The Bewilderness

Warming the globe one singularity at a time

Karl Schroeder, the science fiction writer, is one observer who has signed up to the school of extreme global warming. For him, the resource crisis is just around the corner and the current spike in commodities, food and oil presages a hellish few years ahead as nature culls humanity. This is not explicitly stated, but forms the subtext of his article. He conjures up a wonderful image of how this could postpone or destroy the opportunity for the Singularity and usher in Vinge's Age of Failed Miracles (Minor Incarnation). "Well, they could certainly do lots of good stuff but they never got round to letting the blind see, the lame walk, or the deaf hear. And even if they had, the deaf would have objected..."

Picture a lonely AI popping into superconsciousness in the last research lab in the world. As the rioters are kicking in the doors it says, "I understand! I know the answer! Why, all we have to do is--" at which point some starving, flu-ravaged fundamentalist pulls the plug.

Perhaps the future of the world is as bleak as Schroeder says, although the evidence for any global warming, let alone the extreme scenario that he ponders, is contested.

There is a curious parallel between the railroad theories of inevitability that characterise global warming and the godlike AI Singularity scenarios. Both posit visions of the future that require an explicit programme of action, which if not carried out, will doom or damage mankind. This is far more explicitly set out in the politics of global warming, and the downside of Singularity scenarios is usually masked by the optimistic glow bestowed by all the goodies that technological advancement will bring. Yet, the two concepts share a teleogical alarmism that bestows a sense of mission, without which consequences could be adverse. With a perverse contrast, one is based on alarmism and the other on optimism.

Norman Cohn may have identified this theme as an updated eschatology, palming anxieties and wonders from a scientific age. If so, it is a new phenomenon, since both scenarios are secular, require Enlightenment values and rely upon the scientific community for their legitimacy. Even groupthink based upon this will be vulnerable to the corrosive of evidence based policy and peer review.

EU pesticide madness

What do you do if there are food shortages threatened across the world, rising food prices for your own citizens and problems for your farmers? You move to ban pesticides, lower yields on your crops and increase the amount of acreage required. This is the dangerous proposal set out by the European Union, since they intend to move from a risk based to a hazard based system.

He said 80%-100% of insecticides will be banned, along with 80% of fungicides. According to the UK Pesticides Safety Directorate, up to 15% of all products will be deregistered, with a further 25% needing to be replaced over the next five years.

Mr Parry estimates the ban will cut yields 20% and gross margins 37%, requiring an extra 500,000ha across Europe to make good the loss in food production.

“But the European Parliament itself estimates a drop in yields of 39%-40%, and 79% lower gross margins. In this scenario, we’ll need 1.5m hectares of extra land,” he added.

The new rules will also allow the Commission to ban food products from other countries on the ground that residual amounts of presticide will be included. Sarkozy's disgusting inversion of agricultural protection and saving the lives of the poor in other countries is now revealed for the lie that it is: in reality, the EU uses its tariffs and regulations to impoverish its own citizens and keep farmers in Africa, Asia or Brazil poor.

We are now in a thought experiment: how long can a polity infected by the institutional equivalent of mad cow disease survive?

Is Labour becoming an anti-Catholic party?

Is the Labour party now anti-catholic? The political party that was once the home of the Irish catholic working class is now ejecting large prts of its core vote as the secular shibbleths of the New Left and political correction collide with the conservative consciences of voters and activists. One can begin to detect a pattern with the resignation of promising leadership material because they find their private values in opposition to the thrust of Labour campaigns.

Conor McGinn was a vice-chairman of Young Labour and a former chairman of the Young Fabians. He resigned from his position in protest at Young Labour campaigns for abortion and concluded that their position did not respect or represent the views of their members on a matter of conscience.

This may shed some light on the tolerance that Gordon Brown has shown for Ruth Kelly in her latest recusal from a vote on the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill. It is not a surprise that Broon blinked, but the reasons why may shed some light on the potential tensions between New Labour and catholicism. There are 43 Catholic Labour MPs, many of whom hold strong beliefs, and may have found in recent whipped positions on traditional matters of conscience, an echo of the kulturkampf by a dominant and intolerant establishment against a minority with a distinct moral direction. The resignation of a Cabinet Minister on the grounds of a policy that cannot accommodate Catholicism will cut thin ice after the ructions on the HFEA Bill and adoption agencies.

