Ed note: Friedman raised has legitimate concerns that an unfocused chaotic Whitehouse will not have the bandwidth to deal with, let alone understand, the major changes in Iran and Israel. Perhaps more importantly he won’t understand the coming explosion of A.G.I. and won’t have the capability of dealing with the major disruptions coming.
By Thomas L. Friedman
Opinion Columnist in the NYT
Donald Trump left the White House nearly four years ago. Given his self-confidence, I suspect he is now thinking: “What could be so different? I’ve got this.”
Well, I just traveled from a reporting trip in Tel Aviv to a conference in the United Arab Emirates to a deep dive with Google’s DeepMind artificial intelligence team in London, and I think the president-elect would be wise to remember a famous aphorism: There are decades when nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen.
What I saw and heard exposed me to three giant, shifting tectonic plates that will have profound implications for the new administration.
The most significant geopolitical event
In just the last two months, the Israeli military has inflicted a defeat on Iran that approaches its 1967 Six-Day War defeat of Egypt, Syria and Jordan. Full stop. Let’s review:
Over the past few decades, Iran built a formidable threat network that seemed to put Israel into an octopuslike grip. It became widely accepted that Israel was deterred from striking at Iran’s nuclear facilities because Iran had armed the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon with enough precision rockets to destroy Israel’s ports, airports, high-tech factories, air bases and infrastructure.
Not so fast. It turned out that the Mossad and Israel’s cyber Unit 8200 had been forging what became one of the country’s greatest intelligence successes ever. They planted explosive devices in the pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah’s military commanders, developed human and technological tracking capabilities to find Hezbollah’s top leaders, painstakingly identified storage facilities in Lebanon and Syria for Hezbollah’s most lethal precision rockets and then systematically took many of them out by air in October.
The result is that Hezbollah looks likely to accept a 60-day cease-fire with Israel in Lebanon negotiated by the U.S. mediator Amos Hochstein. This is a big deal. It means that, even if just for 60 days, Hezbollah and, by extension, Iran have decided to delink themselves from Hamas in Gaza and stop the firing from Lebanon for the first time since Oct. 8, 2023, the day after Hamas invaded Israel. We will see if it lasts, but if it does, it will increase the pressure on Hamas to agree to a cease-fire and hostage release with Israel, more on Israel’s terms. (continued)
There is a reason for this. Hezbollah’s mother ship has suffered a real blow. According to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s April strike on Iran eliminated one of four Russian-supplied S-300 surface-to-air missile defense batteries around Tehran, and Israel destroyed the remaining three batteries on Oct. 26. Israel also damaged Iran’s ballistic missile production capabilities and its ability to produce the solid fuel used in long-range ballistic missiles. In addition, according to Axios, Israel’s Oct. 26 strike on Iran, which was a response to an earlier Iranian attack on Israel, also destroyed equipment used to create the explosives that surround uranium in a nuclear device, setting back Iran’s efforts in nuclear weapons research.
A senior Israeli defense official told me that the Oct. 26 attack on Iran “was lethal, precise and a surprise.” And up to now, the Iranians “don’t know technologically how we hit them. So they are at the most vulnerable point they have been in this generation: Hamas is not there for them, Hezbollah is not there for them, their air defenses are not there anymore, their ability to retaliate is sharply diminished, and they are worried about Trump.”
Which means that Tehran is either riper than ever for negotiations to curb its nuclear program or riper than ever for an attack by Israel or the Trump administration — or both — to destroy those nuclear facilities. Either way, Trump will face choices he did not have four years ago.
It is not only a new Iran that Trump will be dealing with but also a new Israel
There were legitimate reasons President Biden denounced the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrants against Netanyahu and his former defense minister Yoav Gallant, accusing them of war crimes in Gaza against a Hamas enemy that deliberately embedded itself among civilians. The same court never issued an arrest warrant for President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, whose army killed hundreds of thousands of his own people. The I.C.C. said Syria is not a member. But neither is Israel. It is also odd that the I.C.C. issued a warrant only for the Hamas leader Mohammed Deif, who is widely believed to be dead, and not for the very much alive Muhammad Sinwar (the younger brother of the late Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar), who is now reportedly running Hamas in Gaza and was a commander in the Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
But while the I.C.C. warrants are questionable, they were also avoidable. The strategy that Netanyahu has imposed on his military is one of the ugliest in Israel’s history: Go into Gaza, destroy as much of Hamas as you can, don’t be too worried about civilian casualties, then leave the remnants of Hamas in charge to loot food convoys and intimidate the local population — then rinse and repeat. Go back in, smash and leave no one better in charge, creating a permanent Somalia on Israel’s border.
