Remember When France Looked Like the Future?

While natives of the English-speaking world may be surprised to hear it, there was a time when France looked like "the future," Paris a glimpse of "tomorrowland."

This may seem strange given that we associate that status with countries that became industrial superpowers--like Britain or the United States, or more tentatively, Germany or Japan--and France never quite had that stature, for various reasons. (There was maritime Britain's advantage over continental France in chasing after colonial markets, and escaping the effects of continental land wars--like the defeat by Prussia in 1870-1871 that cost it critical natural and industrial resources. There was the extent to which a big and powerful financial sector that preferred speculation and capital export to investment in actually making stuff at home called the shots politically at critical times. And so forth.)

However, if France’s industry was less impressive than others with regard to scale, it consistently impressed qualitatively, the country tending to "punch above its weight class" in high-tech.

Thus while Britain became an industrial superpower on the basis of mechanized textile production, France produced the Jacquard loom--no great hit at the time, but a milestone in the development of computing. The redevelopment associated with Baron Haussmann and world capital-scale gas-light and the construction of the tallest building in the world out of iron (the Eiffel Tower) made Paris seem futuristically modern to Victorian eyes, while pre-Ford France was the world leader in auto production, and aviation too, because of the excellence of French engine-building.

So did it go in the post-World War II period. While people in other countries talked about nuclear power, France actually went and made it the basis of its grid (today getting 70 percent of its electricity from this source, while being a significant electricity exporter as well), and pioneered the "breeder" reactors that it seemed would be hugely important to any wider usage. France, not Britain or wartime era rocket pioneer Germany, was the West European leader in space, becoming the third country to orbit a satellite in 1965, after only the Soviet Union and the U.S.. The country also built high-speed trains, supersonic airliners, and the proto-Internet remembered as the "Minitel"--which gave the French public access to online amenities such as few Americans had at the time.

Why has all this not been more widely appreciated? I suppose there is the old "Anglo-Saxon" prejudice which held the continent, with the French the continentals par excellence, to be backward, poor, shabby in comparison with themselves. In the post-war era there was disdain for France's more statist and welfarist economic model--a disdain which only grew in the 1980s with France’s apparent left turn under a Socialist Party government as America and Britain went right, epochally. Information age euphoria also had its effect--convincing a great many Americans in particular that the Web was about to make the world a utopia, and that all the credit for that could go to Bay Area garage tinkering and absolutely nothing else, and anyone else doing anything in any other way was doomed to be left out forever, with the Europeans in particular an image of perpetual stagnation and inevitable decay.

The misapprehensions of this compound of nationalism and techno-libertarianism have been very, very slow to pass (Paul Krugman in 2011 quipping that "the US elite picture of Europe is stuck in a sort of time warp, in which it's always 1997, and we have the Internet and they don't"), and as yet have done so imperfectly. The result is that where, for example, Germany has managed to win some respect for its undeniable achievements as a manufacturer (such that even longtime Europe-bashers offer a word or two in praise for the German economy) it remains common to see France solely through the lens of the shopworn clichés discussed here, such that one can only wonder what we may be missing about France, and the world, as a result.

A "Greater Germany" in Military as Well as Economic Terms?

Some time ago I read Emmanuel Todd's discussion with Olivier Berruyer of the German economy's weight within the European Union and was struck by the pointed difference between his assessment and my previous impressions. I equated Germany with the nation-state that is the Federal Republic of Germany, with its population of some 80 million and GDP of $4 trillion. However, Todd described an increasingly coherent economic space encompassing Western Europe's other German-speaking territories (Switzerland, Austria); the territories associated with them for centuries through the Prussian and Austrian Empires, especially about the Baltic and Adriatic coasts (Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Slovenia, Croatia, while the landlocked but also formerly Austrian territory of Czechia is also in there); and the Benelux countries (Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg) and Sweden for good measure; within which, by virtue of trade, investment and the influence they bring, German interests are dominant.

The resulting entity, recalling the Pan-German dreams of another era, and which might be spoken of as an economic "Greater Germany," comes to 200 million people with a GDP of $8 trillion that can seem more than the sum of its parts (bringing together as it does unique strengths from the Dutch monopoly of cutting-edge photolithography to the financial weight of Switzerland and Luxembourg). A much more satisfactorily superpower-like entity in itself than the Federal Republic, with the help of partners like France, it is the dominant force in an undeniably superpower-like European Union of 450 million people with a $16 trillion economy.

Still, this Greater Germany had distinct limits, not least in the military sphere, which have only since been underlined by the discussions of Germany's elevation of its defense spending--the proposals of February 2022, however heavily they lay on Germany's citizenry, a far cry from what it would take to make Germany stand as tall in Europe and the world militarily as it does economically, never mind realize any superpower aspirations.

It did occur to me that Germany could endeavor to integrate the armed forces of the "Greater Germany" into its own in some fashion--a process that had already begun in a small way, with the Netherlands has been integrating their ground forces into the German army. As it happens, this process has already been long ongoing, specifically entailing the Netherlands integrating each of the three brigades of the Royal Netherlands Army into one of each of Germany's three army divisions. Taking place over many years, according to the English-language statement on the web site of the Netherlands' Ministry of Defense, this past March saw the completion of the process with the last Dutch unit, a Dutch light armored brigade, now integrated into a German armored division.

