道义高地容不下背信弃义

编者：2019年人民日报的评论，到了2025年居然如此应景。一叹人心难料，二叹世事多歧，三叹世间之无常，身处天地间，唯奋力而平心而已。

看清美国某些政客“合则用、不合则弃”的真面目  (时间： 2019-06-11

来源： 《人民日报》)

“利者，义之和也。”一些目光短浅的美国政客怕是不明白这个道理，反而亲手抛弃了曾经自我标榜的国际道义，让世人看清了什么叫见利忘义、什么叫背信弃义。

　　上世纪40年代以来，美国成为全球头号强国，并逐渐改变曾经的“孤立主义”政策，积极参与全球事务，宣传其价值理念，极力塑造“第一大国”形象，编织了美国“自由世界领袖”“必不可少的国家”等神话。然而，这届美国政府却要将本就广受质疑的所谓道义家底彻底败光。

　　美国一些政客嘴上说着“自由、公平和互惠的贸易”，却不断挥舞关税大棒，搞极限讹诈；口口声声说“打造开放投资环境”，却以“莫须有”名义打压他国企业；自身发展遇到问题，却蒙骗民众，转嫁国内矛盾；天天高谈阔论国际责任，自己却单方面退出巴黎协定等国际条约；自我标榜“维护世界和平的重要力量”，却肆意干预他国内政；毫无根据地指责别国侵犯人权，自己却执意退出联合国人权理事会……咨询机构盖洛普的一项民调显示，在抽取的134个国家中，对当下的美国持正面看法的人持续减少，和几年前相比降幅高达近20个百分点。

　　现如今，大家都看清了所谓美式道义的真相：符合美国利益的就是“道义”的，无助于实现“美国优先”就是“不道义”的。连美国众多盟友也吃了大亏。美国单方面退出由其牵头的跨太平洋伙伴关系协定，给其他参与国来了个措手不及；美国单方面宣布退出伊朗核问题全面协议，使多年艰苦谈判的成果付诸东流；美国刚与欧盟发表暂缓加征关税的联合声明不到一个月，就再次要挟对汽车加征25%关税……提出“软实力”概念的约瑟夫·奈都不得不承认，美国的“软实力”已经遭到削弱。

　　美国对国际道义的扭曲和蔑视，暴露了一些美国政客极端实用主义的处事做派。在他们看来，国际交往根本毫无价值、规则可言，仿佛除了赤裸裸的利益交换，就是力量对抗。而所谓“道义”，不过是他们争夺话语权、营造舆论，并最终谋取私利的工具而已。美国学者劳伦斯·达根一针见血地指出，“美国的政策是打着‘理想’旗号的变相帝国主义”“是用道德高尚的辞藻对损人利己的行为进行解释”。这就不难理解，为什么一些美国政客总是嘴上说一套，实际做一套，对待国际规则更是“合则用、不合则弃”。

　　人无德不立，国无德不兴。真正的国际道义，不仅是国际话语权的基础，更代表着国际社会对一些问题的共识，表征着人类文明对一些价值理念的尊崇。比如要互助合作，而不能以邻为壑；要遵信守义，而不是反复无常；要相互尊重，与他国平等相待，而不能搞唯我独尊、霸凌主义那一套……肆无忌惮践踏公认的价值准则，只能成为众矢之的，遭到国际社会的谴责。正所谓“得道者多助，失道者寡助”，美国决策者应当明白这个道理。

　　美国前总统林肯有句名言，“人所能负的责任，我必能负；人所不能负的责任，我亦能负。如此，你才能磨炼自己，求得更高的知识而进入更高的境界。”美国作为全球大国，理应负起应有的责任。越是在复杂问题面前，越应显示出与自身体量相匹配的风度和智慧。要知道，在当今世界，一个国家的国际影响力，并不简单取决于其拥有的力量，归根到底靠的是守住共同的价值，推动形成更广泛的共识、达成更广泛的合作，最终实现互利共赢、共同发展。

　　“所守者道义，所行者忠信，所惜者名节。”一个国家只有堂堂正正，才会赢得世人的认可。奉劝美国一些政客搞明白一个最基本的道理，那就是道义高地容不下背信弃义，背信弃义无法对自己的国家和人民负责，也无法对世界发展和人类文明进步负责。

Biden Pledges U.S. 'Will Not Walk Away From Ukraine'

 Dec. 12, 2023 | By Joseph Clark, DOD News 

President Joe Biden pledged that the U.S. will continue to stand with Ukraine following his meeting today with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the White House.

