Showing posts with label intelligence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label intelligence. Show all posts
Thursday 26 August 2021
Monday 22 March 2021
Thursday 19 March 2020
Can computers ever replace the classroom?
With 850 million children worldwide shut out of schools, tech evangelists claim now is the time for AI education. But as the technology’s power grows, so too do the dangers that come with it. By Alex Beard in The Guardian
For a child prodigy, learning didn’t always come easily to Derek Haoyang Li. When he was three, his father – a famous educator and author – became so frustrated with his progress in Chinese that he vowed never to teach him again. “He kicked me from here to here,” Li told me, moving his arms wide.
Yet when Li began school, aged five, things began to click. Five years later, he was selected as one of only 10 students in his home province of Henan to learn to code. At 16, Li beat 15 million kids to first prize in the Chinese Mathematical Olympiad. Among the offers that came in from the country’s elite institutions, he decided on an experimental fast-track degree at Jiao Tong University in Shanghai. It would enable him to study maths, while also covering computer science, physics and psychology.
In his first year at university, Li was extremely shy. He came up with a personal algorithm for making friends in the canteen, weighing data on group size and conversation topic to optimise the chances of a positive encounter. The method helped him to make friends, so he developed others: how to master English, how to interpret dreams, how to find a girlfriend. While other students spent the long nights studying, Li started to think about how he could apply his algorithmic approach to business. When he graduated at the turn of the millennium, he decided that he would make his fortune in the field he knew best: education.
In person, Li, who is now 42, displays none of the awkwardness of his university days. A successful entrepreneur who helped create a billion-dollar tutoring company, Only Education, he is charismatic, and given to making bombastic statements. “Education is one of the industries that Chinese people can do much better than western people,” he told me when we met last year. The reason, he explained, is that “Chinese people are more sophisticated”, because they are raised in a society in which people rarely say what they mean.
Li is the founder of Squirrel AI, an education company that offers tutoring delivered in part by humans, but mostly by smart machines, which he says will transform education as we know it. All over the world, entrepreneurs are making similarly extravagant claims about the power of online learning – and more and more money is flowing their way. In Silicon Valley, companies like Knewton and Alt School have attempted to personalise learning via tablet computers. In India, Byju’s, a learning app valued at $6 billion, has secured backing from Facebook and the Chinese internet behemoth Tencent, and now sponsors the country’s cricket team. In Europe, the British company Century Tech has signed a deal to roll out an intelligent teaching and learning platform in 700 Belgian schools, and dozens more across the UK. Their promises are being put to the test by the coronavirus pandemic – with 849 million children worldwide, as of March 2020, shut out of school, we’re in the midst of an unprecedented experiment in the effectiveness of online learning.
But it’s in China, where President Xi Jinping has called for the nation to lead the world in AI innovation by 2030, that the fastest progress is being made. In 2018 alone, Li told me, 60 new AI companies entered China’s private education market. Squirrel AI is part of this new generation of education start-ups. The company has already enrolled 2 million student users, opened 2,600 learning centres in 700 cities across China, and raised $150m from investors. The company’s chief AI officer is Tom Mitchell, the former dean of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, and its payroll also includes a roster of top Chinese talent, including dozens of “super-teachers” – an official designation given to the most expert teachers in the country. In January, during the worst of the outbreak, it partnered with the Shanghai education bureau to provide free products to students throughout the city.
Though the most ambitious features have yet to be built into Squirrel AI’s system, the company already claims to have achieved impressive results. At its HQ in Shanghai, I saw footage of downcast human teachers who had been defeated by computers in televised contests to see who could teach a class of students more maths in a single week. Experiments on the effectiveness of different types of teaching videos with test audiences have revealed that students learn more proficiently from a video presented by a good-looking young presenter than from an older expert teacher.
When we met, Li rhapsodised about a future in which technology will enable children to learn 10 or even 100 times more than they do today. Wild claims like these, typical of the hyperactive education technology sector, tend to prompt two different reactions. The first is: bullshit – teaching and learning is too complex, too human a craft to be taken over by robots. The second reaction is the one I had when I first met Li in London a year ago: oh no, the robot teachers are coming for education as we know it. There is some truth to both reactions, but the real story of AI education, it turns out, is a whole lot more complicated.
At a Squirrel AI learning centre high in an office building in Hangzhou, a city 70 miles west of Shanghai, a cursor jerked tentatively over the words “Modern technology has opened our eyes to many things”. Slouched at a hexagonal table in one of the centre’s dozen or so small classrooms, Huang Zerong, 14, was halfway through a 90-minute English tutoring session. As he worked through activities on his MacBook, a young woman with the kindly manner of an older sister sat next to him, observing his progress. Below, the trees of Xixi National Wetland Park barely stirred in the afternoon heat.
A question popped up on Huang’s screen, on which a virtual dashboard showed his current English level, unit score and learning focus – along with the sleek squirrel icon of Squirrel AI.
“India is famous for ________ industry.”
Huang read through the three possible answers, choosing to ignore “treasure” and “typical” and type “t-e-c-h-n-o-l-o-g-y” into the box.
“T____ is changing fast,” came the next prompt.
Huang looked towards the young woman, then he punched out “e-c-h-n-o-l-o-g-y” from memory. She clapped her hands together. “Good!” she said, as another prompt flashed up.
Huang had begun his English course, which would last for one term, a few months earlier with a diagnostic test. He had logged into the Squirrel AI platform on his laptop and answered a series of questions designed to evaluate his mastery of more than 10,000 “knowledge points” (such as the distinction between “belong to” and “belong in”). Based on his answers, Squirrel AI’s software had generated a precise “learning map” for him, which would determine which texts he would read, which videos he would see, which tests he would take.
As he worked his way through the course – with the occasional support of the human tutor by his side, or one of the hundreds accessible via video link from Squirrel AI’s headquarters in Shanghai – its contents were automatically updated, as the system perceived that Huang had mastered new knowledge.
Huang said he was less distracted at the learning centre than he was in school, and felt at home with the technology. “It’s fun,” he told me after class, eyes fixed on his lap. “It’s much easier to concentrate on the system because it’s a device.” His scores in English also seemed to be improving, which is why his mother had just paid the centre a further 91,000 RMB (about £11,000) for another year of sessions: two semesters and two holiday courses in each of four subjects, adding up to around 400 hours in total.
“Anyone can learn,” Li explained to me a few days later over dinner in Beijing. You just needed the right environment and the right method, he said.
For a child prodigy, learning didn’t always come easily to Derek Haoyang Li. When he was three, his father – a famous educator and author – became so frustrated with his progress in Chinese that he vowed never to teach him again. “He kicked me from here to here,” Li told me, moving his arms wide.
Yet when Li began school, aged five, things began to click. Five years later, he was selected as one of only 10 students in his home province of Henan to learn to code. At 16, Li beat 15 million kids to first prize in the Chinese Mathematical Olympiad. Among the offers that came in from the country’s elite institutions, he decided on an experimental fast-track degree at Jiao Tong University in Shanghai. It would enable him to study maths, while also covering computer science, physics and psychology.
In his first year at university, Li was extremely shy. He came up with a personal algorithm for making friends in the canteen, weighing data on group size and conversation topic to optimise the chances of a positive encounter. The method helped him to make friends, so he developed others: how to master English, how to interpret dreams, how to find a girlfriend. While other students spent the long nights studying, Li started to think about how he could apply his algorithmic approach to business. When he graduated at the turn of the millennium, he decided that he would make his fortune in the field he knew best: education.
In person, Li, who is now 42, displays none of the awkwardness of his university days. A successful entrepreneur who helped create a billion-dollar tutoring company, Only Education, he is charismatic, and given to making bombastic statements. “Education is one of the industries that Chinese people can do much better than western people,” he told me when we met last year. The reason, he explained, is that “Chinese people are more sophisticated”, because they are raised in a society in which people rarely say what they mean.
Li is the founder of Squirrel AI, an education company that offers tutoring delivered in part by humans, but mostly by smart machines, which he says will transform education as we know it. All over the world, entrepreneurs are making similarly extravagant claims about the power of online learning – and more and more money is flowing their way. In Silicon Valley, companies like Knewton and Alt School have attempted to personalise learning via tablet computers. In India, Byju’s, a learning app valued at $6 billion, has secured backing from Facebook and the Chinese internet behemoth Tencent, and now sponsors the country’s cricket team. In Europe, the British company Century Tech has signed a deal to roll out an intelligent teaching and learning platform in 700 Belgian schools, and dozens more across the UK. Their promises are being put to the test by the coronavirus pandemic – with 849 million children worldwide, as of March 2020, shut out of school, we’re in the midst of an unprecedented experiment in the effectiveness of online learning.
But it’s in China, where President Xi Jinping has called for the nation to lead the world in AI innovation by 2030, that the fastest progress is being made. In 2018 alone, Li told me, 60 new AI companies entered China’s private education market. Squirrel AI is part of this new generation of education start-ups. The company has already enrolled 2 million student users, opened 2,600 learning centres in 700 cities across China, and raised $150m from investors. The company’s chief AI officer is Tom Mitchell, the former dean of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, and its payroll also includes a roster of top Chinese talent, including dozens of “super-teachers” – an official designation given to the most expert teachers in the country. In January, during the worst of the outbreak, it partnered with the Shanghai education bureau to provide free products to students throughout the city.
Though the most ambitious features have yet to be built into Squirrel AI’s system, the company already claims to have achieved impressive results. At its HQ in Shanghai, I saw footage of downcast human teachers who had been defeated by computers in televised contests to see who could teach a class of students more maths in a single week. Experiments on the effectiveness of different types of teaching videos with test audiences have revealed that students learn more proficiently from a video presented by a good-looking young presenter than from an older expert teacher.
When we met, Li rhapsodised about a future in which technology will enable children to learn 10 or even 100 times more than they do today. Wild claims like these, typical of the hyperactive education technology sector, tend to prompt two different reactions. The first is: bullshit – teaching and learning is too complex, too human a craft to be taken over by robots. The second reaction is the one I had when I first met Li in London a year ago: oh no, the robot teachers are coming for education as we know it. There is some truth to both reactions, but the real story of AI education, it turns out, is a whole lot more complicated.
At a Squirrel AI learning centre high in an office building in Hangzhou, a city 70 miles west of Shanghai, a cursor jerked tentatively over the words “Modern technology has opened our eyes to many things”. Slouched at a hexagonal table in one of the centre’s dozen or so small classrooms, Huang Zerong, 14, was halfway through a 90-minute English tutoring session. As he worked through activities on his MacBook, a young woman with the kindly manner of an older sister sat next to him, observing his progress. Below, the trees of Xixi National Wetland Park barely stirred in the afternoon heat.
A question popped up on Huang’s screen, on which a virtual dashboard showed his current English level, unit score and learning focus – along with the sleek squirrel icon of Squirrel AI.
“India is famous for ________ industry.”
Huang read through the three possible answers, choosing to ignore “treasure” and “typical” and type “t-e-c-h-n-o-l-o-g-y” into the box.
“T____ is changing fast,” came the next prompt.
Huang looked towards the young woman, then he punched out “e-c-h-n-o-l-o-g-y” from memory. She clapped her hands together. “Good!” she said, as another prompt flashed up.
Huang had begun his English course, which would last for one term, a few months earlier with a diagnostic test. He had logged into the Squirrel AI platform on his laptop and answered a series of questions designed to evaluate his mastery of more than 10,000 “knowledge points” (such as the distinction between “belong to” and “belong in”). Based on his answers, Squirrel AI’s software had generated a precise “learning map” for him, which would determine which texts he would read, which videos he would see, which tests he would take.
As he worked his way through the course – with the occasional support of the human tutor by his side, or one of the hundreds accessible via video link from Squirrel AI’s headquarters in Shanghai – its contents were automatically updated, as the system perceived that Huang had mastered new knowledge.
Huang said he was less distracted at the learning centre than he was in school, and felt at home with the technology. “It’s fun,” he told me after class, eyes fixed on his lap. “It’s much easier to concentrate on the system because it’s a device.” His scores in English also seemed to be improving, which is why his mother had just paid the centre a further 91,000 RMB (about £11,000) for another year of sessions: two semesters and two holiday courses in each of four subjects, adding up to around 400 hours in total.
“Anyone can learn,” Li explained to me a few days later over dinner in Beijing. You just needed the right environment and the right method, he said.
Derek Haoyang Li, the founder of Squirrel AI, at a web summit in Lisbon. Photograph: Cody Glenn/Sportsfile via Getty Images
The idea for Squirrel AI had come to him five years earlier. A decade at his tutoring company, Only Education, had left him frustrated. He had found that if you really wanted to improve a student’s progress, by far the best way was to find them a good teacher. But good teachers were rare, and turnover was high, with the best much in demand. Having to find and train 8,000 new teachers each year was limiting the amount students learned – and the growth of his business.
The answer, Li decided, was adaptive learning, where an intelligent computer-based system adjusts itself automatically to the best method for an individual learner. The idea of adaptive learning was not new, but Li was confident that developments in AI research meant that huge advances were now within reach. Rather than seeking to recreate the general intelligence of a human mind, researchers were getting impressive results by putting AI to work on specialised tasks. AI doctors are now equal to or better than humans at analysing X-rays for certain pathologies, while AI lawyers are carrying out legal research that would once have been done by clerks.
Following such breakthroughs, Li resolved to augment the efforts of his human teachers with a tireless, perfectly replicable virtual teacher. “Imagine a tutor who knows everything,” he told me, “and who knows everything about you.”
In Hangzhou, Huang was struggling with the word “hurry”. On his screen, a video appeared of a neatly groomed young teacher presenting a three-minute masterclass about how to use the word “hurry” and related phrases (“in a hurry” etc). Huang watched along.
Moments like these, where a short teaching input results in a small learning output, are known as “nuggets”. Li’s dream, which is the dream of adaptive education in general, is that AI will one day provide the perfect learning experience by ensuring that each of us get just the right chunk of content, delivered in the right way, at the right moment for our individual needs.
One way in which Squirrel AI improves its results is by constantly hoovering up data about its users. During Huang’s lesson, the system continuously tracked and recorded every one of his key strokes, cursor movements, right or wrong answers, texts read and videos watched. This data was time-stamped, to show where Huang had skipped over or lingered on a particular task. Each “nugget” (the video to watch or text to read) was then recommended to him based on an analysis of his data, accrued over hundreds of hours of work on Squirrel’s platform, and the data of 2 million other students. “Computer tutors can collect more teaching experience than a human would ever be able to collect, even in a hundred years of teaching,” Tom Mitchell, Squirrel AI’s chief AI officer, told me over the phone a few weeks later.
The speed and accuracy of Squirrel AI’s platform will depend, above all, on the number of student users it manages to sign up. More students equals more data. As each student works their way through a set of knowledge points, they leave a rich trail of information behind them. This data is then used to train the algorithms of the “thinking” part of the Squirrel AI system.
This is one reason why Squirrel AI has integrated its online business with bricks-and-mortar learning centres. Most children in China do not have access to laptops and high-speed internet. The learning centres mean the company can reach kids they otherwise would not be able to. One of the reasons Mitchell says he is glad to be working with Squirrel AI is the sheer volume of data that the company is gathering. “We’re going to have millions of natural examples,” he told me with excitement.
The dream of a perfect education delivered by machine is not new. For at least a century, generations of visionaries have predicted that the latest inventions will transform learning. “Motion pictures,” wrote the American inventor Thomas Edison in 1922, “are destined to revolutionise our schools.” The immersive power of movies would supposedly turbo-charge the learning process. Others made similar predictions for radio, television, computers and the internet. But despite small successes – the Open University, TV universities in China in the 1980s, or Khan Academy today, which reaches millions of students with its YouTube lessons – teachers have continued to teach, and learners to learn, in much the same way as before.
There are two reasons why today’s techno-evangelists are confident that AI can succeed where other technologies failed. First, they view AI not as a simple innovation but as a “general purpose technology” – that is, an epochal invention, like the printing press, which will fundamentally change the way we learn. Second, they believe its powers will shed new light on the working of the human brain – how repetitive practice grows expertise, for instance, or how interleaving (leaving gaps between learning different bits of material) can help us achieve mastery. As a result, we will be able to design adaptive algorithms to optimise the learning process.