What is one to make all this? Certainly examining Germany's ground forces, like those of other major West European states, one is struck by their relatively understrength quality--the Bundeswehr’s "armored divisions" on paper being something a lot less numerous and heavily armed than the label implies. (On paper Germany has two "armored divisions." In reality it lacks enough main battle tanks for one division on the old standard.) One may add that Germany has long strained to make good the shortfalls in its case, in part because of difficulty recruiting enough volunteers to simply keep the gaps from being too disruptive. Germany's filling out "understrength" formations with whole units from its neighbor and longtime NATO ally, with which it has long had a special bilateral association in the German/Dutch Corps founded in the early 1990s, and which just so happens to use much of the same equipment German forces do (like Leopard 2 tanks, Boxer armored fighting vehicles, and Panzerhaubitze 2000 howitzers), seems one way of compensating for the inadequacies in short order.

The Dutch Ministry of Defense emphasizes in the aforementioned statement that "the Netherlands remains in control of the decision whether and where to deploy its military forces," but one may presume that there is an expectation of cooperation in any really important eventuality requiring the dispatch of an entire division. That said, the Netherlands is but one European state, and represents a relatively limited part of the potential "pool" of Greater Germany's military power--but that this happened at all can seem suggestive indeed of the direction in which Germany would like to move, and in which at least some of its neighbors and partners may be prepared to follow.

Will Democracy Survive in France? Reflections on Emmanuel Todd's Comments

From the standpoint of 2023 the history of the twenty-first century can seem one long succession of deeply unpleasant shocks, which by the '10s were increasingly manifesting themselves in the most fundamental aspects of the political life of Western democracies in ways that no one could overlook. France, far from being an exception to the pattern, has instead been a particularly conspicuous case. The country saw the collapse of its established party system, the emergence of a mass protest movement in the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests), the ascent of the far right, and even the country's military establishment's openly threatening a coup--all as the government, headed by a "strong presidency" that, in Simon Kuper's words, is "the closest thing in the developed world to an elected dictator," displayed an increasing taste for rule by emergency measures to the point of routinizing them amid conditions of pandemic, war, economic stagnation and growing labor strife. The result is that even so mainstream and conservative a publication as The Financial Times recently ran an editorial (by the aforementioned Kuper) calling on France to move on from its Fifth Republic to a sixth.

Still, in the English-speaking world we hear about France mainly from other English-speaking writers, often not just outsiders to the country about which they write, but questionably informed about their subject, while bringing to the discussion a heavy freight of view-distorting prejudices (as the "experts" presented by a media historically lousy at identifying genuine expertise so often turn out to be--remember the drivel they used to write about Japan, and still write about that country today?). Meanwhile the commentary in France itself has been increasingly and unhelpfully skewed. The result is that when social scientist Emmanuel Todd (the author of The Final Fall, After the Empire and The Third World War Has Begun) gave Marianne's Etienne Campion a long interview regarding the protests against President Emmanuel Macron's use of article 49.3 to force a raising of the retirement age down the throat of a French public when unable to get his law passed through routine legislative processes the item seemed to me to be well worth some attention.

As one might guess from his prior work Todd is a staunch critic of Macron's act. The raising of the retirement age itself is in his view unjust, useless and incoherent ("injuste, inutile et incohérente"), and its being forced through in this manner unconstitutional. Moreover, there is a context here that makes the act much more than an abuse of the presidency's emergency powers to circumvent democratic institutions, to which neoliberalism is critical. Todd regards that ideology not as some revival of the classical liberalism of John Locke-Adam Smith, but an "economic nihilism" summed up in such "idiocies" ("idioties") as Margaret Thatcher's famous remark that "There is no such a thing as society."* Indeed, so far as Todd is concerned making short-term individual economic rationality ("la rationalité individualiste," "la rationalité économique à court terme") the determining principle of all of social life, with its destruction of the economic base (as through the deindustrialization of the U.S., Britain and France) and the social supports that give the population an indispensable minimum of security (sufficient for people to start families, for example), is "destructive of the capacity of populations to reproduce and societies to survive"--literally, as he shows on the basis of the falling life expectancy in the U.S. and sub-replacement birth rates across the advanced world (with France's high natality bespeaking its refusal of neoliberalism, and in an inversion of the neoliberal view of France, that refusal actually the country's greatness).**

Increasingly exposed for the nihilism it is, Todd holds neoliberalism to be "dying" (alluding even to a return to "state entrepreneurship" in that great champion of neoliberal policy, the U.S.), in spite of which Macron, as this pension reform shows, is, in spite of some glib, vague and unconvincing rhetoric about "reindustrialization," still pushing the neoliberal project. Of course, if Macron is a neoliberal in a world becoming less so this requires some explanation, and Todd offers it, speaking of political inertia--and the personal defects of Macron himself, not least a "cognitive deficit" (Todd uses the term at least three times over the interview's course), and serious problems of personality. These include a hatred for "ordinary people," and even a child-like "testing the limits" of what is allowed him as he deliberately provokes the public with his style as well as his substance.

