Michael Lind

As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly sophisticated, the time has come for humanity to choose. Should the nations of the world shut down or tightly regulate AI until it is clear a godlike artificial superintelligence will not gain consciousness and exterminate the human race? Or should governments not regulate AI at all, in the hope that it will cause an acceleration of technological progress that results in our colonization of the universe, our uploading as bodiless computer programs into the galaxy-wide web – or both? Or how about a third option: AI regulation by AI-enabled industry? AI may turn out to be the latest in a series of “general purpose technologies” (GPTs) that transform the economy, politics and society.

If the nightmare of anticommunists during the cold war was an endless future of totalitarian terror, the nightmare of today’s critics of liberalism is an endless future of constant social upheaval and atomisation as a result of unchecked markets and radical individualism. Not a boot stamping on a human face forever, but a high-tech appliance in need of the latest upgrades – forever. What many critics as well as defenders of liberalism tend to overlook is the possibility that liberalism – in the economy, in politics, and in culture – will prove to be unstable and self-liquidating. To put it another way, a liberal social order tends to be an ephemeral transition between one nonliberal system or regime and another.

Will nobody think of the pigeons? That thought has repeatedly occurred to me, as beloved roosts for generations of urban pigeons have been toppled in one city after another on both sides of the Atlantic by the radical left, in the greatest eruption of iconoclasm since the era when Theodora graced the burlesque stage in Constantinople. Tearing down Confederate war memorials, it turns out, is a gateway drug to toppling statues of Catholic saints, Civil War abolitionists and Abraham Lincoln himself. Gradually, it has dawned on a horrified, watching world: they don’t hate Confederates. They hate statues! All statues!Now, thanks to the actions of a lawless few, countless pigeons in cities in America and Europe have been rendered homeless.

It was inevitable that the wave of destructive rioting and looting that has swept through cities that are almost all governed by progressive Democrats, triggered initially by outrage over the sickening death in police custody of George Floyd, would be compared to the American urban riots of earlier generations. But the parallels miss profound differences in the underlying economic and social dynamics. The Detroit and Newark riots of 1967 and the Los Angeles riot of 1992, for example, took place in cities suffering from the effects of deindustrialization. Los Angeles is not often thought of as a major manufacturing center, but Southern California had a flourishing aerospace industry that went into decline following the Cold War.

The targeted killing of suspected terrorists and enemy soldiers by drones is rapidly moving from controversial innovation to standard government practice around the world.  Pakistan’s announcement that it killed three suspected terrorists in a drone strike on Monday, September 7, makes Pakistan the fourth country to use drones in combat after the US, UK and Israel.  News of the Pakistani strike followed the controversy that erupted in the UK over Prime Minister David Cameron’s revelation that two British nationals had been killed in an RAF drone strike in Syria. Some opponents of drone warfare argue that it is immoral, nothing more than the summary execution of suspects.

   Washington DC [audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_20_Nov_2014_v4.mp3" title="Michael Lind and Sebastian Payne discuss the growing similarities of the Britain and American right" startat=1350] Listen [/audioplayer]Amid all the commentary about the Republican party’s triumph in America’s midterm elections, a remarkable fact was ignored: in style and substance, the American right is rapidly becoming a lot more like Britain’s. And that might be the key to its success. In the last generation, American right-wingers have stood proudly apart from their counterparts in Europe, Britain, Canada and Australia. They were more religious, and more supportive of mass immigration. But that is changing.