Foreign Policy’s 2024 election roundup

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Foreign Policy has a useful roundup of election results from around the world in 2024. Despite the rightward lurch in the United States, there doesn’t seem to have been a clear ideological trend globally. The narrative this story puts forward is that voters around the world rejected incumbents in favor of whoever was offering an alternative, and a lot of this was fueled by the sudden and shocking reductions in disposable income that affected massive numbers of people around the world. I learned something from this – inflation, assuming it outpaces wage increases, is worse politically than unemployment. Where unemployment has a profound affect on a small number of voters, inflation has a less acute but still profound enough affect on a majority of voters. And this happened around the world (which analytical, rational people, who seem to be in short supply in the U.S., might realize can’t be blamed on Joe Biden. If anything, Biden’s downfall was that he first raised expectations by cushioning the blow early in his presidency, and then let it hit people below the belt right at the worst time, politically speaking, a little after the midpoint of his presidency. Anyway, here is the FP roundup:

  • Iran voted out a conservative president in favor of a more liberal minded one, at least by local standards. Of course, they still have an unelected supreme leader for life (but only one, compared to the nine we have here in the United States).
  • India’s right-wing religious nationalist party lost ground and had to form a coalition government.
  • While I have heard (United States of) American women say in interviews that they don’t think a woman will be taken seriously as leader of a country and they have never heard of such a thing, and are shouting brainless slogans like “drill baby drill!”, famously tough-guy dominated MEXICO has elected a FEMALE CLIMATE SCIENTIST president.
  • A decade or so on from the Steve Bannon-engineered Brexit fiasco, the UK has for the moment at least reverted to a center-left government.
  • Indonesia has elected a right-wing paramilitary leader suspected of crimes against humanity.

will 2025 see the rise of the AI agents?

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Despite all the AI hype, we (at least the general public and most workers and middle managers) do not have AI agents we can assign to do our bidding. This is going to be a game changer, for better and for worse. This article is about shopping, which seems to me like one of the most frivolous use of these agents, but of course one that businesses will look to as a way to extract even more value from all of us.

In 2024, venture funds invested an estimated US$1.8 billion in AI agent projects. Deloitte’s latest Global Predictions Report argues 25% of companies that use generative AI will launch agentic AI projects in 2025.

Research firm Gartner predicts that by 2028, 15% of day-to-day work decisions will be made by AI agents.

I’m trying to think of uses for AI agents in my personal and work life. They should be really good schedulers and calendar managers. I can imagine giving them limited autonomy to schedule appointments for recurring home maintenance, for example, giving me a checklist to fill out confirming that the work has been completed satisfactorily according to industry standards and legal requirements, and paying the contractor if it has. if it hasn’t, my agent might engage in some kind of preliminary negotiation with the contractor’s agent and be allowed to settle within certain bounds before taking up the time of us valuable humans. You can see where I am going with this – there are all kinds of applications in project management, construction management, operations management, and (gulp) tourism and hospitality management. Companies have been trying to automate these tasks for decades, in fact, with very unsatisfactory results and a lot of human time wasted. Smarter AI systems should be able to reduce some of this friction, handling routine tasks while just keeping humans minimally informed, and understanding when a human being needs to make a decision and exactly what information they will need to do so.

I can imagine a helpful AI looking over my shoulder as I make small daily decisions and telling me whether they are likely to help or hinder me in meeting my long-term goals. For example, will my eating and shopping choices increase or decrease my expected life span? Will they increase or decrease my expected net worth at retirement age? Good AI agents might be able to help me counteract the bad AI agents out there that are going to be trying to get me to make bad choices.

