“Blessed is the nation that doesn’t need heroes" Goethe.
“Hero-worship is strongest where there is least regard for human freedom.” Herbert Spencer.
"My 80% friend isn't my 20% enemy" Ronald Reagan.
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.
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.
As I write, president-elect Donald Trump – soon to become the most powerful individual on Earth – is having a tantrum on his Twitter feed. Losing the popular vote can have devastating consequences for a bigoted plutocrat’s ego, and accusations that Vladimir Putin’s regime intervened to his advantage are getting him down. “The ‘intelligence’ briefing on so-called ‘Russian hacking’ was delayed until Friday,” he claims (falsely, apparently), “perhaps more time needed to build a case. Very strange!”
Did Putin intervene in the US election? It is entirely plausible, although evidence from the CIA (with its dubious record) and the FBI needs to be carefully scrutinised, whatever our feelings on Trump. And if the Democratic establishment pin the supposedly unthinkable calamity of Trump’s triumph on a foreign power, they will fail to learn the real lessons behind their defeat.
That doesn’t mean alleged interference by the Russian regime shouldn’t be taken seriously. Putin heads a hard-right, kleptocratic, authoritarian government that persecutes LGBT people, waged a murderous war in Chechnya, and has committed terrible crimes in Syria in alliance with Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorship. It is a pin-up for populist rightwingers across the west, from Trump to Ukip, from France’s Front National to Austria’s Freedom party. Its undemocratic manoeuvres should be scrutinised and condemned.
But while Americans feel justifiably angry at alleged interference with their political process, they have also been handed a mirror, and the reflection should disturb them.
For the US is a world leader in the field of intervening in the internal affairs of other countries. The alleged interference is far more extensive than hacking into emails belonging to unfavoured political parties. According to research by political scientist Dov Levin, the US and the USSR/Russia together intervened no less than 117 times in foreign elections between 1946 and 2000, or “one out of every nine competitive, national-level executive elections”.
Indeed, one cannot understand US-Russian relations today without acknowledging America’s role in the internal affairs of its defeated cold war foe. As Stephen Cohenputs it, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the approach of US advisers “was nothing less than missionary – a virtual crusade to transform post-communist Russia into some facsimile of the American democratic and capitalist system”.
As soon as Bill Clinton assumed the White House in 1993, his experts discussed “formulating a policy of American tutelage”, including unabashed partisan support for President Boris Yeltsin. “Political missionaries and evangelists, usually called ‘advisers’, spread across Russia in the early and mid-1990s,” notes Cohen: many were funded by the US government. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former national security adviser, talked of Russia “increasingly passing into de facto western receivership”.
The results were, to put it mildly, disastrous. Between 1990 and 1994, life expectancy for Russian men and women fell from 64 and 74 years respectively to 58 and 71 years. The surge in mortality was “beyond the peacetime experience of industrialised countries”. While it was boom time for the new oligarchs, poverty and unemployment surged; prices were hiked dramatically; communities were devastated by deindustrialisation; and social protections were stripped away.
To the horror of the west, Yeltsin’s popularity nosedived to the point where a communist triumph in the 1996 presidential elections could not be ruled out. Yeltsin turned to the oligarchs, using their vast resources to run an unscrupulous campaign. As Leonid Bershidsky puts it, it was “a momentous event that undermined a fragile democracy and led to the emergence of Vladimir Putin’s dictatorial regime”. It is even alleged that, in 2011, Putin’s key ally – then-president Dmitry Medvedev – privately suggested the election was rigged. In the run-up to the election, Russia was granted a huge US-backed IMF loan that – as the New York Times noted at the time – was “expected to be helpful to President Boris N Yeltsin in the presidential election”.
Yeltsin relied on US political strategists – including former aides to Bill Clinton – who had a direct line back to the White House. When Yeltsin eventually won, the cover of Time magazine was “Yanks to the rescue: The secret story of how American advisers helped Yeltsin win”.
Without the chaos and deprivations of the US-backed Yeltsin era, Putinism would surely not have established itself. But it’s not just Russia by any means, for the record of US intervention in the internal affairs of foreign democracies is extensive.
Take Italy in 1948: as the cold war unfolded, the US feared that a socialist-communist coalition would triumph in Italian elections. It barred Italians who “did not believe in the ideology of the United States” from even entering the country; funded opposing parties via the CIA; orchestrated a massive propaganda campaign, including millions of letters from Americans of Italian origin; and made it quite clear, via the State Department, that there was “no further question of assistance from the United States” if the wrong people won. Its efforts were a success. This was the first of many Italian elections featuring US interference.
