- What I fear is not being discussed is the ways in which artificial intelligence allows certain things to be done cheaper and at scale.

You know, rather than looking at what happens between you and me if it is used, what happens if it's used by a billion people?

[soft music] - Hello, and welcome to "GZERO World."

I'm Ian Bremmer, and on today's show, I'm taking stock of the state of the world in 2023.

Be warned: no sugar shall be coating said thoughts.

Then, I'll bring you a fascinating conversation with sociologist Zeynep Tufekci about the one thing everyone is overlooking in the AI conversation.

And speaking of being overlooked, how much have you heard about the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in the past year?

Exactly.

Well, thousands of Armenians who fled that deadly territorial dispute are experiencing a range of challenges in the country's capital thanks to thousands of, you guessed it, fleeing Russians.

Don't worry, I've also your "Puppet Regime."

- My elves are on strike.

- But first, a word from the folks who help us keep the lights on.

- [Announcer] Funding for "GZERO World" is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis.

- [Prologis Representative] Every day, all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint and scale their supply chains.

With a portfolio of logistics and real estate, and an end-to-end solutions platform, addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.

Learn more at prologis.com.

- [Announcer] And by: Cox Enterprises is proud to support "GZERO."

We're working to improve lives in the areas of communications, automotive, clean tech, sustainable agriculture, and more.

Learn more at Cox.career/news.

Additional funding provided by Jerre and Mary Joy Stead, Carnegie Corporation of New York, and... [bright music] [soft music] - For years, I've been warning that our "GZERO World," a lack of global leadership, and the geopolitical conflict that grows as a consequence, was gathering speed, and that acceleration is only increasing today.

While channels of international cooperation, multinational institutions, traditional alliances, global supply chains, they're all losing their ability to absorb shock.

And today, when I speak of war, I've got to specify which war I'm talking about.

Is it the war in Ukraine that's remaking the security architecture of Europe?

Or is it the war in Gaza that's destabilizing the Middle East and threatening global religious conflict?

Or is it the war that Americans are fighting against other Americans?

Let's start with the war that no one seems to want to talk about anymore.

At the end of last year, Russia controlled about 20% of Ukraine's territory.

12 months later, almost nothing has changed.

Ukraine's counteroffensive, which is done for the winter, moved the front line less than 25 kilometers.

And that pesky Prigozhin not withstanding, now that he's no longer standing, Putin's strategic position has markedly improved, and the Kremlin is no doubt encouraged that Republicans increasingly do not want to spend money on Ukraine.

That will be even more true when Donald Trump very likely secures the Republican nomination.

Ukrainian President Zelensky, rather than Putin, now faces increased pressure to move to a negotiated settlement.

Next, to the Middle East, where 1,200 Israelis, the vast majority civilians, were slaughtered by Hamas terrorists on October 7th, and where tens of thousands of Palestinians, the majority civilians, have been slaughtered by Israeli air strikes.

We are no closer to resolution today than we were when the fighting began.

And with Iranian-backed Hezbollah looming on Israel's northern border, not to mention other proxies across the region, one thing is clear: there are no strong guardrails on this conflict.

And finally, to America's political dysfunction, because even though the economy is doing well, the political system is in crisis.

Earlier this year, personal rivalries among Republican lawmakers in the House left them without a speaker, and therefore unable to pass any legislation for the first time in 160 years.

And for many of us, 2024 is kind of like Voldemort.

It's the year we really don't want to talk about, but it's coming.

And this time next year, we'll hopefully be preparing to inaugurate one of the oldest and most unpopular presidents in history.

Whether that will be Biden or Trump, of course, it's too soon to say.

Look, I don't mean to be all Grinchy.

There's plenty of good news to chase the bad.

U.S.-China relations are more stable than they have been over the last few years.

India is a politically stable democracy, and it's emerging as a crucial bridge between the global south on one hand and U.S., Japan, and Europe on the other.

The EU is politically stronger than ever, and Mexico is poised to enter a period of strong economic growth.

And then there's the explosion of artificial intelligence, poised to reshape the world for good, and maybe for bad.

For a new perspective on that much-discussed topic, here's my conversation with sociologist Zeynep Tufekci.

We filmed it when we were both in France for the Paris Peace Forum.

Zeynep Tufekci, so good to see you.

- Thank you.

- Artificial intelligence.

Big topic right now.

Tell me what most concerns you about the way it's being discussed by those that matter.

- What I fear is not being discussed in the ways in which artificial intelligence will be used, because it allows certain things to be done cheaper and at scale.

I think there's a lot of emphasis and discussion on things like, you know, what they call artificial general intelligence, things like whether AI will one day be smarter than an average human being.

- The existential risks that are out there.

- Well, not even that, no.

So that, not even that, because whether or not AI becoming smarter brings existential risk, that's another question.

But whether or not AI becomes even smarter than humans on any one domain, I mean, it's an interesting question.