Biden praised Ukraine's defenders who have pushed back against Russia's full-scale assault for nearly two years, adding that the "American people can and should be incredibly proud of the part they played in supporting Ukraine's success."

"Mr. President, I will not walk away from Ukraine, and neither will the American people," Biden said. 

The two leaders met amid negotiations on Capitol Hill over Biden's supplemental funding request to continue critical military and humanitarian aid for Ukraine.

"The brave people in Ukraine have defied [Russian President Vladimir] Putin's will at every turn, backed by the strong and unwavering support of the United States and our allies and partners in more than 50 nations in Europe and the Indo-Pacific," he said. "Ukraine will emerge from this war proud, free and firmly rooted in the West, unless we walk away."

Spotlight: Support for Ukraine

He said he would continue to provide U.S. military assistance for as long as Congressionally approved funds are available.   

During his address, Biden announced his approval on the latest round of military assistance, valued at $200 million, which includes critically needed air defense interceptors, artillery and ammunition.  

"Without supplemental funding, we are rapidly coming to an end of our ability to help Ukraine respond to the urgent operational demands that it has," he said.

"Putin is banking on the United States failing to deliver for Ukraine," he continued. "We must prove him wrong."  

While in Washington, Zelenskyy met with defense officials and lawmakers to extend his gratitude for the United States' support and underscore the urgent need for that support to continue.

In introductory remarks yesterday ahead of Zelenskyy's address at National Defense University in Washington, D.C., Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III underscored the United States' "unshakable" commitment to support Ukraine as it defends itself against Russian aggression.

"Ukraine matters profoundly to America's security, and to the trajectory of global security in the 21st century," Austin said. "That's why the United States has committed more than $44 billion in security assistance to Ukraine's brave defenders."

He added that the U.S.-led coalition of allies and partners have also contributed more than $37 billion in security assistance to Ukraine. Those contributions include capabilities that "are making a crucial difference on the battlefield," Austin said, and have helped Ukraine recoup more than half of the territory seized by Russia since February 2022.

He said the U.S. and its allies and partners remain "determined to help Ukraine consolidate and extend its battlefield gains, and to build a future force that can ward off Russian aggression in the years ahead."

Yuval Noah Harari argues that AI has hacked the operating system of human civilisation

 Storytelling computers will change the course of human history, says the historian and philosopher

Fears of artificial intelligence (ai) have haunted humanity since the very beginning of the computer age. Hitherto these fears focused on machines using physical means to kill, enslave or replace people. But over the past couple of years new ai tools have emerged that threaten the survival of human civilisation from an unexpected direction. ai has gained some remarkable abilities to manipulate and generate language, whether with words, sounds or images. ai has thereby hacked the operating system of our civilisation.

Language is the stuff almost all human culture is made of. Human rights, for example, aren’t inscribed in our dna. Rather, they are cultural artefacts we created by telling stories and writing laws. Gods aren’t physical realities. Rather, they are cultural artefacts we created by inventing myths and writing scriptures.

Money, too, is a cultural artefact. Banknotes are just colourful pieces of paper, and at present more than 90% of money is not even banknotes—it is just digital information in computers. What gives money value is the stories that bankers, finance ministers and cryptocurrency gurus tell us about it. Sam Bankman-Fried, Elizabeth Holmes and Bernie Madoff were not particularly good at creating real value, but they were all extremely capable storytellers.

What would happen once a non-human intelligence becomes better than the average human at telling stories, composing melodies, drawing images, and writing laws and scriptures? When people think about Chatgpt and other new ai tools, they are often drawn to examples like school children using ai to write their essays. What will happen to the school system when kids do that? But this kind of question misses the big picture. Forget about school essays. Think of the next American presidential race in 2024, and try to imagine the impact of ai tools that can be made to mass-produce political content, fake-news stories and scriptures for new cults.

