Tag Archives: technology

The Ripening of the Human Community: a New Year’s Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

31 Dec

It is New Year’s Eve in the US, an erstwhile flipping of the calendar which offers more old symbolism than fresh content as almost all of what we have done – and failed to do – in 2023 will carry forth into 2024.  There is no flipping here so much as dragging, dragging behind us elements of a year which for many was less than they had hoped and for others more fraught with violence and despair then we “civilized” humans should ever tolerate.

For some the past year also brought about reminders of how little we humans seem to have the capacity to shift our present course.  We have invented shiny new tools to generate vast amounts of both wealth and disinformation.  But beyond the realm of the technological, and surely in the realm of politics and policy, we have often offered more lip-service than tangible progress such as when organizing massive, cost-ineffective international conferences only to witness more global warning, more food insecurity, more violence in more places.   

Moreover, we have still not demonstrated the political courage needed to place the aspirations of global youth and the multiply vulnerable on a par with our own.  We have willingly kicked multiple cans down the road, leaving to our children the task of making urgent changes in the midst of crises we could well have resolved — in part if not in full — in our own time.  We have closed the curtains so as not to be worldly distracted from our more repetitive, domiciled distractions.

None of this is news to those of you who still read these posts.  But what to do about this?  What to do (for us at least) about the prospect of another year of polarized politics across national entities, of diplomatic statements by the thousands largely lacking self-awareness, urgency or inspiration, characterized by responsibility frequently projected but rarely  assumed?

It is all that many young people can do to maintain their belief that “life is NOT a joke,” that it is worth trying, worth deferring, worth caring.  The relative cynicism and indifference of our age has clearly and much too often been visited on the young.

In response and in my own small way, what I try to do in these posts is to highlight “takeaways,” images or ideas that might stick with people long after they have logged off this blog.  The quotations which often adorn the front sections of these pieces are designed for that purpose.  You might have little use for what I have to say but also might have your week’s enthusiasm salvaged by excerpts from the accumulated wisdom of women and men who have struggled – in their time and ours – to reinforce the value of arising from slumber and facing life’s challenges, those which affect us directly and those not.

Today’s wisdom appropriate for this calendar flipping comes from Rilke’s “Book of Hours,” lovingly translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy.  Among the glorious and passionate imagery in these poems, especially in the “Pilgrimage” section, I have been most captivated by the image of ripening (reift).  For indeed, despite the calling of great minds and artists in diverse cultures and over many generations, we have surely, by temperament and intent, remained an unripe species, stubbornly clinging to familiar vines and branches, refusing to mature as we were intended to mature, even taking pride in the metaphorical hardness generally characteristic of the unripe.

As Rilke reminds, we as a species continue to “entangle ourselves in knots of our own making,” knots which in essence cut ourselves off from the nutrients which ripeness requires.  Thus we continue our collective struggle, increasingly lonely and confused, scratching our heads as we seek to discern how yet another “well-meaning” policy has crashed and burned, how a species with so many reminding us of our potential for caring and justice could routinely practice such cruelty and indifference.

Folks, we can choose to make this the year to untie the knots and allow our species to ripen, to become what we were intended to become, what we must urgently become if our children and their children are to have a fighting chance of life as we know it.  This can be the year to ripen and then to harvest the best of us. Let us strive to make it so.

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Innovation for a Sustainable Planet, Dr. Robert Zuber

28 Mar

Editor’s Note: This post is a lightly edited version of the second presentation I made to students at Georgia Tech University earlier this month. Delays in posting were attributable to several things, one of which is the relentless policy challenges in technology, in peace and security, and related matters which I am having to work harder and harder just to keep up. Still the opportunity to address younger audiences — to share and reflect and even to apologize — is one which I value highly and never take for granted.

I want to begin this afternoon by referencing an MIT study from 1972 which was updated in 2021.  There is much to fear regarding the conclusions of this study and its three proposed scenarios, primarily its contention that the global community is headed for a systemic collapse by 2040 if we cannot change our current course and, more specifically, the way in which we as a species choose to innovate in all its dimensions.  

Of the three scenarios outlined for 2040, two are relatively hopeful but the third is the one deemed most likely — the problematic “business as usual” scenario where the innovation we need to forestall disaster is still buried under an avalanche of AI and other tech “advances”  designed primarily to be monetized, benefitting some at the likely expense of the many.

So, let’s talk a bit about innovation today, something about which all of you are learning to be proficient in this place.  From my own limited vantage point, there are three basic types of innovation we need to consider:   Making new things, adapting existing things and adjusting our own priorities as a species.  I will return to the first of these towards the end. 

Regarding innovation as adaptation, the notion of dual use is built into our contemporary understandings, most prominently perhaps in areas of defense and weapons technology where much of that research and development has eventual implications for the consumer sector as well.  But such implications are only rarely adapted to context and are only occasionally designed to help real people in the real world live in a manner that protects their future as well as enriches their present.  The impetus driving these adaptations is too often what someone wants to sell rather than on some irresistible clamor from prospective consumers.  How many of you, for instance, stay awake at night pining for self-driving cars or cruise ships with an amusement park on the top deck?

We increasingly recognize the importance of reuse to sustainable lifestyles, resisting the temptation to merely toss things into landfills when we have finished with them.  As such the kind of innovation we need now is also about finding new uses for the things already in our midst, uses which can be both life-affirming and take us well beyond what the enclosed instructions of our consumption seem to encourage.