UCL Institute of Education professor and machine learning expert Rose Luckin believes that one day we might see an AI-enabled “Fitbit for the mind” that would allow us to perceive in real-time what an individual knows, and how fast they are learning. The device would use sensors to gather data that forms a precise and ever-evolving map of a person’s abilities, which could be cross-referenced with insights into their motivational and nutritional state, say. This information would then be relayed to our minds, in real time, via a computer-brain interface. Facebook is already carrying out research in this field. Other firms are trialling eye tracking and helmets that monitor kids’ brainwaves.Get the Guardian’s award-winning long reads sent direct to you every Saturday morning
The supposed AI education revolution is not here yet, and it is likely that the majority of projects will collapse under the weight of their own hype. IBM’s adaptive tutor Knewton was pulled from US schools under pressure from parents concerned about their kids’ privacy, while Silicon Valley’s Alt School, launched to much fanfare in 2015 by a former Google executive, has burned through $174m of funding without landing on a workable business model. But global school closures owing to coronavirus may yet relax public attitudes to online learning – many online education companies are offering their products for free to all children out of school.
Daisy Christodoulou, a London-based education expert, suggests that too much time is spent speculating on what AI might one day do, rather than focusing on what it already can. It’s estimated that there are 900 million young people around the world today who aren’t currently on track to learn what they need to thrive. To help those kids, AI education doesn’t have to be perfect – it just needs to slightly improve on what they currently have.
In their book The Future of the Professions, Richard and Daniel Susskind argue that we tend to conceive of occupations as embodied in a person – a butcher or baker, doctor or teacher. As a result, we think of them as ‘too human’ to be taken over by machines. But to an algorithm, or someone designing one, a profession appears as something else: a long list of individual tasks, many of which may be mechanised. In education, that might be marking or motivating, lecturing or lesson planning. The Susskinds believe that where a machine can do any one of these tasks better and more cheaply than the average human, automation of that bit of the job is inevitable.
The point, in short, is that AI doesn’t have to match the general intelligence of humans to be useful – or indeed powerful. This is both the promise of AI, and the danger it poses. “People’s behaviour is already being manipulated,” Luckin cautioned. Devices that might one day enhance our minds are already proving useful in shaping them.
In May 2018, a group of students at Hangzhou’s Middle School No 11 returned to their classroom to find three cameras newly installed above the blackboard; they would now be under full-time surveillance in their lessons. “Previously when I had classes that I didn’t like very much, I would be lazy and maybe take naps,” a student told the local news, “but I don’t dare be distracted after the cameras were installed.” The head teacher explained that the system could read seven states of emotion on students’ faces: neutral, disgust, surprise, anger, fear, happiness and sadness. If the kids slacked, the teacher was alerted. “It’s like a pair of mystery eyes are constantly watching me,” the student told reporters.
The previous year, China’s state council had launched a plan for the role AI could play in the future of the country. Underpinning it were a set of beliefs: that AI can “harmonise” Chinese society; that for it to do so, the government should store data on every citizen; that companies, not the state, were best positioned to innovate; that no company should refuse access to the government to its data. In education, the paper called for new adaptive online learning systems powered by big data, and “all-encompassing ubiquitous intelligent environments” – or smart schools.
At AIAED, a conference in Beijing hosted by Squirrel AI, which I attended in May 2019, classroom surveillance was one of the most discussed topics – but the speakers tended to be more concerned about the technical question of how to optimise the effectiveness of facial and bodily monitoring technologies in the classroom, rather than the darker implications of collecting unprecedented amounts of data about children. These ethical questions are becoming increasingly important, with schools from India to the US currently trialling facial monitoring. In the UK, AI is being used today for things like monitoring student wellbeing, automating assessment and even in inspecting schools. Ben Williamson of the Centre for Research in Digital Education explains that this risks encoding biases or errors into the system and raises obvious privacy issues. “Now the school and university might be said to be studying their students too,” he told me.
While cameras in the classroom might outrage many parents in the UK or US, Lenora Chu, author of an influential book about the Chinese education system, argues that in China anything that improves a child’s learning tends to be viewed positively by parents. Squirrel AI even offers them the chance to watch footage of their child’s tutoring sessions. “There’s not that idea here that technology is bad,” said Chu, who moved from the US to Shanghai 10 years ago.
Rose Luckin suggested to me that a platform like Squirrel AI’s could one day mean an end to China’s notoriously punishing gaokao college entrance exam, which takes place for two days every June and largely determines a student’s education and employment prospects. If technology tracked a student throughout their school days, logging every keystroke, knowledge point and facial twitch, then the perfect record of their abilities on file could make such testing obsolete. Yet a system like this could also furnish the Chinese state – or a US tech company – with an eternal ledger of every step in a child’s development. It is not hard to imagine the grim uses to which this information could be put – for instance, if your behaviour in school was used to judge, or predict, your trustworthiness as an adult.
The idea for Squirrel AI had come to him five years earlier. A decade at his tutoring company, Only Education, had left him frustrated. He had found that if you really wanted to improve a student’s progress, by far the best way was to find them a good teacher. But good teachers were rare, and turnover was high, with the best much in demand. Having to find and train 8,000 new teachers each year was limiting the amount students learned – and the growth of his business.
The answer, Li decided, was adaptive learning, where an intelligent computer-based system adjusts itself automatically to the best method for an individual learner. The idea of adaptive learning was not new, but Li was confident that developments in AI research meant that huge advances were now within reach. Rather than seeking to recreate the general intelligence of a human mind, researchers were getting impressive results by putting AI to work on specialised tasks. AI doctors are now equal to or better than humans at analysing X-rays for certain pathologies, while AI lawyers are carrying out legal research that would once have been done by clerks.
Following such breakthroughs, Li resolved to augment the efforts of his human teachers with a tireless, perfectly replicable virtual teacher. “Imagine a tutor who knows everything,” he told me, “and who knows everything about you.”
In Hangzhou, Huang was struggling with the word “hurry”. On his screen, a video appeared of a neatly groomed young teacher presenting a three-minute masterclass about how to use the word “hurry” and related phrases (“in a hurry” etc). Huang watched along.
Moments like these, where a short teaching input results in a small learning output, are known as “nuggets”. Li’s dream, which is the dream of adaptive education in general, is that AI will one day provide the perfect learning experience by ensuring that each of us get just the right chunk of content, delivered in the right way, at the right moment for our individual needs.
One way in which Squirrel AI improves its results is by constantly hoovering up data about its users. During Huang’s lesson, the system continuously tracked and recorded every one of his key strokes, cursor movements, right or wrong answers, texts read and videos watched. This data was time-stamped, to show where Huang had skipped over or lingered on a particular task. Each “nugget” (the video to watch or text to read) was then recommended to him based on an analysis of his data, accrued over hundreds of hours of work on Squirrel’s platform, and the data of 2 million other students. “Computer tutors can collect more teaching experience than a human would ever be able to collect, even in a hundred years of teaching,” Tom Mitchell, Squirrel AI’s chief AI officer, told me over the phone a few weeks later.
The speed and accuracy of Squirrel AI’s platform will depend, above all, on the number of student users it manages to sign up. More students equals more data. As each student works their way through a set of knowledge points, they leave a rich trail of information behind them. This data is then used to train the algorithms of the “thinking” part of the Squirrel AI system.
This is one reason why Squirrel AI has integrated its online business with bricks-and-mortar learning centres. Most children in China do not have access to laptops and high-speed internet. The learning centres mean the company can reach kids they otherwise would not be able to. One of the reasons Mitchell says he is glad to be working with Squirrel AI is the sheer volume of data that the company is gathering. “We’re going to have millions of natural examples,” he told me with excitement.
The dream of a perfect education delivered by machine is not new. For at least a century, generations of visionaries have predicted that the latest inventions will transform learning. “Motion pictures,” wrote the American inventor Thomas Edison in 1922, “are destined to revolutionise our schools.” The immersive power of movies would supposedly turbo-charge the learning process. Others made similar predictions for radio, television, computers and the internet. But despite small successes – the Open University, TV universities in China in the 1980s, or Khan Academy today, which reaches millions of students with its YouTube lessons – teachers have continued to teach, and learners to learn, in much the same way as before.
There are two reasons why today’s techno-evangelists are confident that AI can succeed where other technologies failed. First, they view AI not as a simple innovation but as a “general purpose technology” – that is, an epochal invention, like the printing press, which will fundamentally change the way we learn. Second, they believe its powers will shed new light on the working of the human brain – how repetitive practice grows expertise, for instance, or how interleaving (leaving gaps between learning different bits of material) can help us achieve mastery. As a result, we will be able to design adaptive algorithms to optimise the learning process.
UCL Institute of Education professor and machine learning expert Rose Luckin believes that one day we might see an AI-enabled “Fitbit for the mind” that would allow us to perceive in real-time what an individual knows, and how fast they are learning. The device would use sensors to gather data that forms a precise and ever-evolving map of a person’s abilities, which could be cross-referenced with insights into their motivational and nutritional state, say. This information would then be relayed to our minds, in real time, via a computer-brain interface. Facebook is already carrying out research in this field. Other firms are trialling eye tracking and helmets that monitor kids’ brainwaves.Get the Guardian’s award-winning long reads sent direct to you every Saturday morning
The supposed AI education revolution is not here yet, and it is likely that the majority of projects will collapse under the weight of their own hype. IBM’s adaptive tutor Knewton was pulled from US schools under pressure from parents concerned about their kids’ privacy, while Silicon Valley’s Alt School, launched to much fanfare in 2015 by a former Google executive, has burned through $174m of funding without landing on a workable business model. But global school closures owing to coronavirus may yet relax public attitudes to online learning – many online education companies are offering their products for free to all children out of school.
Daisy Christodoulou, a London-based education expert, suggests that too much time is spent speculating on what AI might one day do, rather than focusing on what it already can. It’s estimated that there are 900 million young people around the world today who aren’t currently on track to learn what they need to thrive. To help those kids, AI education doesn’t have to be perfect – it just needs to slightly improve on what they currently have.
In their book The Future of the Professions, Richard and Daniel Susskind argue that we tend to conceive of occupations as embodied in a person – a butcher or baker, doctor or teacher. As a result, we think of them as ‘too human’ to be taken over by machines. But to an algorithm, or someone designing one, a profession appears as something else: a long list of individual tasks, many of which may be mechanised. In education, that might be marking or motivating, lecturing or lesson planning. The Susskinds believe that where a machine can do any one of these tasks better and more cheaply than the average human, automation of that bit of the job is inevitable.
The point, in short, is that AI doesn’t have to match the general intelligence of humans to be useful – or indeed powerful. This is both the promise of AI, and the danger it poses. “People’s behaviour is already being manipulated,” Luckin cautioned. Devices that might one day enhance our minds are already proving useful in shaping them.
In May 2018, a group of students at Hangzhou’s Middle School No 11 returned to their classroom to find three cameras newly installed above the blackboard; they would now be under full-time surveillance in their lessons. “Previously when I had classes that I didn’t like very much, I would be lazy and maybe take naps,” a student told the local news, “but I don’t dare be distracted after the cameras were installed.” The head teacher explained that the system could read seven states of emotion on students’ faces: neutral, disgust, surprise, anger, fear, happiness and sadness. If the kids slacked, the teacher was alerted. “It’s like a pair of mystery eyes are constantly watching me,” the student told reporters.
The previous year, China’s state council had launched a plan for the role AI could play in the future of the country. Underpinning it were a set of beliefs: that AI can “harmonise” Chinese society; that for it to do so, the government should store data on every citizen; that companies, not the state, were best positioned to innovate; that no company should refuse access to the government to its data. In education, the paper called for new adaptive online learning systems powered by big data, and “all-encompassing ubiquitous intelligent environments” – or smart schools.
At AIAED, a conference in Beijing hosted by Squirrel AI, which I attended in May 2019, classroom surveillance was one of the most discussed topics – but the speakers tended to be more concerned about the technical question of how to optimise the effectiveness of facial and bodily monitoring technologies in the classroom, rather than the darker implications of collecting unprecedented amounts of data about children. These ethical questions are becoming increasingly important, with schools from India to the US currently trialling facial monitoring. In the UK, AI is being used today for things like monitoring student wellbeing, automating assessment and even in inspecting schools. Ben Williamson of the Centre for Research in Digital Education explains that this risks encoding biases or errors into the system and raises obvious privacy issues. “Now the school and university might be said to be studying their students too,” he told me.
While cameras in the classroom might outrage many parents in the UK or US, Lenora Chu, author of an influential book about the Chinese education system, argues that in China anything that improves a child’s learning tends to be viewed positively by parents. Squirrel AI even offers them the chance to watch footage of their child’s tutoring sessions. “There’s not that idea here that technology is bad,” said Chu, who moved from the US to Shanghai 10 years ago.
Rose Luckin suggested to me that a platform like Squirrel AI’s could one day mean an end to China’s notoriously punishing gaokao college entrance exam, which takes place for two days every June and largely determines a student’s education and employment prospects. If technology tracked a student throughout their school days, logging every keystroke, knowledge point and facial twitch, then the perfect record of their abilities on file could make such testing obsolete. Yet a system like this could also furnish the Chinese state – or a US tech company – with an eternal ledger of every step in a child’s development. It is not hard to imagine the grim uses to which this information could be put – for instance, if your behaviour in school was used to judge, or predict, your trustworthiness as an adult.
Students leaving a gaokao college entrance exam in Hangzhou, China. Photograph: Imaginechina/Rex/Shutterstock
On the one hand, said Chu, the CCP wants to use AI to better prepare young people for the future economy, and to close the achievement gap between rural and urban schools. To this end, companies like Squirrel AI receive government support, such as access to prime office space in top business districts. At the same time, the CCP, as the state council put it, sees AI as “opportunity of the millennium” for “social construction”. That is, social control. The ability of AI to “grasp group cognition and psychological changes in a timely manner” through the surveillance of people’s movements, spending and other behaviours means it can play “an irreplaceable role in effectively maintaining social stability”.
The surveillance state is already penetrating deep into people’s lives. In 2019, there was a significant spike in China in the registration of patents for facial recognition and surveillance technology. All new mobile phones in China must now be registered via a facial scan. At the hotels I stayed in, Chinese citizens handed over their ID cards and checked in using face scanners. On the high-speed train to Beijing, the announcer repeatedly warned travellers to abide by the rules in order to maintain their personal credit. The notorious social credit system, which has been under trial in a handful of Chinese cities ahead of an expected nationwide roll out this year, awards or detracts points from an individual’s trustworthiness score, which affects their ability to travel and borrow money, among other things.
The result, explained Chu, is that all these interventions exert a subtle control over what people think and say. “You sense how the wind is blowing,” she told me. For the 12 million Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang, however, that control is anything but subtle. Police checkpoints, complete with facial scanners, are ubiquitous. All mobile phones must have Jingwang (“clean net”) app installed, allowing the government to monitor your movements and browsing. Iris and fingerprint scans are required to access health services. As many as 1.5 million Uighurs, including children, have been interned at some point in a re-education camp in the interests of “harmony”.
As we shape the use of AI in education, it’s likely that AI will shape us too. Jiang Xueqin, an education researcher from Chengdu, is sceptical that it will be as revolutionary as proponents claim. “Parents are paying for a drug,” he told me over the phone. He thought tutoring companies such as New Oriental, TAL and Squirrel AI were simply preying on parents’ anxieties about their kids’ performance in exams, and only succeeding because test preparation was the easiest element of education to automate – a closed system with limited variables that allowed for optimisation. Jiang wasn’t impressed with the progress made, or the way that it engaged every child in a desperate race to conform to the measures of success imposed by the system.
One student I met at the learning centre in Hangzhou, Zhang Hen, seemed to have a deep desire to learn about the world – she told me how she loved Qu Yuan, a Tang dynasty romantic poet, and how she was a fan of Harry Potter – but that wasn’t the reason she was here. Her goal was much simpler: she had come to the centre to boost her test scores. That may seem disappointing to idealists who want education to offer so much more, but Zhang was realistic about the demands of the Chinese education system. She had tough exams that she needed to pass. A scripted system that helped her efficiently master the content of the high school entrance exam was exactly what she wanted.
