#154 THE G|O BRIEFING, OCTOBER 12, 2024
Barbarity in the Middle East: will the response be humanity or disaster? | GESDA aims to avoid another ChatGPT moment | Destruction of Hamas the only hope for Palestinians
Friends,
We traditionally open our Briefing by hoping you are well. Not this week: It feels glib after witnessing such barbarity in the Middle East. Not today, with the UN warning of possible “disaster” as Israel prepares to strike back at Hamas.
Israel has the right to defend itself and to ensure that such terrorist attacks never happen again, Antony Blinken said from Jerusalem, after his meeting with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. “But how Israel does this matters,” he said, adding that democracies distinguish themselves from terrorists “by striving for a different standard […] Our humanity is what makes us who we are.”
Once more, the whole of humanitarian Geneva is called into action, anxiously hoping that its numerous repeated appeals to open a humanitarian corridor will be heard by Jerusalem—echoing Antonio Guterres, who in a statement released today said that “crucial life-saving supplies—including fuel, food, and water—must be allowed into Gaza.”
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) regularly releases flash bulletins on the situation. We are sharing the latest one with you here.
It May Already Be Too Late to Regulate AI—The Geneva Science and Diplomacy Anticipator Wants to Ensure That Won’t Happen with the Next Scientific Breakthrough
A year ago, OpenAI unleashed ChatGPT-4 on the world. AI had been growing in the lab for fifty years; contained, and inaccessible to the public. Last November, OpenAI’s founders had a stroke of Silicon Valley commercial and financial genius: wrapping their technology into a simple seamless web and mobile user interface—a UI. With AI meeting UI, ChatGPT was able to take the world by storm. It took barely two months for the conversational chatbot to acquire 100 million active users, making it the fastest-adopted technology in history.
ChatGPT and AI are technological masterpieces. As they continue to develop, however, they could well turn into monstrous dystopian creations. COVID-19 vaccines were developed in a little more than a year—in part thanks to AI. Those vaccines underwent rigorous clinical trials before being approved. But neither ChatGPT nor any of the other AI tools available today have been submitted to any kind of formal approval, and their creators have never been asked to ensure that their flaws—among them their ability to “hallucinate” and produce “informational” toxic garbage—would be corrected before their release. The bright and wonderful genie and its evil twin are now well and truly out of the bottle, while the world is left scrambling, trying, post-partum, to apply some order to this mayhem.
Given the huge impact science and technology have such an on our lives, and on the future of mankind, the world desperately needs to avoid another ChatGPT/AI moment. We must ensure society is never again caught off guard by a technological breakthrough of such magnitude.
Science for the Common Good
Anticipating technology’s impact rather than reacting to it is the mission that the Geneva Science and Diplomacy Anticipator (GESDA) has given itself. Reduced to its essence, that is exactly what its overly complicated name calls for: Making sure major scientific inventions are developed with the common good in mind, that they are trustworthy, reliable, and ultimately shared across the planet for the benefit of all, is GESDA’s ultimate goal. And doing so requires, well, scientists and diplomats and, of course, many other stakeholders.
The challenge is undoubtedly daunting: Science and technology are central elements in the great technological and geopolitical power play between the US and China; fatigue prevails when it comes to international cooperation and multilateralism; and questions mount, quite rightly, over the relevance of institutions seen by many as unable to respond to what’s now been coined a global “polycrisis.”
All this notwithstanding—and maybe because of it, at least in part, as a new sense of polarized urgency sets in—three years after its launch, GESDA, a private foundation supported by the Swiss Government, is confident that its initiative is gaining increasing traction and attention. As it holds its annual Summit at CERN, the birthplace of the Web—whose capture by Big Tech is an error GESDA would like not to see repeated—the Anticipator finds itself increasingly well-endowed, intellectually as well as financially, having onboarded leading international personalities. The latest of these are former Italian prime minister Enrico Letta and former UNICEF Chief Henrietta Fiore; also joining its Board is Cheryl Moore, Wellcome Trust director.
