ ability to create jobs and meet global challenges.

regulators accept that governments willshare sovereignty over digital space with technology companies

the state’s position as the provider of last resort in therst place.

ueling impressions inBeijing that Taiwan is being dragged further into the U.S. orbit

Facebook might have the hardest timenavigating a landscape that favored national champions if it is seen asproviding a platform for foreign disinformation without also oeringuseful assets for the government

itraises costs and regulatory risks for companies

. e increasingly fragmented nature of the Internet,

As the United States and China decouple, companies that can recastthemselves as national champions are rewarded

Europe’s technology sector has little choice but to follow Washington’sagenda.

Europe is the big loser here, as it lackstechnology companies with the nancial capacity or technologicalwherewithal to hold their own against those of the two major powers.

Systemicshocks, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, and long-term threats, such asclimate change, coupled with a public backlash against the power oftechnology rms, entrench government authority as the only force thatcan resolve global challenges.

one in which the state reigns supreme,rewarding the national champions; one in which corporations wrestcontrol from the state over digital space, empowering the globalists; orone in which the state fades away, elevating the techno-utopians.

If it tightens its grip too much, it risksharming the country itself by smothering innovation.

thereum’s design includes smartcontracts, which enable the parties to a transaction to embed the terms ofdoing business into hard-to-alter computer code. Entrepreneurs haveseized on the technology and the surrounding hype to cook up newbusinesses, including betting markets, nancial derivatives, and paymentsystems that are almost impossible to alter or abolish once they have beenlaunched. Although much of this innovation to date has been in thenancial realm, some proponents believe that blockchain technology anddecentralized apps

Whereas globalists want the state to leave them alone

Microsoft’s growing role in policingdigital space on behalf of the United States and allied democracies andtargeting misinformation spread by state actors

in “mask diplomacy”by shipping badly needed medical supplies to needy countries to enhanceChina’s soft power.

Huawei andSMIC are China’s core national champions in 5G and semiconductors

Governments and technology companies arepoised to compete for inuence over both worlds—hence the need for abetter framework for understanding what the companies’ goals are andhow their power interacts with that of governments in both domains.

If Europeanstates want greater control of the technology sector, they’re going to haveto invest much more money.

whether a group of companies operating under greatergovernment supervision can still produce cutting-edge digitalinfrastructure that is globally competitive.

l. e EUand inuential member states, such as France, are also calling fortechnology-focused industrial policies—including billions of euros ofgovernment funding—to encourage new approaches to pooling data andcomputing resources

In the United States, a combination ofcongressional dysfunction and Silicon Valley’s potent lobbying power willlikely continue to preclude expansive new regulations that could pose aserious threat to the digital giants. It is dierent in Europe, where thelack of homegrown cloud, search, and social media conglomerates makespassing ambitious legislation easier. And it is certainly dierent in China,where a recent round of regulatory crackdowns has sent shares of thecountry’s own technology heavyweights reeling.

China created the so-called Great Firewall to control theinformation its citizens see, and the United States’ spy agenciesestablished the echelon surveillance system to monitor globalcommunications.

Companies are subject tonational laws

Governments aretaking steps to tame an unruly digital sphere:

s. e biggesttechnology companies are building the backbone of the digital world andpolicing that world at the same time.

Private-sector technology rms are also providing national security, a rolethat has traditionally been reserved for governments and the defensecontractors they hire.

they are increasingly providing a full spectrum ofboth the digital and the real-world products that are required to run amodern society.

they are also shaping behaviorsand interactions

eople are increasingly living out their lives inthis vast territory, which governments do not and cannot fully control.

It is onething to wield power in the smoke-lled rooms of political powerbrokers; it is another to directly aect the livelihoods, relationships,security, and even thought patterns of billions of people across the globe.

by atechno-elite that assumes responsibility for oering the public goodsonce provided by governments?

Big Techdecisively wrest control of digital space from governments, freeing itselffrom national boundaries and emerging as a truly global force

there are three broad forces thatare driving their geopolitical postures and worldviews: globalism,nationalism, and techno-utopianism.

digitalspace

l. esecompanies are increasingly shaping the global environment in whichgovernments operate. ey have huge inuence over the technologies andservices that will drive the next industrial revolution, determine howcountries project economic and military power, shape the future of work,and redene social contracts

. e same goes for Chinese technologycompanies, such as Alibaba, ByteDance, and Tencent.

se technology companies’ reactions

Finnish-US undersea cable to strengthen Europe’s digital trade with Asia

For defense contractors, war means massive profits by definition. In just the last few years, the U.S. has spent more than $2 billion on military aid to this nation called Ukraine that most people couldn't identify on a map. Just the other day, the administration announced $200 million more. 

Polls show that most Americans are completely opposed to fighting Russia over Ukraine because they're not demented.

The core problem is that in America, elected officials no longer decide when we go to war, as in, say, a democracy. 

We need strong regulatory frameworks to change this business model.

The business models of social media companies profit from algorithms that prioritize addiction, outrage and anxiety at the cost of public safety. 

Global Digital Compact as part of the Summit of the Future in 2023. The Compact will bring together governments, the private sector and civil society to agree on key principles underpinning global digital cooperation. This will reinforce the ongoing coordinated approach on cyber security to protect civilians and civilian infrastructure. And I’ve proposed a Global Code of Conduct to end the infodemic and the war on science, and promote integrity in public information, including online.

Our personal information is being exploited to control or manipulate us, change our behaviors, violate our human rights, and undermine democratic institutions.   Our choices are taken away from us without us even knowing it.

The

Agenda

I want to begin the year by raising five alarms -- on COVID-19, global finance, climate action, lawlessness in cyber space, and peace and security.

From global health to digital technology, many of today’s multilateral frameworks are outdated and no longer fit for purpose.

And the information superhighway is clogged with hatred and lies, giving oxygen to the worst impulses of humanity.

Daesh (ISIS), among other anti-state organizations, promising new attacks after the U.S. and NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan,

draw Japan, Australia, India, and the U.S., among other states, into direct conflict with China

to rising productivity

And Europe may soon pass a sweeping Digital Markets Act, aimed at regulating big technology companies “ex ante”—that is, constraining such firms’ behaviour upfront, rather than punishing them later with antitrust cases

there are the decentralised blockchain services owned and operated by users, loosely known as Web3.

but future forms of AI may not.

The problem is that nobody knows what it will be. But it will probably involve new physical devices that will supersede the smartphone as the dominant means of connecting people to information and services. Whoever makes such devices will therefore control access to users. This explains why Apple is planning a virtual-reality headset to compete with Meta’s Oculus range and Microsoft’s HoloLens. Alphabet, Apple and Amazon have also all placed expensive bets on autonomous cars. And vast sums are being spent on designing specialised chips, and pursuing new approaches like quantum computing, to provide the processing power for whatever new devices emerge.

were brought down not by regulators, but by missing the next big thing.

Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta and Microsoft—call them MAAMA.