#160 THE G|O BRIEFING, NOVEMBER 23, 2023
Open AI Saga Bodes Badly for UN | Window of Opportunity Closing to Break WTO Deadlock | Is Hope Over for a Two-State, Two-Economy Solution?
Today in The G|O, an Op-Ed by yours truly on the Sam Altman/Open AI saga and why new AI dynamics don’t bode well for the discussions around the United Nations Global Digital Compact. Jamil Chade has a long read on the frantic search for a solution to break the deadlock at the World Trade Organization (WTO). And from Ramallah, economist Raja Khalidi, Director-General of the Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute (MAS), shares his pessimism about the feasibility of a two-state, two-economy solution.
Why What Happened at Open AI Doesn't Bode Well for the UN Global Digital Compact
Set aside for a moment the insufferable habit of our contemporaneous zeitgeist to create cult-life figures out of tech entrepreneurs. Not easy, I admit, when for a couple of days, Sam Altman and the OpenAI saga seemed to be all that mattered, eclipsing wars—and, of course, climate change—from our algorithmically fine-tuned social media feeds, front pages, and broadcasters’ leads. If you insist, then don’t think of Steve, Mark, or Elon, but consider instead the power the Valley’s stars have to deceive—you only have to look as far as crypto-emperor-sans-clothes Sam Bankman-Fried who, after hobnobbing with the mighty and powerful in short pants and sneakers, is now awaiting his sentencing and may spend the rest of his life in jail.
While the allure of Crypto Bros like Bankman-Fried may be on the wane, Artificial Intelligence is anything but. The now widely-shared analysis among Big Tech experts is that, for now at least, AI fundamentalists have won the great battle over the cautious ones in their project to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI, not to be confused with Generative AI), potentially the most disruptive technology invented since the atomic bomb, is truly bad news for the UN—and more broadly, all other efforts to regulate AI.
“The mission continues,” joyfully Xed the thirty-something Sam Altman, minutes after he had been hired by Microsoft—before getting his old job back just days later, under a more amenable board, purged of its more prudent elements.
the mission continues https://t.co/d1pHiFxcSe
— Sam Altman (@sama) November 20, 2023
It is high time that we all start understanding the intellectual underpinnings and societal and political vision of Silicon Valley's masters. Failure to do so puts us at risk of repeating what we have seen with the internet and social media. Spoiler alert: probing the ‘soul’ of the Valley can quickly become quite unsettling for those of us who believe in social progress and justice. At the very least, you quickly come to the inescapable realization that the UN Global Digital Compact—part of next year’s Summit of the Future, which aims to put together principles for an “open, free and secure digital future”—runs the risk of becoming another painful failure for the organization. In June of this year, speaking in this very city at the International Telecommunication Union’s ‘AI for Good Summit, Amandeep Singh Gill, Antonio Guterres’ new technology envoy, extolled the virtues and absolute necessity of addressing AI from a human-centered approach grounded in human rights. The annual summit itself is meant to be a platform to accelerate the implementation of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. Unfortunately, for some radical fundamentalist and their financial backers, both human rights and the SDGs are absolute abominations, and their defenders the “enemy”—a true quote.
The Anarcho-Libertarian Manifestos of the Tech Fundamentalists
The latest unadulterated expression of what Malcolm Harris calls the “Palo Alto System” in his book Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism and the World, which he describes as a violent, predatory, and exploitative kind of capitalism developed over 200 years and brought to absolute perfection by today’s masters of Big Tech, came very recently in ‘The Techno-Optimist Manifesto’ by Marc Andreessen, one of the Valley’s most admired, wealthiest, and influential venture capitalists. A personal note: In 1983 I welded my first modem to a luggable computer the size of a sewing machine (a year-end present to myself as a twenty-five-year-old freelance reporter in New York), which allowed me to connect to the bare-bones text-only era web invented at CERN by Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau. Ten years later, as a computer science university student, Andreessen and a college mate developed the first web browser. I have followed his career ever since.
Andreessen is now known for regularly posting lengthy thoughts on his corporate website. The passages in direct relation to the focus of this opinion piece are worth quoting at some length.
“We are being lied to,” Andreessen tells us in his opening sentence. He continues:
“We are told that technology takes our jobs, reduces our wages, increases inequality, threatens our health, ruins the environment, degrades our society, corrupts our children, impairs our humanity, threatens our future, and is ever on the verge of ruining everything.
We are told to be angry, bitter, and resentful about technology.
We are told to be pessimistic.
The myth of Prometheus—in various updated forms like Frankenstein, Oppenheimer, and Terminator—haunts our nightmares.
We are told to denounce our birthright—our intelligence, our control over nature, our ability to build a better world.
We are told to be miserable about the future.”