On stage at AIAED, Tom Mitchell had presented a more ambitious vision for adaptive learning that went far beyond helping students cram for mindless tests. Much of what he was most excited by was possible only in theory, but his enthusiasm was palpable. As appealing as his optimism was, though, I felt unconvinced. It was clear that adaptive technologies might improve certain types of learning, but it was equally obvious that they might narrow the aims of education and provide new tools to restrict our freedom.
Li insists that one day his system will help all young people to flourish creatively. Though he allows that for now an expert human teacher still holds an edge over a robot, he is confident that AI will soon be good enough to evaluate and reply to students’ oral responses. In less than five years, Li imagines training Squirrel AI’s platform with a list of every conceivable question and every possible response, weighting an algorithm to favour those labelled “creative”. “That thing is very easy to do,” he said, “like tagging cats.”
For Li, learning has always been like that – like tagging cats. But there’s a growing consensus that our brains don’t work like computers. Whereas a machine must crunch through millions of images to be able to identify a cat as the collection of “features” that are present only in those images labelled “cat” (two triangular ears, four legs, two eyes, fur, etc), a human child can grasp the concept of “cat” from just a few real life examples, thanks to our innate ability to understand things symbolically. Where machines can’t compute meaning, our minds thrive on it. The adaptive advantage of our brains is that they learn continually through all of our senses by interacting with the environment, our culture and, above all, other people.
Li told me that even if AI fulfilled all of its promise, human teachers would still play a crucial role helping kids learn social skills. At Squirrel AI’s HQ, which occupies three floors of a gleaming tower next door to Microsoft and Mobike in Shanghai, I met some of the company’s young teachers. Each sat at a work console in a vast office space, headphones on, eyes focused on a laptop screen, their desks decorated with plastic pot plants and waving cats. As they monitored the dashboards of up to six students simultaneously, the face of a young learner would appear on the screen, asking for help, either via a chat box or through a video link. The teachers reminded me of workers in the gig economy, the Uber drivers of education. When I logged on to try out a Squirrel English lesson for myself, the experience was good, but my tutor seemed to be teaching to a script.
Squirrel AI’s head of communications, Joleen Liang, showed me photos from a recent trip she had taken to the remote mountains of Henan, to deliver laptops to disadvantaged students. Without access to the adaptive technology, their education would be a little worse. It was a reminder that Squirrel AI’s platform, like those of its competitors worldwide, doesn’t have to be better than the best human teachers – to improve people’s lives, it just needs to be good enough, at the right price, to supplement what we’ve got. The problem is that it is hard to see technology companies stopping there. For better and worse, their ambitions are bigger. “We could make a lot of geniuses,” Li told me.
On the one hand, said Chu, the CCP wants to use AI to better prepare young people for the future economy, and to close the achievement gap between rural and urban schools. To this end, companies like Squirrel AI receive government support, such as access to prime office space in top business districts. At the same time, the CCP, as the state council put it, sees AI as “opportunity of the millennium” for “social construction”. That is, social control. The ability of AI to “grasp group cognition and psychological changes in a timely manner” through the surveillance of people’s movements, spending and other behaviours means it can play “an irreplaceable role in effectively maintaining social stability”.
The surveillance state is already penetrating deep into people’s lives. In 2019, there was a significant spike in China in the registration of patents for facial recognition and surveillance technology. All new mobile phones in China must now be registered via a facial scan. At the hotels I stayed in, Chinese citizens handed over their ID cards and checked in using face scanners. On the high-speed train to Beijing, the announcer repeatedly warned travellers to abide by the rules in order to maintain their personal credit. The notorious social credit system, which has been under trial in a handful of Chinese cities ahead of an expected nationwide roll out this year, awards or detracts points from an individual’s trustworthiness score, which affects their ability to travel and borrow money, among other things.
The result, explained Chu, is that all these interventions exert a subtle control over what people think and say. “You sense how the wind is blowing,” she told me. For the 12 million Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang, however, that control is anything but subtle. Police checkpoints, complete with facial scanners, are ubiquitous. All mobile phones must have Jingwang (“clean net”) app installed, allowing the government to monitor your movements and browsing. Iris and fingerprint scans are required to access health services. As many as 1.5 million Uighurs, including children, have been interned at some point in a re-education camp in the interests of “harmony”.
As we shape the use of AI in education, it’s likely that AI will shape us too. Jiang Xueqin, an education researcher from Chengdu, is sceptical that it will be as revolutionary as proponents claim. “Parents are paying for a drug,” he told me over the phone. He thought tutoring companies such as New Oriental, TAL and Squirrel AI were simply preying on parents’ anxieties about their kids’ performance in exams, and only succeeding because test preparation was the easiest element of education to automate – a closed system with limited variables that allowed for optimisation. Jiang wasn’t impressed with the progress made, or the way that it engaged every child in a desperate race to conform to the measures of success imposed by the system.
One student I met at the learning centre in Hangzhou, Zhang Hen, seemed to have a deep desire to learn about the world – she told me how she loved Qu Yuan, a Tang dynasty romantic poet, and how she was a fan of Harry Potter – but that wasn’t the reason she was here. Her goal was much simpler: she had come to the centre to boost her test scores. That may seem disappointing to idealists who want education to offer so much more, but Zhang was realistic about the demands of the Chinese education system. She had tough exams that she needed to pass. A scripted system that helped her efficiently master the content of the high school entrance exam was exactly what she wanted.
On stage at AIAED, Tom Mitchell had presented a more ambitious vision for adaptive learning that went far beyond helping students cram for mindless tests. Much of what he was most excited by was possible only in theory, but his enthusiasm was palpable. As appealing as his optimism was, though, I felt unconvinced. It was clear that adaptive technologies might improve certain types of learning, but it was equally obvious that they might narrow the aims of education and provide new tools to restrict our freedom.
Li insists that one day his system will help all young people to flourish creatively. Though he allows that for now an expert human teacher still holds an edge over a robot, he is confident that AI will soon be good enough to evaluate and reply to students’ oral responses. In less than five years, Li imagines training Squirrel AI’s platform with a list of every conceivable question and every possible response, weighting an algorithm to favour those labelled “creative”. “That thing is very easy to do,” he said, “like tagging cats.”
For Li, learning has always been like that – like tagging cats. But there’s a growing consensus that our brains don’t work like computers. Whereas a machine must crunch through millions of images to be able to identify a cat as the collection of “features” that are present only in those images labelled “cat” (two triangular ears, four legs, two eyes, fur, etc), a human child can grasp the concept of “cat” from just a few real life examples, thanks to our innate ability to understand things symbolically. Where machines can’t compute meaning, our minds thrive on it. The adaptive advantage of our brains is that they learn continually through all of our senses by interacting with the environment, our culture and, above all, other people.
Li told me that even if AI fulfilled all of its promise, human teachers would still play a crucial role helping kids learn social skills. At Squirrel AI’s HQ, which occupies three floors of a gleaming tower next door to Microsoft and Mobike in Shanghai, I met some of the company’s young teachers. Each sat at a work console in a vast office space, headphones on, eyes focused on a laptop screen, their desks decorated with plastic pot plants and waving cats. As they monitored the dashboards of up to six students simultaneously, the face of a young learner would appear on the screen, asking for help, either via a chat box or through a video link. The teachers reminded me of workers in the gig economy, the Uber drivers of education. When I logged on to try out a Squirrel English lesson for myself, the experience was good, but my tutor seemed to be teaching to a script.
Squirrel AI’s head of communications, Joleen Liang, showed me photos from a recent trip she had taken to the remote mountains of Henan, to deliver laptops to disadvantaged students. Without access to the adaptive technology, their education would be a little worse. It was a reminder that Squirrel AI’s platform, like those of its competitors worldwide, doesn’t have to be better than the best human teachers – to improve people’s lives, it just needs to be good enough, at the right price, to supplement what we’ve got. The problem is that it is hard to see technology companies stopping there. For better and worse, their ambitions are bigger. “We could make a lot of geniuses,” Li told me.
Friday 15 September 2017
Pakistan's Intelligence Agencies: The Inside Story
Abbas Nasir from the Dawn archives of 1991
Over the last two decades, the role and scale of Pakistan's intelligence agencies has grown over and above their prescribed functions, to the extent that their operations, often undercover and at odds with even each other, have earned them the reputation of being a "State within a State".
Expanding the theatre of their operations to cover major foreign and domestic policy areas, the workings of the three key intelligence agencies, the ISI, the MI and the IB, have assumed more controversial proportions than ever before.
On a freezing December day in Islamabad, MNA Dr Imran Farooq, ordered the maintenance staff of the MNA hostel to service his room heater. The staff took down the gas heater, only to discover a device that didn't belong there taped to its back. Noticing that there were batteries attached to it, they immediately became alarmed and summoned the bomb disposal squad.
Being experts at their job, the members of the bomb squad soon allayed the perturbed MNA's fears that the device was not a bomb of any sort. Instead, they said, they had discovered a powerful transmitter that was being used to bug the MQM MNA's room.
While the federal interior minister was quick to order an inquiry into the affair, the MQM blamed the former PPP government for bugging Dr Farooq's room. The real culprit, however, is still to be identified.
A few days earlier, a heated debate in parliament had focused on the activities of our intelligence agencies as being "rather over-extended”. As the range of intelligence operations came under discussion, the fact that their agencies were maintaining files and tapes – not only on all politicians in the country, but many non-political civilians as well – drew the wrath of many MNAs of all political shades. Finally, Speaker Gohar Ayub tried to round up the debate, not only by ordering a select committee to look into the matter, but also admitting that “we have all been the target of intelligence agencies.” He even quipped that in the seventies, he knew that he had been code-named ‘Sabra-7’, by the intelligence agencies, which were constantly shadowing him.
Clearly, one constant factor emerged from all the grievances aired in parliament — everyone, under every regime, had either ordered spying on the opposition or had themselves been the target of such ‘special attention’. What was debated in the open forum of the National Assembly, however, is only the tip of the iceberg, as far as the scope and direction of the operation that the intelligence units now take under their purview.
The other thing that can be said with certainty about them is that the intelligence set up in the country is one of the best organised in the business, functioning like a well-oiled, super-efficient machine.
National security theorists in Rawalpindi argue that such a setup is vital to any country which is placed in Pakistan’s strategic geo-political situation. “Given the hostility that the very creation of the country generated and the consequent environment in the subcontinent, Pakistan’s security concerns are legitimate and genuine,” says a retired officer who has served in one of the key intelligence cells of the country.
While this view links the country’s security, and even survival, to the efficiency of its intelligence agencies, it is becoming increasingly clear that the civilian psyche on the other hand, can never appreciate the thorough institutionalisation of these agencies in the running of foreign and domestic policies. One of the reasons for this is because, by their very definition, secret intelligence agencies do not subscribe to the open way of consultative or accountable operation that is central to any democratic system.
The mushroom growth in the size and scope of intelligence agency activities may be linked, to some extent, to the role they have been assigned in Pakistan’s short but eventful history. The events of the last 43 years teach us that the line between the concession of an inch and the taking of a mile has become very thin in this country.
The evolution of the ISI (the Inter-services Intelligence Directorate) in its present form can be traced to the assumption of office by former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. He took over power after the disastrous 1971 war with India, which saw the Pakistan defence forces take a humiliating beating, followed by the creation of Bangladesh.
"You see, Bhutto had served as Ayub’s foreign minister. His education and orientation made him develop an international vision. He realised that an intelligence agency organised on modern scientific lines would enhance foreign policy options at his command,” says an ex-army officer, as he explains the rise of the ISI from his viewpoint.
“Although the ISI existed well before Bhutto came to power, it grew tremendously at that point, because the prime minister sought a greater role in the region for Pakistan. In fact, as the country embarked on its nuclear programme, more and more funds and leeway came the ISI's way," says another officer who served in a senior position during the Bhutto years before retiring in the late seventies.
Another interesting insight is offered by a defence expert. According to him, Bhutto chose the ISI to be the premier agency because he could accomplish two tasks with it. The first related to the country's foreign policy and the second to self preservation, as only a services intelligence agency could look into the army itself and keep Bhutto abreast with the mood and the sentiment in the forces.
This part of history also had its ironical twists. It is widely believed that Bhutto promoted General Zia as the army chief, superseding several far more senior and well-reputed lieutenant generals, because the DG of the ISI had recommended him as the most “reliable and loyal” choice for the coveted post.
It was no coincidence then, that when Bhutto was overthrown, Lt General Ghulam Jilani was retained as the DG of the ISI. Jilani remained one of the most trusted Zia lieutenants for a number of years, both as DG and later as the governor of Punjab.
While Jilani was the governor of Punjab, he made a decision that would create obstacles in the path of the PPP for years to come. He plucked a young industrialist from relative obscurity and nurtured him as a civilian alternative to the PPP leadership. The young man would be prime minister one day. To this day, Jilani remains Nawaz Sharif’s key mentor.
However, many army officers agree that much of the disrepute that came the ISI's way also dates back to the post-Bhutto years. General Zia naturally saw the PPP as an arch enemy which had to be contained at all costs.
Consequently, the whole state apparatus, and the key intelligence agencies in particular, were all geared up to attain this objective. To this end, the agencies were given a full clearance to operate as they chose, so that very soon their reputation as 'surveillance agencies' catapulted to that of a much higher-profile operation that came to be labelled and feared as 'the state within a state'. Midnight knocks, arrests, extorted confessions and phone taps became the order of the day.
The man who directed a major part of this operation from his relatively modest and obscure office in the ISI headquarters in Islamabad in the eighties was a certain Brigadier Imtiaz Ahmad, better known in the army circles both for his cunning and the colour of his eyes, as 'BiIIa' (the cat).
As a young colonel, Imtiaz Ahmed was in charge of the ISI Karachi Det (detachment) when Bhutto was overthrown. He led the famous raid on Bhutto’s 70 Clifton residence, which led to the discovery of some ‘‘important and incriminating” documents. Imtiaz, belonging to a family from Mianwali that was close to General Jilani, reportedly soon earned Zia's admiration and trust.
He was elevated to the influential position of assistant director-general (internal security) at the ISI and headed the dreaded political cell there for several years. Imtiaz wielded enormous power and at times was said to have even bypassed his own DG to report directly to Zia.
Knowledgeable quarters credit Imtiaz with masterminding the idea that would later cause irreparable damage to the PPP. Slowly but surely, he built up an image of the PPP that would convince the whole defence set-up that the Benazir Bhutto-led party was a national security threat. In fact, it has often been said in army circles that it was his national security threat perception, coupled with the blundering style of government, that resulted in Benazir's sacking as the prime minister years later.
ISI observers claim that for many years Imtiaz remained the eyes and the ears of the establishment and watched every move that Benazir made. In fact, sources close to General Zia say that Imtiaz, a master at fabricating evidence, once even sought the general's permission to plant certain photographs in the newspapers that would bring the PPP leader into disrepute. Despite his known antipathy for the PPP, Zia was reportedly firm in denying permission for this excess and did not allow manufactured photographs to be published.
The growth of tile ISI, however, did not remain restricted to the regional role that Bhutto sought for it, nor did it expand solely on the basis of the role that Zia assigned to it in domestic politics. In 1979, Soviet troops marched into Afghanistan, and Pakistan suddenly found itself as a frontline state in the US-Soviet Cold War.
With the exit of Democratic President Jimmy Carter and the arrival on the scene of Republican Ronald Reagan, the US stepped up a covert operation to organise resistance in Afghanistan. By the mid-eighties, this operation had become a multibillion dollar exercise. Although the CIA was solely handling the Washington end, the ISI became actively involved at the Pakistan end of it and neatly transformed itself into a major conduit for arms and money earmarked for the mujahideen.
But again, it was not only these changed circumstances that propelled the ISI into this task. To some extent, the agency was prepared for it already. During the Bhutto years, for instance, after the prime minister had identified the western neighbour as a threat that had to be addressed, the ISI had found and nurtured a young Kabul engineering graduate named Gulbadin Hekmatyar. The ISI not only funded and armed Hekmatyar, but also organised his line of communication inside Afghanistan.