It is here that I want to introduce innovation in the form of a “hack,” that is, striving to adapt alternative uses for the things around us beyond conventional application and, in some instances, beyond wastefulness as well.   In preparing for this talk, I spent some time on YouTube researching some of the many hacks that the clever among us have come up with.  Some of the hundreds of examples include:

  • Making a broom out of plastic bottles
  • Opening beer bottles with an opener made of folded paper (my personal favorite)
  • Using a collapsed balloon to make a  cell phone case
  • Putting lemons in a microwave to get more of the juice when you squeeze
  • Making bibs for babies out of plastic bags (babies don’t mind)

These are simple transactions that don’t move the` needle much. But the mentality associated with  this type of innovation is important, cultivating the habit of seeing what we can do with things aside from merely turning them into rubbish.  I spent the last evening in the Georgia mountains with Dr. Thomas and decided to bring back all my recycling to deposit in the bins here at Tech. Granted, my action doesn’t do much for the world in and of itself but it does reinforce habits of both hands and heart, including mindfulness directed towards trying to give our world a few more hopeful options, about lending my support to something that all of you should soon be expert in – extending the life of the items that our mostly privileged lives routinely use.

Moving on to priorities adjustment, as the MIT study suggests, our behavior in the main is unfortunately not innovating sufficiently to avoid widespread systemic collapse by 2040. We are still too indifferent to the suffering of others, we start too many armed conflicts on too little evidence, we prioritize our own “needs” in competition with others, and we continue to destroy the carrying capacity of the environment beyond its ability to repair.  We talk about lofty things in places like the UN but with too-little confidence that the quality of our innovation will match the volume of our rhetoric.  At the same time, we permit ourselves to be deceived by credentials and claims of expertise – not only credentials that don’t often generate impact that is sustainable, but even those credentials-holders who manage to stifle as much hopeful innovation as they enable.

This begs the question which some of you in this room are actually in this room to try and answer.  How do we innovate for sustainability?  And how do we measure and communicate that impact?  The answer to these questions is not just about what we are “doing” or the impressiveness of our LinkedIn page, but what difference it makes, what difference we wish to make, and to whom we wish to make it.   

We live in a time when branding is a de facto substitute for impact. In this moment of our history, if you can convince others that you are on the right track, and they are willing to invest resources based on that judgment, it doesn’t really matter at one level whether you are on the right track or not. If you get more social media attention than the one sitting next to you, you can claim impact no matter how ephemeral such affirmation might be.  Indeed, the confusion over position or wealth and its alleged ability to move the pile on our collective survival  is compounded by our seemingly endless confusion over exactly who the influencers are and what precisely is being influenced.

It seems clearly dangerous to our prospects for 2040 to promote any further such linkages between position, money, brand and impact.  Branding and status often drive investment, but neither necessarily implies impact that is both sustainable and scalable. And sometimes when funders or investors insist on “outcomes,” they are insisting on something that is abstract or inappropriate to the needs of constituents, let alone to the current needs of our threatened world.

For me, there are two rules related to impact no matter how delusional and out-of-touch they might seem on the surface:  The first rule is that what we support or enable will always be greater than what we do ourselves.  And the second is that in this enormously complex, competitive and at times corrupt world, a healthy regard for the skills of others, skills to be honored but also cultivated, is key to ensuring that “business as usual” might soon not be so “usual.”. What we can do ourselves is but a tiny fraction of what needs to be done in this threatened world. What we enable in others based on a healthy regard for their own innovation potential can set off a chain reaction of sustainable progress that we desperately need.

This sounds more like a passion for ministry than a passion for acquisition, but it is really about ensuring your own personal values are integrated into what and how you innovate, ensuring as best you are able that what you help to create or recreate makes a healthier planet and not only – or even primarily — a healthier stock price.

So let’s return now to the issue of innovation as “making new things.” 

For those of us who work in tech-informed policy, whether through the UN or NGOs (we try to do both) there are issues that come up routinely for us, including in our work to examine impacts and opportunities of what has become a veritable “wild west” of technological development:

  • How does the direction of technological development get younger and more inclusive by gender, race and culture? 
  • How do we inspire innovation without increasing the economic and social gaps which already divide people and stoke conflict? Where are the pressure points related to innovation and access?
  • How can we regulate technology without killing innovation?  Is it even possible?  Given regulatory absence there is an ethical void which leads to the potential for corruption in the sector, corruption not so much related to bribery and other classic manifestations of misuse but about innovation which is intended only for the benefit of the few, innovation which mostly serves to magnify rather than shrink gaps of access and inclusion.
  • How do we ensure attention to “what can go wrong” in a time when  technology appears to be running significantly ahead of efforts to impose some ethical standards to guide its introductions?  In this context, I am reminded of a radio host who asked an AI expert about prospects for government control in the technology sector.  The expert paused, then laughed, and then said “I think that horse has already left the barn.”  If true, those of us in policy are left to work on a few identifiable excesses but have lost touch with the pace of what is now coming into view off and online, and coming with little regard for how the genies might be returned to their bottles, if needed, once they have been released.   

UN working groups do address access and inclusion questions, as well as what it calls “malicious uses” of the internet as it seeks to create voluntary norms for technological assessments. But it is still not clear whose job it is to assess the impacts of technology before it is unleashed on an unsuspecting public.  What are the effects of so much mediated reality and how do we call attention to the dangers without stifling the entrepreneurial creativity that our world also needs? We must all contribute more towards addressing these concerns and dilemmas while there is still time and room to do so.

Back to the MIT prediction now. Where are you likely to be if and when these computer-generated prophecies come to pass?

I will surely be dead in 2040.  You all will be middle-aged, also mid-career if you decide to go that route.  Many of you will have children of your own, children who may have some legitimate fears but perhaps also many questions about why we didn’t change course when it was clear that course correction was an urgent necessity. At the moment, we still have options going forward, but if the MIT folks are correct, business as usual is going to mean a good deal of unpleasantness for you and everyone you care about. And when that time comes, if that time comes, your response options will likely be severely constrained regardless of your academic degrees or financial resources.

