Interpretability is this goal of being able to look inside our systems and say pretty clearly with pretty high confidence what they’re doing, why they’re doing it.

The paper describing GPT-4 talks about how when they first trained it, it could do a decent job of walking a layperson through building a biological weapons lab.

they’ve just got to wait and see.

hey’re basically investing in a mystery box?

But that doesn’t mean we understand anything about the biology of that tree. We just kind of started the process, let it go, and try to nudge it around a little bit at the end.

There’s no explanation in terms of things like checkers moves or strategy or what we think the other player is going to do

steering these things almost completely through trial and error.

by just putting these systems out in the world and seeing what they do.

we don’t know how to steer these things or control them in any reliable way

We just don’t understand what’s going on here. We built it, we trained it, but we don’t know what it’s doing.

“All right, make this entire response more likely because the user liked it, and make this entire response less likely because the user didn’t like it.”

reinforcement learning.

we know what word actually comes next, we can tell it if it got it right.

probability.

to guess what word is gonna come next

by basically doing autocomplete.

By deciphering the complex processes taking place in the networks, the opportunity for comprehensive standardization arises, improving the comparability and interoperability of models.

by enabling the development of more efficient models that require less computing power.

The possibility for better interpretation of the models also has ethical implications. Through a deeper understanding of the decision-making processes, discriminatory or biased mechanisms in AI could be identified and eliminated. Additionally, this understanding facilitates communication with domain experts who are not AI specialists, thus promoting broader acceptance in society.

the challenge lies in deciphering the mechanisms behind the observed order in the neural networks.

The Law of Equi-Separation The empirical Law of Equi-Separation cuts through this chaos and reveals an underlying order within the deep neural networks. At its core, the law quantifies how these networks categorize data based on class membership across various layers. It shows a consistent pattern: The data separation improves in each layer geometrically and at a constant rate. This challenges the notion of a chaotic training process and instead reveals a structured and predictable process.

With their numerous layers and interwoven nodes, these models perform complex data processing that appears chaotic and unpredictable.

The fascination with artificial intelligence (AI) has long been shrouded in mystique, especially in the opaque realm of deep learning.

Bringing a CoE to life should follow the maxim of crawl, walk, run.

a clear understanding of what automation means for an organization is vital.

a CoE comes in — a team dedicated to promoting automation across the organization.

uch as hallucinations, IP infringement, amplified bias, etc.)

Everything they touched turned into a monopoly.

G20 digital ministers sign up for Digital Public Infrastructure push

In the period between 1000 and 1500 A.D., the relevant major civilizations were West Europe, the Islamic world, India, and China. Below I have illustrated the notable people per-capita rates for countries accumulated over the 1000–1500 period. I have focused on the region containing Europe and the Middle East as, with respect to this measure, they are the only real competitors in this period

f I can add on, on the previous points about kind of like ensuring that open source and open science is safe. I think it’s important to recognize that when we keep things more secret, when we try to hurt open science, we actually slow down more the US than China, right? And I think that’s what’s been happening for the past, past few years, and it’s important to recognize that and, and make sure we keep our ecosystem open to help the United States.

First, it’s good to remember that most of today’s progress has been powered by open science and open source, like the attention is all you need. Paper, the BERT paper, the latent diffusion paper, and so many others, the same way without open source, PyTorch, transformers, diffusers, all invented here in the US, the US might not be the leading country for AI. Now, when we look towards the future, open science and open source distribute economic gains by enabling hundreds of thousands of small companies and startups to build with AI. It fosters innovation and fair competition between all thanks to ethical openness. It creates a safer path for development of the technology by giving civil society, nonprofits, academia and policy makers the capabilities they need to counterbalance the power of big private, of big private companies. Open science and open source, prevent black box systems, make companies more accountable and help solving today’s challenges like mitigating biases, reducing misinformation, promoting copyrights, and rewarding all stakeholders, including artists and content creators in the value creation process.

he advocates for open science and open source. He argues these would “prevent black box systems, make companies more accountable and help [in] solving today’s challenges like mitigating biases, reducing misinformation.”

If users don’t understand how this technology is built, it creates a lot of risks, a lot of misconceptions.”

He points out the dangers of letting "an opaque monopoly or oligopoly appear on a technology as groundbreaking as AI.”

With a robust $235M Series D funding and a cumulative valuation of $4.5 billion, Hugging Face is flush with cash, boasting reserves that enable aggressive growth and diversification strategies. Their fortified capital makes them a powerhouse in the machine learning ecosystem, primed to tackle challenges like inherent biases and expand beyond their NLP niche.