ProPublica most-read stories of 2024

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Here are a few stories from ProPublica that caught my eye:

what countries U.S. combat troops are in at the end of 2024

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Twice a year the President is required to inform Congress about where U.S. troops are engaged in combat. This seems to leave a lot out – most obviously, naval and air force operations around the world that are nominally based out of the U.S. and its territories. Massive U.S. bases in Japan, Korea, and elsewhere that are not obviously and directly engaged in combat. “Advisors”, special operations, covert actions, intelligence operations, and contractor operations of various kinds. Satellites, somewhat obviously. Nonetheless, the report says U.S. troops are engaged in combat in:

  • Iraq and Syria – lumped together, somewhat oddly. U.S. combat troops are on the ground inside Syria, a sovereign nation which has not invited us to be there. They are supposedly fighting Islam-inspired terrorists, but not the ones that just overthrew the country’s government. The U.S. is allied with Kurdish groups, which were fighting the Syrian government (but were not allied with the group that successfully overthrew the Syrian government), and are fighting Turkey, which is a U.S. ally and NATO member. The U.S. directly bombed “Iran-affiliated groups” in Syria twice in November. The short letter does not mention any U.S. support for Israeli operations inside Syria, but it is hard to imagine the U.S. being completely uninvolved. The U.S. still has troops in Iraq (Mission Accomplished) 21 years after invading that country. These troops are supposedly invited to be there by the Iraqi government, and are supporting “Kurdish Iraqi security forces” and providing “limited support to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization mission in Iraq”. I am kind of baffled by these last two statements, but I guess I am just ignorant.
  • “Arabian Peninsula Region”. This is an anti-terrorist mission supposedly at the invitation of the Yemeni government. At the same time, we are hearing about massive famine in Yemen caused by the Saudi attacks on the country, and it is not exactly clear what the U.S. role in that is.
  • Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey. U.S. troops are involved in anti-terrorist actions in all these countries, supposedly at the invitation of the host countries.
  • Somalia – U.S. troops are involved in anti-terrorist combat operations at the invitation of the government. This one is pretty ugly, but many accounts.
  • Djibouti – Djibouti is basically a massive U.S. military base for many operations in Africa and the Middle East. Again, it’s a little odd that this gets mentioned when others don’t – what about Bahrain, UAE, Oman, Qatar?
  • Cuba – Guantanamo Bay is still open for business with 30 prisoners. Maybe Biden should just drop these people off in Florida or Texas on January 19.
  • Philippines – again, odd that this massive base gets mentioned when other massive ones do not, but it is because there are some in-country operations U.S. troops are involved in.
  • Israel – U.S. troops are defending Israel while it is attacking its occupied territories and sovereign neighbors.
  • The report mentions small numbers of U.S. troops in Egypt and Kosovo.
  • Afghanistan – “United States military personnel remain postured outside Afghanistan to address threats to the United States homeland and United States interests that may arise from inside Afghanistan.” Um, so this does not make it clear where they are, how many troops there are or what they are actually doing, if anything…
  • Niger – Well, here is a country that kicked us out following a military coup, and apparently we actually left when they asked us to.
  • There are 80,000 U.S. troops deployed to NATO countries in western Europe, according to the letter. Again, it’s a little unclear to me why these are listed while troops in Japan and Korea are not.

Longreads reader favorites

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Longreads.com readers like some weird, occasionally morbid stuff apparently, most of which does not appeal to me personally. The only one that really stood out to me is I was Hypnotized as a Teen. Was it Dangerous? Basically, the verdict is that medical hypnosis is definitely a real thing, and there is overall agreement that stage hypnosis is at least partially real. People can’t be hypnotized against their will, apparently, but once they agree to it at least some people lose control to the hypnotist and do not remember details of the experience.

Longreads #1 stories

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A lot of the #1 stories are kind of depressing, to be honest. Here are a couple that caught my eye:

Planetizen’s top posts of 2024

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There are a lot here. Quite a few have to do with housing, a topic I would be interested in brushing up on. A lot have to do with transportation, a topic I have just feeling complete and utter despair about, at least in the context of the United States and my particular city and state. One possible bright spot is congestion pricing in New York City. Congestion pricing just works, even though it is politically unpopular and counter-intuitive to many people’s “common sense”. Maybe people will notice that it solves some of the congestion and parking issues they like to complain about, and maybe it will slowly spread to other cities and states.