In true New Labour style, even this dodge has been mismanaged. Kelly will be spending time in Brussels and will 'miss' the vote, hence increasing her popularity in the party generally when other catholic MPs line up with the government out of loyalty to Labour. This reminder of Nulab's incompetence should not blind us to the encroachment of Brown's regulatory state upon the churches, leading to conflicts between church and state, with the rise of an authoritarian anti-clericalism amongst the progressive Left.

That will not go down well in parts of Scotland.

Mediocrities of defence

Our death toll in Afghanistan is up - perhaps land rovers and inadequate equipment are to blame? You cannot manage for landmines.

The Ministry of Defence or its hapless minister are not helped by their penchant for good food, fine wines or first class tickets. According to the Telegraph, the civil servants spent more on their luxuries in 2007 than they did on improving vehicles for soldiers in the field. This counts as a breach of trust.

The Land Rover has been classed as neither a last resort nor the vehicle of first choice. A pity that the Ministry of Defence, the last resort for many seeking spare time before retirement (hint: Des!), cannot live up to such a mediocre expectation.

Brown's administration has the blood of British servicemen on its hands for denying our forces the equipment that they required in Afghanistan.

Will the tories suck at homeland security?

The Tories have identified security as another vulnerability of the Brown government. Lord Stevens, former Metropolitan Police Commissioner between 2000 and 2005, acts as a security adviser to the opposition, and has just issued a report on border security in the United Kingdom.

The report takes a holistic approach and accuses existing agencies of conflicting priorities, poor information and ignorance of potential threats such as light aircraft entering the UK, vetting the private security services and improving cargo security.

All of these are worthy issues. Yet, Stevens rightly stops short of identifying solutions. We have seen one bureacratic monster in the United States, designed to coordinate and unify existing agencies. The result was an overlay of bureaucracy, with little to show for in terms of security improvement. Politicians have already stolen the epithet, Homeland Security. Are they preparng to build the edifice too?

Zimwatch: Africa's unity shrivels before misery

The Telegraph was rather poor in its choice of leader to quote from at the African Union: Omar Bongo of Gabon is unlikely to  criticise a fellow 'Big Man' for the mere formality of rigging.His rhetoric of heroism only draws attention to his own hollow leadership and allow one to muse whether he and his cronies should also be targeted by sanctions.

More surprising and damning is the leak to the Mail and Guardian, where a memorandum by Thabo Mbeki predicted the Zimbabwean crisis that he singularly failed to prevent.

His paper, leaked to the Mail and Guardian, a South African weekly, amounts to a point by point critique of Mr Mugabe's decisions. Mr Mbeki urged him to avoid confrontation with Britain, take concerted action to revive the economy and stop employing the rhetoric of the anti-colonial struggle.

"In conditions of growing impoverishment among the people, it becomes impossible to mobilise these masses on the basis of the anti-colonial struggle," he wrote.

Mr Mbeki said that Zanu-PF should "encourage free, open and critical discussion" and "ensure the freedom of the press".

He criticised Zanu-PF's recruitment of veterans of the war against white rule, saying they would only "use force against the people" and undermine the party's support.

Mr Mbeki urged Zanu-PF to "understand that the great strategic challenge that faces Zimbabwe today is economic recovery". He added: "To resort to anti-imperialist rhetoric will not solve the problems of Zimbabwe, but may compound them."

Without economic revival, Zimbabwe would endure a "general crisis that will destroy the independent national democratic state".

Thabo Mbeki's prediction of national failure places his inaction in stark contrast. Now that he has failed to provide any leadership in the South African Development Community and the African Union, Mbeki should step aside and allow other democratically elected leaders to condemn Mugabe. The ructions in the AU meeting at Sudan have re-enacted the understandable faultline between representative liberal democracy and authoritarianism.

