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.

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. 

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.

it is crucial that concerted UN-backed Contact Group diplomacy

a third actor could set a match to the whole system of rival alliances—much as was the case for the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in July 1914.

The fear of alliance defection could then impel Washington to whip its allies into line by making them spend even more money on defense—even though the U.S. itself already spends more on the military than 11 countries combined.

more like the alliance systems before World War I and World War II than like the “bicentric” Cold War.

The winner of such a war could be the side that possesses the most advanced technological capabilities and systems of Artificial Intelligence.

make “limited” nuclear war possible in certain regions

The Cold War doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) is dead

Likewise, China’s dam and water policies are augmenting regional tensions by creating friction with Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam over the Mekong River. China’s diversion of rivers in Xinjiang has had a devastating downstream impact upon Central Asia while its plan to dam the Brahmaputra river in the Himalayas has enraged India.

the fact that Beijing is seeking to monopolize its political control over the “rare earth” resources that are needed for the new “green” economy has begun to spur worldwide neo-imperialist rivalries for access to, and control over, those resources.

The neoliberal belief that economic inter-dependence will help prevent major power wars does not apply to Imperial Germany whose economic inter-dependence with Britain did not prevent World War I.

Interstate wars thus become more likely when political elites call for national unity and alliance solidarity in the effort to deflect attention from both domestic quarrels and international tensions—rather than fully engaging in both domestic socio-economic reforms and full-fledged diplomacy with foreign rivals.

more extensive social and political conflicts

through proxy wars

Upload tools for adding your own markers and other map elements. For instance, you may want to add a hamburger icon to identify restaurants on your map.

Full interactivity, with features for clicking to get directions and viewing more information like phone numbers and store hours.

Options to place your maps in other places besides pages. We like to see shortcodes and widgets for sidebars, posts, and footers.

Support for quick geographical searches using coordinates or addresses. It shouldn’t be required to have the exact coordinates of a place when making a map since no one knows these and it takes a while to find them online. Mapmaking excels with rapid address search tools.

It’s a huge undertaking that would require standardization and cooperation among tech giants, who are not prone to collaborating with competitors

The boy straps on his headset, reminiscent of a pair of VR goggles, and escapes into a trippy virtual universe, dubbed “Oasis.”

Companies will struggle with how their apps affect kids' mental health and safety

They would also force companies to crack down more on harmful content, such as child sex abuse and terrorism, and give users more control over how their data is used to target ads.

to protecting kids and teens online.

Democrats want laws that force tech companies to take down more harmful content. Republicans say the platforms censor conservative views, despite evidence showing that right-wing content and figures thrive on social media.

We won’t tell you what to think about the future, but how to think about it.

critical but not cynical;

shouldn’t shy away from pushing the envelope either

this or that invention would “change everything.”

But whatever the story, you should find something to learn from it—and, ideally, the inspiration to make a positive difference yourself.

You cannot explain the impacts of technology on the world without deeply understanding the motives, incentives, and limitations of the people who build and use it.

What would it take to build a better future?

a false dichotomy

This tug-of-war between optimism and pessimism is the reason why I said this feels like an inflection point in the history of tech

Blockchain is either the most radical invention of the century or a worthless shell game. The metaverse is either the next incarnation of the internet or just an ingeniously vague label for a bunch of overhyped things that will mostly fail. Personalized medicine will revolutionize health care or just widen its inequalities. Facebook has either destroyed democracy or revolutionized society. Every issue is divisive and tribal. And it’s generally framed as a judgment on the tech itself—“this tech is bad” vs. “this tech is good”—instead of looking at the underlying economic, social, and personal forces that actually determine what that tech will do.

Yet debates about tech, like those about politics or social issues, still seem to always collapse into either/or.

an intelligent person should be able to hold opposed ideas in their mind simultaneously and still function.

to think tech itself was the solution—and that we’d now be equally wrong to treat tech as the problem.

with rejecting the binary

What does it mean to be WIRED, a publication born to celebrate technology, in an age when tech is often demonized?

Today, a great deal of media coverage focuses on the damage wrought by a tech industry run amok.

how to think about the issue intelligently and with nuance instead of always falling into the binary trap.

More likely, you—like me—are at neither of these extremes.

is "called to be truly inclusive, not canceling but cherishing the differences and sensibilities that have historically marked various peoples."

The pope slammed those who operate under the "guise of defending diversity" and in the process eliminate "all sense of identity," which he said risks "silencing positions that defend a respectful and balanced understanding of various sensibilities."

“common values of humanity”

Recently, the issue of child safety in virtual reality was raised by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH). The campaign group looked at a popular third-party app called VRChat.

"Diplomacy is called to be truly inclusive, not canceling but cherishing the differences and sensibilities that have historically marked various peoples," he added.

Speaking on Monday, the head of the Catholic Church blasted “one-track thinking” in which individuals express a “mindset that rejects the natural foundations of humanity.”

During his address to the diplomats, Pope Francis welcomed the forthcoming opening of the 88th permanent embassy in the Eternal City, that of Switzerland, until now located in Slovenia.

The Holy See has either a local nunciature (106) or a delocalized nunciature (77). In comparison, China has an ambassador in 169 countries, the United States in 168 countries and France in 161 countries.

The Holy See has either a local nunciature (106) or a delocalized nunciature (77). In comparison, China has an ambassador in 169 countries, the United States in 168 countries and France in 161 countries.

In the past, malicious spam focused more on using techniques such as viruses. Now that computers are better at auto-updating to patch security holes, spammers are targeting people with social attacks, using techniques like impersonating real companies or people. They’re exploiting human weaknesses more than computer weaknesses.

there has been a 30 percent increase in the volume of spam this past year across services.

particularly in the past six months — many people using free-email services have noticed a surge of unwanted scam emails

hanks to improvements in automatic filters from email providers and third-party services, the early 2000′s onslaught of sketchy Viagra offers and promised contest winnings were mostly kept out of sight.

she believes that local residents are right in arguing that they don’t get much in return for hosting data centers.

One of the most common arguments against the facility is its huge demand for green energy that was destined for Dutch homes. The data center “uses an enormous amount of electricity, of which a big part is green electricity, which we don't have much of in the Netherlands anyway,” says de Roos. The new Dutch government echoed this sentiment in its December coalition agreement, saying that "hyperscale data centers place an unreasonably large demand on the available renewable energy in relation to their societal or economic value.”

Like Schaap, other residents of Zeewolde are outraged that Meta has chosen their town for its first gigantic data center in the Netherlands. They claim the company will be allowed to syphon off a large percentage of the country’s renewable energy supply to power porn, conspiracy theories, and likes on Meta’s social platforms.