Recommended Reading

[by Mark Safranski, a.k.a. “zen“]

Have not done this in a while as real life has eaten most of my blogging time, but here goes with a focus on Friends of Zenpundit!

Adam Elkus, is writing on tech and society for Slate:

….Tesla’s Elon Musk and the famous astrophysicist Stephen Hawking have become standard-bearers for the growing fear over artificial intelligence—but perhaps the most fascinating element here is that their warnings focus on hypothetical malicious automatons while ignoring real ones. Musk, in a recent interview, mused aboutwhether we would be lucky if future robots enslaved us as pets. Yet today humankind is imperiled by a different type of bot onslaught from which there is no escaping, and Musk has not sounded the alarm. Perhaps that is due to the fact that the artificial menace behind this rise of the machines is not really anything we would consider to be “artificial intelligence.” Instead, to survey the bot armies marching across the Internet is to marvel at the power of artificial stupidity. Despite bots’ crudely coded, insectoid simplicity, they have managed to make a lot of people’s lives miserable.

Charles already noted Cheryl Rofer, also a long time friend, has assessments of the Iranian nuclear deal at Nuclear Diner and at Mother Jones:

….The extent of Iran’s past activity on nuclear weapons was relegated to the IAEA by the P5+1 throughout the negotiations, and is a lesser provision in the fact sheet. Do we have to know all Iran’s dirty secrets to police a future agreement? Probably not.

The Supreme Leader issued a tweet stream that seems to give his blessing for a deal to go forward, but his words were unclear enough that domestic hardliners could seize on them in an attempt to scuttle the deal. Iran’s President Rouhani has voiced his support. In Israel, even the general who bombed the Osirak reactor thinks it’s a good deal.

Thomas P.M. Barnett is blogging a little again after a very long hiatus where he was helping get Wikistrat up, running and growing. After connecting through the good offices of Critt Jarvis, Tom Barnett had a very significant influence in the evolution of zenpundit, particularly in inspiring my research interests to move from straight diplomatic history and foreign policy to a deep dive into strategy and grand strategy. On that note, I recommend you check out How to Become a Grand Strategist (unpublished):

There are four fundamental reasons why American grand strategy matters more right now than any other nation’s grand strategy.

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