Israel’s Ethnic Cleansing Push

Plus: AI anxiety goes mainstream. New Year climate optimism. The arms industry’s bloody proving ground. Modi’s techno-tyranny. And more!

Concerns that the Gaza war will culminate in the ethnic cleansing of Gaza got various forms of corroboration this week.

On Wednesday, an Israeli newspaper reported that Israeli officials have held secret talks with the Congo and unnamed other nations about accepting migrants from Gaza. The idea of shipping masses of unwanted people to Africa reminded some observers of the Nazi plan to send European Jews to Madagascar (a plan superseded by Hitler’s decision to kill them instead). Gregg Carlstrom, Middle East correspondent for the Economist, tweeted, "The Israeli government thinking an African country might be a dumping ground for forcibly displaced people is just the darkest historical irony."

Also this week, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir advocated the mass emigration of Gazans as a way to keep Israel secure after the war. 

Both men cast the relocation as voluntary; Israel should be “encouraging” migration, said Ben-Gvir on Monday. The next day, Intelligence Minister Gila Gamliel, speaking in the Knesset, envisioned post-war Gaza as the kind of place that would reinforce such encouragement. With Hamas destroyed, she said, there will be “no municipal authorities, the civilian population will be entirely dependent on humanitarian aid. There will be no work, and 60 percent of Gaza’s agricultural land will become security buffer zones.” In mid-October, Gamliel’s ministry prepared a report, later leaked to the Israeli press, recommending the permanent transfer of all Gazan civilians to Egypt. 

Ben-Gvir and Smotrich got pushback from the US State Department, which called their statements “inflammatory and irresponsible.” To which Ben-Gvir replied: “Really appreciate the United States of America but with all due respect we are not another star on the American flag. The United States is our best friend, but first of all we will do what is best for the State of Israel.”

An op-ed in Le Figaro questioned whether the coerced relocation of Gazans is indeed what’s best for the state of Israel. A “Zionism of conquest,” wrote journalist Renaud Girard, is “suicidal for Israel… A strategy of forced expulsion of the descendants of the inhabitants who lived for centuries in Ottoman Palestine has very little chance of ever being accepted by Israel’s neighbors, near or far. This is the perfect recipe for eternal war.”

America’s interests, too, would seem to be ill-served by Israel’s present course. In Responsible Statecraft, former CIA officer Emile Nakhleh writes, “The more Palestinians believe that Washington is condoning the unprecedented devastation of Gaza and the killing and injuring of tens of thousands of Palestinians, the higher the probability that Hamas’s resistance against Israel could expand into a global jihad and raise the terrorism threat against the United States.” Nakhleh notes that Hamas militants and spokesmen have started to call the US the “far enemy”—an eerie echo of the language used by Osama bin Laden in the runup to 9/11. Such language seems unlikely to fade away if it turns out that US-supplied arms not only killed thousands of Gazan civilians but paved the way for the forced relocation of the rest of them (a war crime, by the way).

President Biden has the leverage to wind down the war before the ethnic cleansing push gathers more momentum—and before the Israeli military makes that push easier by rendering even more of Gaza uninhabitable. Israeli Major General Yitzhak Brick was quoted recently in Mother Jones as saying, “All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the US. The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting… Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.”

However, the upshot of that Mother Jones piece (by staffer Noah Lanard) is that Biden is unlikely to use that leverage. The piece is mainly about the origins of “Biden’s deference to Israel”—about how Biden, as a young senator with no particular interest in Israel, fell under the influence of neoconservative Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson and came to be even more obliging to Israel than the average US senator. During the early years of the Obama administration, Lanard notes, Vice President Biden assured an Israeli official of America’s support with these words: “Israel could get into a fistfight with this country and we’d still defend you.”

If 2023, the year of Chat-GPT4’s unveiling, found you upping your estimate of how fast AI is advancing, you’re in good company. The year seems to have had the same effect on AI researchers.

That’s one takeaway from a survey, conducted in 2022 and then again in the fall of 2023, that focused on AI researchers who have published in the most prestigious journals.

The researchers were asked to predict when AI would first perform 33 different feats (like write a bestselling novel). For two thirds of those tasks, the average predicted date moved forward between the 2022 and 2023 surveys. So expect that bestselling novel in 2030 (the 2023 prediction), not 2039 (the 2022 prediction). And an AI-created top-40 pop song is now expected in 2028, not 2030. 

For the 11 tasks that went in the other direction—their predicted date receding rather than advancing—the revisions were on average less dramatic; in five cases the change was less than a year, and in some others it was only one year. Robots are now expected to be folding laundry at a human level by 2029, not 2028.

As for when we’ll see the “full automation of labor”—well, apparently most of us won’t. That’s not predicted until 2116. Then again, a year ago the predicted date was 2164—so stay tuned for next year’s update.