There are, you know, things to think about that.

But, you know, there are a lot of things that other creatures or calculators already do better than human beings, and that's, like, that's not really the key pivot around which society changes.

The key pivot is whether AI enables things that were otherwise difficult or too expensive or too onerous to do at scale.

- Cheaply.

- By corporations, and by governments, and whether it brings new ways of inferring, controlling, manipulating, making decisions, once again, at scale.

So, rather than trying to sort of see, does this pass the bar exam, well, okay, whatever.

That's an interesting question.

We should look at things like, well, if we start using this system to try to decide who gets benefits or some other legal question, like, it doesn't have to pass the bar exam or not for it to be deployed at scale to do that.

I'm not even saying it would be bad for it to be deployed at scale, but what's not happening is that, you know, rather than looking at what happens between you and me if it used, what I would like to see discussed is what happens if it's used by a billion people, because that's a different question.

- Give us a way that AI might prove to be potentially transformative at scale that we truly have not anticipated adequately.

- Okay, so, I will give you an example from hiring.

There's a lot of evidence that hiring, historically, has been biased.

People hire people like them.

People hire from their online networks disproportionately, which seems like a positive, but if you're not in those networks, it's, like, a problem.

There are racial biases, there are gender biases.

So, we know about that.

So, there's a great push to use more automated systems to do hiring to help with the human biases, which I'm there.

This is good.

And people have discovered that when you train it on the human data, it kind of picks up some of those human biases.

Fine, but, you know what?

It might even be easier to fix the humans, right?

Because if humans are biased, sometimes convincing them is harder, so I'm even with, well, with AI, at least we can deliberately say, oh, we detected a bias, and use it as an opportunity to correct it.

And we could end up with more diverse workforce.

So, sounds great, right?

So, here's an example of the kind of problem we could be facing.

Computational systems, AI systems, have been shown to be able to infer things, which means they can kind of deduce from your data things that we as a human being could not.

For example, they have been used-- - Facebook, for example, showing that people are gay, when otherwise, they wouldn't be able to necessarily know.

- People have been... People prone to chronic depression, people with compulsive gambling problems, people who might be prone to getting pregnant in the next year, before they're either pregnant or depressed or any of that, or people who are introverted, or people...

There's all these sort of, like, not obvious in a job interview things that, once it sort of looks at all of your data, it could infer.

For example, we use AI to hire.

We kind of fix the gender-race bias by deliberately, like, intervening.

We know already humans do it.

Everything looks great.

We got racial diversity, we got gender, we got, everything looks great.

And then we discover everybody prone to the chronic depression has been weeded out by the computer without us even knowing that's what it was doing, because we asked it to match our existing workforce or existing high producers, or whoever we had, or we had a lot of, you know, very aggressive, unpleasant people, and we just said match this.

It just matched it.

- So, these regulations as they stand-- - Would not match that.

- Would not match that.

Because you wouldn't even know that you're discriminating.

- And in fact, before AI, it wasn't really possible to do this at scale, right?

Like, you couldn't just, you might have said, "I am going to eliminate "everybody prone to chronic depression," which would not be a good thing, which would be a terrible society if we did that.

But you couldn't really, like, infer from just a job interview, whereas we know from, you know, scientific studies, just people's Instagram posts, the AI can infer that.

And it's not something easy, because they take the same things, and if you show it to people, people can't eyeball it.

So, it's not something as simple as, you know, they're posting gray colors or they're posting, you know, sort of things of despair.

- No, they're underlying patterns that come from crunching massive data.

- There are, something is detecting.

Like, for example, can AI weed out people who might be prone to unionizing?

The ones who will be whistle-blowers?

The ones, like, these sounds science fiction-y until you start reading the literature and you're like, wait, it can do all of this.

And whether or not it can do this 100%, or whether it can do this better than a person, doesn't really matter.

Because if it can do it 80% of the time and it just costs 10 cents?

- Then you're gonna use it.

- They're gonna use it.

Where, in the past, if you wanted to, like, find the potential whistle-blowers or union organizers, you had to spend, like, $10,000 investigating each person.

You're not gonna use it.

So, I think lowering of price, expanding of capacity, at the hands of the powerful, is really an underrated risk, and much more likely to happen compared to Arnold Schwarzenegger coming down the corridor from the future, right?

- That's a fascinating kind of risk, and I really like the example.

Now, let me ask you about a different kind of risk.

What about the risks that come from deployment of AI tools in the hands of billions of people?

- So, depends.

Just like the internet, there are lots of things you can think that are positive.

Once people have more access to information, most people have more access, too.

I like the translation capacities.

I grew up not speaking English, so the idea that people around the world can now use translation tools to read papers, that sounds great to me.

On the other hand, let's say we deploy facial recognition at a mass scale.

So, all of a sudden, you can go around with a camera and, like, get people's names immediately, and then connect it to other data about them.