Another of GESDA’s distinct advantages lies in its location in the world’s global governance and multilateralism engine room. For its founders, the presence here of actors like CERN, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), or the UN Human Rights Office (OHCHR) makes International Geneva the best suited theater for GESDA to deploy its methodology of anticipation, acceleration, and translation. Anticipation, they explain, finds its concrete application in the Science Breakthrough Radar®, a scientist-driven evolving chart of “what’s cooking in the lab,” on a 5-, 10-, and 25-year horizon. The interactive platform—a dense read—is meant to help the global community continuously monitor and assess the advancement of scientific inventions in the hope of steering them toward positive outcomes.
The speed at which scientific and technological inventions happen today requires, GESDA argues, an acceleration of the conversation between all stakeholders in first trying to assess the impacts, both positive and negative, of future science breakthroughs, and second, helping develop sound policies in advance of their deployments. Thirdly, GESDA—which bills itself as a “do tank” as well as a think tank—aims to translate the distillations of its global community of scientists, diplomats, academic, and policymakers by prototyping solutions within the multilateral framework, geared towards effective, impactful, and equitable multilateralism. “We are here in the laboratory of the global governance of the 21st century,” Swiss State Secretary Alexandre Fasel told the Summit attendees yesterday. The gathering, he said, was a condensed version of GESDA’s aims and actions, a sort of a dress rehearsal.
GESDA also announced that the Wellcome Trust will invest CHF 8 million to sustain the Anticipator’s second most-advanced initiative, the Global Curriculum for Science and Diplomacy (GCSD), seen by its initiators as a key tool for achieving a more effective multilateralism. The GCSD involves a number of academic and diplomatic actors, committed to developing a global framework for training professionals in science and diplomacy based on commonly recognized skills and knowledge.
On its closing day tomorrow (October 13), the GESDA Summit will launch one of its most anticipated initiatives, the Open Quantum Institute (OQI). “It seeks,” its website says, “to inclusively unleash the powers of quantum computing to ensure that the whole world contributes to and benefits from quantum computing.”
Quantum computing is widely considered the next true frontier in computer science. It is still in its infancy, with experts expecting concrete application within the next decade. More science than technology, quantum computers operate on a completely different logic than semiconductor-powered computers, which they would mostly render obsolete. It could bring about real-world breakthroughs in material science, communications and many other fields.
It might also be GESDA's ultimate test.
-PHM
Philippe Mottaz
Philippe Mottaz
Philippe MottazIs China’s Influence at the Human Rights Council Declining? Western Countries Hope So
The text before the Human Rights Council may have been tabled by the group of Non-Aligned countries, but for human rights watchers and Western governments alike, the inspiration for the resolution on “the right to development” was unmistakable. Beijing’s efforts to reshape the human rights regime continues unabated, they say, and this is yet another part of its efforts. Late today, the Council accepted the text, submitted by Azerbaijan on behalf of the Non-Aligned Movement, by 29 votes to 13, with five abstentions.
In another decision, this one taken by consensus, the Council also approved a resolution we reported on last week, on the promotion of economic, social and cultural rights. The initial text was slightly amended, with China agreeing to drop a reference to the “obligation for international cooperation,” a notion rejected by the West. The Chinese concession allowed the text to be accepted by consensus rather than by a vote, an example of the kind of fine diplomatic maneuvering taking place before the Council on a daily basis. The provisions of the text that could have limited the independence of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) were also dropped, a clear victory for the Western Group. But the resolution still contains a demand that that the UN prioritize economic, social and human rights and give them its full attention.
Today, Westerns governments are nevertheless hopeful that Beijing’s influence at the Council may have reached its limit. Earlier this week, although Beijing was re-elected at the Council for the period of 2024-2026, the support was lukewarm: It received 154 votes at the United General Assembly, 26 fewer than in 2016.
With Russia’s failure to be elected to the Council, European diplomats and NGOs see these results in conjunction as a snub of the Beijing-Russian axis, which could encourage Western countries to continue putting pressure on the two regimes, both in New York and in Geneva.
-JC
The Spiral of Violence that Led to Hamas
By Peter Singer*
Hamas’s brazen and vicious attacks within Israel have rightly drawn condemnation from around the world. If this is a war, as both sides agree it is, then Hamas’s deliberate targeting of civilians counts as a major war crime.
But the brutality demonstrated by Hamas did not emerge in a vacuum. The lesson of what is currently happening in Israel and Gaza is that violence breeds more violence.