CIA concludes Russia interfered to help Trump win election, say reports
Take the CIA’s self-professed involvement in the military coup that overthrew democratically elected secular Iranian president Mohammad Mosaddeq in 1953: it was “carried out under CIA direction as an act of US foreign policy, conceived and approved at the highest levels of government”, as the agency later confessed. The nature of the 1979 Iranian revolution cannot be understood without it. Or what of CIA backing for Augusto Pinochet’s murderous overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973?
There are more recent examples too. Take the military overthrow of Honduras’ Manuel Zelaya in 2009. The then secretary of state – a certain Hillary Clinton – refused to describe the toppling of Zelaya as a “military coup”, which would have required the suspension of US aid, including to the armed forces. Rather than call for Zelaya’s reinstatement, Clinton called for new elections. US assistance – including military aid – continued as dissidents were treated brutally; as death squads re-emerged; as violence against LGBT people surged; and as widely boycotted unfair elections took place.
Allegations of Russian interference in the US elections are undoubtedly alarming, but there’s a double standard at play. Meddling in foreign democracies only becomes a problem when the US is on the receiving end. The US has interfered with impunity in the internal affairs of so many other countries. The day that all such interference is seen for what it is – a democratic outrage, unworthy of any great nation – will be a great day indeed.
The world’s most successful secret society has been given a lesson in transparency and that is cause for celebration.
No tears need be wasted on the panjandrums who have been running the Board of Control for Cricket in India and its State associations like personal fiefdoms.
The Supreme Court finally reeled in the long rope it had given the BCCI, and so tripped up its senior officials. If there was contrition among the officials, these remained unexpressed. Yesterday’s powerhouses will be tomorrow’s forgotten men, their frown and wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command erased forever.
Inevitably, some good men will be thrown out with the bad, and there will be much churning as the old order makes way for the new. The saner elements of the board will wonder if it had to come to this, when, with greater maturity and common sense, the BCCI might have emerged with some dignity.
For the BCCI brought about its own downfall, aided by nothing more than its hubris and cavalier disregard for the laws of the land. You cannot ignore a Supreme Court judgement, as the BCCI did, and hope that nothing will change. It wasn’t just arrogance, it was foolishness of the highest order.
Would past presidents like Chinnaswamy and Sriraman, Gaekwad and Bindra, Dungarpur and Dalmiya have allowed things to come to this pass? It is convenient to believe they wouldn’t. But there is false memory at play here, a harking back to a golden era that never existed. Ghulam Ahmed, former off spinner and board vice-president, put it succinctly, “There are no values in the board.”
The Anurag Thakurs and Ajay Shirkes are paying the price for the culture that men like those mentioned had brought into the BCCI. These men ran the best sports body in the country, and somehow believed that they had a divine right to do so. Players kowtowed to them, politicians and businessmen chased them, and they clung on to power with a touching desperation.
The current dispensation extended that culture and refined it. They, like their predecessors, failed to understand the connection between actions and consequences.
At any time in the BCCI’s eight-decade history, the Supreme Court could have stepped in and ruled as it did now. Accountability and transparency were never in the BCCI’s handbook for officials, but public scrutiny was not as intense as it is now, and in some cases the good that an official did outweighed the bad, and all was forgiven.
Brinkmanship — a tactic much favoured by the BCCI to bring other cricket boards and indeed the International Cricket Council to its knees — is not a strategy guaranteed to impress the Supreme Court. That the highest court gave the BCCI more than six months to comply with its order when it could have acted even as deadlines were ignored is a testimony to its benevolence.
But how did a three-time Member of Parliament, which is what Anurag Thakur is, and sundry other luminaries, misjudge the seriousness of the situation? Was this a proxy war fought on behalf of his political masters by Thakur, or was the board, recognising the inevitable, preparing for a scorched earth response? The first will have to remain in the realm of speculation till a lead actor in the drama spills the beans. We shall soon know about the second.
The BCCI’s death wish has been one of the features of the whole saga. Thakur came in as the bright, young face of the board. There was an energy about him which makes his fall a disappointment. At 42 he was the man who replaced the old guard. Yet, within weeks, the cozy club he had tried to break up when N. Sinivasan was in charge, quickly reshaped itself into a new cozy club.
