Restricted aid to Ukraine

I planned to write this text regarding USA, Ukraine, Russia, Israel, Iran, North Korea, China and Trump a month ago, but didn’t have the time.

Between the US presidential election and the inauguration of Donald Trump, many pundits and military analysts had hopeful discussions on how Trump could help Ukraine more than the Biden administration. I really couldn’t see this.

Book review: World on the Brink

Sinea deterrendae sunt – China must be deterred. That is the maxim of World on the Brink: How America can beat China in the race for the Twenty-First Century by Dmitri Alperovitch (and Garrett M. Graff). The title is self-revelatory, because the book is mainly about China, the United States and Taiwan.

Book review: The Alignment Problem

Probably you’ve heard about reinforcement learning in conversations on AI. It originates from psychology and animal behaviourism, like so many other parts of the field of AI (neural networks and temporal differences are two others), while others touch philosophical issues and conundrums humans have pondered on for centuries. Brian Christian, like Johan Harri, travels the world to interview lots of people about how to get machines to understand and obey humans. 

At the parliament

A couple of weeks ago I visited the Swedish Parliament (Sveriges riksdag) to attend an award ceremony. My supervisor got the School for social sciences at Södertörn University to nominate my bachelor’s thesis for an award issued by the Swedish Parliament.

On long, hard thoughts

Right now The Ezra Klein Show has a series of podcast episodes on artificial intelligence (just like early 2023). Yesterday I listened to the discussion with Nilay Patel (of course I recommend it). Among the things they discussed was how hard thinking was at risk of being discarded with the introduction of A.I. programs such as ChatGPT 4 or Claude.

Book review: How To Do Nothing

Jenny Odell, an artist and former teacher at Stanford University, wrote a book on how to do nothing (resisting the attention economy), published in 2019, on… many things. Usually, it’s classified as related to technology (and/or science), which can confuse a reader like me, because it’s not about merely about tech’s (contemporary) inherent obsession with attention, but about being present, bonding with and relating to other beings, forgetting yourself.