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Union General William Tecumesh Sherman famously said, “War is Hell.” I think few would dispute that claim.

For millennia armies have battled each other in bloody engagements. Hand-to-hand combat during the days of the Greeks and Romans wasn’t that different from that of soldiers in World Wars I and II, or even this century, with U.S. Special Operations forces fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan – and elsewhere.

We – especially the United States – have looked to technology to keep our warriors out of harm’s way. Nowhere is this more prevalent than in our use of armed unmanned aerial systems – “drones” to take out enemy combatants.

But far from being easy and “antiseptic” this missions have had often-severe consequences for the men and women he operate these drones.

This issue was perhaps addressed best in a powerful article – a New York Times Magazine cover story – entitled: “The Wounds of the Drone Warrior.” Here’s how it begins:

In the spring of 2006, Christopher Aaron started working 12-hour shifts in a windowless room at the Counterterrorism Airborne Analysis Center in Langley, Va. He sat before a wall of flat-screen monitors that beamed live, classified video feeds from drones hovering in distant war zones. On some days, Aaron discovered, little of interest appeared on the screens, either because a blanket of clouds obscured visibility or because what was visible — goats grazing on an Afghan hillside, for instance — was mundane, even serene. Other times, what unspooled before Aaron’s eyes was jarringly intimate: coffins being carried through the streets after drone strikes; a man squatting in a field to defecate after a meal (the excrement generated a heat signature that glowed on infrared); an imam speaking to a group of 15 young boys in the courtyard of his madrasa. If a Hellfire missile killed the target, it occurred to Aaron as he stared at the screen, everything the imam might have told his pupils about America’s war with their faith would be confirmed.

The infrared sensors and high-resolution cameras affixed to drones made it possible to pick up such details from an office in Virginia. But as Aaron learned, identifying who was in the cross hairs of a potential drone strike wasn’t always straightforward. The feed on the monitors could be grainy and pixelated, making it easy to mistake a civilian trudging down a road with a walking stick for an insurgent carrying a weapon. The figures on-screen often looked less like people than like faceless gray blobs. How certain could Aaron be of who they were? “On good days, when a host of environmental, human and technological factors came together, we had a strong sense that who we were looking at was the person we were looking for,” Aaron said. “On bad days, we were literally guessing.”

Want more? You can read this powerful article here

Want to enjoy summer more? Of course you do…don’t we all? I needed a bit of encouragement to relax and do so, and found just the tonic in Patricia Hampl’s piece, “The Season for Learning To Do Nothing.” Here’s how she begins:

I barely had time to digest my colleague’s automated out-of-office email reply—“I regret missing your message. I am out of the office for two weeks on vacation, without access to email”—when her email arrived. Thirty seconds, and there she was, zooming in to solve my minor bureaucratic problem from her lake cabin half a continent away. She was still on the job, at the ready to put out any little fire flaring up on the distant horizon. “I’m only checking email twice a day,” she wrote sheepishly—or was it proudly?

We are all breathless with our busyness, over-amped with everything we must/should/could do, gleaming with how necessary we are. Time off is a guilty pleasure. Or maybe, deep down in the contemporary heart, it’s mainly just guilty: I should be making myself useful, if only to myself. This duty-driven life makes it difficult to really and truly go on vacation, or as we say, “take” a vacation—as if it were a form of theft, low-grade larceny, time pilfered from the cash machine.

How to leap off the grid of good behavior and duty, how to be out of reach? Especially out of reach of one’s own inner compulsion to be—well, doing something.

Some vacations, of course, pose no such problem. Skiing, scuba diving, following the Piero della Francesca trail in Umbria—such vacations are chosen assignments, pleasurable tasks, activities, projects. No trouble there.

But how about just letting go, allowing yourself to drift into a free fall of ease for a couple of weeks? Spend the day without knowing quite where it went—and be happy about this lapse into timelessness. Take two weeks to do nothing much, to have nothing to show for it—and find you’re the better for it. Possible?