At the end of his manifesto, Andreessen names the liars, whom, in an angry Trumpian tone, he calls “the enemy:”
“We have enemies.
Our enemies are not bad people—but rather bad ideas.
Our present society has been subjected to a mass demoralization campaign for six decades—against technology and against life—under varying names like “existential risk,” “sustainability,” “ESG,” “Sustainable Development Goals,” “social responsibility,” “stakeholder capitalism,” “Precautionary Principle,” “trust and safety,” “tech ethics,” “risk management,” “de-growth,” “the limits of growth.”
This demoralization campaign is based on bad ideas of the past—zombie ideas, many derived from Communism, disastrous then and now—that have refused to die.
Our enemy is bureaucracy, vetocracy, gerontocracy, blind deference to tradition.
Our enemy is corruption, regulatory capture, monopolies, cartels.
Our enemy is institutions that in their youth were vital and energetic and truth-seeking but are now compromised and corroded and collapsing—blocking progress in increasingly desperate bids for continued relevance, frantically trying to justify their ongoing funding despite spiraling dysfunction and escalating ineptness.
Our enemy is the ivory tower, the know-it-all credentialed expert worldview, indulging in abstract theories, luxury beliefs, social engineering, disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable—playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences.”
Ur-libertarian pronouncements have been with us from the beginning of the web—once it was democratized thanks to the invention of the browser. (There are striking similarities between the early web and AI, forty years in the lab before being popularized by an interface.)
Related article:
Philippe Mottaz
“Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather,” wrote one-time songwriter for the Grateful Dead John Perry Barlow in 1997 in his own manifesto.
John Perry Barlow
For the Valley’s tech titans, this has always been more than an economic project; it is a “political movement that sees the modern economy as corrupt and harmful […] In the spirit of their anarcho-libertarian heroes [they believe] that the ‘administrative state’ needs to be killed off. If they achieve their aims, by 2035 they will be leaving in a semi-stateless economic system, without any transparency,” writes Jonathan Taplin in his recent book, The End of Reality.
But you may have to go back to 1997 and read The Sovereign Individual to grasp the radical nature of their political project. Its authors—one of them Richard Rees-Mogg, father of UK parliamentarian Jacob—gleefully predict the rise of what they call a “cognitive elite” whose project is to operate outside political control.
“At the highest plateau of productivity, these Sovereign Individuals will compete and interact on terms that echo the relations among the gods in Greek myth […] The new Sovereign Individual will operate […] in the same physical environment as the ordinary, subject citizen, but in a separate realm politically. Commanding vastly greater resources and beyond the reach of many forms of compulsion, the Sovereign Individual will redesign governments and reconfigure economies in the new millennium.”
It may seem like Silicon Valley drama, but politics, not technology alone, are at stake in the AI battle between the fundamentalists and the reasonables that invaded the global conversation for a few days this week and which will, no doubt, continue to resonate.
-PHM
The Clock Is Once Again Ticking at a Paralyzed World Trade Organization. Will It Spring Back to Life?
Setting a short deadline to increase pressure is as old a technique as negotiations themselves. But this time, several trade diplomats in Geneva told me, if a solution can't be found by February 24 to the deadlock that has been hobbling the World Trade Organization (WTO), the fear is that it could prove fatal to the body—at least as a credible and efficient arbiter of global trade.
The US is less alarmist, saying it will, in fact, be “hard” to reach a deal so soon, and that more time is needed. No wonder, observers note, as it is Washington’s position that is causing the organization’s paralysis in the first place—and which has, so far, largely prevented the other 163 WTO member states from working out a solution to restore its arbitration powers, thus depriving it of one of its most important functions. Despite professing its commitment to the organization, the Biden administration has fully endorsed Trump’s policy, albeit with better manners, its position being that unfettered globalization, free and open trade as we have known it, no longer serve the interests of the American people, and that the current trade architecture is not fit to answer today’s challenges.
“The Biden Administration is still committed to the WTO and the shared values upon which it is based: fair competition, openness, transparency, and the rule of law,” Jake Sullivan, President Biden's National Security Advisor, said in April, in a major policy speech at the Brookings Institution. “But serious challenges, most notably nonmarket economic practices and policies, threaten those core values. So that’s why we’re working with so many other WTO members to reform the multilateral trading system so that it benefits workers, accommodates legitimate national security interests, and confronts pressing issues that aren’t fully embedded in the current WTO framework, like sustainable development and the clean-energy transition.”
The White House
As it happens, the February 24 deadline coincides with the WTO’s next ministerial conference (MC13). Given the time left, it’s safe to predict that trade diplomats in Geneva and elsewhere will have, once more, a grueling holiday season—such is the lot, it appears, of those tending an IO in ICU. In fact, negotiations started back in 2022, in the hope of reaching an agreement by September of this year, to be finalized and announced during the MC13.