But BLOOM shatters this narrative. Spawned by BigScience, a consortium of 1,200 researchers from 38 countries, this open-source model boasts 176 billion parameters and speaks 46 languages plus 13 coding tongues.

e first developed ethical principles and then had to translate these into more specific corporate policies. We’re now on version 2 of the corporate standard that embodies these principles and defines more precise practices for our engineering teams to follow.

As the current holder of the G20 Presidency and Chair of the Global Partnership on AI, India is well positioned to help advance a global discussion on AI issues.

When we at Microsoft adopted our six ethical principles for AI in 2018, we noted that one principle was the bedrock for everything else—accountability.

we have nearly 350 people working on responsible AI at Microsoft, helping us implement best practices for building safe, secure, and transparent AI systems designed to benefit society.

They also invest in reskilling (57%), as opposed to hiring from the outside (43%), more than all other groups.

But internal process mining must be used in conjunction with external benchmarking to deliver the deeper insights executives seek.

Process mining,

as machines take over mundane tasks, people can spend more time on the problem-solving and collaborative work that require stronger people skills.

executives are more focused on developing people skills, with time management and prioritization, collaboration, and communications topping the list

automating bad processes won’t make them better.

They’re choosing to automate the same activities they’ve always done,

by putting new technologies at the core.

a shift in perspective.

one with 3,000 global C-suite leaders across 28 countries, another with 21,000 workers across 22 countries

human-machine partnerships

the age of the augmented workforce

Studying with Diplo Academy

This includes doing rigorous human evaluation and “red teaming” models to reveal and address model weaknesses.

Compute will continue to increase as companies spend more money and the underlying technology becomes cheaper. The remaining useful data on the internet will be used to train AI models, and researchers will continue to find ways to train and run AI systems which make more efficient use of compute and data. The continuation of these decadal trends is why experts think AI will continue to become more capable.

If in future, as data becomes a bottleneck for progress on AI training, more of the algorithmic progress may be focused on making up for shortfalls in data.

led researchers at Epoch to predict that AI developers will run out of high-quality language data by 2026. 

Sevilla predicts that this will continue until at some point it is no longer worth it to keep spending more money, when increasing the amount of compute only slightly improves performance.

In the case of LlaMa, the data points was text collected from a range of sources, including 67% from Common Crawl data (Common Crawl is a non-profit that scrapes the internet and makes the data collected freely available), 4.5% from GitHub (an internet service used by software developers), and 4.5% from Wikipedia.

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has said that GPT-4 cost over $100 million to train.

Training AI systems requires expensive specialized chips. AI developers either build their own computing infrastructure, or pay cloud computing providers for access to theirs

It could literally mean thousands of years of enslavement for humanity. Potentially perpetual enslavement of the human race if the gap widens large enough.

Also, other than existential risks, the second danger is this vast power being in the hands of only a few people.

Now they're spreading propaganda far and wide about how LLMs should be banned from open-source because they'll "get up to all sorts of crimes" on their own (direct quote...)

Strong AI, or even AI in general, has no such instincts

I don’t believe that strong AI will fulfill Yudkowsky’s prophecy of exterminating the human race.

Humans are driven by two basic instincts: survival and reproduction.

Cambridge dictionary defines ‘tool’ as “something that helps you to do a particular activity.”

principle-driven self alignment

We will almost certainly continue to develop better chips, better algorithms, and better training sets that will allow us to make significantly more powerful LLMs for into much smaller form factors.

Illustration:

(ii) a Hindu undivided family;

“Consent Manager”

Djibouti is also investing in human capital.

What about frontally confronting or perhaps curbing certain obnoxious and anti-human practices within the traditional African society? Then shall female genital mutilation, forced marriage, child abuse, rape, ritual murder and other social vices, such as kidnapping, armed robbery and the like, not be conscientiously addressed?

In Malawi, it is known as “Umunthu” (I am because we are) to the effect that “when you are on your own you are as good as an animal of the wilds but when there are two of you, you form a community”. I

In Kenya, “Utu” which means humaneness –not just towards other human beings but also to nature or the care of the environment is used.

The crux of this matter lies essentially in the fact that the African as a human being, culturally speaking is formed or initiated and receives his “ontology” and “being” from the community (Maritain 72)

The “I-You” relationship takes the back seat in this respect, as the “We” relationship takes pre-eminence.