Want more? You can read the full article here

One of the things most people agree on is that high self-esteem is good, and low self-esteem is bad. Most of us more-or-less accept that “truth.”

That’s why I was quite taken by the review of “Selfie” a book that tries to get at the root of how we’ve gone from just having self-esteem to being self-obsessed. Here’s how it begins:

Worrying about one’s own narcissism has a whiff of paradox. If we are suffering from self-obsession, should we really feed the disease by poring over another book about ourselves? Well, perhaps just one more.

“Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It’s Doing to Us,” by Will Storr, a British reporter and novelist, is an intriguing odyssey of self-discovery, in two senses. First, it tells a personal tale. Storr confesses to spending much of his time in a state of self-loathing and he would like to know why. On a quest to explore self-esteem and its opposite, he interviews all sorts of people, from CJ, a young American woman whose life revolves around snapping, processing and posting hundreds of thousands of selfies, to John, a vicious London gangster who repented of his selfish ways, possibly because of his mother’s prayers to St. Jude. Storr takes part in encounter groups in California, grills a Benedictine monk cloistered at Pluscarden Abbey in Scotland, and gets academic psychologists to chat frankly about their work. Storr’s side of the conversations he recounts tends to be blunt, inquisitive and peppered with salty British swearing. One comes to like him, even if he does not often like himself.

Want more? You can read the full article here

Last month I teed up the distant horizon point of view of “Global Trends: Paradox of Progress,” and talked about how our world will look if the “Islands,” or “Orbits” scenarios play out in the future.

There is one more scenario that could shape our future world. This one is a bit more radical than its two cousins, but it is thought-provoking and deserves our attention.

This scenario explores the issues that arise as the enormity of future economic and governance challenges test the capacity of national governments to cope, creating space for local governments and private actors and thus questioning assumptions about the future of governance. This scenario emphasizes the trends associated with the changing nature of power and advances in information and communications technologies that are enabling a broader array of influential actors and identifies how such trends might lead to choices that create both opportunities and hurdles for future governance. The story of this scenario is told from the perspective of a future mayor of a large Canadian city in 2035, reflecting on the changes she has witnessed during the previous two decades:

As we can see from this brief description of the three scenarios, the paths each one takes us down are dramatically different. Global Trends emphasizes that there is nothing in any of these scenarios that is preordained. Rather, choices governmental leaders make today will largely determine which scenario plays out decades hence.

Want more now? You can read Global Trends: Paradox of Progress here

Many of us grew up with Fred Rogers…and for those who didn’t…your kids did. But few know how the show got started or much, for that matter, of what went on behind the scenes.

That’s why I found this piece by David Brooks, “Fred Rogers and the Loveliness of the Little Good,” so interesting. Here’s how it begins:

Often people are moved to tears by sadness, but occasionally people are moved to tears by goodness. That’s what happens to the audiences of “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” the new documentary about Fred Rogers.

The documentary demonstrates how Rogers’s children’s show got started and how he used it over 30 years to teach and accompany children. It describes the famous opening sequence — Mister Rogers going to the closet, putting on the sweater, changing his shoes. It describes how he gently gave children obvious and non obvious advice: You are special just the way you are; no, children can’t fall down the drains in the bathtub.

Sometimes he would slow down time, be silent for long periods as he fed his fish. Occasionally “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” touched politics. During the civil rights era, when black kids were being thrown out of swimming pools, Rogers and a black character bathed their feet together in a tub. After Bobby Kennedy was killed, Rogers gently explained what an assassination was.

There’s nothing obviously moving here, and yet the audience is moved: sniffling, wiping the moisture from their cheeks. The power is in Rogers’s radical kindness at a time when public kindness is scarce. It’s as if the pressure of living in a time such as ours gets released in that theater as we’re reminded that, oh yes, that’s how people can be.