The pace of negotiations became more frantic in the middle of this year after the US dropped a paper on the organization’s member states. “It was a sort of take-it-or-leave-it gesture,” a European diplomatic source told The G|O. “They essentially told us, ‘we’ve done our part, now you do yours.’ But the problem was that its provisions regarding the Appellate Body were totally unacceptable for the majority of the member states.” While Washington claimed that “the US had shared a number of ideas on dispute settlement in the informal discussions, with an open mind to different ways of achieving the interests that other members and we have identified,” the US also insisted that it was “not advancing specific negotiating proposals at this stage”—for many, an admission that Washington was not really engaging with the member states.
In a rare but long-established show of bi-partisan consensus, both Republican and Democrat administrations have expressed their opposition, often bordering on abhorrence, to the Appellate Body, the WTO’s highest trade dispute settlement court, whose rulings are binding. It is widely considered by the White House and Congress to have chiefly benefitted China following its joining the WTO in 2001, helping the country to become the economic superpower it is today. The consensus in the US is that China has abused its status at the WTO as an emerging economy, and that in its rulings, the Appellate Body has been guilty of “overreach.” In 2016, even before the era of Donald Trump, the Obama administration had started to veto some nominations, and now Joe Biden has also decided to block the nomination of new judges to fill the Body’s vacant seats. As a sorry indicator of the current state of affairs, about 30 trade disputes now lie unresolved.
The latest proposal to fix the WTO is contained in a highly confidential document, first revealed by Reuters. Sources spoken to by The G|O were taking absolutely no risks by sharing its content except in very general terms, for fear that in such a complex negotiation, involving so many actors, any public disclosure may jeopardize the whole exercise. According to trade diplomats here, the document is far-reaching but still suffers from a major flaw: it doesn’t address head-on the highly divisive question of the Appellate Body that is effectively pitting Washington against the rest of the world.
Various negotiating tactics have been used, so far without success. For instance, some member states had hoped that by agreeing to a number of reforms, they would be able to convince Washington to unblock the nomination of judges with a commitment to fully reforming the body once back on track. But Washington’s firm position has left little room for maneuver, a situation that has engendered some serious frustrations, particularly among the emerging economies. “There was an attempt to hijack the whole system, forcing it to be reformed,” one participant in the negotiations told me, without naming the US. “If we deliver on a new agreement, on a new mechanism, we could also hope to find a solution for the nomination of the judges.”
Over the last few months, the US has floated several ideas on how to reform the Appellate Body in the context of its rivalry with China. One proposal, for instance, is that disputes would only be submitted to the Appellate Body if both parties agreed to move ahead. Another would give member states unilateral power to decide if something fell outside the WTO’s jurisdiction on grounds of national security. For many observers, however, both proposals would lead to a serious weakening of the body.
The difficult task of facilitating the negotiations on an informal basis falls to Ambassador Marco Molina, Guatemala’s Deputy Permanent Representative to the WTO. It is also Molina who, speaking on behalf of 130 members, recently proposed that the ban on nominating new judges be lifted—for the 68th time. In a closed briefing, on October 26, he told members that he was “continuing to reach out to delegations and meet with experts [on a daily basis], either individually, in small groups or in regional groups, in order to seek their opinions, promote convergence, and ensure that the consolidated draft text, as it continues to evolve, is representative of the views of all WTO Members.”
The hope is that, eventually, a consensus will emerge through these informal discussions where participants feel freer to express their positions than in the more rigid framework of official negotiations. But time is getting short. “For many reasons, I am convinced this is the last chance to restore the system. If we don’t reach a proposal by the ministerial conference, there won’t be another window of opportunity like the one we have today,” Marco Molina told my colleague Emma Farge at Reuters. On one thing, however, WTO observers and diplomats are in agreement: it is vital to find a solution before next year’s US presidential election. The prospect of Donald Trump winning and potentially gutting the WTO altogether is on everybody’s mind.
The business community, meanwhile, is also becoming increasingly impatient. In a report published earlier this month, the International Chamber of Commerce expressed its concern that “while active discussions are underway and various WTO members have submitted proposals, there is yet to emerge a coherent and structured framework that maps all the issues to be addressed in a reform agenda and articulates a holistic vision for reform.” The WTO is imperative for business, the ICC insists: “Since its establishment […] it has been the backbone of the multilateral trading system. Through enforceable rules, the system provides the stability, transparency, and predictability in trade relations needed for informed long-term trade and investment decisions.”
joachimd
-JC
The Two-State, Two-Economy Solution
By Raji Khalidi*
RAMALLAH – For some people, the bloody war in Gaza may have shattered the 35-year-old consensus that the only feasible solution to the region’s troubles is to have two states, Israel and Palestine, living peaceably side by side. Yet others suggest that the horrors we have witnessed since October 7 could augur the revival of that very goal.