His fall is a cautionary tale for those who set out to change the system but is absorbed by it. The Supreme Court’s ruling will also impact other sports which have been resisting change like the BCCI. And that is good news for Indian sport. The domestic season has been unaffected by the BCCI’s problems. This has been the case traditionally, and is one of the true blessings of Indian cricket. There are enough dedicated officials to ensure that the show goes on.
A generational change has been forced upon the BCCI, which is otherwise happy to continue with sons and nephews (never daughters and nieces) and other relatives keeping everything in the family.
Now State associations will have to change their registrations where necessary, holding general body meetings in order to advance this. Legal procedures need to be followed. There is a temptation to believe that cricketers make the best administrators. This is a common fallacy. There are cricketers who have made excellent administrators, but being able to play the square cut is no guarantee of managerial skills. The names of corrupt cricketer-officials are well known.
There is a long road ahead, mostly uncharted. But a start has been made. The new system may not be perfect, but it is better than the old one. Accountability ensures that.
This may or may not be a good time for democracy, but one thing is certain about the past year of political upsets; it’s heaped further humiliations on the economics profession.
A substantial majority of economists thought the mere act of voting for Brexit would pole-axe the economy. Not only did voters ignore these warnings, but so far the “experts” have proved almost wholly wrong. Internationally, the story is much the same. The profound shock to global confidence anticipated by the International Monetary Fund, the OECD , Uncle Tom Cobley and all, failed to materialise; Brexit had no discernible impact on the world economy. Having cried wolf over the short term consequences, the profession should not be surprised if rather more credible warnings of pain delayed are widely disbelieved.
Similarly with Donald Trump, where the widely expected economic and market mayhem his election would supposedly unleash has so far been conspicuously absent. This collective misreading has been widely attributed to the perils of “groupthink” – where opinion hugs the consensus for fear of derision - or more conspiratorially, to vested interest and deliberately misleading intent.
But there is in fact a more prosaic explanation; that as a discipline, the dismal science has quite simply lost the plot. All over the shop, economics seems incapable of answering the great questions of our time. Are we heading for deflation or inflation? Are we locked in secular stagnation or have we finally put the financial crisis behind us? The conceit of modern economics is that it sees itself as an evidence-based science, yet if it could ever be such a thing, it is today no nearer its goal than when Adam Smith penned the Wealth of Nations, and in some respects, a good deal less so.
When he wrote his treatise, Adam Smith was not an economist at all, but a professor of moral philosophy, yet many economists have come to believe that they should be as divorced from moral judgement as scientists – that economics should be a technical discipline free of ethical concerns. In the battle between moralism and mechanism, mechanism won. Unlike science, however, it doesn’t appear to have delivered anything remotely useful.
Few of the profession’s more recent failings should have come as any great surprise, for they merely follow the monumental breakdown in economic analysis exposed by the financial crisis. The Queen’s faux naïve question of economists at the time – “how come nobody saw this coming” – has yet to be answered.
As Andy Haldane, chief economist at the Bank of England, pointed out in a recent lecture, economic models provided an exceptionally poor guide to economic dynamics at the time of the financial crisis. Even after the crisis erupted, the profession seemed oblivious to its likely consequences. Virtually all the economic forecasts produced in the final quarter of 2007 – that’s after the collapse of Northern Rock - were not just mildly wrong about the coming year, but spectacularly so. Few saw any possibility even of a downturn, let alone the worst recession since the 1930s.
Mainstream economic modelling failed spectacularly during the financial crisis and has largely failed since
This failing has been explained by the Nobel prize winning economist Robert Lucas thus: “The simulations were not presented as assurances that no crisis would occur, but as a forecast of what could be expected to occur conditional on a crisis not occurring”. Thanks for nothing.
A somewhat similar excuse is proffered by HM Treasury for its ill judged analysis of the short term consequences of a vote for Brexit. This was not a prediction, but a “scenario”, it is claimed, based on two assumptions that turned out to be wrong – that Article 50 would be immediately triggered, and that there would be no countervailing monetary action by the Bank of England. Yet in truth, it was always obvious both that Article 50 would not be immediately triggered, and that the Bank of England would indeed take action to support the economy.
A stone when dropped will always fall to the ground. Human behaviour is by contrast far less certain, the result of a complex series of interactions which will always be inherently unpredictable, or what Mervyn King, former Governor of the Bank of England, has called “radical uncertainty”. The trouble with much modern economic modelling is that it assumes the laws of physics can indeed be applied to economics, or that behaviour will always respond to given inputs in a particular way. Time and again this has been proved incorrect.