This is just a snippet. Want more? You can read the full article here

Silicon Valley has given us a lot – and taken away a lot. We seem to be dividing into those who embrace technology and those who fear it.

That’s why I was taken by Gal Beckerkan’s recent piece, “Kicking the Geeks Where it Hurts.” The subtitle, “Why Silicon Valley Should Embrace Inefficiency,” says a lot. Here’s how it starts:

Hypocrisy thrives at the Waldorf School of the Peninsula in the heart of Silicon Valley. This is where Google executives send their children to learn how to knit, write with chalk on blackboards, practice new words by playing catch with a beanbag and fractions by cutting up quesadillas and apples. There are no screens — not a single piece of interactive, multimedia, educational content. The kids don’t even take standardized tests.

While Silicon Valley’s raison d’être is making platforms, apps and algorithms to create maximum efficiency in life and work (a “friction-free” world, as Bill Gates once put it), when it comes to their own families (and developing their own businesses, too), the new masters of the universe have a different sense of what it takes to learn and innovate — it’s a slow, indirect process, meandering not running, allowing for failure and serendipity, even boredom.

Back in 1911, the English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead said that “civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.” By that metric, Uber and Google and Amazon Prime have given us a whole lot of civilization. And there’s no doubt our lives are better for it. (Ordering Chinese takeout in 30 seconds on an app might not be up there with Shakespeare or the incandescent light bulb, but it’s pretty great.) This unrelenting drive for efficiency has, however, blotted out a few things we all know intuitively but seem to be forgetting.

To create a product or service that is truly efficient often involves a lot of inefficiency — more like learning to knit than pressing a button. Likewise, gadgets built with a single-minded focus on efficiency can often backfire, subverting their purpose. Algorithms designed to dish up the news and information we most prefer end up blinkering us to all but a narrow slice of political and social reality. Our smartphones untether us from the office, saving us energy on travel, but also allow our lives to be interrupted nearly 24 hours a day, chewing up any productive idle time.

Want more? You can read the full article here

Last week, I teed up the distant horizon point of view of “Global Trends: Paradox of Progress,” and talked about how our world will look if the “Islands,” scenario plays out in the future.

That is only one of three options. Another one is ORBITS. Here’s how that scenarios would play out and what our future would look like:

The ORBITS scenario explores a future of tensions created by competing major powers seeking their own spheres of influence while attempting to maintain stability at home. It examines how the trends of rising nationalism, changing conflict patterns, emerging disruptive technologies, and decreasing global cooperation might converge to increase the risk of interstate conflict. This scenario emphasizes policy choices that would reinforce stability and peace or exacerbate tensions. The story of this scenario is told from the perspective of a national security advisor reflecting on his assessment of the international environment in his memoirs written sometime in the future.

Want more now? You can read Global Trends: Paradox of Progress here:

https://www.dni.gov/files/images/globalTrends/documents/GT-Main-Report.pdf

Who doesn’t want more self-control? Talk about and easy question.

While there isn’t an easy answer to gaining the degree of self-control we all seem to want, Tim Herrera recently teed up some good ideas. Appropriately, his piece features a plate of delicious-looking chocolate brownies. Here’s how he begins:

Picture this: You’re staring down a plate of fresh brownies during your 2 p.m. lull. You had an early lunch so your stomach is grumbling, and dinner feels a lifetime away. What happens next?

You’re probably eating those brownies, friend-o. (And I am, ahem, definitely not pulling this story from personal experience.)

Self-control in the face of temptation is a tricky thing. We tend to view it in black-and-white, almost moralistic terms: Anyone who succumbs to temptation, in whatever form, clearly must be weak willed. A stronger person would never eat that brownie, fall into a 90-minute YouTube spiral or watch another three episodes of “Billions” instead of writing his weekly newsletter.

But the science behind self-control tells a different story.

A 2011 study that examined how people deal with self-control found that those of us who are best at it aren’t more strong-willed or dedicated: They simply experience temptation less.