December 2024 in Review

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In December I reviewed a number of “best of” posts by others, so this is really a roundup of roundups.

Most frightening and/or depressing story: The annual “horizon scan” from the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution lists three key issues having to do with tipping points: “melting sea ice, melting glaciers, and release of seabed carbon stores”.

Most hopeful story: I’m really drawing a blank on this one folks. Since I reviewed a number of book lists posted by others, I just pick one book title that sounds somewhat hopeful: Abolishing Fossil Fuels: Lessons from Movements That Won.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Bill Gates recommended The Coming Wave as the best recent book to understand the unfolding and intertwined AI and biotechnology revolution. I also listed the 2024 Nobel prizes, which largely had to do with AI and biotechnology.

real Terminator-style augmented reality in 2025?

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From this Wired headline, you might think 2025 will be year I finally get directions superimposed on the real world through my glasses. But read farther and it sounds more like this is still hard and 2025 will just be a year I can listen to podcasts through my glasses, if I wanted to do that for some reason.

  • Apple Vision Pro and Meta Quest 3S – These are full-on virtual reality helmets I think. I can see this being cool on, say, a long-haul flight, but not walking around a city. Magic Leap is still out there, somewhere, doing something.
  • Ray-Ban Meta – Seriously, this is just making phone calls and listening to music through your glasses. Fine, but not augmented/mixed reality in my opinion. There are some other similar ones from Oppo, Swave, and Emteq and some others that failed on the launchpad or are still in development.
  • Meta Orion, Snap Spectacles, Google Android XR – These are supposed to be the real deal, but are still in the R&D phase. So not too hopeful they will burst onto the commercial scene in 2025.
  • Form – “smart swim goggles”. I can see this – swimming can be boring, and nobody has invented a truly foolproof set of swimming headphones/earbuds that I am aware of.
  • XReal – “focuses on mimicking a big screen display right on the lenses to let users feel like they’re watching media on a big screen”. Again, could be cool on a plane, train, bus, or self-driving vehicle.
  • Emteq – basically sounds like a Fitbit in glasses form. Maybe less dorky than when you see joggers with phones strapped to their arms.

You would assume Apple has some augmented/mixed reality R&D work going on, but they usually seem happy to skip the first couple generations of a new product category (think AI) and let it mature a bit before they join the fray. So the lack of any public hype from Apple is probably a sign that the technology is not going to mature in the next 12 months.

So there you have it – I personally am still looking forward to the (mildly dystopian) world of Rainbow’s End, but it doesn’t sound like 2025 will be the year we get there.

Project Syndicate 2024 book picks

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Usually Project Syndicate tells me my free articles are used up, but they are letting me look at their “best books” roundup, I suppose because they are trying to sell me something and I should thank them for the privilege. Anyway, there are a few interesting ones here in the realm of socioeconomic and/or geopolitical non-fiction books. I don’t read too many books in this genre because I am a busy working parent and many of these are TLDR that would have worked fine as longish magazine articles. In fact, sometimes they are magazine articles that got popular and the authors/publishers are trying to cash in. Other times I suspect they are written by humanities professors who are paid by the pound. Nonetheless, here are some that caught my eye. As usual, I am more or less just riffing on the titles and haven’t actually read the books, so don’t take my thoughts as book reviews per se.