Innovation has a key role to play in forestalling disaster, but innovation which exists beyond technology itself and certainly beyond its relentless and rapid monetization.  We need more innovation which is context specific, adaptable to scale, committed to new uses, and which does not obscure the importance of growth in the personal realm, of becoming more like the people we have the potential to be, people who can move beyond business as usual and embrace the tasks and responsibilities of business as unusual. There is a lot of talent in this room.   There is a lot of anxiety in this room as well. Time for all of us to get busy and stay busy to ensure that “business as usual” doesn’t back us into corners we will eventually find it almost possible to escape.   

The hard lesson in all of this is to be careful what you innovate.  Be mindful of what you innovate.  We in the educational and policy realms are barely staying connected to all that has come and all that is to come as technology now seems to be driving humanity, perhaps eventually off a cliff, if we cannot together find ways to retain control of the steering wheel. 

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Perseverance: Reaching the Bars We Set for Ourselves, Dr. Robert Zuber

21 Feb
Members of NASA's Perseverance rover team react in mission control at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, after receiving confirmation the spacecraft successfully touched down on Mars on Thursday, Feb. 18, 2021.
 (Bill Ingalls/NASA)

You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated.  Maya Angelou

Try again. Fail again. Fail better. Samuel Beckett

Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.  Thomas A. Edison

A bend in the road is not the end of the road.   Helen Keller

Character consists of what you do on the third and fourth tries.  James A. Michener

I like the scientific spirit—the holding off, the being sure but not too sure, the willingness to surrender ideas when the evidence is against them.  Walt Whitman

The seeker after truth should be humbler than the dust. Mahatma Gandhi

This was one of those weeks which stretched our recognition of human capacity and human ineptitude both in the wider world and within our bubbles of global policy.

In the US alone, emotions were yet again stirred as the Perseverance Rover managed a damage-free landing on the surface of Mars and Special Envoy John Kerry announced (with what might be considered excessive fanfare) a “humble” but determined return by the US to the Paris Climate agreement.  The Rover’s mission, no doubt watched with interest by other orbiting probes from China and the United Arab Emirates, demonstrated the technology and tenacity over a decade + that we would do well to see more of in these precarious times, a combination that will eventually result in a joint US-European Union effort to bring samples of the Martian surface back to earth by 2031.  And while perhaps not as dramatic or romantic as previous successes placing humans on the lunar surface, some viewing the remarkable images now emanating from Mars gleaned similar lessons to place our earthbound follies in context. Indeed, as one commentator on a relevant Washington Post report stated, “It makes all these earthly fights and wars over politics, power and property seem pretty primitive and clueless.”

Beyond the justifiable cheers from the Perseverance control room, there was plenty else happening this week for which “primitive and clueless” might also be appropriate.  Despite the fact that the US is one of the ten countries worldwide at this moment with access to 75% of the world’s COVID-19 vaccine supplies, production and supply chain issues continue to impede vaccine delivery with direct implications for the health and safety of the elderly, store clerks and a bevy of other front-line workers – often people of color and those of limited financial means.  Such supply issues and parallel wasting of precious vaccine stocks has been exacerbated by a massive winter storm which both affected vaccine delivery and left millions (especially in Texas) without heat or potable water for days. The storm provided a different sort of optic – not of sophisticated technology on the Martian surface but of long lines of people standing in the cold hoping to return home with a bit of food or water to keep their families afloat until their own damaged infrastructure can be successfully repaired.

This is where we are now, or so it seems:  Mind-boggling technology that with the right levels of tenacity and perseverance can accomplish miracles, from soft landings on other planets to effective vaccines developed in record time.  But alongside this are horrific images of children in Yemen dying of famine; children in Texas dying of hypothermia, children being denied educational opportunity due to a combination of pandemic and armed violence, children whose vaccinations for the diseases which predate COVID-19 are being interrupted by security deficits and the often-related damage to health infrastructure.

It is, indeed, a measure of our sometimes “primitive and clueless” selves that we are unable or unwilling to deploy that combination of ingenuity and tenacity which clearly lies at our disposal to address some of the other, looming global threats, to do more than talk about the urgency of things, the unfairness of things but rather to sustain levels of commitment and skill commensurate with current challenges here on the only planet we have.  We are still, as noted this week by the World Health Organization’s Dr. Mike Ryan, “writing checks that we will be unable to cash,” unable because we continue to talk a better game than we play.  Our power (and often petty) politics at national and global levels are too-often “in the way” of goals that would otherwise be well within our grasp – including to rebuild our frayed infrastructure, eliminate digital divides, and ensure greater equity in the distribution of health-related and other resources.

As our partners on sustainable development are fond of reminding us, we know what needs to be done and largely have the tools with which to do so.  What is lacking is the will to persevere, the will to employ the best of our minds and character, the will to push through failure until we can grasp the success that might actually be closer than we allow ourselves to believe.

If only we had fewer deficits to overcome.  At the UN this week, we witnessed a dazzling, bewildering array of events and report launches, including on peacekeeping reform, on “making peace with nature” (report here), on “digital inclusion for all,” on efforts to stabilize states such as Iraq and Libya, and on the annual Munich Security Conference which brought together UN officials and others (including heads of state of the US, Germany and France) to discuss how to revitalize our fraying trans-Atlantic alliances as well as how we can better collaborate on climate threats, what SG Guterres rightly characterized as “the race of our lifetime.”

And for us these weren’t even the most important discussions of the week.  That designation went to a Security Council meeting this past Wednesday on COVID-19 and conflict and a Thursday discussion hosted by the president of the Economic and Social Council on “Reimagining Equality.”  These two discussions had more points of convergence than might otherwise meet the eye.  For as important as it would be to successful vaccination efforts to adopt and sustain a global cease fire, our current patterns of what Niger described as “vaccine hegemony,” patterns which persist amidst the rhetoric of “global public goods,” have clear discriminatory overtones.  Indeed, we heard during this Council session that as many as 130 countries have yet to see a single vaccine shipment; we heard the warnings from Mexico that some countries might not even see vaccines before 2023; we heard frustration about vaccine hoarding and a reminder from UNICEF Director Fore that violence in many forms continues to destroy health infrastructure, continues to complicate efforts to vaccinate in the global south even where the resolve to do so exists.