All this manoeuvring was to be used to exert pressure on any Kabul government that harboured any wish of rekindling the Pakhtunistan issue. And these pressure tactics had worked wonders when they were applied to President Daud in the seventies. In a quick volte-face from the belligerent posture he had adopted, Daud had rushed to Murree for talks with Bhutto and had promptly made very conciliatory noises.
However, when the CIA-ISI tie-up went into effect, the Pakistani agency slowly acquired a far more sophisticated and scientific outlook. It is said that some officials, including the then DG, Lt General Akhtar Abdur Rehman, benefited in more than one way from the covert operation. In fact, the explosion at Ojhri camp (the munitions depot for the Afghan resistance in Rawalpindi) was described by some quarters as having occurred because 'stock taking' measures were on their way after charges of pilferage.
The inquiry ordered by the then prime minister, Muhammad Khan Junejo, into the incident, according to knowledgeable quarters, was one of the reasons for his undoing. The major factor, perhaps, was the very system that General Zia had visualised for the country in the mid-eighties. This system not only created friction between the parties that shared power in the country, but also contributed to the growth of intelligence agencies which worked at cross purposes with one another.
Although Junejo was handpicked by Zia to be the prime minister, the man soon showed that he had a mind of his own. As Junejo's ambitions grew, so did the Directorate of the Intelligence Bureau (DIB), the civilian intelligence agency which had previously played second fiddle to the ISI. Although the stated functions of the DIB assign it an important role, for years it had suffered neglect both in terms of staffing, funding and orientation. All that the rulers, including Bhutto, assigned to the DIB was the policing of opposing politicians.
Under Junejo, the DIB chief, Rathore turned the once sleepy agency into a vibrant organisation, but all its counter-intelligence was restricted to looking out for anti-Junejo government moves rather than anti-state actions. The irony, of course, with intelligence agencies the world over, is that, though they work for the same country, they often become each other's bitterest rivals. The same was the case with the DIB. It embarked on an ambitious exercise in which it started tapping the telephones of the Army House – where General Zia lived – to the extent that the DIB was monitoring every move made by Zia and the members of government close to him.
For its part, the ISI was monitoring Junejo and his cronies. And though by the time the Ojhri blast took place, General Rehman was serving as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee, he still wielded considerable influence over the ISI. Even though Major General Hamid Gul had been appointed as DG of the ISI, General Rehman was still running the Afghan wing of the ISI. Therefore, Junejo’s inquiry into the Ojhri explosion so angered Rehman that, apparently, he presented Zia with doctored tapes of Junejo’s alleged phone conversations. Sources say that despite the fact that until then Zia had been willing to tolerate Junejo, these tapes quickly changed his mind and he finally decided to get rid of his prime minister.
Months after Junejo's sacking, both Zia and Rehman died in the Bahawalpur crash. But their legacy remained, to the extent that the system that Zia had evolved continued to remain intact, in the sense that the intelligence agencies continued to transcend the parameters of the growing role assigned to them.
Although Brigadier Imtiaz had operated in obscurity until then, his name exploded to the fore as he became instrumental in the formation of the IJI before the 1988 polls and pioneered the concept of one-to-one contests in the elections. An expert in ‘psych-war ', he was the main architect of the IJI election strategy, to the extent that image-building slogans such as “jaag Punjabi jaag, teray pag noon laga daag” were attributed to his genius.
When Ms Bhutto took over as prime minister, she insisted on the removal of Brigadier Imtiaz from the ISI. Naively perhaps, she forced the appointment of a retired Lt. General, Shamsur Rehman Kallue, in place of Hamid Gul, who was promoted and given command of the prestigious armoured corps in Multan. Having a man of her choice posted as DG of the ISI and naming a retired major, Masud Sharif — who was described as a "blundering fool" — to head DIB, she relaxed. Obviously, she had not realised that the agencies that had been described as a 'state within a state' could hardly be neutralised through a couple of postings and transfers.
Moreover, she was never even chastened by the fact that, instead of her nominees, a couple of serving officers nominated by the COAS General Mirza Aslam Beg, remained in charge of the Afghan and Kashmir policies.
Subsequently, whatever was removed from the jurisdiction of the ISI after Kallue took over, was soon thrown into the lap of the military intelligence. The military intelligence immediately expanded its theatre of operations, as Benazir sought to cut the ISI to size. In effect, therefore, no qualitative change really occurred in the system of the intelligence units that had become used to conducting independent foreign, and to some extent, domestic policy operations.
However, the Benazir Bhutto government did make one decision of real consequence. It appointed a committee headed by a former chief of air staff, Air Chief Marshal (retd) Zulfikar Ali Khan, to look into the working of the intelligence agencies, and to suggest measures to delink them from politics as well as to improve their functioning. But the report of this committee, which was reportedly compiled after the air marshal interviewed scores of intelligence personnel, is now unlikely to see the light of day in the changed circumstances.
In the present situation, however, it is not clear what roles are being assigned to the three major agencies. But with the appointment of Brigadier Imtiaz Ahmad as the chief of the IB, it can be surmised that the establishment still sees the PPP as a major threat.
What one can hope for is that the days of the midnight knock do not return to Pakistan. The intelligence agencies, which now have to counter the Raw-Mossad nexus – particularly in the regional nuclear context – could do well to draw a clear distinction between anti-government and anti-state activities.
The crucial question that still needs to be addressed is whether these agencies operate under the watchful eyes of an elected government or are they still so strong that they are themselves instrumental in installing or toppling such governments.
Over the last two decades, the role and scale of Pakistan's intelligence agencies has grown over and above their prescribed functions, to the extent that their operations, often undercover and at odds with even each other, have earned them the reputation of being a "State within a State".
Expanding the theatre of their operations to cover major foreign and domestic policy areas, the workings of the three key intelligence agencies, the ISI, the MI and the IB, have assumed more controversial proportions than ever before.
On a freezing December day in Islamabad, MNA Dr Imran Farooq, ordered the maintenance staff of the MNA hostel to service his room heater. The staff took down the gas heater, only to discover a device that didn't belong there taped to its back. Noticing that there were batteries attached to it, they immediately became alarmed and summoned the bomb disposal squad.
Being experts at their job, the members of the bomb squad soon allayed the perturbed MNA's fears that the device was not a bomb of any sort. Instead, they said, they had discovered a powerful transmitter that was being used to bug the MQM MNA's room.
While the federal interior minister was quick to order an inquiry into the affair, the MQM blamed the former PPP government for bugging Dr Farooq's room. The real culprit, however, is still to be identified.
A few days earlier, a heated debate in parliament had focused on the activities of our intelligence agencies as being "rather over-extended”. As the range of intelligence operations came under discussion, the fact that their agencies were maintaining files and tapes – not only on all politicians in the country, but many non-political civilians as well – drew the wrath of many MNAs of all political shades. Finally, Speaker Gohar Ayub tried to round up the debate, not only by ordering a select committee to look into the matter, but also admitting that “we have all been the target of intelligence agencies.” He even quipped that in the seventies, he knew that he had been code-named ‘Sabra-7’, by the intelligence agencies, which were constantly shadowing him.
Clearly, one constant factor emerged from all the grievances aired in parliament — everyone, under every regime, had either ordered spying on the opposition or had themselves been the target of such ‘special attention’. What was debated in the open forum of the National Assembly, however, is only the tip of the iceberg, as far as the scope and direction of the operation that the intelligence units now take under their purview.
The other thing that can be said with certainty about them is that the intelligence set up in the country is one of the best organised in the business, functioning like a well-oiled, super-efficient machine.
National security theorists in Rawalpindi argue that such a setup is vital to any country which is placed in Pakistan’s strategic geo-political situation. “Given the hostility that the very creation of the country generated and the consequent environment in the subcontinent, Pakistan’s security concerns are legitimate and genuine,” says a retired officer who has served in one of the key intelligence cells of the country.
While this view links the country’s security, and even survival, to the efficiency of its intelligence agencies, it is becoming increasingly clear that the civilian psyche on the other hand, can never appreciate the thorough institutionalisation of these agencies in the running of foreign and domestic policies. One of the reasons for this is because, by their very definition, secret intelligence agencies do not subscribe to the open way of consultative or accountable operation that is central to any democratic system.
The mushroom growth in the size and scope of intelligence agency activities may be linked, to some extent, to the role they have been assigned in Pakistan’s short but eventful history. The events of the last 43 years teach us that the line between the concession of an inch and the taking of a mile has become very thin in this country.
The evolution of the ISI (the Inter-services Intelligence Directorate) in its present form can be traced to the assumption of office by former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. He took over power after the disastrous 1971 war with India, which saw the Pakistan defence forces take a humiliating beating, followed by the creation of Bangladesh.
"You see, Bhutto had served as Ayub’s foreign minister. His education and orientation made him develop an international vision. He realised that an intelligence agency organised on modern scientific lines would enhance foreign policy options at his command,” says an ex-army officer, as he explains the rise of the ISI from his viewpoint.
“Although the ISI existed well before Bhutto came to power, it grew tremendously at that point, because the prime minister sought a greater role in the region for Pakistan. In fact, as the country embarked on its nuclear programme, more and more funds and leeway came the ISI's way," says another officer who served in a senior position during the Bhutto years before retiring in the late seventies.
Another interesting insight is offered by a defence expert. According to him, Bhutto chose the ISI to be the premier agency because he could accomplish two tasks with it. The first related to the country's foreign policy and the second to self preservation, as only a services intelligence agency could look into the army itself and keep Bhutto abreast with the mood and the sentiment in the forces.
This part of history also had its ironical twists. It is widely believed that Bhutto promoted General Zia as the army chief, superseding several far more senior and well-reputed lieutenant generals, because the DG of the ISI had recommended him as the most “reliable and loyal” choice for the coveted post.
It was no coincidence then, that when Bhutto was overthrown, Lt General Ghulam Jilani was retained as the DG of the ISI. Jilani remained one of the most trusted Zia lieutenants for a number of years, both as DG and later as the governor of Punjab.
While Jilani was the governor of Punjab, he made a decision that would create obstacles in the path of the PPP for years to come. He plucked a young industrialist from relative obscurity and nurtured him as a civilian alternative to the PPP leadership. The young man would be prime minister one day. To this day, Jilani remains Nawaz Sharif’s key mentor.
However, many army officers agree that much of the disrepute that came the ISI's way also dates back to the post-Bhutto years. General Zia naturally saw the PPP as an arch enemy which had to be contained at all costs.
Consequently, the whole state apparatus, and the key intelligence agencies in particular, were all geared up to attain this objective. To this end, the agencies were given a full clearance to operate as they chose, so that very soon their reputation as 'surveillance agencies' catapulted to that of a much higher-profile operation that came to be labelled and feared as 'the state within a state'. Midnight knocks, arrests, extorted confessions and phone taps became the order of the day.
The man who directed a major part of this operation from his relatively modest and obscure office in the ISI headquarters in Islamabad in the eighties was a certain Brigadier Imtiaz Ahmad, better known in the army circles both for his cunning and the colour of his eyes, as 'BiIIa' (the cat).
As a young colonel, Imtiaz Ahmed was in charge of the ISI Karachi Det (detachment) when Bhutto was overthrown. He led the famous raid on Bhutto’s 70 Clifton residence, which led to the discovery of some ‘‘important and incriminating” documents. Imtiaz, belonging to a family from Mianwali that was close to General Jilani, reportedly soon earned Zia's admiration and trust.
He was elevated to the influential position of assistant director-general (internal security) at the ISI and headed the dreaded political cell there for several years. Imtiaz wielded enormous power and at times was said to have even bypassed his own DG to report directly to Zia.
Knowledgeable quarters credit Imtiaz with masterminding the idea that would later cause irreparable damage to the PPP. Slowly but surely, he built up an image of the PPP that would convince the whole defence set-up that the Benazir Bhutto-led party was a national security threat. In fact, it has often been said in army circles that it was his national security threat perception, coupled with the blundering style of government, that resulted in Benazir's sacking as the prime minister years later.
ISI observers claim that for many years Imtiaz remained the eyes and the ears of the establishment and watched every move that Benazir made. In fact, sources close to General Zia say that Imtiaz, a master at fabricating evidence, once even sought the general's permission to plant certain photographs in the newspapers that would bring the PPP leader into disrepute. Despite his known antipathy for the PPP, Zia was reportedly firm in denying permission for this excess and did not allow manufactured photographs to be published.
The growth of tile ISI, however, did not remain restricted to the regional role that Bhutto sought for it, nor did it expand solely on the basis of the role that Zia assigned to it in domestic politics. In 1979, Soviet troops marched into Afghanistan, and Pakistan suddenly found itself as a frontline state in the US-Soviet Cold War.
With the exit of Democratic President Jimmy Carter and the arrival on the scene of Republican Ronald Reagan, the US stepped up a covert operation to organise resistance in Afghanistan. By the mid-eighties, this operation had become a multibillion dollar exercise. Although the CIA was solely handling the Washington end, the ISI became actively involved at the Pakistan end of it and neatly transformed itself into a major conduit for arms and money earmarked for the mujahideen.
But again, it was not only these changed circumstances that propelled the ISI into this task. To some extent, the agency was prepared for it already. During the Bhutto years, for instance, after the prime minister had identified the western neighbour as a threat that had to be addressed, the ISI had found and nurtured a young Kabul engineering graduate named Gulbadin Hekmatyar. The ISI not only funded and armed Hekmatyar, but also organised his line of communication inside Afghanistan.
All this manoeuvring was to be used to exert pressure on any Kabul government that harboured any wish of rekindling the Pakhtunistan issue. And these pressure tactics had worked wonders when they were applied to President Daud in the seventies. In a quick volte-face from the belligerent posture he had adopted, Daud had rushed to Murree for talks with Bhutto and had promptly made very conciliatory noises.
However, when the CIA-ISI tie-up went into effect, the Pakistani agency slowly acquired a far more sophisticated and scientific outlook. It is said that some officials, including the then DG, Lt General Akhtar Abdur Rehman, benefited in more than one way from the covert operation. In fact, the explosion at Ojhri camp (the munitions depot for the Afghan resistance in Rawalpindi) was described by some quarters as having occurred because 'stock taking' measures were on their way after charges of pilferage.
The inquiry ordered by the then prime minister, Muhammad Khan Junejo, into the incident, according to knowledgeable quarters, was one of the reasons for his undoing. The major factor, perhaps, was the very system that General Zia had visualised for the country in the mid-eighties. This system not only created friction between the parties that shared power in the country, but also contributed to the growth of intelligence agencies which worked at cross purposes with one another.
Although Junejo was handpicked by Zia to be the prime minister, the man soon showed that he had a mind of his own. As Junejo's ambitions grew, so did the Directorate of the Intelligence Bureau (DIB), the civilian intelligence agency which had previously played second fiddle to the ISI. Although the stated functions of the DIB assign it an important role, for years it had suffered neglect both in terms of staffing, funding and orientation. All that the rulers, including Bhutto, assigned to the DIB was the policing of opposing politicians.
Under Junejo, the DIB chief, Rathore turned the once sleepy agency into a vibrant organisation, but all its counter-intelligence was restricted to looking out for anti-Junejo government moves rather than anti-state actions. The irony, of course, with intelligence agencies the world over, is that, though they work for the same country, they often become each other's bitterest rivals. The same was the case with the DIB. It embarked on an ambitious exercise in which it started tapping the telephones of the Army House – where General Zia lived – to the extent that the DIB was monitoring every move made by Zia and the members of government close to him.
For its part, the ISI was monitoring Junejo and his cronies. And though by the time the Ojhri blast took place, General Rehman was serving as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee, he still wielded considerable influence over the ISI. Even though Major General Hamid Gul had been appointed as DG of the ISI, General Rehman was still running the Afghan wing of the ISI. Therefore, Junejo’s inquiry into the Ojhri explosion so angered Rehman that, apparently, he presented Zia with doctored tapes of Junejo’s alleged phone conversations. Sources say that despite the fact that until then Zia had been willing to tolerate Junejo, these tapes quickly changed his mind and he finally decided to get rid of his prime minister.