Why is Macron managing to get away with such behavior? Todd argues that this is a matter of the combination of France's electoral system, and specifically its not offering its voters proportional representation (as seen in the two-round presidential elections), and the divisions between left and right in the country as represented by the "Unsubmissive France" ("Nupes") that Jean-Luc Melenchon led and Marine Le Pen's "National Rally" ("RN"). Both opposed to the neoliberal course, they are divided by what Americans today would call the "Culture War," in which educational levels factor (people who are not well-off but are still college degree-holders favoring Nupes, while their non-college-educated counterparts favor Le Pen). Still, while acknowledging the barriers to civility between them Todd, who admits to worries that on its present course the country is headed for a collision between the neoliberal "state-finance aristocracy" and the far right, ends the interview with a call to all French persons, whatever their educations, wealth, party or anything else to be the "adults" and "stop the child," and Nupes and the RN make some temporary pact under which they join forces to reform the voting system and introduce the "proportional" ballot France does not have, which he now thinks just about the only thing that can save French democracy.

Considering Todd's remarks I found his appraisal of neoliberalism of particular interest--his characterization of it as nihilistic in the cultural and economic sphere fair enough (and I think, Todd quite right to point out that the view of there being "No such thing as society" is not the tradition of Adam Smith, however much Thatcher had her economic thinking done for her by the folks of the Adam Smith Institute). This extends to his more specific remarks about family formation, birth rates, and the rest. Also noteworthy, and quite correct, is Todd's recognition of the essential endurance of neoliberalism underneath Macron's gestures toward protectionism (a subject on which I have found myself writing quite a bit these last couple of years as people speak of neoliberalism's supposed demise).

However, it seems to me that France is less unique here than some French observers seem to think (Todd perhaps included). Bruno Amable and Stefano Palombarini call Macron "the last neoliberal" (and I got the impression that Todd is thinking along the same lines), but I remember all too well that reports of the death of neoliberalism have been "greatly exaggerated" over and over again these past four decades (amid the neomercantilist fad of the '90s, after the 2007 crash, etc., etc.). And it seems to me that pretty much wherever one looks across the advanced world we see neoliberals confusing onlookers with protectionist gestures (increasingly numerous and disruptive as they have been) as they otherwise "stay the course"--that neoliberalism, for all its faults and failures, and for all the opposition it has aroused, is not being given up, even in a gradualist way, but at most adapted to meet the present emergency. (We see it in fiscal and monetary policy, we see it in social policy, we see it above all in the continued centrality of creditism-fueled and speculation-minded financialization in the economic model, among much, much else; while I might add that Todd's reference to "the return of the entrepreneurial state" in the U.S. must be highly qualified, a very limited matter in as well as out of the national security arena, and which seems likely to only dwindle in the months and even years ahead, given the combination of the shifting focus of a Joseph Biden administration which was never much of a candidate for a break with the past, the current makeup of Congress, or the response likely to follow in the wake of the current cryptocurrency and bank failures from Silvergate on.)

This exaggerated sense of the demise of neoliberalism extends to the domestic scene in France where, while popular sentiment is clearly and forcefully against it (across educational levels, a point he discusses in a more nuanced way than we tend to see in the U.S.), I am not sure how deep the opposition to neoliberalism of Melenchon and Le Pen goes--neither having said or done anything to make me think they, or the leaders of the tendencies they lead, are anything but another couple of politicians promising change on the campaign trail, but in office likely to continue and even intensify the policies seen to date. (Britain affords a striking example. There Keir Starmer posed as a socialist with a social democratic platform when it was convenient, then discarded that platform in the most brazen manner imaginable--such that the country's choice in the next General Election, barring some unforeseen change, is between the Tory neoliberalism of Rishi Sunak and the New Labour Blairite neoliberalism of Starmer.)

Being somewhere between "faint" and "facade" the two parties' supposed common opposition to neoliberalism is thus no foundation for overcoming their perhaps irreconcilable differences. Meanwhile, it may be that proportional representation is the last thing that Le Pen and the RN want, precisely because of how, in 2002 and more significantly in 2017 and 2022, the lack of such representation lifted this party with a mere 15 percent of the seats in the National Assembly to that second round of voting in the presidential election—where in 2022 it got over 40 percent of the vote. Putting it bluntly, the RN's best hope for winning in 2027 may be that disgust with Macron, and the blocking of any alternatives to Macron but themselves, push them over the top and put Le Pen in the Élysée Palace. (Indeed, in making his call Todd can seem to be calling on Le Pen and the RN to link hands with their center-left rivals to help save France from . . . Le Pen and the RN.) The result is that some Nupes/RN alliance coming to the rescue of French democracy in the manner Todd describes seems to me very, very unlikely indeed.