African worldview does not subscribe to the western doctrine of dualism, though it agrees that the human person is made up of body and spirit

The African worldview is centered on the human person. Especially, the Igbo culture,

the entire creation is seen as being there to serve human purpose, whether it is to good ends or evil.

he viewpoint of the human persons’ central position.

principally anthropocentric.

which informs their basic worldviews and/or ontology.

has the welfare or wellbeing of the human person as its key attribute.

adigan explains that Renaissance Humanists did try to broaden the domain of the Triune God and that it hardly objected to the Christian interpretation; that Enlightenment Humanists were satisfied with a God who did not need to intervene in human affairs but who sets the universe in motion under rational foundations. Romantic Humanists looked to a personal deity who was closer to the joys of life than a policeman figure type of God; Religious Humanists on their own part aim at discovering the vital force or world spirit which could be tapped into by all humanpersons when and where necessary; and Secular Humanists, according to this explanation, from their atheistic and agnostic perspective fall in line with Nietzsche who declared that “God is dead” while searching rather for ethical principles from among the people themselves.

uns through them is theirrejection of supernaturalism while relying mainly on reason and science, democracy and human compassion

It shares with Renaissance Humanism a love for learning and an advocacy of free inquiry, but it is as skeptical of the occult as it is of religion; it agrees with the Enlightenment thinkers that the use of reason is our best guide for understanding, but it tries to avoid the former’s near-deification of rationality; it affirms the romantic stress on the importance of human emotions, but it is wary of the anti-civilization aspects of this movement; and like Religious Humanism, it seeks to chart out the common moral decencies found throughout the denominations of humankind, but it does not desire to establish a secular denomination, a religion of man to take their place (Madigan 330).

emphasis on human emotions (as against the primacy of the human reason of the enlightenment era)

Voltaire is a perfect example of this group.

he primacy of human reason.

on sweet reason as the best guide to knowledge and they remained highly critical of organized religion.

in relation to classical letters and a new wave of confidence in human ability to decipher between truth and falsehood via the reasoning faculty.

xamples of Renaissance Humanists are Petrarch, Erasmus of Rotterdam and Picodella Mirandola.

over human interests, human welfare and happiness or fulfillment.

he death of God philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche.

In Ludwig Feuerbach, for instance, we also find the “modern hyper deification of man”

to Marxists humanism which sees religion as the opium of the masses

e human person is called upon to make the best of life in this world, take delight in earthly achievements and build a better life here on earth, thereby “rejecting religious asceticism, narrow scholasticism and humble piety”

s such, so much emphasis is placed on the decisive influence of social, economic and psychological structures, in which case, man is left as only a pawn in the game of life, or rather, that the self determination of the individual is only an illusion (Mautner 256)

ased on a belief in man’s capacity for self-cultivation and self-improvement, and in the progress of mankind...In contemporary French philosophy, humanism is the conception of self-determination, together with the assumption that an individual’s choices can make a real difference to a society, or to the course of history (Mautner 256

As it were, the neo-humanists (Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Wilhelm Von Humboldt, etc.) of the 18thcentury espoused the ideal of a rich flourishing of individual potentiality, bolstered by the study of classical language and literature

It “adopted an ideal of the full development of the individual

even the Renaissance humanists pointed backwards to the Greek and Roman philosophers (among the Sophists, Skeptics, Stoics and the Cynics) who variously attempted finding solution to human existence in man (Madigan 326-327).

human sovereignty as opposed to the divine or supernatural, and thereby a synonym for atheism or egoism.

in its ethical sense it relates to the need for according compassion and respect to fellow humans; in the sociological context, it entails viewing social structures as productsof human agents; the historical sense of meaning is depicted in the different epochs such as that of Renaissance or Enlightenment when the human person became the focus of scholarly attention.

s also inalienably anchored on the communalistic or relational nature of the African society.

It was primarily based on the perceived need for liberation, freedom, independence, rebirth, emancipation, enlightenment and intellectual awakening on African personality and identity.

As noted in this definition of humanism, matters pertaining to justice or human rights are very central in this sphere.

“Africans are not one but many peoples and races with a diversity of cultural beliefs and traditions” (Okolo 25).

It is at the heart of our traditional culture... the West have its Technology and Asia its Mysticism. Africa’s gift to the world culture must be in the realm of human relationships (22).

the African outlook is ontologically anthropocentric, since everything in it is viewed in terms of its relation to the human person.