We know that “vaccine nationalism” persists.  We know that we have often “dropped the ball” regarding funding for health infrastructure, even by some of the wealthiest countries on the planet.  We know that we remain woefully unprepared for the next iteration of pandemic. And we know that our current failures on vaccine distribution endanger many lives, not only within the countries of greatest need but globally as new variants evolve and spread, complicating the resolve to rebuild economies in a more climate-friendly manner and overcome what one diplomat this week deftly referred to as our “baggage of biases,” the ones which trick our minds into thinking we’re being equitable and inclusive when the data suggests otherwise.

As the Perseverance Rover captures informative and inspiring images from the Martian surface, it transmits them home to a planet still reeling from, as one speaker noted during the “Reimagining Equality” event, our “tsunami’s of hate,” our inattentiveness to the pervasiveness of racism and other forms of discrimination as well as to the specific communities which bear that brunt year after year, the communities still on the outside of access to education, to economic opportunity, to adequate climate adaptation, to the vaccines which represent an investment in the lives of all of us.

Amidst this current swirl of global need, of articulated commitments often masking their practical neglect, we must find and sustain that tenacity to navigate the many bends in the roads we have chosen to travel, to learn how to “fail better,” to keep consulting all relevant evidence and not give up until we succeed in the tasks that we have collectively set out for ourselves – a world free of famine, free of discriminatory practices, free of neglected and traumatized children, free of governance more corrupt than responsive, free of biological extinctions, free of armed violence and mass atrocities.

The human community that can set a rover safely on Martian soil can figure out how to distribute the vaccines that our science raced to provide, can find the means to ensure access to education and technology for all, can silence the guns that kill and traumatize millions, can make a more convincing case for human solidarity over human discrimination. We have established diverse and daunting policy bars for ourselves. But as several speakers noted during this busy week, we are running out of time to demonstrate the tenacity and perseverance needed to reach them.

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Pajama Party: Impediments to Rescuing the Commons, Dr. Robert Zuber

20 Oct

Spy

The way things are supposed to work is that we’re supposed to know virtually everything about what they [the government] do: that’s why they’re called public servants. They’re supposed to know virtually nothing about what we do: that’s why we’re called private individuals. Glenn Greenwald

To claim the affection and to do the spying. It is something not wrong, but the danger. Ehsan Sehgal

Of course I’m not going to look through the keyhole. That’s something only servants do. I’m going to hide in the bay window. Penelope Farmer

Harry swore to himself not to meddle in things that weren’t his business from now on. He’d had it with sneaking around and spying.  J.K. Rowling

On Friday afternoon, in the presence of Dr. John Burroughs of the Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy and Dr. Bonnie Jenkins – formerly the US National Threat Coordinator – we met with a group of our younger activists regarding threats to their future and what older folks like me need to do differently such that their stake in a future clouded by weapons, climate and other threats can be better magnified and encouraged.

We try to have these conversations on a regular basis, in part because of our deep respect for the people we are blessed to attract into our space, in part because the list of threats seems ever to be growing and shifting, and in part because few (in this work at least) offered us the same opportunities for sharing and disclosure way back when we were the younger ones.

I have often said, jokingly, that when I was younger, I spent most of my time catering to whims of older persons; now that I am older I spend a good bit of time catering to the whims of young persons.  Perhaps it has always been so.  Perhaps it must always be so.  Indeed, one of the tests of character that we subtly employ here is the “test” of concern for generations to come, the recognition that those in their 20s and 30s are not, in fact, the last generation but merely the latest in a sequence to “come of age” with younger persons nipping at their heals, needing guidance from them now about how to navigate the treacherous spaces relentlessly unfolding in the global commons.

Part of this mentoring responsibility involves the courage to assess the risks coming into view and not only the ones that are widely known.  We “know” about threats from nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction.  We “know” about threats from climate change and biodiversity loss, though we often organize our lives as though we don’t.  We “know” that economic and social inequalities are still growing, though here in NY’s privileged spaces we tend to evaluate the success of our lives within narrow peer bandwidths, failing to appreciate the many advantages that have allowed us entry into the economic and policy “pods” we now jealously guard.

And we seem to assume (or wish) fervently that technology will somehow enable our collective rescue, that we will find the precise coding that will allow our machines to deflect incoming meteors, “eat” the carbon that is warming our atmosphere, skim the plastics off the surface of our dying oceans, and “blockchain” our way to more efficient and ethical means to link productive capacity and consumer demand.

And it might eventually be able do all of those things.  But in the meantime, we are also guilty of enabling technology of a different sort, enabling it to essentially run amok beyond the control of government and multilateral institutions, making more and more decisions for us that, at both a personal and institutional level, we feel less and less able (and inclined) to resist. From self-driving cars and autonomous weapons to highly sophisticated surveillance that, more and more, relies on the phones that have become deeply embedded in our psychology as well as our logistics, we have largely abandoned scrutiny of a force that to some now seems as inevitable as our genetics and hormones.

The UN has not remained entirely aloof from these concerns. In a report recently released by the UN Conference on Trade and Development, the authors made clear that, for all their potential and realized benefits, global digital platforms tend to further  “accentuate and consolidate” wealth and power rather than “reducing inequalities within and between countries.” Moreover, at a Mexico-sponsored “Youth Migration Film Forum” event this week, the highly moving films about the value and dignity of migrant youth were punctuated by cautious referrals to the high-tech surveillance on both sides of the US-Mexico border that mostly reinforces caricatures of migrants as disembodied threats rather than as human beings with families, aspirations, skills and faith.