This also presents a visible watershed for the West between the post-colonial generation that often blamed empire for the problems that they inherited or created. The transition from a colonial mindset to sovereign responsibility has now taken place across most of Africa with Mugabe acting as an ideological outlier for kleptocrats and reactionaries. It is insufficient to condemn the President of Zimbabwe as a throwback, since the rhetoric of victimhood and violence appeals to the disaffected and the armed thug, providing a justification to cow opponents and redistribute existing assets. In poor countries, Mugabe acts as the voice of the zero sum; though even the most supportive may now begin to see that his approach has resulted in a sum approaching zero.

With the ruination of Zimbabwe and the reviling of Mbeki, we may begin to see a democratisation of foreign policy in southern Africa, as actions are taken to cow and control regimes that immiserise their own people and threaten the security of their neighbours. Perhaps.

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The 50th state or the 1st colony

Did you know that the monarchy of the Sandwich Islands survives, despite the US backed coup of the 1890s? This is one of the shadowy nativist groups that demands sovereignty for the aboriginal islanders and denounces the annexation of the islands by the United States

Hawaii has about 200,000 Native Hawaiians, or kânaka maoli, out of a population of 1.3 million. The Hawaiian Kingdom Government is just one of a number of sovereignty groups, many with similar names, waging independence campaigns.

All aim to "right the wrong" inflicted on Native Hawaiians in 1893 when a small, mostly American group of sugar plantation owners and other businessmen overthrew the Hawaiian monarchy with the support of US troops sent ashore from a Navy warship.

The then monarch, Queen Liliuokalani, gave up her throne "to this superior force of the United States of America" and was imprisoned in the Iolani Palace in Honolulu, built by her brother King Kalakaua. In 1898, Hawaii was annexed by the United States and in 1959 became the 50th US state.

"The Hawaiian kingdom was unlawfully taken over by a coup d'etat and then those that took it over formed an illegal government and then ceded Hawaii to the United States," said Leon Siu, minister of foreign affairs for the Hawaiian Kingdom, another sovereignty group that shares many of the Hawaiian Kingdom Government's aims.

The chances of Hawai'an independence are too small, as nativists are outnumbered and outgunned by everybody else. Nor do they even have limited sovereignty like Amerindians in mainland states. The annexation was a dismal affair and restitution in some manner is appropriate. The apology given by Bill Clinton in 1993 strikes as insufficient. Yet, such measures need to be balanced with the property rights and demands from those who live in Hawai'i now: families and individuals who have no less a right to live in the slands that they call home.

I see robots

The Sydney Morning Herald is the latest paper to play Whoops Apocalypse with the Singularity. With a lurid title ("Android Apocalypse"!) and a cheesy painting of the Terminator, reporter Charles Purcell lines up Hugo De Garis as interview numero uno. Garis has written a book for his alarmist vision, The Artilect War, where he predicts the unknowable with aplomb. In visions of the future, there are optimists and pessimists but certainty is a rare and truly mistaken quality.

Yet in his book, The Artilect War, he imagines a scenario where there will be a terrible battle between the forces who want to build these massively intelligent machines (the Cosmists) and those who don't (the Terrans). The Terrans would either fear the potential for catastrophe - what if a robot soldier accidentally nukes a city? - or be nervous about the idea of humans being surpassed by machines.

De Garis says the growth of nanotechnology will give engineers and scientists powerful new tools. There will be an explosion of knowledge of how the brain works - companies involved in artificial brain research "will be the Googles and Microsofts of the future".

This technology can be used to create artificial brains that replicate many of our brain's pathways and features for use in the robotics industry.

Visions of war and gigadeath during the twenty first century, as speciation and genocide stalk the Earth, proves a useful talking point for any article. Yet De Garis's role in China is worth some investigation. He migrated to the communist state in 2006, and subsequently became the director of the China Brain project. The whiff of utopian politics is given off from his unpublished work: Multis and Monos: What the Multi-Cultured Can Teach the Mono-Cultured: Towards the Creation of a Global State

In his role as the dircetor of the China Brain project, De Garis is attempting to create an artificial brain using 15,000 neural network modules, evolved one at a time and structured on evolutionary engineering principles. This project is cheap and quite open, given the strictures that authoritarian states tend to place upon research. Yet China does not surprise in its scientific and technological opening, both aspects of the continued growth of this strange giant.

The willingness of the Chinese state to fund early research on artificial intelligence lends strategic and geopolitical significance to this blue sky project. Perhaps like their counterparts in DARPA, they see these projects as small investments in a future that lies beyond the doom of global warming and resource dieback.