And as for the character of future artificial intelligence: More than half of the researchers who participated in this year’s survey think there is a greater than 40 percent chance of the following being true of AI 20 years from now:

It can be “jailbroken” to follow illegal commands.

It sometimes deceives humans to achieve a goal without this being intended by humans.

It has goals not aligned with human goals.

It forms collaborative relationships with other AI systems without this being intended by humans.

But there’s (relatively) good news when it comes to the question of whether “human-level machine intelligence” (now anticipated by 2047, compared to 2060 a year ago) will bring “extremely bad outcomes (for example, human extinction).” If you average out the respondents’ estimates of the probability of such outcomes, you get a 9 percent probability, down from 14 percent last year. (That’s average in the sense of mean, not median.)

And as for how the broader public has been absorbing news about AI: For that we turn to a Pew poll conducted in late summer of this year, a few months after the release of Chat-GPT4, and compare its findings to those of earlier Pew polls: 

Graph adapted by Clark McGillis.

If you want to hear contrasting views on how warranted AI anxiety is or isn’t, check out the latest Nonzero podcast, a conversation with tech writer Timothy Lee, publisher of the Understanding AI newsletter. As usual, paid NZN subscribers get access to the Overtime segment.

The Russia-Ukraine war continues to cause mass destruction and untold suffering. But, as the old saying goes, “It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good.” In this case the somebody who is benefiting is the military industrial complex—not just because the war is boosting profits for arms makers but because it’s providing a proving ground for their products. NZN’s quote of the week comes from Time correspondent Vera Bergengruen, who, while discussing military drones on a recent podcast, said:

“I was speaking to someone who was at a European defense expo, a big defense conference, and they said that people aren’t even buying anything that doesn’t have the ‘tested in Ukraine’ stamp on it.”

Here at NZN, we try to begin each year on at least one note of hope. So we scoured the planet for such a thing and hit the jackpot: two notes of hope in one—reason to feel a bit more upbeat about both the battle against climate change and the impact of artificial intelligence!

NPR details four ways AI is helping Earthlings mitigate global warming and manage its effects. On the mitigation front, for example: Researchers are using AI to detect methane, a potent greenhouse gas released by landfills, the power sector, and agricultural activities. “Before we could mine satellite information with AI, we had no idea where methane was coming from,” says Antoine Halff of Kayrros, an environmental intelligence firm. Kayrros’s tech is helping the United Nations verify the accuracy of companies’ methane emissions reports.  

And, as if that weren’t enough uplift for one newsletter, we bring you a bonus dose of cheer:

Data scientist Hannah Ritchie has spent the past few years crunching the climate numbers and was pleasantly surprised by what she learned: Thanks to government policies and technological progress, Earthlings are making real headway in combatting climate change.

Before, Ritchie was pessimistic about the chances of limiting global warming to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above pre-industrial levels—a goal set at the 2015 Paris climate change summit. But not anymore: “My perspective flipped quickly after studying the data, not newspaper headlines,” she writes in her new book, Not the End of the World. You can read an excerpt in the Guardian, or even read the whole book. And if you don’t find it persuasive, well, you can’t say we didn’t try.

From Our World in Data, graph adapted by Clark McGillis.

Indian journalists and politicians are being targeted with the smartphone-invading spyware Pegasus, reveals a joint Amnesty International-Washington Post investigation. The prime suspect is the Indian government—in part because the Israeli company that makes Pegasus purportedly licenses it only to governments, and in part because many of the targeted figures have been critics of Indian billionaire Gautam Adani, an ally of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

This isn’t the first time New Delhi has faced allegations of using Pegasus for unlawful surveillance. In 2021, the notorious spyware was used to spy on Indian journalists and activists and some of Modi’s political rivals. Pegasus can read a smartphone’s emails and messages, eavesdrop on calls, monitor app usage, and activate a phone’s camera and microphone without the user’s knowledge.

Calling attention to the Modi administration’s alleged abuses can be perilous. The Washington Post reports that in October, after Apple notified Indian journalists and politicians of possible state-sponsored efforts to hack their iPhones, Indian officials announced an investigation into Apple and summoned an Apple representative to New Delhi for a private dressing-down.

NZN member perks: 

1. The Overtime segment of Bob’s conversation with journalist Jefferson Morley about the assassination of America’s 35^th president. Morley is convinced the official narrative doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, and Bob is starting to agree.

2. The Overtime segment of Bob’s latest conversation with tech reporter Timothy Lee about AI anxiety, superintelligence, and the New York Times’s lawsuit against OpenAI.

—By Robert Wright and Andrew Day

Earthling banner created by Clark McGillis. Netanyahu pic from CNN. Photos and graphics, unless otherwise credited, are taken from articles linked to in the corresponding text.