And during a session of the UN General Assembly Third Committee, the ever-thoughtful Philip Alston gave his final report as the UN Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty, during which he spoke about the ways in which technology is now insulating and intimidating rather than liberating persons living in poverty.  He spoke passionately about the largely “human rights-free zone” characteristic of much big technology, the degree to which surveillance of the poor (and the rest of us) is being used by the governance and investment classes to “punish” persons who use “our” money for purposes that the authorities don’t approve of.  As he (sadly for us) ends his mandate, Alston urged creation of a “shared language of human rights” that can help us avoid the collective (and very real) danger of “stumbling zombie-like into a “digital welfare dystopia” where decisions about human beings are based on algorithms rather than relationships, on the need to control rather than the need to assist. Indeed, in a world where many people trust their phones more than their neighbors, this “dystopia” warning is not as far-fetched as it might initially appear.  Our interns certainly took it very seriously.

Part of the solution clearly lies in technological oversight, in resurrecting the role of the state to protect people from excessive interference from the technologists – and from the governments themselves. Clearly, the “surveillance culture” of our time has impacts, not only for migrants and the poor, but for others who seek to defend their rights and interests, to any effort to reaffirm the importance of public spaces and values not subject to private priorities. Much time at the UN now, including this week, is properly devoted to increasing attacks on civil society, activists or journalists, anyone who dares to defy “the norm.”  But in too many instances, under-regulated state interests and private-sector technologies are aligned in a desire to shrink and securitize public spaces.  Even UN spaces.

At another event at the UN this past week on “public space in a digital age,” UN-HABITAT brought together a variety of experts who critiqued “sanitized, securitized” and highly expensive development priorities such as NYC’s “Hudson Yards.” Such priorities often lead to the neglect of public spaces more conducive to personal engagement, spaces that can help people connect to each other and inject dimensions of “playfulness and plurality” into communities in ways that enable and enhance both personal connection and the “emotional health that we in this city (and in so many others) badly need.

This session was full of insight, much of which was directly relevant to this post:  the suggestion that “citizens are not aware of how social media now allows private actors to create, define and surveil public space,” the degree to which digital space encourages narrow mindedness while public space tends to cultivate “broad mindedness,” and the sense that in healthy environments, personal relationships must take sequential precedence over their digital counterparts.  Amazon, one speaker half-joked, “wants us to live our entire lives in our pajamas,” engaging the digital realm as consumers of goods and gossip while eschewing the risks associated with that “playfulness and plurality” which only public spaces can deliver.

I can only speak for myself here, but I don’t want a life without risk, nor do I want a life dominated by technology over which I have no control, one which offers me products I don’t want and promises to “save” me from “threats” that, to my mind at least, are less threatening than the steady erosion of personal freedom, respect for diverse voices, and some semblance of privacy.   I would also much rather sit in a Bronx park watching children play than walk the High Line with tourists and their selfie-sticks.

As one of the youth delegates at the “Migration Film Forum” rightly noted, technology can in fact create new contexts for inclusion.  But this is mostly true when we sequence it properly, when technology becomes merely the means to extend connection, not give it birth.  We may be collectively too addicted now to our devices, too willing to forgive them for digitalizing our complex life preferences, keeping us in our sleeping clothes, and spying on every idea and action our lives are capable of generating.

But unless we can find the courage to resist and reshape that addiction, to re-personalize the spaces and relationships that are now, too-often, providing little more than digital fuel for Alston’s “dystopia,” this self-inflicted “pajama party” is not going to end well.  We cannot go on “claiming affection” while spying on each other, judging each other by what we find in some random database rather than what we know from our own direct engagements.

The lesson here seems clear: when we cease to trust our own senses and experiences, we risk losing a good chunk of our remaining capacity to trust one another.  There is, perhaps, no risk facing the global commons greater than this.

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STEM Cells:   The UN seeks an Elusive Balance on Human Innovation, Dr. Robert Zuber

10 Jun

Medicine Bottle

If you are too careful, you are so occupied with being careful that you are sure to stumble over something. Gertrude Stein

A single decision can spawn a thousand others that were entirely unnecessary or it can bring peace to a thousand places we never knew existed. Craig Lounsbrough

Don’t sail out farther than you can row back.   Danish saying

This was an interesting week at the UN punctuated by important elections for the UN Security Council and for the president of the General Assembly.   The new Council members – Belgium, Dominican Republic, Germany, Indonesia and South Africa – will bring considerable policy savvy and expertise to the Council oval as well as well-crafted positions on how the Council can be reformed to more effectively serve the interest of the membership and more skilfully address peace and security challenges.

As for the incoming president of the General Assembly, we have high hopes for María Fernanda Espinosa Garcés, currently Ecuador’s Minister of Foreign Affairs.  Our own twitter feed has been on overload all week as people reacted to the sound of a strong woman’s voice set to lead the UN’s most democratic chamber.  Ms. Espinosa Garcés, as has been noted often, is only the 4th woman to hold this post in the history of the UN.  But what excites us is the range and strength of her policy priorities – disarmament and indigenous rights, gender and environmental health, including ocean health.  She is well-positioned to continue the recent history of successful GA presidencies while keeping a watchful eye on challenges that now threaten a vibrant multilateralism.

In these and other policy matters, she has her work cut out for her.

Among the many policies elevated by the UN this week – from migration and criminal tribunals to counter-terror and the drive to end tuberculosis – the state of our environment took center stage. Of particular concern was the urgency of eliminating single use plastics that have created toxic islands larger than France in the middle of our oceans, endangering all marine life including (as noted in a side event) the birds that must rely on a now-plastic-infested and declining ocean bounty.

