Jan 05, 2025 08:22 PM IST
Global leaders will need to address questions arising from wars, the climate crisis, and evolution of Artificial Intelligence
Let’s look at some of New Year’s Day headlines. In New Orleans in the United States (US), a terrorist mowed down revellers killing 15 people and injuring dozens. The driver Shamsuddin Jabbar later tried to fire at the crowd but the police gunned him down. Jabbar once served in the US army and as such it’s the failure of the American intelligence agencies that ignored the signs of the impending mayhem. He had a criminal past and yet he escaped tight security scrutiny. Innocent US civilians paid the price of this laxity.
For the US, the tragedy didn’t end there. Within hours of the New Orleans incident, a truck exploded in front of the Donald Trump hotel in Las Vegas. An interesting fact is the truck that exploded killing a passerby was manufactured at President-elect Trump’s close associate Elon Musk’s Tesla factory. The third incident happened in the Queens borough of New York. A shootout in a nightclub left 11 people injured. Both these incidents are being investigated. Till the time of writing this article, police in the US had not declared them as clear acts of terrorism, but the incidents have once again brought to light the growing unease in American society.
Apart from these three incidents in the US, two more developments that unfolded in other parts of the globe have the potential for long-term adverse consequences for the world. On New Year’s night, Israel conducted an air raid on Gaza killing 12 people. In the second incident, Ukraine took control of a gas pipeline and stopped the supply of gas from Russia to the rest of Europe. It will have consequences for the Russian economy, of course. But what about the impact it could have on Europe, which faces bone-chilling cold at this time of the year?
What do these headlines suggest?
A crown of thorns awaits Donald Trump in his second innings at the Oval Office. President Trump will have to contend with challenges in the international as well as domestic arenas. New Orleans, New York, and Las Vegas have once again made it amply clear that the veneer of US invincibility can be breached from within. In such a scenario, how will Trump be able to satisfactorily resolve Israel Hamas and the Russia-Ukraine conflict?
The Russia-Ukraine conflict, about to enter its fourth year, is raising doubts about Russian military might and superiority. The last three years have shown that strongman Vladimir Putin too has chinks in his armour. Cracks are appearing in his fearsome image and the reputation he had so assiduously built over the years. History is testimony to the fact that a declining autocrat tries every trick in the trade to destroy others. Since the gas pipeline incident, concerns have been raised about the possibility of a rash decision by Putin.
Does it mean the top priority of the year 2025 is to stop the wars?
How the wars have bled humanity is clear from the human rights data released by the United Nations — from January 2024 to October 21, at least 11,973 citizens were killed in the Russia-Ukraine war including 622 children. In the Israel-Hamas war, according to the Palestinian health ministry claims, 45,000 people have died in the last 14 months including 17,000 children.
Now let’s look at the most important issue facing the human race — the climate crisis. The year 2024 was the warmest year recorded in the history of the human race. Since the failure of the climate conference, speculations are rife that the challenges for a consensus on climate actions are going to intensify in the years ahead. The early onset of record-breaking winters is also an indication of the same. Trump’s win is going to weaken the effort to tackle this challenge further. His extreme views on the climate crisis are known to all.
Another issue that has piqued our interest and attention is Artificial Intelligence (AI). Debates are raging globally about its strengths and pitfalls. Yuval Noah Harari, a popular writer and professor at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, has raised some pertinent questions. He insists that AI can lie. Harari gives the example that when Open AI launched ChatGPT4, they asked it to solve a CAPTCHA to test its efficacy. ChatGPT4 couldn’t crack the CAPTCHA. It was later given access to a web page called taskrabbit. ChatGPT4 outsourced the task of cracking the CAPTCHA telling the service provider that it was blind. The engineers who created the algorithms were stunned. They couldn’t fathom how AI learned to tell lies. This is the reason that Harari and other public intellectuals are questioning the role of AI. They insist that AI will be lethal as this is the first tool created by humans that can think and make decisions on its own.
There’s no doubt that people with malicious intentions will misuse AI. At the beginning of the year 2024 on January 21, AI was used to clone the voice of the US president Joe Biden and it was employed to make thousands of automated calls to the voters in New Hampshire state in the US. The company, Lingo Telecom, that undertook the operation was later fined $1 million. In India, too, we have the case of actor Rashmika Mandana, whose image was morphed. The question is: Has science created a Frankenstein for the human race?
Will the year 2025 be able to create a consensus on the three challenges threatening humanity — wars, the climate crisis, and AI?
Shashi Shekhar is editor-in-chief, Hindustan. The views expressed are personal
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