All that said (interesting as Todd's remarks about the subject were, the more in as we are so used here in America to the centrist-neoliberal press hailing the Macrons of the world as the "adults in the room" and their critics as unruly children) I am less sure of what to make of Macron the individual--and the relevance of his personality to the situation at hand. After all, the French government's line in policy does not emanate from the outmoded thinking of a single individual stuck in the past, but rather the preferences of the country's elites, which are entirely in line with those of their counterparts the world over (as, consistently shown by the decisions of the Constitutional Council, down to its supporting Macron in his use of 49.3 to push through the reform). Likewise the opposition to neoliberalism, and indeed the recent escalation of that opposition, is not unique to the French people, with, if French opposition in this case has been more focused and dramatic than elsewhere, still clearly part of a growing international trend (as France's neighbors, Britain and Germany, see historic strike action). The same goes for Macron's extreme display of disrespect for the population and authoritarian personal style in response to the protests--disdain for the inevitable widespread dissent virtually a requirement for the job of imposing those hugely unpopular policies. (Indeed, considering Macron, the backlash against him, and his answer to it, can one really say he is very different from Margaret Thatcher--especially the Thatcher of the coal strike and the poll tax riots? Or Blair? Or Sunak and Starmer today? Or any number of other aspirants to the status of being their own country's Thatcher--such as Macron's predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy was?) Still, it is not too great a stretch to believe that he is enjoying playing the part--and there seems nothing to be said in praise of that. One also cannot rule out that his doing so in these different circumstances may have different, very dangerous, consequences.

* No matter how her loyalists try to spin it, "There is no such thing as society" is exactly what Thatcher meant when she spoke those words, as you can see for yourself looking at the full 1987 interview with Woman's Own posted at the Margaret Thatcher Foundation's web site. ** For Todd it is significant that the great neoliberal "success" story, South Korea, is at the extreme opposite end of the spectrum, with a Total Fertility Rate of 0.8, as against France's near-replacement level 1.8.

Microsoft's "Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence" Study: Some Reflections

Since the release of GPT-4 a scarce month ago we have seen an abundance of comment on the capabilities of the system--overwhelmingly superficial comment, with little critical thought in evidence, such that a discerning observer may read a great deal of it without having much basis for judging its actual significance. (We are told over and over and over again that GPT-4 did well on a Bar Exam. That sounds impressive. But what does that really mean?)

However, a new study from a team of scientists at Microsoft, "Sparks of General Intelligence: Early Experiments With GPT-4," offers something more substantial. Working from a definition of intelligence laid out in a noted 1994 editorial produced by a large (52 member!) group of psychologists ("a very general mental capability that" implicitly "encompasses a broad range of cognitive skills and abilities" that includes "among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience"); a standard for what constitutes "Artificial General Intelligence" (as an artificial intelligence able to perform in the aforementioned ways at a level at least comparable to that of a human); and an understanding of how GPT-4 functions (as a neural network-based "Large Language Model" (LLM) trained on a vast body of web-based text "using at its core a self-supervised objective of predicting the next word in a partial sentence"); they devised a series of challenges which would be "novel and difficult" for such a program. In doing so they endeavored to challenge GPT-4 not only with a variety of demanding problems (coping with imagery, producing microcode, solving mathematical problems, etc.), but also highly idiosyncratic challenges that would require the chatbot to synthesize knowledge and skills from different areas to cope with problems for which its training was very unlikely to prepare it, demonstrating that more than memorization was involved, and that instead it possessed a "deep and flexible understanding of concepts, skills and domains." An excellent example is one test requiring it to present the proof of the infinitude of primes (aka "Euclid's theorem") written in the form of Shakespearean poetry, which forced the system to combine "mathematical reasoning, poetic expression and natural language generation." Still another was its being required to solve a riddle that required the system to come up with a conclusion based on the geographical location of the event described purely from clues that, it might be said, could only be handled on the basis of the "common sense" that has been such a challenge for AI developers. (Specifically it was expected to guess the color of a bear a hunter shot in a location where walking one mile south and one mile east walking one mile north brought him back to where he started--which can only be the North Pole, where from any point one mile south a mile back north brings one back to where they were originally.)

All of this established the Microsoft study then proceeds to detail the experiments and their results, and then present more general conclusions drawn from them. Ultimately the authors judged that "in all of these tasks, GPT-4's performance is strikingly close to human-level performance"--it even met the common sense challenge--such that they "believe that it could reasonably be viewed as an early (yet still incomplete) version of an artificial general intelligence (AGI) system" (emphasis added).

Because italicizing the relevant text doesn't seem to do it justice I am going to repeat it: "reasonably . . . viewed . . . as an early . . . version of an artificial general intelligence."

In other words, it is reasonable to say that not only is artificial intelligence here, but AGI is here. Now. As an actuality that millions of people are tinkering with.

Still, in looking at that statement one should not forget the qualifications. It may be reasonable to say GPT-4 is an AGI . . . but an early" and "still incomplete" version of it, and the team devotes as much time to explaining the limits of the AGI at hand as wowing us with its genuinely impressive capabilities. Key to their analysis is the distinction that psychologist Daniel Kahneman drew between "fast thinking" and "slow thinking." The former is automatic and intuitive, the latter controlled and rational--the kind where we have to consciously reason our way to a solution of a problem, a process which is, as implied by the terminology, slower, and more "effortful," but also likely to be more accurate and reliable.