Former GA president Peter Thomson of Fiji is now heading the UN’s efforts on ocean policy and he held a series of meetings with diplomats and other stakeholders to promote a more urgent engagement with ocean health, including support for Law of the Sea treaty obligations and his own plans for a conference in 2020 to assess ocean-related progress.  Thomson, as per his reputation, did not mince words, noting that “we are losing the battle” on oceans, though at least now “we know we are losing” due to a series of dismal ocean indicators.  One can, he suggested, “plead indifference, but not ignorance” to the science that paints an uncertain future for human life as ocean life continues its own downward trajectory.

Later during one of his multiple engagements, Thomson suggested, much more hopefully, that we are all “ocean people” in this room, citing “snowballing commitments” to policies that can address an array of ocean related threats – desalination and depleted fish stocks, plastics pollution and commercial dumping – while we still have the opportunity to reverse conditions.

The question for us had something to do with ocean policy but more to do with the science which must direct such commitments, ensuring that remedial policy measures are correctly targeted, robust in their application, and sufficiently engaging of the widest range of global stakeholders.  As with other existential threats to our children’s future, we are long past the point where half-hearted, token gestures will reverse our current stable of “dismal indicators.”  For too long, we have ignored the scientific evidence of ocean decline.  But more than that, we have resisted the call to better understand the benefits and limitations of the scientific community. We have resisted allowing scientists to help create communities of learning in policy settings, in which global innovation and global ethics can combine to guarantee global health.

Ironically perhaps, as the state of ocean health was being debated in one UN conference room, the STI Forum (Science, Technology and Innovation) sponsored by the UN Economic and Social Council was taking place in another.  In the STI plenary meetings and side events, participants heard much about innovations that promise more accurate and comprehensive data to drive policy response on some of the crucial issues facing the planet.  Of particular note for us was the “integrated system” developed by the World Meteorological Association that seeks to ensure high-quality, real-time information on weather-related shifts and potential climate disasters necessary to accurate forecasting in a time of increasing climate volatility.

But much of what interested us at the STI is the interplay of those for whom technological innovation is now essential to our very being as a species and those who cast a wary eye at any innovation not attached to clear warning labels.  Indeed, the gap between these erstwhile “camps” seems to be widening a bit as more and more people place their bets on technology to solve global problems while others cringe at the increasing complexity of personal and institutional technology which is already running far apace of regulatory policies and structures of governance.  As a representative from Alibaba Group admitted, we are now “being split,” in part because we fail to recognize that all technological developments “are a two-edged sword,” a reassuring breeze in some instances, a tornado in others.

As someone probably more Luddite than acolyte, I have an innate sympathy with those with “stick up their noses” at the enticements of innovation that few actually seem to be asking for and that promise benefits as likely to increase inequalities as level them.   As Brazil urged this week, regarding this “4th Industrial Revolution,” we must “learn the lessons” from the 2nd and 3rd Industrial Revolutions.  Why are inequalities still so pervasive in this world?  In this “tech rich” (and tech-obsessed) age, how is it that so many people are still without toilets?  These are the questions that continue to preoccupy our office, even as our high regard for scientific inquiry remains unbroken.

There are important questions to ask regarding this seemingly widening gap, a gap in part driven by technological enthusiasm, in part driven by a neglect of growing global inequalities, in part driven by public disconnect from the science that can provide indicators of trouble at a moment when trouble can still be diverted.  With climate and ocean threats taking center stage, how do maintain the “culture” for scientific inquiry that keeps us creatively innovating but also mindfully regulating? How do we ensure that the regulation we endorse is robust and flexible enough to keep from “stumbling” over the next iterations of scientific advance?  And perhaps more relevant to the security policy community, how do we keep from running further and further behind the pace of technology for which “dual use” continues to communicate both the promise of progress and of existential threat?

On the table where I am writing sits a bottle of pills that I am “required” to take as part of my long-term recovery from my genetically-mandated heart surgery.  In many ways, these pills (and the complex surgery that preceded their use) represent a culminating moment in my personal interaction with science and technology, having been at least temporarily “cured” of a problem that apparently killed many of my ancestors, a cure that highlights the plight of many of my global contemporaries who, in this stunningly unequal world, do not have access to the high-tech, life-saving measures that I do.

This pill bottle, like many other of life’s affairs, comes attached to both a promise and a warning.   Take the pills as instructed and I am more likely to reap health benefits.  Take them otherwise and not only are the benefits threatened but other complications could ensue – including in this instance liver damage.  When medicines enter a complex organism such as the human body, it is essential  that we do our best to assess risk factors.  What can possibly go wrong here and how can we minimize adverse impacts?

The global community represents complexity on a scale that much more vast, and thus the responsibilities raised by our “ingestion” of technological innovation become more complex as well.  As the World Economic Forum’s Philbeck noted during the STI, we must “avoid language directed towards technology that either fears or romanticizes it.” Other speakers warned of the dangers of taking a passive stance towards technological innovation, noting that as science continues to move past conventional boundaries, we must ensure that any new resulting “tools” enhance sustainable development  rather than take us in another, less inclusive, less participatory direction.

As Philbeck also interjected, trust must be earned in the technological realm as in others, but trust must be grounded in our attentive awareness of potentials and pitfalls.  In an age where so many people are still denied access to the “fruits” of science and technology, where elites eagerly horde both the capacity and application of those “fruits,” and where regular folks increasingly demand the benefits of technology independent of any responsibility to assess its impacts and avert its addictions, we risk exacerbating a crisis of our own making.   We may, indeed, have already sailed further and faster on these technological “waters” than is in our best collective interest.

This is not the time for timidity or the excess caution that might cause us to stumble, to be sure, but it might be wise to slow down the pace of our sailing a bit and recalibrate our distance from the shore.