The risks of this serial inability to diagnose what’s happening in the economy lie not just in the social costs of extreme events, or in wrong-headed policy response to them. It has also made mainstream macro-economics the object of political derision, which is in turn undermining public trust in key aspects of institutional and policy orthodoxy, including central bank independence and inflation targeting, which by and large have served us well.
Already we see some of this backlash in Trumponomics, where established norms, evidence and constraints are rejected in favour of policy based on instinct and narrowly perceived American self interest, including protectionism. These cranky alternatives threaten even worse outcomes than the faulty economics of the past.
Mr Haldane sees some reason for hope in reformed modelling, and in particular in so-called “Agency Based Models”, which take account not just of the observable environment, but also the behaviour of other agents which interact with it. Big Data promises to give these models even better predictive qualities.
Long applied to air traffic control, disease prevention, pharmaceutical drug trials and many other practical fields, use of ABMs in macro-economics is still very recent and far from commonplace. We can but hope they represent the great leap forward proponents claim.
One notable sceptic is the economist Paul Krugman, who claims that the old models didn’t fail, or rather that his own relatively simplistic Keynesian modelling predicted almost exactly the failure in post-crisis macro-economic policy. Ah, the path not taken. The beauty of this line of argument is that we’ll never know whether a different approach would have worked better.
Whatever the answer, economists need to be far more circumspect about prediction, as well as the uses their work are put to by the political class, where there is a growing tendency to cite the “experts” who seem to support the party line as true visionaries and dismiss the ones who don’t as useless propagandists. Pick your poison.
But let’s not entirely despair; undeterred by the low regard in which the discipline is held, there are apparently more students applying to do economics at university than ever. Economics may have lost its mojo, but plainly not yet its fascination.
The so-called post-truth society is not primarily the result of our inability to focus on facts; it is due to our failure to read stories deeply
Tabish Khair in The Hindu
Say the word ‘thinking’, and the image evoked is that of abstract ideas, facts, numbers and data. But what if I say that this is our first and most common error about the nature of thinking? As religions have always known, human thinking is conducted primarily in stories, not facts or numbers.
Human beings might be the only living animals that can think in stories. Facts and information of some sort exist for a deer and a wolf too, but fiction, and thinking in fiction?
Now, stories are celebrated for many things: as repositories of folk knowledge or accumulated wisdom, as relief from the human condition, as entertainment, as enabling some cognitivist processes, even as the best way to get yourself and your children to fall asleep! But all this misses the main point about stories: they are the most common, most pervasive, and probably the oldest way for humans to think.
Problem of a fundamentalist reading Having missed this point, we then proceed to reduce stories — and their most complex enunciation, literature — to much less than what they are or should be. For instance, a good story is not just a narrative. It does not simply take us from point A to point Z, with perhaps an easy moral appended. Religious fundamentalists who see stories only in those terms end up destroying the essence of their religions.
Let us take one example: the Book of Job. The fundamentalist reading of the Book of Job stresses Job’s faith. In this version, the story is simple: Job is a prosperous, God-fearing man, and God is very proud of him. Satan, however, argues that Job is such a good man only because God has been kind to him. Give him adversity and you will see his faith waver, says Satan. God allows Satan to test Job, by depriving him of prosperity, family, health. But Job’s faith does not waver, and finally all is restored to him. The fundamentalist reading — which reduces the story to a narrative — is simple: this is a parable about true faith.
To leave the Book of Job there is to stop thinking about it. Because the narrative of Job is secondary to its problematic. One can even argue that the narrative is misleading: in the restoration of Job’s children, health and wealth, we have a resolution that fails in our terms. We do not expect such miracles in real life. Hence, it is not the narrative of Job that is significant.
What is significant and useful are the problems of the story. For instance, when the righteous, believing Job is afflicted with death and suffering, such questions are raised (in the story and by Job’s friends): Who is to be blamed? Is God unjust or uncaring? Has Job sinned in hiding (or ignorance) and is therefore being punished? Does it all make any sense?
Job adopts a difficult position throughout the story: among other things, he neither blames God, nor does he blame himself, but he demands an answer. When one thinks of this, one comes to the kernel of the thought of this story: how does one live best in a world where undeserved suffering sometimes befalls the good? It is not the unbelievable narrative which makes this a significant story; it is the way Job’s reactions, his friends’ prescriptions and the problematic of the entire story make us think. Moreover, as God’s incomplete ‘answers’ to Job indicate, stories can make us think in very complex ways.