Months after Junejo's sacking, both Zia and Rehman died in the Bahawalpur crash. But their legacy remained, to the extent that the system that Zia had evolved continued to remain intact, in the sense that the intelligence agencies continued to transcend the parameters of the growing role assigned to them.
Although Brigadier Imtiaz had operated in obscurity until then, his name exploded to the fore as he became instrumental in the formation of the IJI before the 1988 polls and pioneered the concept of one-to-one contests in the elections. An expert in ‘psych-war ', he was the main architect of the IJI election strategy, to the extent that image-building slogans such as “jaag Punjabi jaag, teray pag noon laga daag” were attributed to his genius.
When Ms Bhutto took over as prime minister, she insisted on the removal of Brigadier Imtiaz from the ISI. Naively perhaps, she forced the appointment of a retired Lt. General, Shamsur Rehman Kallue, in place of Hamid Gul, who was promoted and given command of the prestigious armoured corps in Multan. Having a man of her choice posted as DG of the ISI and naming a retired major, Masud Sharif — who was described as a "blundering fool" — to head DIB, she relaxed. Obviously, she had not realised that the agencies that had been described as a 'state within a state' could hardly be neutralised through a couple of postings and transfers.
Moreover, she was never even chastened by the fact that, instead of her nominees, a couple of serving officers nominated by the COAS General Mirza Aslam Beg, remained in charge of the Afghan and Kashmir policies.
Subsequently, whatever was removed from the jurisdiction of the ISI after Kallue took over, was soon thrown into the lap of the military intelligence. The military intelligence immediately expanded its theatre of operations, as Benazir sought to cut the ISI to size. In effect, therefore, no qualitative change really occurred in the system of the intelligence units that had become used to conducting independent foreign, and to some extent, domestic policy operations.
However, the Benazir Bhutto government did make one decision of real consequence. It appointed a committee headed by a former chief of air staff, Air Chief Marshal (retd) Zulfikar Ali Khan, to look into the working of the intelligence agencies, and to suggest measures to delink them from politics as well as to improve their functioning. But the report of this committee, which was reportedly compiled after the air marshal interviewed scores of intelligence personnel, is now unlikely to see the light of day in the changed circumstances.
In the present situation, however, it is not clear what roles are being assigned to the three major agencies. But with the appointment of Brigadier Imtiaz Ahmad as the chief of the IB, it can be surmised that the establishment still sees the PPP as a major threat.
What one can hope for is that the days of the midnight knock do not return to Pakistan. The intelligence agencies, which now have to counter the Raw-Mossad nexus – particularly in the regional nuclear context – could do well to draw a clear distinction between anti-government and anti-state activities.
The crucial question that still needs to be addressed is whether these agencies operate under the watchful eyes of an elected government or are they still so strong that they are themselves instrumental in installing or toppling such governments.
Tuesday 20 June 2017
Older men have geekier sons.
Ian Sample in The Guardian
Older men tend to have “geekier” sons who are more aloof, have higher IQs and a more intense focus on their interests than those born to younger fathers, researchers claim.
The finding, which emerged from a study of nearly 8,000 British twins, suggests that having an older father may benefit children and boost their performance in technical subjects at secondary school.
Researchers in the UK and the US analysed questionnaires from 7,781 British twins and scored them according to their non-verbal IQ at 12 years old, as well as parental reports on how focused and socially aloof they were. The scientists then combined these scores into an overall “geek index”.
Magdalena Janecka at King’s College London said the project came about after she and her colleagues had brainstormed what traits and skills helped people to succeed in the modern age. “If you look at who does well in life right now, it’s geeks,” she said.
Drawing on the twins’ records, the scientists found that children born to older fathers tended to score slightly higher on the geek index. For a father aged 25 or younger, the average score of the children was 39.6. That figure rose to 41 in children with fathers aged 35 to 44, and to 47 for those with fathers aged over 50.
The effect was strongest in boys, where the geek index rose by about 1.5 points for every extra five years of paternal age. The age of the children’s mothers seemed to have almost no effect on the geek index.
When the scientists looked at the children’s achievements at school they found that having a high IQ, a tendency to focus intensely and social aloofness were all linked to children taking more technical GCSEs. When children displayed all three traits, the effect was even more pronounced, the researchers write in the journal Translational Psychiatry. Overall, children who were born when their fathers were 50 or older were 32% more likely to achieve two A or A* grades at GCSE than children born to men aged under 25.
Janecka said the study is one of the first to suggest that having an older father can have benefits for a child. Previous work by Janecka and others has found that children born to older men are more at risk of medical conditions including autism and schizophrenia.
The scientists calculate that 57% of the geek index score is inherited, but that figure is likely to vary with age. If right, it suggests that DNA and the environment have roughly an equal share in how geeky someone turns out. Writing in the journal, the researchers speculate that there may be some overlap with genes that contribute to autism and a high score on their index.
If the findings are right, it is unclear why the effect is different in boys and girls. Janecka said that the study may simply have failed to capture how girls display geekiness. “Maybe we aren’t measuring geekiness properly. They may be geeky in a different way to boys,” she said. But it is also possible that whatever averts autism in girls – five times as many males are diagnosed than females – also shields them from the most geeky traits.
Research is under way to recognise why older parents are more likely to have children with particular mental disorders. One theory pinpoints mutations that build up in parents’ sperm and eggs. But with geekiness, the answer could lie in geekier men simply being more likely to delay fatherhood.
“Certain men who delay fatherhood tend to be better educated and have better jobs and a higher geek index and they pass those genetics nto their offspring,” said Janecka. “It causes them to delay fatherhood, but other factors might contribute too.”
Older men tend to have “geekier” sons who are more aloof, have higher IQs and a more intense focus on their interests than those born to younger fathers, researchers claim.
The finding, which emerged from a study of nearly 8,000 British twins, suggests that having an older father may benefit children and boost their performance in technical subjects at secondary school.
Researchers in the UK and the US analysed questionnaires from 7,781 British twins and scored them according to their non-verbal IQ at 12 years old, as well as parental reports on how focused and socially aloof they were. The scientists then combined these scores into an overall “geek index”.
Magdalena Janecka at King’s College London said the project came about after she and her colleagues had brainstormed what traits and skills helped people to succeed in the modern age. “If you look at who does well in life right now, it’s geeks,” she said.
Drawing on the twins’ records, the scientists found that children born to older fathers tended to score slightly higher on the geek index. For a father aged 25 or younger, the average score of the children was 39.6. That figure rose to 41 in children with fathers aged 35 to 44, and to 47 for those with fathers aged over 50.
The effect was strongest in boys, where the geek index rose by about 1.5 points for every extra five years of paternal age. The age of the children’s mothers seemed to have almost no effect on the geek index.
When the scientists looked at the children’s achievements at school they found that having a high IQ, a tendency to focus intensely and social aloofness were all linked to children taking more technical GCSEs. When children displayed all three traits, the effect was even more pronounced, the researchers write in the journal Translational Psychiatry. Overall, children who were born when their fathers were 50 or older were 32% more likely to achieve two A or A* grades at GCSE than children born to men aged under 25.
Janecka said the study is one of the first to suggest that having an older father can have benefits for a child. Previous work by Janecka and others has found that children born to older men are more at risk of medical conditions including autism and schizophrenia.
The scientists calculate that 57% of the geek index score is inherited, but that figure is likely to vary with age. If right, it suggests that DNA and the environment have roughly an equal share in how geeky someone turns out. Writing in the journal, the researchers speculate that there may be some overlap with genes that contribute to autism and a high score on their index.
If the findings are right, it is unclear why the effect is different in boys and girls. Janecka said that the study may simply have failed to capture how girls display geekiness. “Maybe we aren’t measuring geekiness properly. They may be geeky in a different way to boys,” she said. But it is also possible that whatever averts autism in girls – five times as many males are diagnosed than females – also shields them from the most geeky traits.
Research is under way to recognise why older parents are more likely to have children with particular mental disorders. One theory pinpoints mutations that build up in parents’ sperm and eggs. But with geekiness, the answer could lie in geekier men simply being more likely to delay fatherhood.
“Certain men who delay fatherhood tend to be better educated and have better jobs and a higher geek index and they pass those genetics nto their offspring,” said Janecka. “It causes them to delay fatherhood, but other factors might contribute too.”
Tuesday 7 March 2017
Trump is right on Russia
Jawed Naqvi in The Dawn
IT is a strange anomaly. Whenever India or Pakistan, or both, go into the cobra pose, hissing invectives and threatening to decimate each other, including with nuclear weapons, the world cries foul.
When Nawaz Sharif visits Delhi or when Narendra Modi drops in uninvited at a Lahore wedding, Indian and Pakistani peaceniks applaud together with the worried world. Yet, when Donald Trump wants to improve his country’s troubled relations with Vladimir Putin he is pilloried for even making the suggestion.
Granted he is not gender sensitive, that he has wronged and abused women and his mindset is possibly racist, driven by acute Islamophobia. I would liken Russia in this equation to the baby in Trump’s dirty bathtub. The deep state that contrived lies to invade Iraq or exulted in the wrecking of Libya, in cahoots with the media, seems to be facing an existential crisis with Trump’s presidency over his plans to touch base with Putin.
One day Trump excelled himself in his collaring of the deep state, which includes all major parties and the media. He said something to the effect that his country’s image was not exactly squeaky clean when it came to shedding blood around the world. That was his response to a Fox TV question about Putin’s alleged bloodlust as seen in the military operations in Aleppo.
Is the current American president really worse than the marauders of Iraq and Libya?
Trump’s blunt criticism of his country’s savage moments has been at par with Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the priest who baptised Barack Obama’s children. When in a fit of rage over an Israeli assault on Palestinian camps he yelled ‘goddamn America’ Obama cut off ties with the African American priest.
Then suddenly it began to rain scams on Trump. So and so met the Russian ambassador. So and so made eye contact with him. Trump’s attorney general is said to have a racist background. That was forgiven or grudgingly gulped down. Instead his alleged dalliances with Russian diplomats and/or businessmen were picked up for censure.
A wider conspiracy was unleashed to torpedo the new president’s still unwavering plans to improve relations with Putin. BBC dug out dirt on the Russians, which they are good at. Russia was a British quarry, which became America’s bête noire.
Cut to the day when Prime Minister Theresa May sauntered into Washington and Ankara recently and the media said she was fixing business deals. They omitted the fact that both her destinations involved allies who seemed to have lost interest in the old British fear-mongering called Russophobia. Trump’s fascination with Putin was by now legendary and Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan too had shown signs of becoming disenchanted with the British-assigned role of playing an anti-Moscow Sancho Panza.
If we think freely and without the Cold War blinkers, May couldn’t have signed a groundbreaking deal with anybody bilaterally until the fate of Brexit was decided, which could be some years away. Trump looks destined not to last that long.
For Erdogan to become a member of the Russian-Iranian backed peace talks on Syria was a huge somersault by a country that was regarded as a lynchpin to Nato’s Middle East policy. Turkey is no longer insisting on the Syrian president’s head as condition to discuss a future setup in Damascus. Erdogan’s unease with the Americans became more pronounced with the botched coup attempt, which he blamed on Turkish dissidents seated in the US.
It is nearly impossible to believe that May did not discuss her worry about Russia and Putin with Trump and Erdogan. Russia has been a British bugbear for centuries even if Napoleon preceded it and other Europeans in turning an obsession with Russia into an exhausting and costly military expedition.
Russophobia as we know it is a British innovation. It was left to Winston Churchill to give the Cold War a newer variant of an old pursuit. The new seeds were planted in Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech. Then James Bond took over while Alfred Hitchcock also embraced the diabolical imagery of the Russians. Until then, Hollywood had been in hot pursuit of Germans as America’s horns and canines ogres.
Much earlier, before Western democracies were swamped with the Churchillian exhortations against Russia, British governors general and viceroys in India took it upon themselves to deepen and sustain the fear mongering. Delhi’s imposing colonial monument — India Gate — is a testimony to this perpetually induced fear with the rulers of Moscow. All sides of the landmark sandstone monument are lined with thousands of names of Sikh and Muslim soldiers who were sacrificed in the suicidal Afghan wars. May must have seen how Britain’s self-defeating obsession with Russia had dissipated into the brick-batting in Washington D.C. between the Democrats and the Republicans.
Going by usually trustworthy accounts Donald Trump is an unpredictable person, which makes him a dangerous leader of an already error-prone military power. Nevertheless, Noam Chomsky must have shocked the Democrats by suggesting that in his view John Kennedy was the most dangerous of presidents. Trump is lampooned daily, which is as it should be, as an unqualified gatecrasher in the White House. The suggestion, however, implies that the world was somehow better off under George W. Bush and, more worryingly, under his Dr Strangelove-like colleagues — Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. Is Trump really worse than the marauders of Iraq and Libya?
Shorn of any media support in the heart of the land of free speech, Vladimir Putin wrote a piece for the American audiences in The New York Times of Sept 11 2013.
“Relations between us have passed through different stages. We stood against each other during the Cold War. But we were also allies once, and defeated the Nazis together.” Trump believes the two countries should jointly fight a new menace, the militant Islamic State group. His detractors within the deep state somehow seem not to like the idea.
IT is a strange anomaly. Whenever India or Pakistan, or both, go into the cobra pose, hissing invectives and threatening to decimate each other, including with nuclear weapons, the world cries foul.
When Nawaz Sharif visits Delhi or when Narendra Modi drops in uninvited at a Lahore wedding, Indian and Pakistani peaceniks applaud together with the worried world. Yet, when Donald Trump wants to improve his country’s troubled relations with Vladimir Putin he is pilloried for even making the suggestion.
Granted he is not gender sensitive, that he has wronged and abused women and his mindset is possibly racist, driven by acute Islamophobia. I would liken Russia in this equation to the baby in Trump’s dirty bathtub. The deep state that contrived lies to invade Iraq or exulted in the wrecking of Libya, in cahoots with the media, seems to be facing an existential crisis with Trump’s presidency over his plans to touch base with Putin.
One day Trump excelled himself in his collaring of the deep state, which includes all major parties and the media. He said something to the effect that his country’s image was not exactly squeaky clean when it came to shedding blood around the world. That was his response to a Fox TV question about Putin’s alleged bloodlust as seen in the military operations in Aleppo.
Is the current American president really worse than the marauders of Iraq and Libya?
Trump’s blunt criticism of his country’s savage moments has been at par with Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the priest who baptised Barack Obama’s children. When in a fit of rage over an Israeli assault on Palestinian camps he yelled ‘goddamn America’ Obama cut off ties with the African American priest.
Then suddenly it began to rain scams on Trump. So and so met the Russian ambassador. So and so made eye contact with him. Trump’s attorney general is said to have a racist background. That was forgiven or grudgingly gulped down. Instead his alleged dalliances with Russian diplomats and/or businessmen were picked up for censure.
A wider conspiracy was unleashed to torpedo the new president’s still unwavering plans to improve relations with Putin. BBC dug out dirt on the Russians, which they are good at. Russia was a British quarry, which became America’s bête noire.
Cut to the day when Prime Minister Theresa May sauntered into Washington and Ankara recently and the media said she was fixing business deals. They omitted the fact that both her destinations involved allies who seemed to have lost interest in the old British fear-mongering called Russophobia. Trump’s fascination with Putin was by now legendary and Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan too had shown signs of becoming disenchanted with the British-assigned role of playing an anti-Moscow Sancho Panza.
If we think freely and without the Cold War blinkers, May couldn’t have signed a groundbreaking deal with anybody bilaterally until the fate of Brexit was decided, which could be some years away. Trump looks destined not to last that long.
For Erdogan to become a member of the Russian-Iranian backed peace talks on Syria was a huge somersault by a country that was regarded as a lynchpin to Nato’s Middle East policy. Turkey is no longer insisting on the Syrian president’s head as condition to discuss a future setup in Damascus. Erdogan’s unease with the Americans became more pronounced with the botched coup attempt, which he blamed on Turkish dissidents seated in the US.