In recent years the qAnon cult has coalesced around anonymous online messages, known as “q drops”. Followers collected, revered and interpreted these q drops as a sacred text. While to the best of our knowledge all previous q drops were composed by humans, and bots merely helped disseminate them, in future we might see the first cults in history whose revered texts were written by a non-human intelligence. Religions throughout history have claimed a non-human source for their holy books. Soon that might be a reality.

On a more prosaic level, we might soon find ourselves conducting lengthy online discussions about abortion, climate change or the Russian invasion of Ukraine with entities that we think are humans—but are actually ai. The catch is that it is utterly pointless for us to spend time trying to change the declared opinions of an ai bot, while the ai could hone its messages so precisely that it stands a good chance of influencing us.

Through its mastery of language, ai could even form intimate relationships with people, and use the power of intimacy to change our opinions and worldviews. Although there is no indication that ai has any consciousness or feelings of its own, to foster fake intimacy with humans it is enough if the ai can make them feel emotionally attached to it. In June 2022 Blake Lemoine, a Google engineer, publicly claimed that the ai chatbot Lamda, on which he was working, had become sentient. The controversial claim cost him his job. The most interesting thing about this episode was not Mr Lemoine’s claim, which was probably false. Rather, it was his willingness to risk his lucrative job for the sake of the ai chatbot. If ai can influence people to risk their jobs for it, what else could it induce them to do?

In a political battle for minds and hearts, intimacy is the most efficient weapon, and ai has just gained the ability to mass-produce intimate relationships with millions of people. We all know that over the past decade social media has become a battleground for controlling human attention. With the new generation of ai, the battlefront is shifting from attention to intimacy. What will happen to human society and human psychology as ai fights ai in a battle to fake intimate relationships with us, which can then be used to convince us to vote for particular politicians or buy particular products?

Even without creating “fake intimacy”, the new ai tools would have an immense influence on our opinions and worldviews. People may come to use a single ai adviser as a one-stop, all-knowing oracle. No wonder Google is terrified. Why bother searching, when I can just ask the oracle? The news and advertising industries should also be terrified. Why read a newspaper when I can just ask the oracle to tell me the latest news? And what’s the purpose of advertisements, when I can just ask the oracle to tell me what to buy?

And even these scenarios don’t really capture the big picture. What we are talking about is potentially the end of human history. Not the end of history, just the end of its human-dominated part. History is the interaction between biology and culture; between our biological needs and desires for things like food and sex, and our cultural creations like religions and laws. History is the process through which laws and religions shape food and sex.

What will happen to the course of history when ai takes over culture, and begins producing stories, melodies, laws and religions? Previous tools like the printing press and radio helped spread the cultural ideas of humans, but they never created new cultural ideas of their own. ai is fundamentally different. ai can create completely new ideas, completely new culture.

At first, ai will probably imitate the human prototypes that it was trained on in its infancy. But with each passing year, ai culture will boldly go where no human has gone before. For millennia human beings have lived inside the dreams of other humans. In the coming decades we might find ourselves living inside the dreams of an alien intelligence.

Fear of ai has haunted humankind for only the past few decades. But for thousands of years humans have been haunted by a much deeper fear. We have always appreciated the power of stories and images to manipulate our minds and to create illusions. Consequently, since ancient times humans have feared being trapped in a world of illusions.

In the 17th century René Descartes feared that perhaps a malicious demon was trapping him inside a world of illusions, creating everything he saw and heard. In ancient Greece Plato told the famous Allegory of the Cave, in which a group of people are chained inside a cave all their lives, facing a blank wall. A screen. On that screen they see projected various shadows. The prisoners mistake the illusions they see there for reality.

In ancient India Buddhist and Hindu sages pointed out that all humans lived trapped inside Maya—the world of illusions. What we normally take to be reality is often just fictions in our own minds. People may wage entire wars, killing others and willing to be killed themselves, because of their belief in this or that illusion.

The AI revolution is bringing us face to face with Descartes’ demon, with Plato’s cave, with the Maya. If we are not careful, we might be trapped behind a curtain of illusions, which we could not tear away—or even realise is there.

