Henry Kissinger and Eric Schmidt’s Big Treatise on AI Panned in Book Review
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The only thing I take away from this news is that Eric Schmidt has an even weaker moral compass than I previously thought.
Publications either fail to reference their source, or give secondary references, or give incorrect references.
For an example of the last, https://ccp.org.au/content/2-exhibitions/1-all/0-fertile-gro... cites "Kissinger, H., National Security Council. (1974). The Kissinger Report: NSSM-200 Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security Interests", but I could not find that quote in https://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PCAAB500.pdf .
I looked at that one because Google Scholar says that "Fertile Ground" document I linked to is from 1992. Internal evidence shows it's no older than 2019.
The oldest actual mention in Google Scholar is from 2006 at http://www.libertydollar.org/news-stories/pdfs/1161050727.pd... , without attribution. Note that https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/global-research/ refers to the organization as 'a Canadian conspiracy website'.
In 2007 there are a few more citations, like http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.532... . That in turn cites WikiQuote. WikiQuote currently has that quote in the Talk page under "None of these quotes should be reinstated in the article unless a source is found."
I looked at the next few years of publications which use that quote. None give a primary reference or even provide a citation.
This pattern strongly suggests that Kissinger did not say it. Clearly it must have been Lincoln or Churchill. /s
It was given to him less than eight months after he became president, mostly based on his campaign rhetoric. Really just massively embarrassing for the Nobel committee in hindsight.
The Nobel Secretary regrets that award. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-34277960
Numerous choices of his as Secretary of State were nearly indefensible, sure, but often as a product of his involvement and meticulous work in every foreign affairs matter, where everything had to be exact, and to fit into the grander strategy that he envisioned for the United States.
As one small example: while H.W. Bush was able to show his goodness and his morality by fighting for Taiwan's role in his role as Ambassador to the UN, Kissinger's controversial pro-PRC stance, however much I despise the PRC government today and then, was what was necessary for the time.
His administration's decision in using the rift that already existed between the PRC and the USSR to further pull them away from one another and open up diplomatic relations with the West instead is a major reason that China has become as powerful as it is today, which is an understandable cause of criticism. At the same time, we can't know what would've happened otherwise, but it's easy to imagine that the USSR could have kept up their Iron Curtain much longer, and the Cold War could've gone in a very different direction.
We can look at other controversial decisions like Allende, the Yom Kippur War, and Vietnam in the same light.
These are the hard decisions one grapples with as Secretary of State. Kissinger's own history as a Jewish immigrant who witnessed Nazism led to this rationalistic pessimism, and this idea that the best state we can hope for is teetering on the edge, slowly relieving tension a la detente, and that true utopia is unachievable.
You can disagree with most of his decisions, but to not even consider his advice after all he's experienced seems unwise.
Edit: Questionably cited Taiwan as democratic at the time — it was a military dictatorship as another commenter mentioned. H.W. Bush's decision of supporting the 'true' government of China was the moral, easily swallowed one, that was much more popular with the American public. Taiwan was heralded to the American people as a potential democratic alternative to the PRC, though it was not a democracy at the time, and so citing the decision as supporting democracy is questionable.
> hese are the hard decisions one grapples with as Secretary of State.
SoS of an imperialist country. During a time of America's greatest atrocities. And during a time where no one could challenge US hegemony. There is no statecraft to be learned here. There is nothing to learn from him other than what a piece of shit he is.
But let's not pretend that there's some alternative world out there where we could have had clean hands, but not ended up in some communist dystopia where most of us wouldn't be here, because our parents or grandparents were liquidated.
Wow, that really took a quick turn from apologism into weird tinfoil-hattery
It's due to the Cold War we were experiencing around that time, and the fact that U.S. hegemony was only checked by a truly evil force (in its good nature, to be apologist). The USSR would have loved for the United States to end up the same type of place, with many millions dead or permanently interned in camps.
I imagine you're younger than to have experienced that type of fear, but it was real fear and a real threat. The questionable and bloody decisions our government made was largely to fight that threat and ensure that wouldn't happen to us.
btw Allende was in office for 3 years before he was deposed.
"revolutionary" is a clever way of excluding all of the successful models of socialism - like the scandanavian countries which consistently rank as the happiest countries on the planet.
I imagine that nearly everyone with a unique perspective is capable of having interesting thoughts on AI and technology with how ubiquitous it's become. If you'd like me to venture a couple guesses as reasons for his relevance:
(1) AI will become closely intertwined with government and governmental processes. (2) There will be an increasingly asymmetric power relationship growing with the power of AI.
He's very experienced with government, with asymmetric power relationships, and he's notorious for his belief in analyzing more than data in decisions, whereas AI will lead us towards a further reliance on data. If every government eventually has a form of AGI, it will be a fascinating and terrifying geopolitical climate akin to every government having a nuclear warhead. He knows what that evolution is like.
Anyway, my conjecture on the scrapped book aside, here's an article that allegedly led to the book [1].
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/08/henry-k...
Bizarre framing, given that Taiwan wasn't a democracy in 1971 but rather a military dictatorship.
Isn't it basically like saying Xi Jinping made a controversial decision to wipe out the Uyghurs?
Kissinger was a man who made a lot of hard decisions, and that meant a lot of controversial decisions — decisions that killed many people. In most of those decisions (not all to be honest), however, we can clearly see how more destruction may have come from choosing another path.
The Uyghur genocide is Xi's attempt to strengthen stability in China through forced assimilation, which I personally have a hard time to stomach, especially without this even being justified by any recent conflict. There were a handful of anti-Chinese terror attacks in the 2000s-2010s following the Urumqi riots, but there are plenty of countries experiencing isolated incidents of terrorism from an ethnic minority that haven't sent that minority to a camp.
If you actually want to argue that the Holocaust was the better alternative, I'd be interested to hear your case on what that alternative was.
There's a reason that Kissinger was afraid of too much reliance on data, and that's why. As a German Jew, Kissinger experienced the start of the Holocaust. I imagine he's more adept at distinguishing bad from worse than either of us are.
He was a shitty statesman, and a laughably bad political consultant.
For just how a "high class" consultant he was, look for how he absolutely hilariously blew the Rockefeller's plans to enter politics.
Saying him simply being "unwise" would not make him any justice.
> These are the hard decisions one grapples with as Secretary of State. Kissinger's own history as a Jewish immigrant who witnessed Nazism led to this rationalistic pessimism, and this idea that the best state we can hope for is teetering on the edge, slowly relieving tension a la detente, and that true utopia is unachievable.
Traumatic experiences can change a person for both good, or worse. In this case, this bitterness, and insecurity definitely turned a person for worse.
It was entertaining to watch the internal memegen when this went down.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/08/henry-k...
Also fun fact, Kissinger was on Theranos’ board of directors.
I'm not understanding the rationalization? I keep parsing the sentence as either 'He's too old to be a criminal.' , or 'He existed in an era that was horrible, so give him a pass.'
I don't consider either rationalizations to be worth contemplation, honestly.
I'm not sure if 'war criminal' is a title with expiration, nor do I think that such titles should be normalized by comparing it to some of the most tumultuous times in human history.
The only other group of people that shrug off 'war criminal' titles as easily as Kissinger are US presidents; that feels telling to me.
He has a long and storied history of being a horrible person , but being exceedingly successful at it.
The word pan is far too overloaded as is: a metal cooking utensil, a camera going across, sorting gold from dirt, to conclude or end up (it panned out), to criticize sharply. Can't we use something else?
Wow, the guy is still alive. I though he kicked the bucket long ago.