It is nearly impossible to believe that May did not discuss her worry about Russia and Putin with Trump and Erdogan. Russia has been a British bugbear for centuries even if Napoleon preceded it and other Europeans in turning an obsession with Russia into an exhausting and costly military expedition.
Russophobia as we know it is a British innovation. It was left to Winston Churchill to give the Cold War a newer variant of an old pursuit. The new seeds were planted in Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech. Then James Bond took over while Alfred Hitchcock also embraced the diabolical imagery of the Russians. Until then, Hollywood had been in hot pursuit of Germans as America’s horns and canines ogres.
Much earlier, before Western democracies were swamped with the Churchillian exhortations against Russia, British governors general and viceroys in India took it upon themselves to deepen and sustain the fear mongering. Delhi’s imposing colonial monument — India Gate — is a testimony to this perpetually induced fear with the rulers of Moscow. All sides of the landmark sandstone monument are lined with thousands of names of Sikh and Muslim soldiers who were sacrificed in the suicidal Afghan wars. May must have seen how Britain’s self-defeating obsession with Russia had dissipated into the brick-batting in Washington D.C. between the Democrats and the Republicans.
Going by usually trustworthy accounts Donald Trump is an unpredictable person, which makes him a dangerous leader of an already error-prone military power. Nevertheless, Noam Chomsky must have shocked the Democrats by suggesting that in his view John Kennedy was the most dangerous of presidents. Trump is lampooned daily, which is as it should be, as an unqualified gatecrasher in the White House. The suggestion, however, implies that the world was somehow better off under George W. Bush and, more worryingly, under his Dr Strangelove-like colleagues — Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. Is Trump really worse than the marauders of Iraq and Libya?
Shorn of any media support in the heart of the land of free speech, Vladimir Putin wrote a piece for the American audiences in The New York Times of Sept 11 2013.
“Relations between us have passed through different stages. We stood against each other during the Cold War. But we were also allies once, and defeated the Nazis together.” Trump believes the two countries should jointly fight a new menace, the militant Islamic State group. His detractors within the deep state somehow seem not to like the idea.
Sunday 19 February 2017
We need democracy because people can be wrong
It’s the only political system that allows us to regularly check the mistakes we make, bloodlessly, and correct them
Tabish Khair in The Hindu
The people are always right. No? Ah, but then they vote for leaders like Donald Trump and… Oh well, we can add to the list, internationally and nationally!
Does this mean that democracy is a mistake? No, quite the contrary! But we have to hack away at some stubborn centuries-old shrubbery in order to see the foundation of this clearly enough.
One of the greatest myths about democracy — started largely by the Left in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and continued with a twist by the Right into the 21st — relates to the most common rationale behind it. The people are always right, claimed the Left in the past. The market, or the consumer, is always right, claims the capitalist Right today, tweaking the Leftist argument cleverly.
Between them, they justify democracy as a form of political organisation based on human beings being basically ‘always right’. Very little in the past — from the picnics at public hangings outside London jails to the genocides of colonisation and Nazism — justifies such confidence in people being always right. Over centuries, people have been horribly wrong at times.
Majority’s mistrust
Way back in 1882, Henrik Ibsen, the great Norwegian playwright, wrote An Enemy of the People (adapted into a film, Ganashatru, by Satyajit Ray in his last years) around one aspect of this perception, arguing that one needs to be morally and intellectually ahead of ‘people’ in order to be right. Ideas and ‘truths’, Ibsen suggests in this play, get dated, habitual and platitudinous, and hence the majority, which lives habitually by grasping on to platitudes, tends to mistrust the truly ethical and intellectual individual. In other words, if you are Jesus, you risk getting crucified.
But even this argument is faulty: a lot of intelligent people can go horribly wrong. Cleverness does not necessarily save you from mistakes, and even ethics can be twisted in painful ways: there are many in the U.S. who claim to be ‘pro-life’ and hence will criminalise abortions, but they spare little thought (and no money) for the plight of women forced into unhappy pregnancies or the future of poor, abandoned and unwanted children.
History is full of brilliant people — ‘great’ leaders, scientists, thinkers, planners — who helped destroy a village, a nation or an age. Sometimes it appears that intelligence, on its own, merely provides a person with an easier ability to make excuses for his or her mistakes, and hoodwink others in the process.
So if people — whether as individual or group, entrepreneur or consumer, tribe or republic, nation or political party, king or voter — seem to make horrible mistakes much of the time, what hope is there for democracy? Why believe in democracy at all?
Actually, one can argue that the main justification of democracy is exactly this: that anyone — ordinary voter or monarch — can be wrong about any given matter. The ability to make mistakes is human — neither power nor riches nor education can eradicate it, though self-awareness might help. A king or dictator can make a mistake as well as the majority of voters in an election who vote in a party or a leader with bad plans. But in a democracy, after a period, during the next elections, such mistakes can be corrected.
A democracy, in other words, allows us to regularly check the mistakes we make — bloodlessly — and correct them when their disastrous consequences become finally clear to us. This is far more difficult, and costly, to do in any other kind of (autocratic) regime, whether justified in worldly or ‘divine’ terms.
Living with one’s opponents
Democracies are not necessary because people are always right: if we were certain of being right all the time, we would not need any political organisation at all, let alone a democracy. We would be gods. Democracy is necessary because people — groups and individuals — can be wrong. Hence, in a democracy one learns to live with one’s opponents, not exile or murder them. This is a political version of the fact that in life we always live with others — or with the Other, the self who is not and cannot be (by definition) entirely yourself.
Democracy is the only political option that allows us to mitigate the effects of our own mistakes, and the mistakes of others. Democracy is necessary not because the people are always right, but because human beings are often wrong. We forget this only at great peril to ourselves and others.
Saturday 18 February 2017
Friday 17 February 2017
Revenge of America’s deep state
Stanly Johny in The Hindu
Not many had foreseen such an abrupt end to Michael Flynn’s role in the Donald Trump presidency. Mr. Flynn, who was Mr. Trump’s National Security Adviser for 24 days, the shortest stint for anybody since the post was created over 60 years ago, was seen as a key architect of the new administration’s foreign and security policies. He was one of the first military figures to endorse Mr. Trump and had been closely associated with him through his rise to the White House.
Still he was forced to leave amid a growing scandal over his contacts with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian Ambassador in Washington. While the sudden resignation may be surprising, for those who closely watch the events that led to Mr. Flynn’s downfall, it’s not difficult to see an underlying pattern in them, which points to a growing tussle between the Trump team and U.S. intelligence agencies. The U.S. deep state, a web of military (intelligence), political and other interests operating behind the scene to ensure the status quo prevails, may not be as visible to the public as in dictatorships. That’s mainly because its interests have always been taken care of by the political leadership. However Mr. Trump’s attack on the establishment and his seemingly friendly approach towards Russia, the arch enemy of the U.S. in Washington parlance, clearly upset the deep state.
The Russia factor
So the tussle between Mr. Trump and intelligence agencies dates back to the billionaire property mogul’s surprising election victory on November 8, 2016. Within a month, the American media carried reports that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had concluded that Russia had interfered in the U.S. election to help Mr. Trump become President. The finding was that Russian hackers attacked Democratic campaign servers, stole emails and gave them to WikiLeaks, which released them to the public apparently hurting Hillary Clinton’s chances in the election. Barack Obama, by then a lame-duck President, quickly acted on the intelligence reports, imposing fresh sanctions on Russia and expelling 35 Russian diplomats. Clearly, it made any reset in ties difficult for his successor.
Another report that came a month later, again leaked by intelligence officials, claimed that Russia had “compromising personal and financial” information about Mr. Trump.
There were even allegations in Washington by influential people such as Strobe Talbott, a former Deputy Secretary of State, and Michael Morell, a former acting CIA director, that Mr. Trump is a “Kremlin stooge” and a “Putin recruit”. The leaks did not stop after Mr. Trump assumed office or his nominees took over the Pentagon and intelligence agencies. Mr. Flynn’s fall is a case in point. To bring him down, intelligence officials have leaked the contents of intercepted communication, something which is seen as one of the most serious felonies among crimes involving leaking classified information. Mr. Flynn talked to the Russian Ambassador multiple times on the phone on December 29, the day Mr. Obama imposed fresh sanctions on Russia and sacked the diplomats. He first denied having spoken of sanctions. So did the White House. But the Ambassador had been wiretapped and the intelligence community had the details of what was discussed. Once the media got hold of these details, the White House had no option but to give up on Mr. Flynn.
What connects all these exposés and allegations is the Russia factor. Mr. Trump had sought better cooperation with Moscow in the war against the Islamic State. He had also challenged certain accepted notions among the Washington establishment such as the role and relevance of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). This was unacceptable for the deep state, for which the presidency is temporary and the system permanent. The first major leak by the CIA on the Russian involvement in the cyberattack on Democratic campaign servers was a declaration of war. This doesn’t mean that the leaks are bad. Any attempt to make information public, irrespective of its cause and effect, is welcome. But in this case, information is being used as a weapon in a battle between powerful groups. It’s also to be noted that the establishment doesn’t have a problem with Mr. Trump’s more dangerous (for both the U.S. and the world) and provocative policy measures. The Republican leadership, including Paul Ryan, defended his Muslim ban. His belligerence on West Asia is unlikely to invite significant opposition. The opposition comes only over the red line, and that’s Russia.
Mr. Trump could either fight back or make peace. Two days after Mr. Flynn’s resignation, he has signalled both. He attacked the intelligence agencies on Twitter on Wednesday, while the White House indicated that the promised détente with Russia was over. But Mr. Flynn has set in motion a process that is unlikely to be controlled by a seemingly incompetent administration like Mr. Trump’s. With chaos engulfing his government, Mr. Trump will be forced to conform.
Not many had foreseen such an abrupt end to Michael Flynn’s role in the Donald Trump presidency. Mr. Flynn, who was Mr. Trump’s National Security Adviser for 24 days, the shortest stint for anybody since the post was created over 60 years ago, was seen as a key architect of the new administration’s foreign and security policies. He was one of the first military figures to endorse Mr. Trump and had been closely associated with him through his rise to the White House.
Still he was forced to leave amid a growing scandal over his contacts with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian Ambassador in Washington. While the sudden resignation may be surprising, for those who closely watch the events that led to Mr. Flynn’s downfall, it’s not difficult to see an underlying pattern in them, which points to a growing tussle between the Trump team and U.S. intelligence agencies. The U.S. deep state, a web of military (intelligence), political and other interests operating behind the scene to ensure the status quo prevails, may not be as visible to the public as in dictatorships. That’s mainly because its interests have always been taken care of by the political leadership. However Mr. Trump’s attack on the establishment and his seemingly friendly approach towards Russia, the arch enemy of the U.S. in Washington parlance, clearly upset the deep state.
The Russia factor
So the tussle between Mr. Trump and intelligence agencies dates back to the billionaire property mogul’s surprising election victory on November 8, 2016. Within a month, the American media carried reports that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had concluded that Russia had interfered in the U.S. election to help Mr. Trump become President. The finding was that Russian hackers attacked Democratic campaign servers, stole emails and gave them to WikiLeaks, which released them to the public apparently hurting Hillary Clinton’s chances in the election. Barack Obama, by then a lame-duck President, quickly acted on the intelligence reports, imposing fresh sanctions on Russia and expelling 35 Russian diplomats. Clearly, it made any reset in ties difficult for his successor.
Another report that came a month later, again leaked by intelligence officials, claimed that Russia had “compromising personal and financial” information about Mr. Trump.
There were even allegations in Washington by influential people such as Strobe Talbott, a former Deputy Secretary of State, and Michael Morell, a former acting CIA director, that Mr. Trump is a “Kremlin stooge” and a “Putin recruit”. The leaks did not stop after Mr. Trump assumed office or his nominees took over the Pentagon and intelligence agencies. Mr. Flynn’s fall is a case in point. To bring him down, intelligence officials have leaked the contents of intercepted communication, something which is seen as one of the most serious felonies among crimes involving leaking classified information. Mr. Flynn talked to the Russian Ambassador multiple times on the phone on December 29, the day Mr. Obama imposed fresh sanctions on Russia and sacked the diplomats. He first denied having spoken of sanctions. So did the White House. But the Ambassador had been wiretapped and the intelligence community had the details of what was discussed. Once the media got hold of these details, the White House had no option but to give up on Mr. Flynn.
What connects all these exposés and allegations is the Russia factor. Mr. Trump had sought better cooperation with Moscow in the war against the Islamic State. He had also challenged certain accepted notions among the Washington establishment such as the role and relevance of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). This was unacceptable for the deep state, for which the presidency is temporary and the system permanent. The first major leak by the CIA on the Russian involvement in the cyberattack on Democratic campaign servers was a declaration of war. This doesn’t mean that the leaks are bad. Any attempt to make information public, irrespective of its cause and effect, is welcome. But in this case, information is being used as a weapon in a battle between powerful groups. It’s also to be noted that the establishment doesn’t have a problem with Mr. Trump’s more dangerous (for both the U.S. and the world) and provocative policy measures. The Republican leadership, including Paul Ryan, defended his Muslim ban. His belligerence on West Asia is unlikely to invite significant opposition. The opposition comes only over the red line, and that’s Russia.
Mr. Trump could either fight back or make peace. Two days after Mr. Flynn’s resignation, he has signalled both. He attacked the intelligence agencies on Twitter on Wednesday, while the White House indicated that the promised détente with Russia was over. But Mr. Flynn has set in motion a process that is unlikely to be controlled by a seemingly incompetent administration like Mr. Trump’s. With chaos engulfing his government, Mr. Trump will be forced to conform.
Thursday 5 January 2017
Japanese company replaces office workers with artificial intelligence
Justin McCurry in The Guardian
A future in which human workers are replaced by machines is about to become a reality at an insurance firm in Japan, where more than 30 employees are being laid off and replaced with an artificial intelligence system that can calculate payouts to policyholders.
Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance believes it will increase productivity by 30% and see a return on its investment in less than two years. The firm said it would save about 140m yen (£1m) a year after the 200m yen (£1.4m) AI system is installed this month. Maintaining it will cost about 15m yen (£100k) a year.
The move is unlikely to be welcomed, however, by 34 employees who will be made redundant by the end of March.
The system is based on IBM’s Watson Explorer, which, according to the tech firm, possesses “cognitive technology that can think like a human”, enabling it to “analyse and interpret all of your data, including unstructured text, images, audio and video”.
The technology will be able to read tens of thousands of medical certificates and factor in the length of hospital stays, medical histories and any surgical procedures before calculating payouts, according to the Mainichi Shimbun.
While the use of AI will drastically reduce the time needed to calculate Fukoku Mutual’s payouts – which reportedly totalled 132,000 during the current financial year – the sums will not be paid until they have been approved by a member of staff, the newspaper said.
Japan’s shrinking, ageing population, coupled with its prowess in robot technology, makes it a prime testing ground for AI.
According to a 2015 report by the Nomura Research Institute, nearly half of all jobs in Japan could be performed by robots by 2035.
Dai-Ichi Life Insurance has already introduced a Watson-based system to assess payments - although it has not cut staff numbers - and Japan Post Insurance is interested in introducing a similar setup, the Mainichi said.
AI could soon be playing a role in the country’s politics. Next month, the economy, trade and industry ministry will introduce AI on a trial basis to help civil servants draft answers for ministers during cabinet meetings and parliamentary sessions.
The ministry hopes AI will help reduce the punishingly long hours bureaucrats spend preparing written answers for ministers.
If the experiment is a success, it could be adopted by other government agencies, according the Jiji news agency.
If, for example a question is asked about energy-saving policies, the AI system will provide civil servants with the relevant data and a list of pertinent debating points based on past answers to similar questions.
The march of Japan’s AI robots hasn’t been entirely glitch-free, however. At the end of last year a team of researchers abandoned an attempt to develop a robot intelligent enough to pass the entrance exam for the prestigious Tokyo University.
“AI is not good at answering the type of questions that require an ability to grasp meanings across a broad spectrum,” Noriko Arai, a professor at the National Institute of Informatics, told Kyodo news agency.