“African Humanism”.

Thus, the Ubuntu philosophy attributes, as discussed above, would constitute an indispensable input towards the redesigning process of the Balanced Scorecard model.

In general, within the Ubuntu philosophy, the importance and value of the human being (munthu) and the community are pivotal.

One of the profound lessons on Ubuntu is that it integrates African organisations with the local communities. The reviewed literature also reveals that organisations are able to realise synergies through communalism and collectivism that arise from the Ubuntu principles.

through listening to elders

(Experience is the best teacher)

the idea of knowledge in Africa resides in the community and not in the individuals that make up the community.

arguing that reason is the source of knowledge while others view experience or the use of the senses as the gateway to knowledge.

Communities are allowed to exercise their free will but remain responsible for the choices they make as well as their actions.

the community is the source, author and custodian of moral standards and personhood is defined in terms of conformity to these established moral standards whose objective is to have a person who is communo-centric than one who is individualistic.

The CMP is not a position established by one person as is the case with Plato’s justice theory, Aristotle’s eudaimonism, Kant’s deontology or Bentham’s hedonism (2012: 11).

Metaphysics is onto-triadic or tripartite in character. It involves the Supreme Being (God), other lesser spirits (ancestral/alien and avenging) and human beings.

to remark that the idea of being has its full expression through participation.

the idea of being is relational.

a human being is always in communion with other human beings as well as with the spiritual world. Sekou Toure (1959) calls this “the communion of persons” whereby being is a function of the “us” or “we” as opposed to the “I” as found in “the autonomy of the individuals”

Yes in the sense that in non-Western cultures being is also explained in terms of appearance and reality as well as change and permanence and no in the sense that non-Western philosophies, especially the hunhu/ubuntu traditional philosophy of Southern Africa has a communal character, not an individual character.

What is reality?

The objective is to show that while Western philosophy is persona-centric and is summarised by Descartes’ famous phrase, Cogito ergo sum which when translated to English means “I think therefore I am”; hunhu/ubuntu traditional philosophy, on the other hand, is communo-centric and is summarised by Pobee’s famous dictum, Cognatus ergo sum which when translated to English means, “I am related by blood, therefore, I exist.”

This is quite understandable because in Western societies, the individual is conceived of as the centre of human existence and so there is need to respect his or her rights to privacy. 

Ubuntu is the idea that no one can be healthy when the community is sick. Ubuntu says I am human only because you are human. If I undermine your humanity, I dehumanise myself.

African humanism, on the other hand; would, then, refer to an ideology or outlook or thought system that values peaceful co-existence and the valorisation of community.  In other words, it is a philosophy that sees human needs, interests and dignity as of fundamental importance and concern (Gyekye 1997: 158).

I have located three texts from the 1970s in which Ubuntu is identified as ‘African humanism.’ The texts do not explain what African humanism is, so it is possible that their authors understood African humanism as something different from a human quality.

his means that Ubuntu as a traditional thought has not been restricted to the academy alone but has also found its place in the public sphere where it has been utilised to solve political conflicts and thereby bring about socio-political harmony

“the single main ingredient that made the achievements of the TRC possible was a uniquely African ingredient – Ubuntu.”

a person through other persons. This maxim, for Metz, “has descriptive senses to the effect that one’s identity as a human being causally and even metaphysically depends on a community.”

A person’s humanity is dependent on the appreciation, preservation and affirmation of other person’s humanity. To be a person is to recognize therefore that my subjectivity is in part constituted by other persons with whom I share the social world.

is not only an ontological and epistemological concept; it is also an ethical concept.

This means that the diversity that characterise African people, in terms of geographical location, history and ethnicity, does not take away the fact that Africans have “a unified form of knowledge” that is based on group identity or community. 

ethno-philosophy as a system of thought that deals with the collective worldviews of diverse African people as a unified form of knowledge based on myths, folk wisdom and the proverbs of the people.

