20 March 2024 comment on post below: We are now only one step from NATO formally declaring war against Russia.  That step would be a military action by Russia against a NATO member.  But how likely is this?

Our world is facing the greatest geopolitical risks we have seen for over 40 years, with an ongoing war in Eastern Europe, conflict in the Middle East and major tensions over the future of Taiwan.

The Second World War showed us how a war in one region can make other conflicts more likely, because different nations start seeing opportunities of their own in the midst of regional and global chaos.

History shows that the ability of dictators to start new wars is directly related to the political power they have. And President Putin's power base in Russia is now stronger than before the invasion of Ukraine, while his ambition continues to grow to expand the territory that Russia controls.

The more powerful a dictator becomes, by definition, the quieter the voices of dissent around them, the more feeble the challenges to any unrealistic ambitions. Powerful dictators risk loosing their grip on practical realities (eg actual military strength) because those around them are often too afraid to tell them the truth. P

Europe / NATO is therefore at great risk of a further miscalculation / gamble by President Putin, emboldened by a distorted view of the wider world, by lack of internal threats to his power, by mobilisation of his nation to a wartime economy, and by what he believes is fading support for Ukraine in the US.  

Set against this is the fact that Russian military strength has been weakened in the last two years.

 In comparison, NATO / Western Europe can hardly find enough ammunition to supply half of Ukraine's front-line needs, has been very slow to ramp up defence spending, has a poorly defined nuclear weapons strategy, and is in no fit state to go to war against Russia. 

A single new military action by President Putin could be enough to trigger war with NATO, with potential for vast destruction across Western, Eastern and Central Europe - even assuming that no nuclear weapons are fired.  

The most effective way to reduce this risk is for Europe / NATO to rapidly mobilise for outright war, as a preventative measure, but this is currently happening at a very slow pace.  

Manufacturing of new weaponry is painfully slow, and EU nations have hardly woken up to the wartime realities which will mean diverting major spending from other important areas such as health care, and increasing government debt.

Expect EU / NATO to accelerate military spending, with many nations budgeting 2% of GDP, some like Poland far more, by 2027, partly because of pressures from the US to honour NATO-related pledges.

Expect many corporations to continue to shorten supply chains to minimise risk, sourcing within regions rather than across the world.

11 July 2022 note on post below:  History shows that small conflicts often trigger wider ones which is what is happening.  Hundreds of companies cancelled Russian business contracts or exited operations altogether from Russia within days and weeks of the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, but wider factors remain far more important from the global point of view.

On the one hand, the Russian economy was in any case smaller than Spain before the invasion, and will continue to shrink rapidly during the rest of 2022 and into 2023.  Yet on the other hand, it has a huge old-fashioned military able to create First World War type regional destruction on a massive scale - without using nuclear devices.  Sadly it can cost a mere $100,000 to blow up a 1000 year old building, but $500m to rebuild and restore (and nothing can replace the original history).

So Russia is not an economic superpower able to sustain a massive war for a long period without financial catastrophe.  Nor does Russia have the economic, military or organisational power to subdue and control 40 million angry and bitter Ukrainians....

In December 2018, I gave a keynote via Webinar for Enel Power. They say it was watched live by over 800,000 on several platforms, and by June 2019, it had over 1.4m views on just one platform alone, by March 2024, that had risen to 1.8m. The core messages are even more urgent and relevant today. My physical audience in the room was 25 global influencers from every part of the world, all with popular blogs / followings on green tech and alternative energy. A massive global social media campaign took place in the run up to the Webinar.  Here are the key messages....

* "How AI Will Change your life - A Futurist's Guide to a Super-Smart World" - Patrick Dixon's latest book on AI is published in September 2024 by Profile Books.  It contains 38 chapters on the impact of AI across different industries, government and our wider world, including impact of AI on the energy industry, sustainability, green tech innovation and reducing global CO2 emissions.

* "How AI Will Change Your Life - A Futurist's Guide to a Super-Smart World" - Patrick Dixon's new book on AI is published in September 2024 by Profile Books 

What will be the future impact of AI / Artificial Intelligence on our wider world?  The answer is that it will be massive in every dimension of human life.

Most of the influence of AI on your own life will be hidden, and hard to understand but the total combined effect will be very powerful, affecting decisions you make, influencing your thoughts, shaping your opinions, affecting your own unconscious bias and preferences.

To help explore these issues, I thought it would be revealing to have a conversation (below) about the future of AI with AI itself - using ChatGTP, a powerful Artificial Intelligence engine, which has learned about the world by analysing billions of words written by human beings.  My conclusion about the conversation is that ChatGTP is not telling the truth when it comes to the downsides of AI.

Word-based machines like ChatGPT are running out of text to learn from

Word-based AI machines like ChatGPT are already up against a limit in their training programmes. For example, ChatGTP has already read most of the available words online and is rapidly running out of new material to learn from! So the next step-wise improvement will need to come from other innovations in Artificial Intelligence, and from actually engaging with live human beings.

We can expect another major extension of AI language learning by feeding AI with recorded content - all the world's TV, radio and films for example.  But the total number of new words in all that is surprisingly small - human beings can't speak much faster than 130 words a minute, so even an hour of TV rarely contains more than 6000 words.

So what of the future?  How good will such word-based engines be by 2025?  Answer: good enough to convince most people most of the time that they are chatting online to a human being.

AI is already good enough to pass some student exams 

The AI system is already good enough to deliver coursework for exams, complete homework assignments, write press releases or information bulletins, write computer code, and so on.

Billions of pages of text have already been generated by AI bots like ChatGTP, potentially swamping the web and search engines with automated articles, social media posts and so on.  

This is already degrading the experience of human beings searching for world-class content, amongst all the automatically generated clutter.  

Text produced by AI is being swept up into the pool of all available text to train all AI future chatbots - so that AI text begins to train AI to produce more AI text.  This could easily result in a distortion, subtle at first, for example in literary styles. It will mean that early AI bots may have a profound impact on the language capabilities and "personality" of bots that follow.

So here below is the AI view of the future of AI.  You will notice that many of the answers are quite upbeat and tend to avoid discussions of risks from AI, threats in a world dominated by Artificial Intelligence.  Text created by ChatGTP is in italics.  My own comments are in bold....

* "How AI Will Change Your Life - A Futurist's Guide to a Super-Smart World" - Patrick Dixon's new book on AI is published in September 2024 by Profile Books