 

 

 

 

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Bucking Inevitability:  Putting Technology in its Place, Dr. Robert Zuber

8 Oct

Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense. Gertrude Stein

Once a new technology rolls over you, if you’re not part of the steamroller, you’re part of the road. Stewart Brand

It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity. Albert Einstein

I have spent a good bit of this past week in the community of Georgia Tech, a university whose rise in quality and prominence is mirrored by the city of Atlanta of which it is a prominent part.

I come here in part at the urging of Professor Robert Thomas and in part because I get to speak to – and with – some very talented students (including former interns) who ply their wares in fields far removed from my own but in no way irrelevant to what we and others try to accomplish in New York.

It is not irrelevant because, of course, the skills they now cultivate are essential to fulfilling our sustainable development promises.   These are people who can design sustainable cities, not just talk about the need for them.  These are people who can help create funding strategies that might actually support healthier oceans and gender-balanced schools.  These are the people who can engineer transportation systems that can reduce both emissions and rider frustrations.

It all sounds quite positive.  What could possibly run this train off the tracks?

To answer this fairly, we should take a step back.  Earlier this week at the UN, Kazakhstan sponsored an event that focused on technological advances and their impacts on weapons systems and disarmament prospects.  Among the presentations was one focused on the increasing speed with which (hypersonic) missiles will be able to find their targets and the knowledge and response deficits that this speed helps create.  The scenario was painted of leaders having to take action without definitive knowledge about the payload or intent of the incoming threat, and the sometimes grave mistakes that can proceed from such “decision-making on the fly.”

As is the case in some of the more intimate UN “side event” discussions, the train of thought moved in even more productive directions, inspired in part by a comment that much of what technology demands, in domains far beyond military defense, is rapid response.   In the personal realm, for instance, we tend to react immediately and at times thoughtlessly to the messages on our smart phone; we respond to email messages at a rapid fire rate in an attempt – usually futile – to keep those messages from dropping on our screens past the point that they are visible enough to prompt action. We feel the urgency to “get back to people,” those hostile or not, before we have thought through the longer-term implications of our shorter-term communications blasts.

And it’s not just our smart phones that are motivating responses that lack a concern for the longer-view. Indeed, the demand for short-term gain, for instant investor gratification has become something of a hallmark of our modern economic system.   Despite the obvious threats that our economic choices can unleash, we continue to make “business decisions” without considering the impacts on prospects for our children – the stable, secure and healthy environment that we all could do more to ensure and in which they might find productive and socially-useful pathways for talents that have often come at the considerable cost of time, effort and even tuition.

At the UN where we sit each and every day, such a stable environment is at best a patchwork of possibility. Success in Colombia and Liberia is offset by new patterns of misery in places like Syria, Myanmar and now Cameroon.   Determination on sustainable development is contextualized by armed violence that destroys community infrastructure and saps hope.  Progress on global migration governance is stifled by governments erecting walls of all sorts and even inciting otherwise generous souls to turn their backs on forcibly displaced.

And there is another alarming back story to our current technological preoccupations, a second, discouraging dimension of “dual-use.”   The dual use of our common policy discourse is unsettling enough – technology that appears to serve civilian uses but is actually a platform for more military-friendly applications.  Here we are thinking of space-based, communications technology that covers for military intelligence gathering, or drones that can deliver consumer packages and annoy neighbors but are equally well-designed to deliver remote-controlled explosives.

But “dual use” has another dimension, one that the engineering and science majors working on grant-related research often come to understand well.   In the US as with many other parts of the world, the major “investor” in research and development are Departments of Defense.   As a result, initial applications following successful research are often military in significance.   Consumer applications come later, often in the form of new products that can generate significant revenue and are frequently presented (and accepted) as some form of inevitable imposition, akin to death and taxes, and invoking a similar sense of resignation.  Are we really clamoring for driver-less cars?   For robots that make products we no longer have the revenue to purchase? For yet another generation of phones that rob us of self-directed skills, stoke our narcissism and anxiety, and fill our heads with other peoples’ nonsense? For computer applications that reveal all sorts of juicy tidbits about other people that we really have no business knowing?

This is dual use with an unsettling twist.  The military establishment gains the benefit of the skills of many of our brightest minds and the rest of us get the shiny dregs in the form of too many products and “services” of convenience for which “desire” and “need” have been relentlessly stoked; that can violate most of what remains of our privacy; and that can increase the complexity and anxiety (and ecological footprint) of our lives more than bring us closer to a sustainable future.

Needless to say, not all of the students I am with this week choose to take on the implications of this dissonance.  Some prefer to stay in their labs, their DNA fully intertwined with their technology, letting the world take care of itself.  But if you probe a bit, there are cracks even in this narrative, cracks occasioned in part by the unlikelihood that any of the real-world implications of technology carefully developed will stay, at least to some degree, in the hands of its developers.  Indeed, few of the academicians who teach engineering or technology and who make chunks of their living from grant-related research in these areas have any illusions regarding their ability to control the consequences of their research beyond the confines of their labs.

Fortunately, there are many other young people who are questioning this inevitability-producing system, who demand more control of the implications of their labors, who seek ways to use their considerable skills to make a safer, saner, more predictable world for all, having an impact greater than simply developing technologies to service military objectives and line the pockets of their consumer counterparts.

Technology has proven itself to be what Einstein and others have long predicted – a great blessing on the one hand, a potentially toxic and dis-empowering addiction on the other. We have showered our technologists with well-deserved admiration but also with excessive deference.  We too often treat technology like some approaching tsunami, something we feel compelled to watch from an unsafe distance and for which we are largely unprepared as the water reaches threatening levels.

We must find ways to do more than manage the technology that is positioned to “flatten” us, more than merely “give way” to its seductive allures.  Later this week at the UN, we will attend an event entitled The Future of Everything – Sustainable Development in the Age of Rapid Technological Change. But we know this already: that any such “future” must be characterized by a deeper commitment to get better control of technology’s “pace,” to ensure that any future innovation has more than a “puncher’s chance” of being placed in the service of a safer, healthier and more equitable world.