The last real chance of avoiding the tragic conflict being waged between Israel and Hamas was destroyed by a single killing: the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. The assassin was not a Palestinian militant, but an Israeli extremist opposed to the Oslo Accords, by which Rabin sought a “land for peace” deal that was anathema to Israeli radicals, for whom Jewish sovereignty in the Holy Land is non-negotiable.
Rabin’s assassination occurred at the end of a peace rally attended by more than 100,000 Israelis, hopeful of an end to hostilities between Israel and Palestinians. At the time, that hope seemed realistic.
The great beneficiaries of the assassination were Israeli nationalists, above all Binyamin Netanyahu, the leader of the right-wing Likud party. Netanyahu had rejected the Oslo Accords, because they required Israel to withdraw from the territories it had occupied after the Six-Day War in 1967. In a protest against the Accords, and against Rabin, Netanyahu led a mock funeral procession, complete with a coffin and hangman’s noose.
In the years after Rabin’s murder, and particularly following the failure to reach a settlement at Camp David in 2000, right-wing extremists gained power in Israel, and the prospect of achieving a viable Palestinian state in the occupied territories all but disappeared. At the same time, the failure of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s secular Fatah movement to deliver Palestinian statehood strengthened the Islamist Hamas, which, along with other Palestinian militant organizations, bases its legitimacy on killing Israelis (as well as accused collaborators with Israel).
With Hamas extending its influence (and exporting its violence) from Gaza, which it has controlled since 2007, to the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority is nominally in charge, a growing number of Israelis supported the repressive measures Netanyahu promised. And with the hapless PA unable to halt relentless expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, the cycle of extremism and violence continued.
Netanyahu now leads the most fanatically nationalist government in Israel’s history, a government that includes Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, whose responsibilities include administration of a large part of the occupied West Bank. Smotrich has repeatedly incited violence against Palestinians.
In February, after a Palestinian shot dead two Israeli settlers, hundreds of Israelis rampaged through Huwara, a nearby Palestinian village, in scenes reminiscent of Cossack pogroms against Jewish settlements in Russia more than a century earlier. The Israelis set fire to Huwara, leaving one villager dead and others injured. And, like the Russian police when a pogrom was underway, Israeli forces in the area did not intervene to protect the residents or arrest the perpetrators.
None of this excuses the atrocities committed against Israeli civilians by Hamas terrorists who killed more than 1,000 Israelis, most of them defenseless civilians, including women and children. Horrific videos show Hamas gunmen shooting, in cold blood, young people at a music festival. As a proportion of the population, this attack killed ten times as many people as al-Qaeda’s attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.
When Hamas attacks Israeli civilians, it knows that this will lead to Israeli counterattacks in Gaza that are bound to kill and injure many civilians. Hamas locates its military sites in residential areas, hoping that this tactic will restrain Israeli attacks, or at least lessen international support for Israel.
Hamas reportedly holds roughly 150 hostages, and has said that it will kill one every time Israel bombs a Gazan home without warning. Hamas leaders surely remember that in 2011, Netanyahu, as prime minister, was willing to free over 1,000 Palestinian prisoners, some of them terrorists, in exchange for the release of a single captive Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit. Against that background, they may believe that Israel will not be prepared to sacrifice the lives of the hostages in order to achieve its military objectives.
If that is what the leaders of Hamas believe, they may find that they have made a mistake. Whether Israel can eliminate Hamas as a military force remains to be seen, but it is clear that in the battle to achieve that objective, Israel will have to be prepared to lose many lives, probably of both soldiers and hostages.
How far Israel will go with its declared intention to deny electricity, fuel, food, and water to the two million citizens of Gaza, many of them children, is hard to know. What is certain is that Hamas’s brutal crimes do not entitle Israel to starve children.
In the eyes of many outside observers, the cause of Palestinian autonomy and statehood has long held the moral high ground. Now that cause has been stained by the gruesome murders and abductions – many of them captured on video – carried out in its name. Paradoxically, if Palestinians are ever to regain the moral high ground, they must hope for the destruction of Hamas. As long as Hamas can claim to represent them, the evil it has perpetrated will taint their cause.
*Peter Singer, Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, is the author of Practical Ethics, The Life You Can Save, Ethics in the Real Word, and, most recently, Animal Liberation Now (Harper Perennial, 2023).