As one might guess from the description of its functioning the word-predicting chatbot is a fast thinker which "essentially" may be said to "come up with an answer in . . . a single pass of the feedforward architecture." This works well with some problems, but not others, particularly those tasks which are "discontinuous" and so "require planning ahead . . . or a 'Eureka idea'"--and when faced with such tasks GPT-4's performance suffers, with the authors as one example of this another problem related to prime numbers. While GPT-4 did surprisingly well at explaining Euclid's theorem by way of Shakespearean poetry (inventively writing that explanation out as a dialogue between Romeo and Juliet) it did not do well at what would seem the much humbler task of simply giving us a list of the prime numbers between 150 and 250, with the authors arguing that this was because this is the kind of "slow thinking" task where most of us would "get out a scratchpad" and work it out--whereas GPT-4 has no such function, or even the basis for one. As this implies GPT-4 is simply not equipped to assess the quality of its own information or thought process, and not very good with context--deficiencies reflective of other lacks, like the absence of long-term memory, and faculties for making use of that memory through "continual learning." Together they leave it very sensitive to the form as well as the content of inputs--"the framing or wording of prompts and their sequencing in a session" easily throwing it even where tasks it can perform well are concerned. The authors of the study also stress that GPT-4 lacks the "confidence calibration" that would let it distinguish between when it is "guessing" and when it actually "knows"; and as many have remarked, prone to "hallucinating" false information. The result is that for its designers to improve this "early" and "still incomplete" AGI into something more complete requires that they add a capacity for "slow thinking" as well as "fast thinking," with the former overseeing the latter; long-term memory; a continual learning capacity to take full advantage of that faculty; and they add a shift beyond single word prediction toward "higher-level parts of [a] text such as sentences, paragraphs or ideas" (which they recognize may or may not emerge from a "next-word-prediction paradigm," even with these improvements).

Even as someone long inclining toward skepticism regarding the significance of the performance of systems like GPT-4 (I have tended to focus on how AI copes with the physical world, an area where the record has been rather disappointing) I have to admit that the case made in the study impressed me, rather more than anything I have heard or read about OpenAI's products since these started grabbing headlines last year. Indeed, I find myself thinking that here, after a great many false starts, AGI may be finally shifting from science fiction to science fact, with some of the capabilities that were supposedly "just around the corner" for decades finally arriving. (Indeed, in this month marking the forty-first anniversary of the Fifth Generation Computer Systems Initiative, it seems that we may be finally getting what was promised then, with important economic and cultural implications perhaps not too far off.)

However, I am also impressed by the constructive criticism offered herein, which seems to me well worth thinking about, particularly in regard for the necessity of a slow thinking function overseeing the more "autocomplete"-like function being demonstrated (the more in as, I suspect, that shift from single-word prediction to dealing with higher parts of text would likely depend heavily on it). If we accept GPT-4 as increasingly human-like when it comes to fast thinking, just where does AI research today stand with regard to the slow kind? And for that matter, where does it stand in regard to the integration of the two in a useful manner? Granting the case made here this would seem the next issue to think about--with the state and rate of progress determining whether the advance of AI research that has seemed so blistering in recent months accelerates, slows or even comes to another screeching halt of the kind that has renewed cynicism toward the field time and time again.

The Russian Armed Forces' Robotization Aspirations

Given both the escalation of interstate conflict in our time, in which tension between Russia and the West, and the Russo-Ukrainian conflict in particular, have been central; and the upsurge of interest in artificial intelligence research and its applications in the military as other spheres; the March 2023 report by the RAND Corporation's Krystyna Marcinek and Eugeniu Han regarding the Russian government's aspirations to the robotization of its military forces (Russia's Asymmetric Response to 21st Century Strategic Competition: Robotization of the Armed Forces) would seem especially timely.

The document, which runs to 132 pages all told, details the concept of robotization not only as understood generally but as it appears to be understood specifically among Russian military thinkers and policymakers; the Russian government's stated plans in this direction; the actual work done to achieve robotization of the Russian armed forces; and Russia's technological-industrial potential to achieve its goals.

As might be expected the mass of organizational, technical and even linguistic detail is considerable (the last seeing the authors decipher particular usages in the Russian literature for the benefit of Western readers who, even if among the very few possessing Russian language fluency, might not have a good grasp of the relevant terminology). Still, they manage to handle the material intelligibly, while in this moment when emotions are running high, and the old analytical baggage surrounding assessments of Russian industrial, technological and military performance can seem to weigh even more heavily than usual, the authors seem to me to manage to treat the subject intelligibly, and with some fair-mindedness.

The result is that they come to some interesting conclusions about differences in the thinking on military robotization as between Russia and the West. In particular, they argue that the Russian government is, if anything, more ambitious than the West with regard to robotization--that one can see this in their greater hope of replacing rather than augmenting human personnel with robots (hence, "robotization"); the signs they give of greater expectations of soon being able to deploy significant numbers of combat robots on the ground, like unmanned tanks; and their apparently greater willingness to countenance those systems using deadly force on an autonomous, no-human-in-the-loop basis. The authors also acknowledge the distance between the actual state-of-the-art in Russian, and everyone else's, robotics. And, as suggested by the title of their study itself (foregrounding "asymmetric response" while relegating mention of robotics to the subtitle), they stress the extent to which the government's ambitions reflect the difficulties of its situation--not least its demographic limitations relative to its rivals, and what its government may see as a geopolitical balance shifting disadvantageously in the near term. (Russia, after all, is a country of 150 million--as against a NATO alliance of some 900 million and growing, or a China of 1.4 billion--while even a Russian military devoted solely to homeland defense of the Russian Federation's territory would have that less than 2 percent of the world's population trying to hold a sixth of the world's landmass.)