  • Amir Lebdioui, Survival of the Greenest: Economic Transformation in a Climate-conscious World. Some ideas on how developing countries could maybe lead the way on various green new deals? Sure, I want to believe in this…
  • Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World. “a fascinating tour of ‘extralegal zones’ of suspended sovereignty – an interconnected network of autonomous, business-friendly enclaves where conventional tax, labor, and immigration laws do not apply.”
  • Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. “a classic case of feudal rent defeating capitalist profit, of wealth extraction by those who already have it triumphing over the creation of new wealth by entrepreneurs.” Well, I want to believe in the tech companies because when it comes to U.S. comparative advantage, it’s kind of all we have left? (well, maybe biotech, but a lot of that is tied up with the predatory health insurance/finance industry which has captured our elected officials and is financially raping its own citizens and customers all day every day rather than creating new value.) I want to believe in Schumpeter’s basic formula: capitalism=competition=innovation=”the greatest wealth creating engine the world has ever known”. But if the tech industry and other modern big businesses are not capitalism at all but rather disguised feudalism, that sort of solves my problem of needing to believe in them. The problem being, what is left to believe in?
  • Shannon Vallor, The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking. AI and (lack of?) ethics. In my own interactions with AI, I have noticed that it can sometimes show more empathy and patience than any human being could consistently be expected to show. You can shout or curse at it and it responds with “I understand your frustration…” and tries to help you. Does it matter whether there are any emotions there as we understand the term? What seems to matter is whether the AI’s interests are aligned with mine. So that is probably what we need to think about.
  • William Ury, Possible: How We Survive (and Thrive) in an Age of Conflict. From a “world-reknowned negotiation expert”. Well, negotiations are about figuring what the interests of the parties are, where they are aligned, and finding something that makes everybody a little better off even if nobody is fully satisfied?
  • Malcolm Gladwell, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don’t Know. I don’t know if this is a good book, or just time for Malcolm Gladwell to write a book… but there seems to be a negotiation, competition, empathy, and cooperation theme developing here. Per Schumpeter, pure capitalist competition is supposed to be sort of a inadvertent cooperation that lifts all boats, right? Dear capitalists – don’t bite the invisible hand that feeds you.
  • Robert D. Blackwill and Richard Fontaine, Lost Decade: The US Pivot to Asia and the Rise of Chinese Power. I just don’t want to believe that China is a military threat to the United States. Maybe I am naive, but I just don’t see how it can be in their interests to threaten us. On the other hand, I am 100% certain they feel threatened by us. So how about a little strategic empathy? Can we be less threatening and still deter conflict?
  • Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. When I was a kid, it was dumb TV and high-sugar cereal that was supposedly rotting our brains. But I do see the screen-addiction in my own kids, and I don’t deny the rise in mental illness (diagnoses, at least) among children. Still, the screens give my children access to the world’s information that I could only dream of at their age, and they will be interacting with screens some day in some capacity as part of the work force. So I don’t have the answers here certainly, but I don’t think turning the screens off entirely can be the answer. Talking about what is on the screens sounds like a better path.
  • Kevin A. Young, Abolishing Fossil Fuels: Lessons from Movements That Won. I am thinking about the sudden spike in energy use when the AI search engines were turned on. I am thinking about the Kardashev scale, where a civilization’s level of advancement is measured by its energy use (more=more advanced). I am thinking about the Fermi paradox – is it possible that civilizations throughout the universe invent AI but then can’t come up with a viable way to power it without fouling their own nest? This doesn’t really make sense though, when half a century of investment and research in safe nuclear power could have gotten us to a place where we could be fueling the AI awakening more sustainably. The sun’s energy is virtually limitless on our human space and time scales, and solar panels in space are viable with current technology – we would just have had to invest in this and make it happen. Fusion is more speculative but there are some promising developments. I’m just saying, our human performance here on Earth may be pathetic and it seems like we may not make it long term, but if there are a billion civilizations out there similar to ours there must be some that got it right.
  • Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy. “the glaring absence of leadership and preparation during the transition to Donald Trump’s first administration, revealing how the US president-elect appointed incompetent and uninformed individuals to oversee America’s vast bureaucracy.” But this time around, it seems like we are getting even less competent, less informed clowns and fools, and only clowns and fools. Maybe the answer to the Fermi Paradox is that in all the billions of advanced civilizations that arise in the galaxy, a Donald Trump always arises at some point and shits the bed.