In fact, the very idea that we can improve our self-control is in question: A 2016 study found that “training self-control through repeated practice does not result in generalized improvements in self-control.”

In other words, don’t beat yourself up over a lack of self-control: We’re wired to be bad at it. But that’s not the end of the story.

Want more? You can read the full article here

Earlier this month I posted a blog entry regarding one of the most controversial issues at the nexus of technology and national security is concerns regarding the “militarization” of artificial intelligence – AI.

Initially an issue consigned to just a few defense-related publications and websites, it has now moved front and center. Some of what is said is shrill, but some if far less so.

That’s why I was taken by a piece in the New York Times entitled:

Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and the Feud Over Killer Robots

with the subtitle

As the tech moguls disagree over the risks presented by something that doesn’t exist yet, all of Silicon Valley is learning about unintended consequences of A.I.

Here’s how it begins:

Mark Zuckerberg thought his fellow Silicon Valley billionaire Elon Musk was behaving like an alarmist.

Mr. Musk, the entrepreneur behind SpaceX and the electric-car maker Tesla, had taken it upon himself to warn the world that artificial intelligence was “potentially more dangerous than nukes” in television interviews and on social media

So, on Nov. 19, 2014, Mr. Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, invited Mr. Musk to dinner at his home in Palo Alto, Calif. Two top researchers from Facebook’s new artificial intelligence lab and two other Facebook executives joined them.

As they ate, the Facebook contingent tried to convince Mr. Musk that he was wrong. But he wasn’t budging. “I genuinely believe this is dangerous,” Mr. Musk told the table, according to one of the dinner’s attendees, Yann LeCun, the researcher who led Facebook’s A.I. lab.

Mr. Musk’s fears of A.I., distilled to their essence, were simple: If we create machines that are smarter than humans, they could turn against us. (See: “The Terminator,” “The Matrix,” and “2001: A Space Odyssey.”) Let’s for once, he was saying to the rest of the tech industry, consider the unintended consequences of what we are creating before we unleash it on the world.

Neither Mr. Musk nor Mr. Zuckerberg would talk in detail about the dinner, which has not been reported before, or their long-running A.I. debate.

The creation of “superintelligence” — the name for the supersmart technological breakthrough that takes A.I. to the next level and creates machines that not only perform narrow tasks that typically require human intelligence (like self-driving cars) but can actually outthink humans — still feels like science fiction. But the fight over the future of A.I. has spread across the tech industry.

You can read the full article here

Over the past few weeks, I’ve teed up the distant horizon point of view of “Global Trends: Paradox of Progress,” as well as three plausible scenarios for what kind of world we’ll find ourselves in decades hence. How these scenarios, Islands, Orbits, and Communities, play out will dominate how our world will be shaped in the future.

The three scenarios—”Islands,” “Orbits,” and “Communities“—explore how critical trends and choices might intersect to create different paths to the future. These scenarios postulate alternative responses to near-term volatility—at the national (Islands), regional (Orbits), and sub-state and transnational (Communities) levels. The names of the three Global Trends: Paradox of Progress scenarios: Islands, Orbits, and Communities are intriguing and bear a bit of explanation.

Here’s a look at ISLANDS, and how it might play out: This scenario investigates the issues surrounding a restructuring of the global economy that leads to long periods of slow or no growth, challenging the assumption that traditional models of economic prosperity and expanding globalization will continue in the future. The scenario emphasizes the difficulties for governance in meeting future societal demands for economic and physical security as popular pushback to globalization increases, emerging technologies transform work and trade, and political instability grows. This scenario underscores the choices governments will face in adjusting to changing economic and technological conditions that might lead some to turn inward, reduce support for multilateral cooperation, and adopt protectionist policies and others to find ways to leverage new sources of economic growth and productivity. The story of this scenario is told from the perspective of an economist reflecting on the twenty years since the 2008 global financial crisis.

Want more now? You can read Global Trends: Paradox of Progress here