The result is that the Russian government's high aspirations in the field of robotics can seem to come down to the hope of "wonder weapons" helping to salvage a worsening security situation--to an implausible degree. After all, overoptimism about the possible rate of progress aside, the fact remains that if Russia is not without some strengths here (among them a good STEM educational system, a relatively well-digitized economy and a genuinely serious government commitment here), it is far from clear how it would vault ahead of the rest of the world in this area given its not only being well behind other nations in even relatively easy areas like the less-demanding aerial drones to the point of relying heavily on foreign inputs for their production, numerous factors handicap it in any "race to AI superweaponry"--be it its having a much smaller industrial base than many other major states (its industrial disadvantage actually far exceeding its demographic disadvantage); its pointed weakness in many of the specific technological areas relevant to producing such weaponry (like the production of semiconductors, and their own required inputs); the difficulties for its activity posed by a sanctions regime increasingly incorporating the most important producers in those fields where it relies on imports (directed against not just Russia, but its important partner China); and the many enduring obstacles to its development broadly (like slight industry-academic collaboration, and the prospect of a "brain drain" as underemployed talent leaves the country for work abroad). Still, no one should be under any illusions about such problems being uniquely Russian, with, to all evidences, every major power currently and significantly a captive of technological hype as it copes with a world situation that is not all that any of them would like it to be.

Reporting the G-7 Economies

Americans are commonly stereotyped less interested in the outside world than other peoples--a function, some suppose, of the country's position in world affairs (its dominant status, which has others paying more attention to it than vice-versa) and more distinct features of its geography and culture (its continental scale, its being part of an already long predominant Anglosphere, its tendency to receive rather than send out immigrants, etc.).

Whether one sees the stereotype as containing any truth or not, the country's media seem to behave as if it were the case, adding a lessened attention to events in much of the world to its other biases--its preference for politics over policy, personality over material facts, narrative over nuance, and a centrist perspective squeamish about or hostile to contextualization and big-picture thinking, inclined to neoliberalism and neoconservatism, and deeply deferential to Establishment "expertise."

All this means that what coverage other countries get is of a very particular kind, as where the economic life of the Group of Seven advanced industrialized countries is concerned. It by and large approves Britain's being neoliberal trailblazer and "financial superpower" (and is much less interested in Britain's deindustrialization). It is less warm in its attitude toward Germany and Japan, but those two countries' economies are so big, powerful and dominant in their regions that the media are compelled to give them some heed--and if hewing to narratives of Eurosclerosis and Japanese "lost decades" for a long time, in the case of Germany especially, but also sometimes Japan, acknowledging manufacturing successes. (It also helps that playing up those countries' economic weight has been prominent in the American media's tendency to encourage those countries' "rearmament"--while given the campaign against China's IT sector there is no getting away from Japan's colossal profile in areas like chip-making inputs and robotics.)

By contrast there seems to me much less coverage of the other three G-7 members--France, Italy, Canada. Where the first two countries are concerned, and France particularly, it revels in neoliberal clichés about an "old Europe" of bloated governments, overgenerous welfare states, uppity, strike-happy workers, ever-low and eroding productivity and "competitiveness," and an oppressed entrepreneur class looking longingly across the English Channel, and still better across the Atlantic, toward FREEDOM! (Indeed, such cliché, which is to be found in France's own press as well as that of foreign countries, has reared its ugly head in American coverage of French protest against the raising of the country's retirement age--cliché consistently acknowledged even by those who would offer a more sympathetic take.) Italy is hazily perceived in a similar manner (the tendency to treat a whole continent as a nearly homogenous blob may not be as bad in Europe's case as in that of "Africa" or "Asia," but not as much better as one might think). Still, it is mostly ignored. And Canada is ignored even more completely--such that one has the irony of America neighboring one of the world's largest and most important economies, and its press paying almost no attention to the fact at all, such that I suspect that even Americans attentive to the relevant areas of the news know less about the economy of their own northern neighbor and North American Free Trade Agreement partner than they do any of the other countries.

Such is the "quality" of the media that centrists endlessly sing as our salvation from fake news-purveying hordes.

On Italy's GPT-4 "Ban"

The Italian Data Protection Authority (Garante Per La Protezione Dei Dati Personali, or GPDP) has imposed an (I quote the official English translation of its statement on its web site) "immediate temporary limitation" on GPT-4.

According to the Authority's own statement (which you can see in the original, and in English translation, at its own web site, here) the action has nothing to do with the fears of AI-out-of-control of which so much is now being made. Rather the GPDP cites the more commonplace Internet regulation concerns of the protection of user privacy ("no information is provided to users and data subjects whose data are collected by Open AI; more importantly, there appears to be no legal basis underpinning the massive collection and processing of personal data in order to 'train' the algorithms on which the platform relies"), and the fear that children will be subjected to inappropriate content ("the lack of . . . age verification mechanism expos[ing] children to receiving responses that are absolutely inappropriate to their age and awareness").

One may speculate that these stated concerns do not exhaust the GPDP's concerns about the technology--and even that other concerns may actually be of higher priority than the ones stated. Still, that these are the ones presented is a reminder that, in what can seem a silly rush to see the release of GPT-4 as a bad sci-fi "rebellion of the robots" scenario, we may be overlooking humbler but quite important concerns--the more in as so much is being made of some of these exact concerns in relation to other technologies.

