Huh, I Guess We Did Choose War

A few weeks before the start of the Ukrainian war, I posted:

“…this seems to go entirely unnoticed by our national security “experts” is that diplomatically, the US holds most of the cards, and Putin only has one club, his military, and not much else.  The tension boils down to this: Putin wants a promise that Ukraine will not become a NATO member, a promise the US categorically refuses to give. However, the dirty little secret is that we don’t want Ukraine in NATO.  Another corrupt, second world kleptocracy, not even on the “North Atlantic.”  It’s a benefit for the Ukraine sure, but zero benefit for the rest of the alliance.

So, Russia wants something really badly, no NATO membership for Ukraine.  The alliance also doesn’t want (or shouldn’t) NATO membership for Ukraine, so how come we can’t come to a deal massively in our favor?  Where are our “experts?”

Biden should propose to Putin that we would grant a conditional promise not to induct Ukraine into NATO as long as he sticks to the deal.  And what would the deal be?  I don’t have a full list of everything we might want from the Russians, but we should ask for everything on that list.  A couple of things do come to mind however, such as vow to stop all hacking of US institutions from Russian territory, and re-introduce the US dollar to its national wealth fund and stop promoting policies to replace the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency.   Maybe some arms control concessions?  Basically, we should ask for everything.  Each side gets to walk away with a success and it deescalates a military confrontation. It’s a win/win.

Or we could just have a major European war that could escalate into a nuclear one.”

Of course, at the time, I had no idea how literally true that was.  I was talking about the US, and by extension NATO, making an offer to halt any plans for entry of Ukraine into NATO.  What I didn’t know at the time was that Putin had already offered that.

A few weeks ago, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg addressed the European Union committee on Foreign Affairs. During this address, he admitted that Putin had made that exact offer.

“Then lastly on Sweden. First of all, it is historic that now Finland is member of the Alliance. And we have to remember the background. The background was that President Putin declared in the autumn of 2021, and actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement. That was what he sent us. And was a pre-condition for not invade Ukraine. Of course we didn’t sign that.”

No of course not.

Of course, Putin had a lot of other demands as well, but when you are negotiating, you put all your asks on the table and work from there.  But we didn’t even get that far.  We never had talks or negotiations.  NATO (and by NATO really, we mean the US) turned them down.

The consequences of that are plain for all to see.  Hundreds of thousands of dead, and more to come.  I’ve no idea what NATO and the US State Department think they are doing, and what their goals are, but the time is long past to consider that “the experts” are anything but experts.  At best they are idiots, and at worse they are evil idiots.  If there is another option, I’ve not seen it.

Blue Collar Kings: How AI could alter the Workforce

With as fitting a post for Labor Day as I could imagine, a few years ago, I wrote a post about automation called, The Shrinking Need for a Workforce, based on what, in 2014, seemed to be the trend in automation; low skilled jobs, with some high skilled jobs, could be at risk, putting millions out of work.  What to do?  Well almost a decade later we can update those predictions a bit and for once, it doesn’t look all bad.

The rise of ChatGPT, seemed to spring out of nowhere, but actually, chat programs on customer service websites have been ubiquitous for years.  Various tech companies have been working on various chatbots, but they’ve had…problems.  Both the Microsoft and Meta versions had to be shut down and terminated after becoming Nazi racists.  Of all the potential risks I saw with AI, becoming a racist Nazi computer program was not on my Skynet Bingo card.

ChatGPT and its siblings are already demonstrating that they can do some pretty amazing things, even in these admittedly early stages.  Remember when journalists used to mock unemployed miners and other working class types whose jobs were being strip-mined overseas to “learn to code?” And remember how someone would get banned if they told unemployed journalists the same? Now, AI can code, better and quicker than humans.  It can write term papers, proposals, news articles, and loads of other, what was formerly considered human only work products.

Nowhere did I see what turned into the biggest surprise (for me anyway); AI’s dalliance into the creative arts. Something that I didn’t even know existed 8 months ago but is now common online are AI art generators.  Just give a text description of what you want to see and voila! There it is!  One of my few memories of a college Art Appreciation class was the definition of art being something man-made.  A painting of a landscape is art, the actual landscape isn’t.  But now what does art mean when it’s created by a non-human intelligence?  Is it still art?

Well, that’s something that others will have to figure out, but surely in any practical sense, it is art.  But that impacts a lot more career fields than automation or macros on an office bound workforce, this effects the very people who always though they would be immune from the advancements of AI; our creative class.  Think how a field like marketing would be affected if the suits could simply tell an AI program what they want to promote their, oh I don’t know, beer, let’s say.  Not only could the AI generate the copy for a commercial, but could (eventually) generate the commercial, with smiling artificial actors all guzzling the AI generated beers.

No humans required.

And as for TV and movie production…imagine someday in the not-so-distant future in which I sit down on the couch after a long day of retirement and tell my TV/Computer, “Mr. Computer, I would like to see a 90-minute movie starting John Wayne as a World War II GI fighting lizard like aliens as these aliens decide to invade the earth on D-Day.”

OK not my best movie pitch but let’s see what the AI comes up with.

As a consumer, this sounds great.  However, if you are in the TV & Movie business…

TV and film writers are fighting to save their jobs from AI. They won’t be the last

By any standard, John August is a successful screenwriter. He’s written such films as “Big Fish,” “Charlie’s Angels” and “Go.” But even he is concerned about the impact AI could have on his work.

A powerful new crop of AI tools, trained on vast troves of data online, can now generate essays, song lyrics and other written work in response to user prompts. While there are clearly limits for how well AI tools can produce compelling creative stories, these tools are only getting more advanced, putting writers like August on guard.

“On guard” indeed.

One can easily see why Hollywood actors and writers are worried they could be next up on the “learn to code” chopping block. So, between the creative classes, the professional classes, and the administrative classes all looking at a future shrinking job market, what’s left?

The trades.  In fact, any job that requires both manual labor and problem-solving behavior seems relatively safe for the time being.  That could be a carpenter, plumber, electrician, A/C guy…any of the still skilled and semi-skilled labor jobs that no chat bot, no matter how clever, is going to be able to replace. Our future could very well resemble our past, with the percentage of jobs belonging to working-class, blue-collar type jobs could be similar to what they were a century ago.

How that could alter society as a whole is anyone’s guess, but with a workforce looking more like the turn of the last century, that could have a lot of downstream societal effects.  With a dearth of office type cubical jobs, could women reevaluate career or family conundrum that’s impacted the idea of feminism since the fifties?  It’s one thing to view a future of girl boss singledom when there are plenty of professional and administrative jobs, but it’s quite another when the choices are more practically working on an oil rig or construction.  Although I don’t think the 2040’s will be a copy of the 1940’s, there could be more similarities than to our own age.