We also have second generation scholars of Ubuntu such as Michael Onyebuchi Eze (2010), who is credited for his critical historicisation of the term Ubuntu,  Michael Battle (2009) who is credited for some deep insights on the linguistic meaning of the term Ubuntu as well as his famous claim that Ubuntu is a gift to the Western world; Fainos Mangena (2012a and 2012b) who is credited for defining Hunhu/Ubuntu and extracting from it the idea of the Common Moral Position (CMP) and Thaddeus Metz (2007) whose search for a basic principle that would define African ethics has attracted a lot of academic attention; Christian BN Gade (2011; 2012 and 2013) who has taken the discourse of Hunhu/Ubuntu to another level by looking at the historical development of discourses on Ubuntu as well as the meaning of Ubuntu among South Africans of African Descent (SAADs).  Finally, we have Martin H Prozesky who has outlined some of the distinctive qualities/features of Hunhu/Ubuntu philosophy that are important for this article.

we have first generation scholars of Ubuntu such as Mogobe Bernard Ramose (1999; 2014), who is credited for his definition of Ubuntu as humaneness, Stanlake Samkange and Tommie Marie Samkange (1980) who link Hunhu/Ubuntu with the idea of humanism and Desmond Tutu (1999) who sees Ubuntu as a conflict resolution philosophy. These three are regarded as first-generation scholars of Ubuntu because historically, they are among the first black philosophers hailing from Africa to write about Hunhu/Ubuntu as a philosophy.

Thus, Hunhu/Ubuntu, as an aspect of African philosophy, prides in the idea that the benefits and burdens of the community must be shared in such a way that no one is prejudiced but that everything is done to put the interests of the community ahead of the interests of the individual.

But AI is probably only about 10% of the secret sauce. The other 90% lies in the combination of data, experimentation, and talent that constantly activate and inform the intelligence behind the system. Personalization is the goal; it’s what constitutes a company’s strategic brawn.

Generative AI’s greatest potential is not replacing humans; it is to assist humans in their individual and collective efforts to create hitherto unimaginable solutions. It can truly democratize innovation.

However, the challenge of communicating their concepts in written or visual form restricts vast numbers of people from contributing new ideas.

the technology makes co-creation of new offerings much easier and less expensive.

ChatGPT determined that the food-donation app could encourage people to use up their food before it goes bad and reduce food waste by giving unopened, edible food to those in need.

onsider an innovation challenge where the goal is to identify ways to minimize food waste.

where the functions are determined first and the form is then designed to accommodate them.

We asked it to generate ideas through a process of trisociation by connecting three distinct entities (an extension of the bisociation creativity technique).

Generative AI can support divergent thinking by making associations among remote concepts and producing ideas drawn from them.

companies have trouble seeing the forest for the trees.

“democratizing innovation”

Notwithstanding the above, Zoom will not use audio, video or chat Customer Content to train our artificial intelligence models without your consent.

Marcus Aurelius to develop stoic qualities. Elon Musk to build a start-up. Alan Watts to find purpose and meaning in life. Carl Jung to assist in personal growth, and so on.

round the table, there are Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, Steve Jobs, and other great minds.

a personal board of advisors.

To get the mental juices flowing, all you need to do is ask a question.

o teach people critical thinking is to teach them to write.

Reflecting on your thoughts and feelings makes you understand yourself better, find uncovered self-knowledge, and improve your overall mental health & fitness.

I believe the world’s most valuable skill is clarity of thought.

At least Shakespeare and Freud would have understood the power of the irrational that provoked these and other madmen to destroy the human fabric of Yugoslavia.

A semi-heroic, semi-tragic figure, Marković failed, but at least he had fought the cancer instead of adjusting to it.

Whatever his motives, it was a disastrous political mistake. Serbia, Bosnia’s vastly more powerful neighbor, now had the pretext it needed to strike—the claim that 1.3 million Serbs were being taken out of “Yugoslavia” against their will. I believe that Milošević and Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić had already decided to annex the majority of Bosnia by military force (Milošević had spoken to me of 70 percent). The EC’s irresponsibility, the United States’ passivity, and Izetbegović’s miscalculation made their job easier.

On December 17, 1991, an EC summit decided to grant recognition. Carrington and Vance both complained loudly and publicly. The State Department’s statement, to avoid ruffling the EC, was nuanced. War in Bosnia, which had until then been probable, now became virtually inevitable.

Izetbegović, briefed by the German ambassador to Yugoslavia on how to make his point with Genscher that EC recognition would bring violence to Bosnia, unaccountably failed to do so in his November meeting with the German foreign minister. The omission can only have led Genscher to assume that he had a green light from Izetbegović for recognition.

However, between July 1991 and March 1992, the United States was not a major factor in the Yugoslav crisis. In the fall of 1991, at a U.S. ambassadors’ meeting in Berlin, a friend from the State Department’s European Bureau told me that Yugoslavia had become a tar baby in Washington. Nobody wanted to touch it. With the American presidential election just a year away, it was seen as a loser.