There was a story this week that the person who created the “Like” button for Facebook decided to delete Facebook altogether from his “smart” phone. Whether or not this is some “declaration of independence,” I have no way of knowing.  The issue is not whether technology is good or bad.  The issue is who controls its development and application, to what ends, at what pace, to whose benefit.   These are questions fundamental to sustainable development, to the inclusive well-being of global citizens, questions that we have barely begun to pose.

If we don’t get the answers we need, we must rethink the inevitability of this current technological wave.  My hope and sense is that there is a new batch of clever young people open to doing precisely that.

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Deconstructing Prevention: The Theory, Policy and Practice of Mass Atrocity Prevention

12 Mar

On Tuesday, February 26, 2013, the Auschwitz Institute for Peace and Reconciliation, in conjunction with the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law Program in Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights Studies, presented a conference entitled Deconstructing Prevention: The Theory, Policy, and Practice of Mass Atrocity Prevention.

The agenda of the conference was situated around atrocity, conflict, and genocide prevention, protection of civilians, the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), transitional justice and the application of crisis mapping and technology to the field and agenda of prevention. In addition, another objective of the conference was to theorize and examine the assumptions and aims of the field of prevention, while also defining and rationalizing the parameters and the relationship that prevention has with other disciplines and agendas.

The topics discussed in this conference remain relevant in finding a means to prevent genocide and mass atrocity around the world. Specifically, the thematics and ideology behind Deconstructing Prevention: The Theory, Policy, and Practice of Mass Atrocity Prevention runs parallel to the mission of Global Action to Prevent War.

This conference has reinforced the need for furthering the discussion on genocide prevention, as it is clear that while the technology is evolving within the field, there is still need for structural and cultural changes, among the major and most powerful players. While it seems that the academic and civil society actors are most active in the push towards improving the use of technology in early warning indicators and the development of groundbreaking mechanisms, it would be in the best interest of the entire global community to work towards strengthening this evolving and pertinent leg of the prevention field.

The event began with an address from the keynote speaker, retired Lieutenant General Romeo Dallaire, followed by the first panel discussion entitled, “The United Nations Office on the Prevention of Genocide and the Responsibility to Protect: An Evolving Institution.” The panelists included Ambassador Francis Deng, Edward Luck and Juan Mendez.

In keeping with the agenda of the conference, the session started with exploring the link between R2P and state sovereignty, the three-pillar approach, developing mechanisms and early warning indicators both regionally and sub-regionally, and the role of institutions in indicating to governments when it is time to act.

Ambassador Deng, former Special Adviser for the Prevention of Genocide, defined genocide as an extreme form of identity conflict, where some are marginalized and others are given the sense of belonging. This may be characterized through regional identities or religious differences. Ambassador Deng also made reference to the Armenian genocide as the first genocide of the 20th century.

It was noted that sub-regional actors are very important in preventing mass atrocities and genocide, as they are usually able to assist in identifying early warning signs. It was noted that with an emphasis on regional engagement, the involvement of civil society actors, and other institutions, the prevention of mass atrocities is possible. However, this regional engagement would need to involve structural and cultural change across the international community, civil society, member states, the private sector, media outlets and academia.  It was also stated that UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon has expressed that prevention is an ongoing responsibility, before, during and after a mass atrocity.

The crisis-mapping portion of the conference served as the most modern and applicable tool of genocide prevention. The three speakers outlined the different means by which GIS technology, mapping and other applications may be used in the field both as a means of prevention as well as a system for tracking progress. Professor Colette Mazzucelli, Adjunct Professor from New York University’s Center for Global Affairs, demonstrated the use of the Ushahidi application in monitoring the election in Kenya. Zach Romanow of Palantir Technologies demonstrated the use of time series mapping in some of the most remote regions in the world, while Professor Jennifer Leaning from Harvard University presented some of her own findings from the application of technology to crisis mapping and early warning in humanitarian settings.

Professor Colette Mazzucelli had the following to say about crisis mapping as it pertains to the prevention of mass atrocities, specific to the application of Ushahidi technology:

“Those among us engaged in crisis mapping must be consistently vigilant as we assess how to translate innovations in technology to prevent mass atrocities while accepting the ethical responsibility to protect those mapping for peace. The focus of our communitarian efforts in the early 21st century is on the urgency to reject the experience of the complicit bystander. The evolution is one of a transnational commitment to map for human security on platforms such as Ushahidi to monitor recent historic elections in Kenya, for example, http://blog.ushahidi.com/ Our community is an emerging “transnational advocacy network,” in the usage defined by Keck and Sikkink. The experiences in network over time with each mapping deployment underscore that our shared humanity is at risk in those areas where “predisposing factors,” in Hamburg’s words, leading to genocide exist. Crisis mapping is a technique as well as a methodology to develop in the prevention toolbox, which places the accent on sovereignty as responsibility. Its contributions over time may highlight the view expressed by the Canadian Senator, General  Roméo Dallaire, that early prevention is preferable to late intervention. Mapping is a way to enhance the awareness of those outside areas in need where local community leaders are taking destiny in hand. These leaders are the linchpin of a pioneering crisis mapping system in which locals are responsible to rewrite grassroots narratives from the ground up. Their story is one of a break with history, a staccato narrative, to cite Zerubavel’s term, after decades of top down impunity in the face of injustices committed by states against their own peoples. Our vocation in crisis mapping is one in which we look beyond the killing fields to the social reality we construct on behalf of a prevention culture, which serves to recall Lemkin’s more expansive definition of genocide.”

Additional resources:

wiki.ushahidi.com

forums.ushahidi.com

community.ushahidi.com

 

 

–Shari Smith

Shari is an intern with Global Action this semester.

 

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