In recent statements, American, Palestinian, and Arab officials have all stressed that a two-state solution must emerge phoenix-like from the ashes of this war. Reasonable people everywhere can only hope that this might still provide the framework for a definitive and mutually agreed end to a century-old struggle.
The timing of this renewed interest is ironic. November is when Palestinians commemorate the Palestine Liberation Organization’s (PLO) 1988 “Declaration of Independence,” which was adopted from exile in Algeria at the height of the first intifada. All Palestinian factions – including the most radical of the period – accepted the partition of Palestine and Israel’s de facto existence within its pre-1967 borders.
In making that breakthrough declaration, the PLO officially identified only one major condition for peace: the 22% of Palestine comprising the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip must be liberated of all Israeli settlers. Otherwise, the territory could never be viable as the space for a sovereign, independent state with its own natural resources and recognizable borders.
Immediately following the Algiers declaration, Palestinian economists started grappling with the economic implications of a two-state configuration. In 1990, a comprehensive PLO-led study concluded that a contiguous Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, with East Jerusalem as its capital, could indeed be economically viable. But, given the weak resource base, the miniscule land area, and the expected challenges of absorbing Palestinian refugees and returnees, viability depended, to begin with, on Israel’s military withdrawal and evacuation and the dismantlement of settlements. Without such a retreat by Israel, economic development could not be assured, because no investor would have confidence in Palestinian sovereignty.
The 1993 Oslo Accords, which the PLO accepted, fell far short of meeting this condition. Instead, they provided largely civil autonomy to the Palestinian Authority (PA) amid continued Israeli settlement, which forced economic planning into the hitherto unknown domain of “sub-sovereign state-building.” Over the subsequent five years, interim negotiations were supposed to reach a “permanent status” agreement on all contentious issues; and such an outcome was almost achieved at Camp David in 2000.
But those negotiations ultimately failed, leading to the 2000-05 outbreak of the second Palestinian intifada, which quickly turned violent, and an overwhelming Israeli military response. A two-state solution came to seem even more distant, and the PA’s already limited jurisdiction was further reduced. The Fatah-Hamas (West Bank-Gaza) division since 2006 created not only political disunity, but also greater economic distortions and a range of dependencies on the pre-eminent Israeli economy, which was experiencing a long boom.
For the past 20 years, Palestinian economists (including me) have devoted much time and energy planning for a Palestinian “national economy” within the two-state configuration. Yet in arguing that a coherent, independent, productive Palestinian economy could still be built even under occupation or siege, we implicitly abandoned the earlier PLO maxim that there can be no development without sovereignty.
Now, the economic legacy of Oslo is clear. Israel dominates – and can easily manipulate – the Palestinian macroeconomy, from currency and fiscal revenues, trade channels, and labor markets to energy, natural-resource access, and all the other attributes of economic viability. So it is no longer credible to argue that an independent Palestinian state could arise amid the archipelago of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, the eco-demographic strangulation of East Jerusalem, and now the destruction of Gaza and the humanitarian catastrophe to which its 2.2 million non-combatants are being subjected.
Even the most starry-eyed economist would be humbled by the scale and complexity of the reconstruction effort that this war has necessitated. Making matters worse, an indirect outcome of the war is that the Palestinian economy in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, is also collapsing.
Well before October 7, Palestinian economic development had become a chimera, especially with the rise of an Israeli government fully committed to the agenda of religious nationalists and messianic settlers. They have pushed the West Bank’s three million Palestinians to the brink since the war began, explicitly calling for their forceful subjugation or displacement.
As The Elders (an independent group of global leaders) argued in a recent open letter, the international community must move quickly if it hopes to turn today’s catastrophe into a last-gasp opportunity to achieve – or to impose, if need be – a two-state outcome. Of course, many of the Israelis currently in power consider such an idea radioactive. But since the extremism within the current Israeli coalition cannot be ignored, it will need to be contained, especially by peace-loving Israelis and their US allies.
Even at this dark hour, there may still be a chance to forge a “real” two-state deal, because we already know what it must include. The original PLO prerequisites for economic viability are as valid today as they were 35 years ago, because they represent the only material basis for a viable and permanent political solution.
For decades now Palestinian economists and planners have been preparing the economic foundations of a sovereign state of Palestine. We have continued pursuing this goal despite seeing its prospects recede before our eyes. Having peered into the bottomless pit of this war, are there still enough Israelis and Palestinians with the courage and political foresight to opt for peace instead of more violence?
*Raja Khalidi is Director-General of the Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute (MAS).
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2023.