A future in which human workers are replaced by machines is about to become a reality at an insurance firm in Japan, where more than 30 employees are being laid off and replaced with an artificial intelligence system that can calculate payouts to policyholders.
Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance believes it will increase productivity by 30% and see a return on its investment in less than two years. The firm said it would save about 140m yen (£1m) a year after the 200m yen (£1.4m) AI system is installed this month. Maintaining it will cost about 15m yen (£100k) a year.
The move is unlikely to be welcomed, however, by 34 employees who will be made redundant by the end of March.
The system is based on IBM’s Watson Explorer, which, according to the tech firm, possesses “cognitive technology that can think like a human”, enabling it to “analyse and interpret all of your data, including unstructured text, images, audio and video”.
The technology will be able to read tens of thousands of medical certificates and factor in the length of hospital stays, medical histories and any surgical procedures before calculating payouts, according to the Mainichi Shimbun.
While the use of AI will drastically reduce the time needed to calculate Fukoku Mutual’s payouts – which reportedly totalled 132,000 during the current financial year – the sums will not be paid until they have been approved by a member of staff, the newspaper said.
Japan’s shrinking, ageing population, coupled with its prowess in robot technology, makes it a prime testing ground for AI.
According to a 2015 report by the Nomura Research Institute, nearly half of all jobs in Japan could be performed by robots by 2035.
Dai-Ichi Life Insurance has already introduced a Watson-based system to assess payments - although it has not cut staff numbers - and Japan Post Insurance is interested in introducing a similar setup, the Mainichi said.
AI could soon be playing a role in the country’s politics. Next month, the economy, trade and industry ministry will introduce AI on a trial basis to help civil servants draft answers for ministers during cabinet meetings and parliamentary sessions.
The ministry hopes AI will help reduce the punishingly long hours bureaucrats spend preparing written answers for ministers.
If the experiment is a success, it could be adopted by other government agencies, according the Jiji news agency.
If, for example a question is asked about energy-saving policies, the AI system will provide civil servants with the relevant data and a list of pertinent debating points based on past answers to similar questions.
The march of Japan’s AI robots hasn’t been entirely glitch-free, however. At the end of last year a team of researchers abandoned an attempt to develop a robot intelligent enough to pass the entrance exam for the prestigious Tokyo University.
“AI is not good at answering the type of questions that require an ability to grasp meanings across a broad spectrum,” Noriko Arai, a professor at the National Institute of Informatics, told Kyodo news agency.
Friday 23 December 2016
World’s largest hedge fund to replace managers with artificial intelligence
Olivia Solon in The Guardian
The world’s largest hedge fund is building a piece of software to automate the day-to-day management of the firm, including hiring, firing and other strategic decision-making.
Bridgewater Associates has a team of software engineers working on the project at the request of billionaire founder Ray Dalio, who wants to ensure the company can run according to his vision even when he’s not there, the Wall Street Journal reported.
'This is awful': robot can keep children occupied for hours without supervision
“AI will ultimately prove to be cheaper, more efficient, and potentially more impartial in its actions than human beings,” said the authors writing up the results of the survey in Harvard Business Review.
However, they didn’t think there was too much cause for concern. “It just means that their jobs will change to focus on things only humans can do.”
The authors say that machines would be better at administrative tasks like writing earnings reports and tracking schedules and resources while humans would be better at developing messages to inspire the workforce and drafting strategy.
Fidler disagrees. “There’s no reason to believe that a lot of what we think of as strategic work or even creative work can’t be substantially overtaken by software.”
However, he said, that software will need some direction. “It needs human decision making to set objectives.”
Bridgewater Associates did not respond to a request for comment.
The world’s largest hedge fund is building a piece of software to automate the day-to-day management of the firm, including hiring, firing and other strategic decision-making.
Bridgewater Associates has a team of software engineers working on the project at the request of billionaire founder Ray Dalio, who wants to ensure the company can run according to his vision even when he’s not there, the Wall Street Journal reported.
“The role of many remaining humans at the firm wouldn’t be to make individual choices but to design the criteria by which the system makes decisions, intervening when something isn’t working,” wrote the Journal, which spoke to five former and current employees.
Ray Dalio, president and founder of Bridgewater Associates. Photograph: Bloomberg/Bloomberg via Getty Images
The firm, which manages $160bn, created the team of programmers specializing in analytics and artificial intelligence, dubbed the Systematized Intelligence Lab, in early 2015. The unit is headed up by David Ferrucci, who previously led IBM’s development of Watson, the supercomputer that beat humans at Jeopardy! in 2011.
The company is already highly data-driven, with meetings recorded and staff asked to grade each other throughout the day using a ratings system called “dots”. The Systematized Intelligence Lab has built a tool that incorporates these ratings into “Baseball Cards” that show employees’ strengths and weaknesses. Another app, dubbed The Contract, gets staff to set goals they want to achieve and then tracks how effectively they follow through.
These tools are early applications of PriOS, the over-arching management software that Dalio wants to make three-quarters of all management decisions within five years. The kinds of decisions PriOS could make include finding the right staff for particular job openings and ranking opposing perspectives from multiple team members when there’s a disagreement about how to proceed.
The machine will make the decisions, according to a set of principles laid out by Dalio about the company vision.
“It’s ambitious, but it’s not unreasonable,” said Devin Fidler, research director at the Institute For The Future, who has built a prototype management system called iCEO. “A lot of management is basically information work, the sort of thing that software can get very good at.”
Automated decision-making is appealing to businesses as it can save time and eliminate human emotional volatility.
“People have a bad day and it then colors their perception of the world and they make different decisions. In a hedge fund that’s a big deal,” he added.
Will people happily accept orders from a robotic manager? Fidler isn’t so sure. “People tend not to accept a message delivered by a machine,” he said, pointing to the need for a human interface.
“In companies that are really good at data analytics very often the decision is made by a statistical algorithm but the decision is conveyed by somebody who can put it in an emotional context,” he explained.
Futurist Zoltan Istvan, founder of the Transhumanist party, disagrees. “People will follow the will and statistical might of machines,” he said, pointing out that people already outsource way-finding to GPS or the flying of planes to autopilot.
However, the period in which people will need to interact with a robot manager will be brief.
“Soon there just won’t be any reason to keep us around,” Istvan said. “Sure, humans can fix problems, but machines in a few years time will be able to fix those problems even better.
“Bankers will become dinosaurs.”
It’s not just the banking sector that will be affected. According to a report by Accenture, artificial intelligence will free people from the drudgery of administrative tasks in many industries. The company surveyed 1,770 managers across 14 countries to find out how artificial intelligence would impact their jobs.
The firm, which manages $160bn, created the team of programmers specializing in analytics and artificial intelligence, dubbed the Systematized Intelligence Lab, in early 2015. The unit is headed up by David Ferrucci, who previously led IBM’s development of Watson, the supercomputer that beat humans at Jeopardy! in 2011.
The company is already highly data-driven, with meetings recorded and staff asked to grade each other throughout the day using a ratings system called “dots”. The Systematized Intelligence Lab has built a tool that incorporates these ratings into “Baseball Cards” that show employees’ strengths and weaknesses. Another app, dubbed The Contract, gets staff to set goals they want to achieve and then tracks how effectively they follow through.
These tools are early applications of PriOS, the over-arching management software that Dalio wants to make three-quarters of all management decisions within five years. The kinds of decisions PriOS could make include finding the right staff for particular job openings and ranking opposing perspectives from multiple team members when there’s a disagreement about how to proceed.
The machine will make the decisions, according to a set of principles laid out by Dalio about the company vision.
“It’s ambitious, but it’s not unreasonable,” said Devin Fidler, research director at the Institute For The Future, who has built a prototype management system called iCEO. “A lot of management is basically information work, the sort of thing that software can get very good at.”
Automated decision-making is appealing to businesses as it can save time and eliminate human emotional volatility.
“People have a bad day and it then colors their perception of the world and they make different decisions. In a hedge fund that’s a big deal,” he added.
Will people happily accept orders from a robotic manager? Fidler isn’t so sure. “People tend not to accept a message delivered by a machine,” he said, pointing to the need for a human interface.
“In companies that are really good at data analytics very often the decision is made by a statistical algorithm but the decision is conveyed by somebody who can put it in an emotional context,” he explained.
Futurist Zoltan Istvan, founder of the Transhumanist party, disagrees. “People will follow the will and statistical might of machines,” he said, pointing out that people already outsource way-finding to GPS or the flying of planes to autopilot.
However, the period in which people will need to interact with a robot manager will be brief.
“Soon there just won’t be any reason to keep us around,” Istvan said. “Sure, humans can fix problems, but machines in a few years time will be able to fix those problems even better.
“Bankers will become dinosaurs.”
It’s not just the banking sector that will be affected. According to a report by Accenture, artificial intelligence will free people from the drudgery of administrative tasks in many industries. The company surveyed 1,770 managers across 14 countries to find out how artificial intelligence would impact their jobs.
'This is awful': robot can keep children occupied for hours without supervision
“AI will ultimately prove to be cheaper, more efficient, and potentially more impartial in its actions than human beings,” said the authors writing up the results of the survey in Harvard Business Review.
However, they didn’t think there was too much cause for concern. “It just means that their jobs will change to focus on things only humans can do.”
The authors say that machines would be better at administrative tasks like writing earnings reports and tracking schedules and resources while humans would be better at developing messages to inspire the workforce and drafting strategy.
Fidler disagrees. “There’s no reason to believe that a lot of what we think of as strategic work or even creative work can’t be substantially overtaken by software.”
However, he said, that software will need some direction. “It needs human decision making to set objectives.”
Bridgewater Associates did not respond to a request for comment.
Tuesday 21 June 2016
Why boarding schools produce bad leaders
Nick Duffell in The Guardian
In Britain, the link between private boarding education and leadership is gold-plated. If their parents can afford it, children are sent away from home to walk a well-trodden path that leads straight from boarding school through Oxbridge to high office in institutions such as the judiciary, the army, the City and, especially, government. Our prime minister was only seven when he was sent away to board at Heatherdown preparatory school in Berkshire. Like so many of the men who hold leadership roles in Britain, he learned to adapt his young character to survive both the loss of his family and the demands of boarding school culture. The psychological impact of these formative experiences on Cameron and other boys who grow up to occupy positions of great power and responsibility cannot be overstated. It leaves them ill-prepared for relationships in the adult world and the nation with a cadre of leaders who perpetuate a culture of elitism, bullying and misogyny affecting the whole of society.
In Britain, the link between private boarding education and leadership is gold-plated. If their parents can afford it, children are sent away from home to walk a well-trodden path that leads straight from boarding school through Oxbridge to high office in institutions such as the judiciary, the army, the City and, especially, government. Our prime minister was only seven when he was sent away to board at Heatherdown preparatory school in Berkshire. Like so many of the men who hold leadership roles in Britain, he learned to adapt his young character to survive both the loss of his family and the demands of boarding school culture. The psychological impact of these formative experiences on Cameron and other boys who grow up to occupy positions of great power and responsibility cannot be overstated. It leaves them ill-prepared for relationships in the adult world and the nation with a cadre of leaders who perpetuate a culture of elitism, bullying and misogyny affecting the whole of society.
Nevertheless, this golden path is as sure today as it was 100 years ago, when men from such backgrounds led us into a disastrous war; it is familiar, sometimes mocked, but taken for granted. But it is less well known that costly, elite boarding consistently turns out people who appear much more competent than they actually are. They are particularly deficient in non-rational skills, such as those needed to sustain relationships, and are not, in fact, well-equipped to be leaders in today's world.
I have been doing psychotherapy with ex-boarders for 25 years and I am a former boarding-school teacher and boarder. My pioneering study of privileged abandonment always sparks controversy: so embedded in British life is boarding that many struggle to see beyond the elitism and understand its impact. The prevalence of institutionalised abuse is finally emerging to public scrutiny, but the effects of normalised parental neglect are more widespread and much less obvious. Am I saying, then, that David Cameron, and the majority of our ruling elite, were damaged by boarding?
It's complex. My studies show that children survive boarding by cutting off their feelings and constructing a defensively organised self that severely limits their later lives. Cameron, Boris Johnson, Jeremy Hunt, Andrew Mitchell, Oliver Letwin et al tick all the boxes for being boarding-school survivors. For socially privileged children are forced into a deal not of their choosing, where a normal family-based childhood is traded for the hothousing of entitlement. Prematurely separated from home and family, from love and touch, they must speedily reinvent themselves as self-reliant pseudo-adults.
Paradoxically, they then struggle to properly mature, since the child who was not allowed to grow up organically gets stranded, as it were, inside them. In consequence, an abandoned child complex within such adults ends up running the show. This is why many British politicians appear so boyish. They are also reluctant to open their ranks to women, who are strangers to them and unconsciously held responsible for their abandonment by their mothers. With about two-thirds of the current cabinet from such a background, the political implications of this syndrome are huge – because it's the children inside the men running the country who are effectively in charge.
Boarding children invariably construct a survival personality that endures long after school and operates strategically. On rigid timetables, in rule-bound institutions, they must be ever alert to staying out of trouble. Crucially, they must not look unhappy, childish or foolish – in any way vulnerable – or they will be bullied by their peers. So they dissociate from all these qualities, project them out on to others, and develop duplicitous personalities that are on the run, which is why ex-boarders make the best spies.
Now attached to this internal structure instead of a parent, the boarding child survives, but takes into adulthood a permanent unconscious anxiety and will rarely develop what Daniel Goleman calls emotional intelligence. In adulthood he sticks to the same tactics: whenever he senses a threat of being made to look foolish, he will strike. We see this in Cameron's over-reaction to Angela Eagle MP, less than a year into his new job. "Calm down, dear!" the PM patronisingly insisted, as if she were the one upset and not he. The opposite benches loved it, of course, howling "Flashman!" (the public school bully from Tom Brown's Schooldays), but they never take on the cause of these leadership defects.
Bullying is inevitable and endemic in 24/7 institutions full of abandoned and frightened kids. Ex-boarders' partners often report that it ends up ruining home life, many years later. Bullying pervades British society, especially in politics and the media, but, like boarding, we normalise it. When, in 2011, Jeremy Clarkson ranted that he would have striking public-sector workers shot, he was even defended by Cameron – it was apparently a bit of fun. No prizes for guessing where both men learned their styles. And no wonder that the House of Commons, with its adversarial architecture of Victorian Gothic – just like a public school chapel – runs on polarised debate and bullying.
Strategic survival has many styles: bullying is one; others include keeping your head down, becoming a charming bumbler, or keeping an incongruently unruffled smile in place, like health secretary Jeremy Hunt, former head boy at Charterhouse. In a remarkable 1994 BBC documentary called The Making of Them, whose title I borrowed for my first book, young boarders were discreetly filmed over their first few weeks at prep school. Viewers can witness the "strategic survival personality" in the process of being built. "Boarding school," says nine-year-old Freddy, puffing himself up, putting on his Very Serious Face and staring at the camera, "has changed me, and the one thing I can do now is get used [to it]". This false independence, this display of pseudo-adult seriousness is as evident in the theatrical concern of Cameron as it was in Tony Blair. It displays the strategic duplicity learned in childhood; it is hard to get rid of, and, disastrously, deceives even its creator.
The social privilege of boarding is psychologically double-edged: it both creates shame that prevents sufferers from acknowledging their problems, as well as unconscious entitlement that explains why ex-boarder leaders are brittle and defensive while still projecting confidence. Boris is so supremely confident that he needs neither surname nor adult haircut; he trusts his buffoonery to distract the public from what Conrad Black called "a sly fox disguised as a teddy bear". On the steps of St Paul's, Boris commanded the Occupy movement: "In the name of God and Mammon, go!" Was it a lark – Boris doing Monty Python? Or a coded message, announcing someone who, for 10 years, heard the King James Bible read in chapel at Eton? Those who don't recognise this language, it suggests, have no right to be here, so they should just clear off.
This anachronistic entitlement cannot easily be renounced: it compensates for years without love, touch or family, for a personality under stress, for the lack of emotional, relational and sexual maturation. In my new book, Wounded Leaders, I trace the history of British elitism and the negative attitude towards children to colonial times and what I call the "rational man project", whose Victorian boarding schools were industrial power stations churning out stoic, superior leaders for the empire.