Of course, the new power of ai could be used for good purposes as well. I won’t dwell on this, because the people who develop ai talk about it enough. The job of historians and philosophers like myself is to point out the dangers. But certainly, ai can help us in countless ways, from finding new cures for cancer to discovering solutions to the ecological crisis. The question we face is how to make sure the new ai tools are used for good rather than for ill. To do that, we first need to appreciate the true capabilities of these tools.

Since 1945 we have known that nuclear technology could generate cheap energy for the benefit of humans—but could also physically destroy human civilisation. We therefore reshaped the entire international order to protect humanity, and to make sure nuclear technology was used primarily for good. We now have to grapple with a new weapon of mass destruction that can annihilate our mental and social world.

We can still regulate the new ai tools, but we must act quickly. Whereas nukes cannot invent more powerful nukes, ai can make exponentially more powerful ai. The first crucial step is to demand rigorous safety checks before powerful ai tools are released into the public domain. Just as a pharmaceutical company cannot release new drugs before testing both their short-term and long-term side-effects, so tech companies shouldn’t release new ai tools before they are made safe. We need an equivalent of the Food and Drug Administration for new technology, and we need it yesterday.

Won’t slowing down public deployments of ai cause democracies to lag behind more ruthless authoritarian regimes? Just the opposite. Unregulated ai deployments would create social chaos, which would benefit autocrats and ruin democracies. Democracy is a conversation, and conversations rely on language. When ai hacks language, it could destroy our ability to have meaningful conversations, thereby destroying democracy.

We have just encountered an alien intelligence, here on Earth. We don’t know much about it, except that it might destroy our civilisation. We should put a halt to the irresponsible deployment of ai tools in the public sphere, and regulate ai before it regulates us. And the first regulation I would suggest is to make it mandatory for ai to disclose that it is an ai. If I am having a conversation with someone, and I cannot tell whether it is a human or an ai—that’s the end of democracy.

This text has been generated by a human.

Or has it?

American Patriots nailed Putin’s hypersonic Kinzhal missile. The world has changed

 There’s much excitement around the world following the events of Monday night, in which Ukrainian air defences armed with US-made weapons reportedly neutralised a heavy Russian missile attack against Kyiv.

In particular the attack apparently included six KH-47M2 Kinzhal (“Dagger”) air-launched missiles, which are often described as “hypersonic”, frequently with the added assertion that there is no defence against such weapons. All six were reportedly stopped by US-made Patriot air defence interceptors, though a Patriot installation was apparently damaged – perhaps by debris from a downed Russian weapon.

Another Kinzhal (referred to by Nato organisations, including the British defence ministry, using the reporting code name “Killjoy”) was also shot down by a Patriot earlier this month. Monday’s interceptions would seem to have confirmed that this was not simply a lucky shot, and the Patriot does indeed offer a strong defence against the Kinzhal and similar weapons.

So, is the world different today? Can any nation in possession of Patriots or similar interceptors rest easy, unworried by the thought of hypersonic weapons – perhaps even, hypersonic nuclear weapons – in enemy hands?

The answer is yes and no: yes, the world is a little different today; and no, even if you have Patriot or similar you are not safe from enemy nukes or true hypersonics.

First let’s take a look at the Kinzhal. It’s really not much more than a modified air-launched version of the ground-launched Iskander short-range ballistic missile, which was developed in the 1980s and 1990s. The Iskander’s rocket propulsion boosts it to speeds of around Mach 6 or 2,000 metres per second. It’s been suggested that the Kinzhal is faster still at Mach 10 or 3,400 m/s.

Hypersonic speed is generally said to begin from Mach 5 upwards so yes, technically these are indeed hypersonic weapons. It’s very difficult to intercept and knock down an object travelling at this kind of speed, so the Patriot has indeed shown itself to be very capable.

However when people in recent times speak of hypersonic weapons they generally mean ones which do not just travel at hypersonic speeds, but which can swerve and jink about while doing so, making themselves still harder to intercept. This class of weapon is often referred to as a “boost-glide” system, as it is often fired atop a booster rocket, possibly out of the atmosphere altogether, before making its manoeuvrable hypersonic descent to the target.