Notes on the 2023 British Defence Review, Thus Far

Government documents regarding official policy, contrary to what they should be, are not written for the intelligent citizen taking an interest in the public affairs with which every citizen ought to be concerned, but the "expert." One reflection of this is a lack of context for virtually everything important, which, especially in combination with the pompous verbosity that is a trademark of such documents' prose, leaves many a reader who takes the trouble to plow through it with a bland, platitudinous text offering little if any real insight into the important issue at hand.

It seems to me that British defence reviews are getting worse rather than better in this respect, with 2023's review document exemplary--the more in as it is a "refresh" of the 2021 document, which itself represented a break with the past. Titled Global Britain in a Competitive Age: the Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy, it combined the review of defence with a much more comprehensive (and much longer) policy statement--and while generally being referred to as the defence review, relegated most of the more narrowly military stuff we actually expect from British defence reviews on the basis of what they previously looked like (like how the armed forces will be sized and structured, what will be done about equipment holdings and bases, etc., etc.) to a separate document, Defence in a Competitive Age.

So basically the thing we call a defence review, even as it swelled to greater proportions, did not actually contain much "defence review stuff" in it, while commentators generally refrain from calling the one with most of the defence review stuff in it something other than a defence review, the much more generic term "command paper," as Walter Sobchak would have it, the "preferred nomenclature." But with, as it happened, the critical stuff about Britain's government's plans to expand its nuclear arsenal mainly in the Integrated Review rather than the more defence review-type command paper.

Entirely logical, of course.

The pattern is being followed this year, with the Integrated Review out first (it appeared March 13), and the command paper to follow. However, when the 2021 Integrated Review came out the "command paper" came out the next day, so at least those interested in the issue had the details of the country's defence posture soon enough. This year, though, while the Integrated Review, which was itself subject to delay (coming out March 13, almost a week later than its initial March 7 due date ), will be followed by the "command paper" not by a single day but by a period of months--this expected out in June!

This very long delay seems the more consequential given the reports going back to February of squabbling among the government's senior policymakers over the armed forces' funding--a reflection, I suppose, of how between the country's post-Great Recession, post-Brexit, post-pandemic, post-Trussonomics economic situation, the reality of NATO's military confrontation with Russia as war rages in Ukraine, and the government's pretensions (prioritizing the Euro-Atlantic while somehow sticking with the "tilt to the Indo-Pacific"), the incoherence of the government's aspirations is impossible for even the senior functionaries to ignore. While it is clear that much remains to be decided, given the disparity between means and stated ends I see no squaring of this circle anytime soon, not with the crowd currently in office, nor for that matter any other allowed anywhere near 10 Downing Street--the more in as this month's Integrated Review appallingly opened with three paragraphs of the government congratulating itself at a moment when serious self-criticism was sorely needed.

Notes on the Comeback of Conscription

As the reaction to a deepfake video of Joe Biden reviving the draft has reminded news-watchers, conscription is appearing on the agenda across much of the Western world. Sweden, scarcely after ending it, has already reinstituted it in a limited way (having a draft, but so far limited call-ups). Meanwhile France, where President Emmanuel Macron who had wanted to mandate "direct experience of military life" for the young for at least a month, now enrolls its young people in a "national service" program where they are "encouraged" to partake of a military component that can seem at least a quarter-step in that direction. Meanwhile Germany's Minister of Defense, while demanding ever more resources for a program of German rearmament already without any point of comparison since at least the founding of the Bundeswehr in the 1950s, openly speaks of the end of conscription as a "mistake."

In the U.S. there has been less discussion as yet, for ample reason, not least an insular geography that makes a manpower-intensive army relatively less important than a technology-intensive navy than is the case for a country with long land borders with big military powers; and a vast and relatively youthful population base that makes it easy to raise large land armies on even a volunteer base. (Compared with the biggest West European power, Germany, the U.S. has four times as big a population, and five times as many people in the critical "military age" category of 18-24--some 30 million to Germany's 6 million.) However, the most immediately important fact is that the U.S. armed forces were never reduced from their Cold War level of strength to anything like the same degree as the European nations. The U.S. cut its armed forces by a third after that conflict--while the cut was closer to two-thirds in the case of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), and much deeper where fighting forces were concerned. Where in the Cold War the FRG's army had a dozen active-duty divisions, including six armored divisions, today it has just three divisions--not a single one of which is a proper armored division on the old standard, because of how the country's "tank park" shrank, from some five thousand tanks to perhaps not even two hundred and fifty--a 95 percent contraction. It is likewise with the reserves whose mobilization would come ahead of any draft. Where the Bundeswehr's massive reserve once permitted its ground-forces component to by itself put over 1 million soldiers into the field when fully mobilized, now it would manage 70,000--a 93 percent drop. And so does it go, more or less, with France, and Britain, and Italy.

