(2023-12-29) Sterling Lebkowsky State of the World

I'm Jon Lebkowsky, co-host at the Plutopia News Network, also co-host of the Inkwell.vue forum here on the WELL. This is our 25th annual State of the World conversation.

Bruce Sterling: Twenty-five years of this ritual? Good Lord, no wonder we're so antique and creaky... I'm gonna need some sources of off-the-wall futuristical razzmatazz... I'm gonna be calling on the State of the World services of a notable young guest-celebrity with his own point-of-view: the Microsoft Bing GPT-4 large-language-model... With Bing "hallucinating" for us in this way, we WELLperns won't need the long-established, continuous WELL-user tradition of gobbling psyechedelic substances at the keyboard.

Johannes Ernst: Does it make sense to think of the items on this list much more as of a single "polycrisis", as some people call it?

JD Work: The revolution in intelligence affairs is an argument that Greg Treverton (formerly chair of the National Intelligence Council, and later with RAND) really brought into prominence. It is the shift from stealing secrets as a function of narrow and opaque government activity, towards dealing with the broader ways of knowing that emerge from lightweight publishing, prosumer media, ubiquitous sensor deployments, and automated processing and exploitation of large datasets - all done increasingly in the private sector rather than in state practice. The latter is now usefully enabled by neural network based tools and emerging AI capabilities, but this is just one piece of radical change. In effect, this is the subversion of a government monopoly on intelligence. (cf open-source intelligence) I would add that polycrisis is very much the new expression of what former DCIA Leon Panetta would describe as "Blizzard War", where issues came at policymakers at volume, variety, and velocity that challenged industrial era governance structures and policymaking processes.