WORLD ROUNDUPIran Unveils First Hypersonic Missile | 6 Swing States Will Decide the Future of Geopolitics | Poland Is Not Ready to Accept a New McCarthyism, and more
· 6 Swing States Will Decide the Future of Geopolitics
These middle powers of the global south should be the focus of U.S. policy
· AI Systems ‘Could Kill Many Humans’ within Two Years
Matt Clifford warns of bioweapon and cyberattack threats
· Poland Is Not Ready to Accept a New McCarthyism
On Sunday, half a million Poles marched to defend the country’s democracy against a ruling party that has just granted itself ominous new powers
· South Korea Declares Nuclear Alliance with U.S. to Deter Kim Jong-un
Announcement follows unprecedented rate of missile tests by Pyongyang
· Iran Unveils First Hypersonic Missile in Challenge to Israel and West
Iran claims that the missile, which can travel at five times the speed of sound, can both bypass and destroy air defence systems
· Hacks Against Ukraine’s Emergency Response Services Rise During Bombings
Data from Cloudflare’s free digital defense service, Project Galileo, illuminates new links between online and offline attack
· Finland’s Nuclear Catacombs Nearly Ready to House Waste
Long-term storage problem of nuclear waste has cast a shadow on nuclear projects
6 Swing States Will Decide the Future of Geopolitics (Cliff Kupchan, Foreign Policy)
Middle powers today have more agency than at any time since World War II. These are countries with significant leverage in geopolitics, but they are less powerful than the world’s two superpowers—the United States and China. In the global north, they include France, Germany, Japan, Russia, South Korea, and others. With the exception of Russia, these countries do not tell us much about the shifting dynamics of power and leverage, as they remain broadly aligned with the United States.
Much more interesting are the six leading middle powers of the global south: Brazil, India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and Turkey. These swing states of the global south are not fully aligned with either superpower and are therefore free to create new power dynamics. All are members of the G-20 and active in both geopolitics and geoeconomics. These six also serve as a good barometer for broader geopolitical trends in the global south.
AI Systems ‘Could Kill Many Humans’ within Two Years (Mark Sellman and Tom Whipple, The Times)
AI systems will be powerful enough to “kill many humans” within just two years, Rishi Sunak’s adviser on artificial intelligence has warned.
Matt Clifford, who is helping the prime minister set up the government’s AI taskforce, said policymakers should be prepared for threats ranging from cyberattacks to the creation of bioweapons if mankind fails to find a way to control the technology.
“You can have really very dangerous threats to humans that could kill many humans, not all humans, simply from where we’d expect models to be in two years time,” he said, speaking on TalkTV.
In the medium term, experts caution that AI could be used to design chemical and biological weapons and conduct massive attacks over the internet. Last week a statement signed by 350 AI experts, including the CEO of OpenAI, which developed ChatGPT, warned there was also a risk in the longer term that the technology could lead to the extinction of humanity.
Poland Is Not Ready to Accept a New McCarthyism (Piotr H. Kosicki, The Atantic)
On Sunday, 500,000 people marched peacefully through the streets of Warsaw. The occasion marked the 34th anniversary of elections that led to Poland’s nonviolent exit from communism. But the mass showing was no ritual commemoration; it was both a celebration of the past and a protest against the