The result is that if really intent on in short order restoring the capability to fight a conventional conflict on any significant scale (even one well short of what they were prepared for in the Cold War) the European states have few alternatives to conscription, as compared with a U.S. which would not have to go anywhere near so far, so soon, still possessing as it does massive conventional war-fighting capabilities (even where ground forces are concerned, plausibly disposing of a greater mechanized fighting capability than Europe's powers bring to the table combined). However, whether other Western states actually will follow Sweden's example will have much to do with how the international scene evolves--and what the publics of those countries will accept. The media is characteristically eager for the most militarized response to the international situation of today--but it is far from clear that the broader public is as enthusiastic. Moreover, the attractiveness of the idea falls in proportion to one's expectation that they will be the one actually drafted--"Back in my day"-growling old people who don't much like young people, and know they themselves are safe from call-up, very readily support the idea--but young people not so much. (After all, if they wanted to be in the armed forces they would likely already be there.) Indeed, forcing large numbers of young people into military service could be exactly what catalyzes the relatively marginal opposition to the conflict seen to date into something much more difficult for supporters of the very conflict for which they drafted them.

Australia and the AUKUS Submarine Agreement

Ever since the announcement of the AUKUS partnership and the Australian nuclear submarine program for which it would allow there has been speculation about just how Australia would actually be supplied with such submarines--or at least, what at least the initial plan for such supply would be. In the wake of a joint statement by U.S. President Joseph Biden, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, and Australia's Prime Minister Anthony Albanese at Naval Base Point Loma in San Diego the period of speculation is over.

Simply going by the official transcript of the statement by the three figures--if also distilling these speakers' all too characteristically rambling, repetitive and public relations-laden rhetoric into hard fact--one gets the following:

Australia will buy three Virginia-class nuclear-powered (but conventionally-armed) boats starting in the early 2030s, with an option on two more. These acquisitions will then be followed by a British-designed next generation of likewise nuclear-powered but conventionally-armed boats incorporating British, Australian and U.S. technology that both Britain and Australia will use, and which will "share components and parts with the U.S. Navy," to the point of communicating "with the same equipment"--the "AUKUS SSN." Australia will build its copies of those AUKUS boats domestically, and sustain them domestically. They will also be commanded by the Australian Navy as a "sovereign capability"--apart from Australia's reliance on imported nuclear fuel, as it will not produce its own (that capacity, of course, necessarily entailing the capacity to produce fissile material, which would be a breach of its non-proliferation commitments). The first of those boats will be delivered in 2042, with new deliveries every three years on, and an ultimate goal of eight boats.

In the meantime Australian personnel have been undergoing "nuclear power training" in the U.S., while "[b]eginning this year, Australian personnel will embed with U.S. and UK crews on boats and at bases in our schools and our shipyards," and U.S., and British, nuclear submarines will make more port visits to Australia, on the way to the establishment of "a rotational presence of U.S. and UK nuclear-powered subs in Australia to help develop the work force Australia is going to need to build and maintain its fleet" later in the decade.

Rounding out the vision of tri-national cooperation there is also the expectation that, Britain and Australia's sovereign but identically equipped and closely collaborating fleets ("[o]ur submarine crews will train together, patrol together . . . maintain their boats together"), and the similarly linked U.S. fleet, will go a long way to realizing that ideal not only of partnership, but efficiency-achieving homogeneity even as each retains control of its assets.

One may add to this that these figures, particularly Australian PM Albanese, also made much of the submarine program from an "industrial policy" standpoint, claiming that "[t]he scale, complexity, and economic significance of this investment is akin to the creation of the Australian automotive industry in the post-World War Two period."

Of course, what we are hearing reported in the press now is not limited to what was presented in the official statement. There are, of course, questions about just how "sovereign" the Australian boats really will be. (As things stand, Australia's nuclear industry is virtually nonexistent--the capacity to build and service such boats as yet nonexistent, and its actual establishment yet to be seen.) There is also the matter of the immensity of the resources invested. Were the cost of the program over the longer haul is concerned we are hearing figures in the $250 billion (U.S. dollars) range for the next three decades. This sum is about equal to 15 percent of Australian GDP today (circa $1.6 trillion), and equal to some $4 trillion in the case of an economy the size of that of the U.S.--exceeding any comparable expenditure the U.S. has made--and even if spread out over three decades, with the tendency of price tags like these to rise set aside, and generous allowance for the possibility of economic growth aided by the "stimulus" of the program, there is no getting away from the sheer size of the bill relative to the country's resources, with that this implies. (Even those who are supportive of such high military expenditure may, in fact, wonder if this is really the best way of getting "value for the money.") And of course there is the geopolitical rationale for the program. The sole reference in the entire transcript to China was mention of the U.S. having "safeguarded stability in the Indo-Pacific for decades to the enormous benefits of nations throughout the region, from ASEAN to Pacific Islanders to the People’s Republic of China." Yet there would be no discussion of such a project at all were it not for the concern among the country's policymakers, and the governments of its allies, about the possibility of conflict with China --and not all are sanguine about a militarized course. (Indeed, many in Australia, and elsewhere, are convinced that confrontation is the wrong path--however much news outlets like the Sydney Morning Herald, with its "Red Alert" series, insist otherwise.)

The result is that if the joint statement answered some questions a great many others remain to be decided--the more in as a very great deal can happen over the very long time frame assumed in this program, which, even if going entirely as planned and scheduled, will not deliver the first Australian-built AUKUS sub to the country's navy for two decades.

After all, just how much resemblance does the world of 2023 bear to the expectations of two decades prior?