Religions have always known that human beings think best and most easily in stories. That is why religions consciously think through stories: the ‘facts’ and ‘details’ of these stories change with changing human circumstances, but what does not change is the bid and ability to make us contemplate, imagine, reason, induce, examine — in other words, think.
Strangely, politicians have also known this. All major political movements have depended on the power of stories. In the decades when the Left was on the ascendency, it had a powerful story to tell — of human exploitation, human resistance and eventually human achievement in the shape of a ‘classless’ society. In recent years, the Right has managed to tell us stories that, for various reasons, seem more convincing to many: inevitable state-aided neo-liberalism, for instance. Narendra Modi’s victory in India, Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s in Turkey, and Donald Trump’s in the U.S. — all three are driven by powerful narratives that explain the ‘past’ and promise a ‘future.’
Failure of academics
Unfortunately, the one area where thinking in stories was taken seriously — and not just reduced to mechanistic explanations — has lost confidence in itself. The Humanities have been too busy trying to justify stories in all possible terms — entertainment, discourse, narratology, cognitivist structures, reader response, etc. — instead of working on how to best think in stories. The total failure of academics, publishers and editors to talk of literature as literature — not just what sells, or a set of ‘reader responses’, or a soporific, or passing politics, or ageless ‘Darwinism,’ etc. — is an index of this failure.
The so-called post-truth society is not primarily the result of our inability to focus on facts; it is due to our failure to read stories deeply. Just as there are ways in which facts can be used positively or negatively, there are ways in which stories can be read — to make us think or to prevent us from thinking. Literature — even in the days when it was written with a capital ‘L’ — was the one area of the Humanities where this was a serious endeavour. This has changed at great cost to human civilisation.
Humans still think primarily in stories. But the failure of standards in education and literary criticism has combined with the rise of fundamentalism (which is not piety or religious thought), scientism (which is not science) and numerical neo-liberalism (which is not even capitalism) to deprive more and more people of the ability to think critically, deeply and sensitively in stories. This explains many of our current political and economic woes.
Rail passengers are spending six times more on fares than their peers in Europe - with 14 per cent of their income being spent on monthly season tickets.
Those commuting from Luton to London pay an average of £387 a month, significantly more than the £61 paid by those in Paris and Rome.
This equates to an average of 14 per cent of monthly earnings, significantly higher than the 2 per cent seen in France, 3 per cent in Germany and 4 per cent in Spain, according to Action for Rail.
TUC General Secretary Frances O’Grady said that not only are prices high but trains were “overcrowded”, “understaffed” and the infrastructure was “out-of-date”.
"British commuters are forced to shell out far more on rail fares than others in Europe. Many will look with envy at the cheaper, publicly-owned services on the continent,” he said.
"Years of failed privatisation have left us with sky-high ticket prices, overcrowded trains, understaffed services and out-of-date infrastructure. Private train companies are milking the system, and the government is letting them get away with it."
Country
From
To
Distance (miles)
Monthly season ticket cost
Monthly earnings
% of monthly earnings
UK
Luton
London St. Pancras
35
£387
£2,759
14%
UK
Liverpool Lime Street
Manchester Piccadilly
32
£292
£2,759
11%
Germany
Dusseldorf
Cologne
28
£85
£2,624
3%
France
Mantes-la-Jolie
Paris
34
£61
£2,545
2%
Italy
Anzio
Rome
31
£61
£2,015
3%
Spain
Aranjuez
Madrid
31
£75
£1,917
4%
RMT General Secretary Mick Cash said: "British passengers are paying the highest fares in Europe to travel on rammed services while the private train companies are laughing all the way to the bank. Companies like Southern Rail and their French owners are siphoning off cash to subsidise rail services in Paris and beyond."
Mick Whelan, the General Secretary of ASLEF added: "It is scandalous that the government is allowing privatised train companies to make even more money for providing an ever-poorer service. We have the most expensive railway in Europe and the train companies, aided and abetted by this government, are about to make it even more costly for people to travel."
Action for Rail
Transport Secretary, Chris Grayling said: “Thanks to action by the Government on train ticket prices, wages are growing faster than regulated fares. This commitment to cap regulated fares in line with inflation will save annual season ticket holders an average £425 in the five years to 2020.
“To improve services, we are investing more than £40billion into our railways. This will provide passengers with better trains that are faster and more comfortable.
"We are delivering the biggest rail modernisation programme for more than a century, providing more seats and services. We have always fairly balanced the cost of this investment between the taxpayer and the passenger.
"On average, 97% of every £1 of a passenger's fare goes back into the railway.”