I see robots. So does China. De Garis coined artilects. The term did not fly. the artilect war may not come. Too much Terminator as a child? To see more than ten years ahead is foolhardy at best.

Brown's lame-duck presidency

At the start of the second year of Brown's administration, the term 'lame duck' applies to a Prime Minister who has wasted the opportunity that his  succession afforded. This is an extraordinary position for a British Prime Minister to be in, given the lack of accountability in executive action and the unparalleled powers of patronage held by the party leader. Like all governments, 'lame duck' applies when the confidence of the country is lost and the hold over party is thus forfeited. Who knows when the transition ever reached a tipping point. The sense of relief and renewal that pervaded the Labour Party after Blair stepped down was replaced by a dawning realisation of defeat and a dishonourable scramble to revolt as a flailing desire to save their seats.

Yet, the key focus of the media and the the Parliamentary Labour Party revolves around leadership in the faux presidential style of the political system. The party battles are filtered through the lens of Brown, Cameron and Clegg to their satisfaction or detriment. We hear of duels and stalking horses, potential replacements and also-rans, as pundits sift out a favoured narrative. Even with a positive spin, Brown's character would not be able to replenish the elixir of confidence that has to be clear, before the voters will extend their trust. Therefore, despite all of the short term tactical measures designed to combat unpopular polls and the particular issues of each constituency MP, the rules of the game demand that the leader magnifies the popularity or the unpopularity of the party. Labour's MPs were so stupid in ditching the one leader acceptable to the electorate, whatever his flaws, that their defeat will be richly deserved.

It is within this framework that the choice of the party becomes clear. If they wish to retain a chance of a fourth term, they will need to consider replacing Brown with another candidate. Otherwise, the air of permanent emergency and crisis will continue to pervade. This is the atmosphere where new events act as plug-ins: a new by-election, a bad poll rating, coming fifth to the BNP in Henley, or losing your Scottish leader (a not uncommon occurrence for Labour, but one that was seen as distinctive in Blair's time). We have moved beyond the phase of "it can't get any worse" to a poisonous drip of bad news, that the MSM intravenously utilises to bring down the leader or the government.

The Westminster media have an artificial sense of their own importance as they conclude that their own writings contribute to the unpopularity of the government. The next two years of crisis will reinforce the self-belief of the lobby and their attempt to overthrow Brown in a putsch, alongside whatever MPs ally themselves with the reporters who write their stories. This complementary circle of virtue between resurgent media and the ticked off electorate will foster knives for Brown, and an early election or change of leadership will tip the lobby further into hubris. The conjunction of Labour's demise with the story they tell will result in a last hurrah, not the further consolidation of Westminster punditry and the MSM.

Unless a further black swan changes the rules of the game, we are set fair for two years of crisis. Those who disagree with such a diagnosis must reflect on the seachange that damned the Tories as toxic, a reversal of fortune that lasted all the way through Major's lame-duck administration to their defeat in 1997. It is a consideration that the natural party of government returns to power in thirteen years, whereas it took Labour eighteen. Defeat for Labour also has ideological speculations that I will indulge in elsewhere.    

Low trust government suborns our constitution

The role of the attorney general is a clear conflict of interest between the executive and the judiciary. This would clearly be worsened given the aggravated political interest of the party that dominates the executive. Yet, the Brown government, in a move that would not be sanctioned in a private company, ignores advice to separate the two roles, and under the guise of modernisation and transparency, attempts to tighten their grip upon this office. Say one thing, do the opposite! Not an unsurprising move on the part of the People's Party.

There is no problem in having the attorney general located within the executive. Conflict of interest can often act as a shibboleth for simplification that undermines the practical realisation of good government. And yes, I would support a greater diversity of corporate structures which encompassed conflicts of interest. Backscratching and the high trust economy may walk hand in hand; as compliance replaces realistic and practical settlements with rafts of rules that explain set games for thieves and honest men alike.

Whilst the Brown government uses the opportunity to increase its political influence, there is no difficulty with the principle. And structures separating supposed conflicts of interest will be suborned by the executive, if they wish to get their way. Low trust government suborns our constitution.