Again, there’s nothing all that new about hypersonic boost-glide. The Nazis had drawing-board plans to use related ideas to bomb the USA during WWII, and various boost-glide projects were set up during the early Cold War. The now-retired Space Shuttle, and subsequent unmanned spaceplanes now in operation by the US and China, are all examples of successful hypersonic boost-glide systems.

Boost-glide for delivering nukes fell out of favour, however, in the mid Cold War with the arrival of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs), whose warheads fall into the atmosphere to reach their targets travelling at Mach 20, perhaps 7,000 m/s. This was deemed to be so fast that nothing could possibly stop such a weapon. Once ICBMs began to be put on nuclear powered submarines, meaning that it would be impossible to locate them in order to knock them out in a sudden pre-emptive strike, the balance of terror seemed to be assured. The world could rest safe in the knowledge that no nation would launch a nuclear first strike, as the enemy’s ICBMs would respond and nothing could stop them.

This balance began to be somewhat upset, however, as long ago as the 1980s. The US in particular began making somewhat serious efforts at defence against inbound ICBMs. This had various effects, one of which was to stimulate the Soviets and then the Russians into looking at ways of making their ICBMs harder to stop. In particular they began working to replace the warheads with manoeuvrable hypersonic glide versions which would be harder to intercept.

This work took a very long time due to the financial and political troubles that beset Russia through the 1990s and 2000s, but at last in 2018 Vladimir Putin (at the same time he introduced the Kinzhal and other supposedly “new” Cold War era weapons) announced that the “Avangard” hypersonic glide vehicle was in production and ready to go into service atop Russian ICBMs. Avangards reportedly descend at Mach 20, swerving and jinking as they come, which should mean they can beat any interceptors they might face. China has also carried out work and flight tests aimed at deployment of such weapons.

Another effect of the US missile-defence aspirations of the 1980s and 1990s was to greatly alarm the kind of people who would really like to ban all nuclear weapons but have reluctantly accepted that isn’t going to happen. People like that were very worried that missile-defence would upset the safe balance of terror: they thought that an America with working defences might be tempted to eliminate Russia, or that the prospect of such defences might push Russia into making a first strike while it still could.

Missile defence technology had its first trial as early Patriots were used to defend against Scud ballistic missiles launched by Saddam Hussein in 1991. This led to a massive disagreement about the Patriot’s effectiveness in which then US President George H W Bush claimed it was 97 per cent effective, the US Army claimed rates between 40 and 80 per cent, and the famous anti-missile-defence activist Theodore Postol claimed it had not worked at all.

Postol and members of his school of thought have since then been very effective in limiting how much money and effort the US has put into missile defences, helped by the fact that various missile-defence projects and programmes have indeed been prone to exaggerate the effectiveness of their equipment. Today the US National Missile Defence effort is explicitly limited to defence against the sort of attack that might be mounted by a rogue state such as North Korea: it is specifically forbidden to work on things which might be able to stop Russia’s vast ICBM force, to avoid panicking Vladimir Putin.

This has meant that to be quite honest, Putin doesn’t really need the Avangard or its like: he can blow up America and its allies whenever he wants, as long as he’s willing to accept Russia becoming a lake of molten glass in its turn.

Putin will still be unpleasantly surprised to find, however, that today’s Patriots can knock down Kinzhals. The Kinzhal may not be a true swerving-and-jinking Mach 20 Avangard, but it is Mach 10 and it is claimed to have some manoeuvrability: it would need at least a bit to make precise strikes, of course.

One of the things which might turn the Ukraine war around for Putin would be the ability to suppress Ukrainian air defences, so permitting his powerful air force to dominate Ukrainian skies as it has so far completely failed to do. It now seems clear that even Russia’s best standoff weapons have little chance of achieving this.

And it won’t just be Vladimir finding Monday night’s events upsetting. Taiwan has the Patriot too. It seems likely that Xi Jinping will be setting up a talk with the head of the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Forces to find out just which of his weapons now seem likely to be effective in any future invasion attempt.