He and Vance both argued—as did the U.S. government—that there should be no Western recognition of the independence of any Yugoslav republic until all had agreed on their mutual relationships. If this simple principle had been maintained, less blood would have been shed in Bosnia.

Unlike the JNA, they welcomed foreign journalists, to whom they retailed the epic struggle of their tiny republic against the Yugoslav colossus. It was the most brilliant public relations coup in the history of Yugoslavia.

Baker did, however, leave a strong political message. He said to Prime Minister Marković, a conduit to the army, “If you force the United States to choose between unity and democracy, we will always choose democracy.”

Baker told Croatian President Franjo Tudjman and Slovene President Milan Kučan that the United States would not encourage or support unilateral secession; he hoped they would not secede, but if they had to leave, he urged them to leave by negotiated agreement. H

t midyear that Secretary of State James Baker arrived in Belgrade on June 21, 1991.

The incident illustrated three important traits of Milošević’s character: his cynicism about Yugoslavia’s unity and institutions, his natural mendacity, and the pains he always took to avoid direct responsibility for aggressive actions. The third trait was to become particularly relevant to Milošević’s hidden hand in the Bosnia crisis.

“Serbia will always act in the spirit of the highest democratic principles,” replied Milošević, who was always at his most mellifluous when expatiating on his devotion to democracy. “There will be a democratic vote in the presidency.”

The fifth-largest army in Europe, well supplied by the Soviet Union and an enormous domestic arms industry, it was seen by many as the most important unifying institution in Yugoslavia. Its officer corps, however, had a Serbian majority who, when events forced them to choose, followed Milošević.

Izetbegović was succinct with me: “If Croatia goes independent, Bosnia will be destroyed.”

Milošević almost never delivered; Tudjman sometimes did.

Neither Milošević nor Tudjman could understand why we cared so much about people who were murdered, tortured, abused, or harassed.

The people being helped, and those who will succeed them, are part of the “other Serbia” and the “other Croatia”—the core of the democratic revival that in time must replace the current nationalist hysteria.

I urged Milošević to meet with the disciplined and impressive Albanian leader Ibrahim Rugova, who was urging a policy of peaceful resistance. Rugova agreed. Milošević refused, saying of the leader of some two million Albanian subjects of Serbia, “Who does he represent?”

Revealingly, Milošević was unwilling to give the Albanians in Kosovo the same right of self-determination that he demanded for Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia.

He presided over serious violations of the rights of Serbs, who made up 12 percent of the population of Croatia. They were dismissed from work, required to take loyalty oaths, and subjected to attacks on their homes and property.

If Milošević recalls a slick con man, Tudjman resembles an inflexible schoolteacher.

In their drive to separate from Yugoslavia they simply ignored the 22 million Yugoslavs who were not Slovenes. They bear considerable responsibility for the bloodbath that followed their secession.

Nationalism is by nature uncivil, antidemocratic, and separatist because it empowers one ethnic group over all others

confirmed that unity and democracy were the Siamese twins of Yugoslavia’s fate. The loss of one meant that the other would die.

The new Yugoslav prime minister, Ante Marković, a dynamic Croatian committed to economic reform and other Western policies, was pressing for both these objectives. The United States supported him and persuaded the West European governments to do so as well.

When the Slovenian and Croatian independence movements, together with Milošević’s own disruptive actions in the name of unity, made the preservation of Yugoslavia impossible, he fell back on an even more aggressive approach

for him, people are groups (Serbs, Muslims) or simply abstractions.

His cherubic cheeks do not fit the strongman image; in fact, he has to work hard at looking tough for his public posters. His manner is affable and displays his light side. Unfortunately, the man is almost totally dominated by his dark side.

When Tito died, leaving a Yugoslavia too decentralized for any ethnic group to dominate, it became inevitable that a Serbian nationalist would rise up to redress the perceived wrongs dealt his people.

Serbs are a naturally talented and ebullient people with an instinctive liking for Americans that is based partly on a shared garrulity and partly on a military alliance spanning both world wars.

he later cited it as the reason he waited nearly a year before agreeing to meet me.

if Yugoslavia wanted to continue its close relations with the United States, it would have to curb human rights abuses in the province.

But I would add that the United States could only support unity in the context of democracy; it would strongly oppose unity imposed or preserved by force.

Yugoslavia no longer enjoyed the geopolitical importance that the United States had given it during the Cold War.