Why is he doing this? Because Bibi is being directed by the far-right Jewish supremacists he needs to stay in power and possibly out of prison on charges of corruption. And the stated goal of those Jewish supremacists is to extend Israeli settlements from the West Bank right through Gaza. They oppose any scenario in which the Palestinian Authority is gradually installed in Gaza as part of an Arab peacekeeping force to replace Hamas. They fear the Palestinian Authority might then become a legitimate partner for a two-state solution.
When you fight a war with this many civilian casualties for a year and offer no vision of peace with the other side, you invite the I.C.C.
Attention, President-elect Trump: Netanyahu will tell you that Israel is defending the free world in defeating the dark forces of Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran. There is truth in that. But there is also truth in the fact that he is doing it to defend a Jewish supremacist apartheid vision in the West Bank and Gaza. It’s a dirty business. If you just unquestionably wrap your arms around him, you will get yourself and America dirty, too. You will also ensure that your Jewish grandchildren will one day learn what it is to be Jewish in a world where the Jewish state is a pariah.
Artificial general intelligence is probably coming on Trump’s watch
Polymathic artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., was still largely in the realm of science fiction when Trump left office four years ago. It is fast becoming nonfiction. And A.S.I. — artificial super intelligence — may be one day as well.
A.G.I. means machines will be endowed with intelligence as good as the smartest human in any field, but because of its capabilities to integrate learning across many fields, it will probably become better than any average doctor, lawyer or computer programmer. A.S.I. is a computer brain that can exceed what any human can do in any field and then, with its polymathic ability, it could produce insights far beyond anything humans could do or even imagine. It might even invent its own language we don’t understand.
How we adapt to A.G.I. was not part of the 2024 presidential campaign. I predict it will be a central theme of the 2028 election. Between now and then, every leader in the world — but particularly the presidents of America and China, the two A.I. superpowers — will be judged by how well they enable their countries to get the best and cushion the worst from the coming A.I. storm.
From what I heard from leading A.I. scientists and Nobel Prize winners at Google DeepMind’s conference on how A.I. is already driving breakthroughs in scientific discovery, A.G.I. is likely to be achieved in the next three to five years.
Two DeepMind scientists just won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their A.I. AlphaFold system, which predicts proteins’ structures and is already being used by scientists to invent drugs and materials all over the world. Now DeepMind is working on GraphCast, an A.I. system that can produce staggeringly precise 10-day weather forecasts in less than a minute, and on Gnome, which has identified some 2.2 million new inorganic crystals that could be useful in manufacturing everything from computer chips to batteries to solar panels.
It’s the tip of an iceberg. It will change or challenge virtually every job. While I was in Tel Aviv, I visited the lab of Mentee Robotics, an Israeli start-up, and was given a demonstration of a humanoid robot, roughly my height, powered by sensors and A.I. with humanlike hand dexterity, a voice and perception that, as its website says, “can be personalized and adjusted to different environments and tasks using natural human interaction.”
President-elect Trump, if you think blue-collar workers without college degrees are facing challenges today, wait until four years from now.
But that’s not Trump’s only challenge. If these A.I. powers fall into the wrong hands or are used by existing powers in the wrong ways, we could be dealing with possibly civilizational extinction events.
Which is why we need to be discussing systems of A.I. control now. And it’s why two DeepMind co-founders, Shane Legg and Demis Hassabis, were signers of a 23-word open letter, issued in May 2023, along with other leaders of the A.I. universe, which declared, “Mitigating the risk of extinction from A.I. should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”
But this can’t just be left to the companies. We tried that with social networks, and it ended badly.
President-elect Trump, you may think that your second term will be judged by how many tariffs you impose on China. I beg to differ. When it comes to U.S.-China relations, I think your legacy — as well as President Xi Jinping’s — will be determined by how quickly, effectively and collaboratively the United States and China come up with a shared technical and ethical framework embedded in each A.I. system that prevents it from becoming destructive on its own — without human direction — or being useful to bad actors who might want to deploy it for destructive purposes.
History will not look kindly on you, President-elect Trump, if you choose to prioritize the price of toys for American tots over an agreement with China on the behavior of A.I. bots.
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