Recent evidence from neuroscience experts shows what a poor training for leaderships this actually is. In short, you cannot make good decisions without emotional information (Professor Antonio Damasio); nor grow a flexible brain without good attachments (Dr Sue Gerhardt); nor interpret facial signals if your heart has had to close down (Professor Stephen Porges); nor see the big picture if your brain has been fed on a strict diet of rationality (Dr Iain McGilchrist). These factors underpin Will Hutton's view that "the political judgments of the Tory party have, over the centuries, been almost continuously wrong".
With survival but not empathy on his school curriculum from age seven, Cameron is unlikely to make good decisions based on making relationships in Europe, as John Major could. He can talk of leading Europe, but not of belonging to it. Ex-boarder leaders cannot conceive of communal solutions, because they haven't had enough belonging at home to understand what it means. Instead, they are limited to esprit de corps with their own kind. In order to boost his standing with the rightwingers in his party, Cameron still thinks he can bully for concessions, make more supposedly "robust" vetos.
His European counterparts don't operate like this. Angela Merkel has held multiple fragile coalitions together through difficult times by means of her skill in relationships and collaboration. Though deadlocked at home, Barack Obama impressed both sides of British politics and in 2009 entered the hostile atmosphere of the Kremlin to befriend the then-president Dmitry Medvedev and make headway on a difficult disarmament treaty. In a subsequent meeting with the real power behind the throne, Obama invited Vladimir Putin to expound for an hour on what hadn't worked in recent Russian-American relationships, before responding. Despite their elitist education, and because of it, our own "wounded leaders" can't manage such statesmanship.
To change our politics, we'll have to change our education system. Today, most senior clinicians recognise boarding syndrome, several of whom recently signed a letter to the Observer calling for the end of early boarding. Its elitism ought to motivate the left. The Attlee government intended to disband the public schools, but not even Wilson's dared to. There's a cash problem: boarding is worth billions and has a massive lobby. Unlike most other European countries, our state does not contribute a per capita sum towards private education, so dismantling these schools, which still enjoy charitable status, would be costly. But can we really afford to sacrifice any more children for the sake of second-rate leadership?
I have been doing psychotherapy with ex-boarders for 25 years and I am a former boarding-school teacher and boarder. My pioneering study of privileged abandonment always sparks controversy: so embedded in British life is boarding that many struggle to see beyond the elitism and understand its impact. The prevalence of institutionalised abuse is finally emerging to public scrutiny, but the effects of normalised parental neglect are more widespread and much less obvious. Am I saying, then, that David Cameron, and the majority of our ruling elite, were damaged by boarding?
It's complex. My studies show that children survive boarding by cutting off their feelings and constructing a defensively organised self that severely limits their later lives. Cameron, Boris Johnson, Jeremy Hunt, Andrew Mitchell, Oliver Letwin et al tick all the boxes for being boarding-school survivors. For socially privileged children are forced into a deal not of their choosing, where a normal family-based childhood is traded for the hothousing of entitlement. Prematurely separated from home and family, from love and touch, they must speedily reinvent themselves as self-reliant pseudo-adults.
Paradoxically, they then struggle to properly mature, since the child who was not allowed to grow up organically gets stranded, as it were, inside them. In consequence, an abandoned child complex within such adults ends up running the show. This is why many British politicians appear so boyish. They are also reluctant to open their ranks to women, who are strangers to them and unconsciously held responsible for their abandonment by their mothers. With about two-thirds of the current cabinet from such a background, the political implications of this syndrome are huge – because it's the children inside the men running the country who are effectively in charge.
Boarding children invariably construct a survival personality that endures long after school and operates strategically. On rigid timetables, in rule-bound institutions, they must be ever alert to staying out of trouble. Crucially, they must not look unhappy, childish or foolish – in any way vulnerable – or they will be bullied by their peers. So they dissociate from all these qualities, project them out on to others, and develop duplicitous personalities that are on the run, which is why ex-boarders make the best spies.
Now attached to this internal structure instead of a parent, the boarding child survives, but takes into adulthood a permanent unconscious anxiety and will rarely develop what Daniel Goleman calls emotional intelligence. In adulthood he sticks to the same tactics: whenever he senses a threat of being made to look foolish, he will strike. We see this in Cameron's over-reaction to Angela Eagle MP, less than a year into his new job. "Calm down, dear!" the PM patronisingly insisted, as if she were the one upset and not he. The opposite benches loved it, of course, howling "Flashman!" (the public school bully from Tom Brown's Schooldays), but they never take on the cause of these leadership defects.
Bullying is inevitable and endemic in 24/7 institutions full of abandoned and frightened kids. Ex-boarders' partners often report that it ends up ruining home life, many years later. Bullying pervades British society, especially in politics and the media, but, like boarding, we normalise it. When, in 2011, Jeremy Clarkson ranted that he would have striking public-sector workers shot, he was even defended by Cameron – it was apparently a bit of fun. No prizes for guessing where both men learned their styles. And no wonder that the House of Commons, with its adversarial architecture of Victorian Gothic – just like a public school chapel – runs on polarised debate and bullying.
Strategic survival has many styles: bullying is one; others include keeping your head down, becoming a charming bumbler, or keeping an incongruently unruffled smile in place, like health secretary Jeremy Hunt, former head boy at Charterhouse. In a remarkable 1994 BBC documentary called The Making of Them, whose title I borrowed for my first book, young boarders were discreetly filmed over their first few weeks at prep school. Viewers can witness the "strategic survival personality" in the process of being built. "Boarding school," says nine-year-old Freddy, puffing himself up, putting on his Very Serious Face and staring at the camera, "has changed me, and the one thing I can do now is get used [to it]". This false independence, this display of pseudo-adult seriousness is as evident in the theatrical concern of Cameron as it was in Tony Blair. It displays the strategic duplicity learned in childhood; it is hard to get rid of, and, disastrously, deceives even its creator.
The social privilege of boarding is psychologically double-edged: it both creates shame that prevents sufferers from acknowledging their problems, as well as unconscious entitlement that explains why ex-boarder leaders are brittle and defensive while still projecting confidence. Boris is so supremely confident that he needs neither surname nor adult haircut; he trusts his buffoonery to distract the public from what Conrad Black called "a sly fox disguised as a teddy bear". On the steps of St Paul's, Boris commanded the Occupy movement: "In the name of God and Mammon, go!" Was it a lark – Boris doing Monty Python? Or a coded message, announcing someone who, for 10 years, heard the King James Bible read in chapel at Eton? Those who don't recognise this language, it suggests, have no right to be here, so they should just clear off.
This anachronistic entitlement cannot easily be renounced: it compensates for years without love, touch or family, for a personality under stress, for the lack of emotional, relational and sexual maturation. In my new book, Wounded Leaders, I trace the history of British elitism and the negative attitude towards children to colonial times and what I call the "rational man project", whose Victorian boarding schools were industrial power stations churning out stoic, superior leaders for the empire.
Recent evidence from neuroscience experts shows what a poor training for leaderships this actually is. In short, you cannot make good decisions without emotional information (Professor Antonio Damasio); nor grow a flexible brain without good attachments (Dr Sue Gerhardt); nor interpret facial signals if your heart has had to close down (Professor Stephen Porges); nor see the big picture if your brain has been fed on a strict diet of rationality (Dr Iain McGilchrist). These factors underpin Will Hutton's view that "the political judgments of the Tory party have, over the centuries, been almost continuously wrong".
With survival but not empathy on his school curriculum from age seven, Cameron is unlikely to make good decisions based on making relationships in Europe, as John Major could. He can talk of leading Europe, but not of belonging to it. Ex-boarder leaders cannot conceive of communal solutions, because they haven't had enough belonging at home to understand what it means. Instead, they are limited to esprit de corps with their own kind. In order to boost his standing with the rightwingers in his party, Cameron still thinks he can bully for concessions, make more supposedly "robust" vetos.
His European counterparts don't operate like this. Angela Merkel has held multiple fragile coalitions together through difficult times by means of her skill in relationships and collaboration. Though deadlocked at home, Barack Obama impressed both sides of British politics and in 2009 entered the hostile atmosphere of the Kremlin to befriend the then-president Dmitry Medvedev and make headway on a difficult disarmament treaty. In a subsequent meeting with the real power behind the throne, Obama invited Vladimir Putin to expound for an hour on what hadn't worked in recent Russian-American relationships, before responding. Despite their elitist education, and because of it, our own "wounded leaders" can't manage such statesmanship.
To change our politics, we'll have to change our education system. Today, most senior clinicians recognise boarding syndrome, several of whom recently signed a letter to the Observer calling for the end of early boarding. Its elitism ought to motivate the left. The Attlee government intended to disband the public schools, but not even Wilson's dared to. There's a cash problem: boarding is worth billions and has a massive lobby. Unlike most other European countries, our state does not contribute a per capita sum towards private education, so dismantling these schools, which still enjoy charitable status, would be costly. But can we really afford to sacrifice any more children for the sake of second-rate leadership?
Monday 6 June 2016
When left alone in a room, people preferred to give themselves electric shocks than quietly sit and think. Why do smart people do stupid things?
Andre Spicer in The Guardian
Thinking is hard work and asking tough questions can make you unpopular. So it’s no wonder that even clever people don’t always use their brains
Thinking is hard work and asking tough questions can make you unpopular. So it’s no wonder that even clever people don’t always use their brains
Scene from The Big Bang Theory: ‘Having a high IQ score does not mean that someone is intelligent.’ Photograph: CBS/Everett/Rex
We all know smart people who do stupid things. At work we see people with brilliant minds make the most simple mistakes. At home we might live with someone who is intellectually gifted but also has no idea. We all have friends who have impressive IQs but lack basic common sense.
For more than a decade, Mats Alvesson and I have been studying smart organisations employing smarter people. We were constantly surprised by the ways that these intelligent people ended up doing the most unintelligent things. We found mature adults enthusiastically participating in leadership development workshops that wouldn’t be out of place in a pre-school class; executives who paid more attention to overhead slides than to careful analysis; senior officers in the armed forces who preferred to run rebranding exercises than military exercises; headteachers who were more interested in creating strategies than educating students; engineers who focused more on telling good news stories than solving problems; and healthcare workers who spent more time ticking boxes than caring for patients. No wonder so many of these intelligent people described their jobs as being dumb.
While doing this research I realised that my own life was also blighted with stupidities. At work I would spend years writing a scientific paper that only a dozen people would read. I would set exams to test students on knowledge I knew they would forget as soon as they walked out of the examination room. I spent large chunks of my days sitting in meetings which everyone present knew were entirely pointless. My personal life was worse. I’m the kind of person who frequently ends up paying the “idiot taxes” levied on us by companies and governments for not thinking ahead.
Clearly I had a personal interest in trying to work out why I, and millions of others like me, could be so stupid so much of the time. After looking back at my own experiences and reading the rapidly growing body of work on why humans fail to think, my co-author and I started to come to some conclusions.
Having a high IQ score does not mean that someone is intelligent. IQ tests only capture analytical intelligence; this is the ability to notice patterns and solve analytical problems. Most standard IQ tests miss out two other aspects of human intelligence: creative and practical intelligence. Creative intelligence is our ability to deal with novel situations. Practical intelligence is our ability to get things done. For the first 20 years of life, people are rewarded for their analytical intelligence. Then we wonder why the “best and brightest” are uncreative and practically useless.
Most intelligent people make mental short cuts all the time. One of the most powerful is self-serving bias: we tend to think we are better than others. Most people think they are above average drivers. If you ask a class of students whether they are above the class average in intelligence, the vast majority of hands shoot up. Even when you ask people who are objectively among the worst in a certain skill, they tend to say they are above average. Not everyone can be above average – but we can all have the illusion that we are. We desperately cling to this illusion even when there is devastating evidence to the contrary. We collect all the information we can find to prove ourselves right and ignore any information that proves us wrong. We feel good, but we overlook crucial facts. As a result the smartest people ignore the intelligence of others so they make themselves feel smarter.
Being smart can come at a cost. Asking tricky questions, doing the research and carefully thinking things through takes time. It’s also unpleasant. Most of us would rather do anything than think. A recent study found that when left alone in a room, people preferred to give themselves electric shocks than quietly sit and think. Being smart can also upset people. Asking tough questions can quickly make you unpopular.
Intelligent people quickly learn these lessons. Instead of using their intelligence, they just stay quiet and follow the crowd – even if it is off the side of a cliff. In the short term this pays off. Things get done, everyone’s lives are easier and people are happy. But in the long term it can create poor decisions and lay the foundations for disaster.
Next time I find myself banging my own head and asking myself “Why are you so stupid?”, I will try to remind myself that I’m trapped in the same situation as many millions of others: my own idiocy probably came with a payoff.
We all know smart people who do stupid things. At work we see people with brilliant minds make the most simple mistakes. At home we might live with someone who is intellectually gifted but also has no idea. We all have friends who have impressive IQs but lack basic common sense.
For more than a decade, Mats Alvesson and I have been studying smart organisations employing smarter people. We were constantly surprised by the ways that these intelligent people ended up doing the most unintelligent things. We found mature adults enthusiastically participating in leadership development workshops that wouldn’t be out of place in a pre-school class; executives who paid more attention to overhead slides than to careful analysis; senior officers in the armed forces who preferred to run rebranding exercises than military exercises; headteachers who were more interested in creating strategies than educating students; engineers who focused more on telling good news stories than solving problems; and healthcare workers who spent more time ticking boxes than caring for patients. No wonder so many of these intelligent people described their jobs as being dumb.
While doing this research I realised that my own life was also blighted with stupidities. At work I would spend years writing a scientific paper that only a dozen people would read. I would set exams to test students on knowledge I knew they would forget as soon as they walked out of the examination room. I spent large chunks of my days sitting in meetings which everyone present knew were entirely pointless. My personal life was worse. I’m the kind of person who frequently ends up paying the “idiot taxes” levied on us by companies and governments for not thinking ahead.
Clearly I had a personal interest in trying to work out why I, and millions of others like me, could be so stupid so much of the time. After looking back at my own experiences and reading the rapidly growing body of work on why humans fail to think, my co-author and I started to come to some conclusions.
Having a high IQ score does not mean that someone is intelligent. IQ tests only capture analytical intelligence; this is the ability to notice patterns and solve analytical problems. Most standard IQ tests miss out two other aspects of human intelligence: creative and practical intelligence. Creative intelligence is our ability to deal with novel situations. Practical intelligence is our ability to get things done. For the first 20 years of life, people are rewarded for their analytical intelligence. Then we wonder why the “best and brightest” are uncreative and practically useless.
Most intelligent people make mental short cuts all the time. One of the most powerful is self-serving bias: we tend to think we are better than others. Most people think they are above average drivers. If you ask a class of students whether they are above the class average in intelligence, the vast majority of hands shoot up. Even when you ask people who are objectively among the worst in a certain skill, they tend to say they are above average. Not everyone can be above average – but we can all have the illusion that we are. We desperately cling to this illusion even when there is devastating evidence to the contrary. We collect all the information we can find to prove ourselves right and ignore any information that proves us wrong. We feel good, but we overlook crucial facts. As a result the smartest people ignore the intelligence of others so they make themselves feel smarter.
Being smart can come at a cost. Asking tricky questions, doing the research and carefully thinking things through takes time. It’s also unpleasant. Most of us would rather do anything than think. A recent study found that when left alone in a room, people preferred to give themselves electric shocks than quietly sit and think. Being smart can also upset people. Asking tough questions can quickly make you unpopular.
Intelligent people quickly learn these lessons. Instead of using their intelligence, they just stay quiet and follow the crowd – even if it is off the side of a cliff. In the short term this pays off. Things get done, everyone’s lives are easier and people are happy. But in the long term it can create poor decisions and lay the foundations for disaster.
Next time I find myself banging my own head and asking myself “Why are you so stupid?”, I will try to remind myself that I’m trapped in the same situation as many millions of others: my own idiocy probably came with a payoff.
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