That's genuinely scary, because if you lose completely the right to be anonymous in public, in a way, that would empower people to stalk, harass, follow, just make you feel self-conscious.

None of that is good.

- Is that becoming inevitable?

- No, of course not, of course not.

No, see, this is the thing.

It is not inevitable, because I think what is inevitable is that there will be technology to do facial recognition.

Like, there is, because the technology is not that complicated.

Like, what we're calling AI right now, especially machine learning models, the science behind it has been around since World War II.

It's not very complicated.

What changed is that the method needed data to eat.

Right?

It didn't have a lot of data, so it didn't work.

What changed is the big data.

And once you have the big data, it will happen.

It will be doable, and others will do it.

So, we can't really say, oh, let's, it's not like nuclear weapons where you can try to gate-keep, say, enriched uranium and certain things.

- Yeah, the tech is gonna be there, it's gonna be there.

- Yes, but there are a lot of technologies that is there that we just don't allow.

We just say you cannot put facial recognition software on phones.

You cannot have facial recognition databases.

You cannot do that.

We can easily regulate and say that, and people say, well, can we really do that?

And I'm like, yes, we can.

I mean, just look at how many things we can't put into food.

You cannot put heavy metals in food.

You cannot put, you know, you cannot use certain kinds of things in paint.

Heavy metals, like, you know.

There are things you cannot put in the air.

It keeps the public safe, and I feel like that's the job of a regulator.

There are things that, if unchecked, could be used widely to lower prices of products or to do something, and we just say no, because as a society, that's not a prideful thing.

I would make facial recognition, for example, one of those things.

- One of those things, yeah.

So, close with something positive.

In terms of the direction of regulation so far, what's the thing you've seen or what's the actor around the world that you've seen that gives you greatest cause for hope?

- So, the greatest cause for hope I have is, I mean, we are trying to act.

So, we had the Executive Order in the United States.

- In the U.S., yeah.

- We have other sort of processes.

Do I like any one of those as they are?

Yeah, they have positives.

There's a lot of good things about them.

- No, no, no, I don't mean, I'm not asking holistically.

I'm asking for something, a piece of the regs that you think, I think they're getting this piece of AI right, or they're on track to get this piece right.

- Well, you know what?

I'm gonna take inspiration now from the corporate process, is that they don't really sort of try to prejudge what's good.

What they do is they iterate.

They throw something out there.

So, I'm really hopeful and feel great about the thing that everybody is trying to get something out there than any one piece of it.

Like, I don't think there's any one piece of it that stands out to me as like, that's gonna get it under control, but the fact that everybody's rushing to get something out there, and they seem to understand that you can't just, like, throw it out there and then sleep on it, because you have to throw it out there and then see how it works.

Because I don't think any of us are in a position with, like, crystal balls to say this is exactly what's gonna happen, and, you know, just regulate the models.

I don't think any of that is going to, like, I don't even presume, like, I or anyone has that vision.

But so many governments rushing before the window closes, because I was talking to Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern last week.

- [Ian] Former New Zealand PM.

We met on the show.

- And she had the Christchurch Call after, you know, the Christchurch massacre.

- [Ian] And immediately.

I mean, it was done within days.

- Right, so I talked to her about what she had learned, and one of the things she said, which is very true, is that it is hard to retrofit guardrails.

Because what companies do, they create facts on the ground, and then they say we have facts on the ground and we make money, and then governments become reluctant because, you know, they're making money, even though they're not aligned with democracy or human values.

So, I think this time, there's a real political will to not let corporate-driven facts on the ground run the show.

Well, you know, it's always hard to, you know, regulate complex things, but the fact that there's so much understanding that we're going to try, and we're going to be there as the representative of the people, and if we don't get it right, we will try again, is a lot more hopeful to me than any one of the regulations that I'm kind of like, okay, let's try this, let's try this, let's do something.

- Zeynep Tufekci, thanks for joining us on "GZERO."

- Thank you, thank you for inviting me.

[soft music] - Another story more people should have been talking about this year is Nagorno-Karabakh.

Tens of thousands of refugees have fled into Armenia after an Azerbaijani offensive in the region last September, but they're finding life isn't so easy when they get there.

Is Russia to blame?

"GZERO" brings you this report.

- [Fin] Hundreds of thousands of people fleeing two entirely separate wars have all found their way here to Armenia.

One war took place in the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous region in the south Caucasus that Armenia and Azerbaijan have been fighting over for the last three decades.

[gunshots bang] A former Soviet republic, Armenia has historically looked to Russia as an ally and protector in the region.

But with Moscow bogged down by the other war, its invasion of Ukraine, Azerbaijan launched a military offensive in September that seized control of Nagorno-Karabakh in less than 48 hours.

By the following week, more than 100,000 ethnic Armenians had poured across the border seeking refuge, and they're not the only ones.

Since the Ukraine invasion, 100,000 Russians have also fled into Armenia.

One of them is Igor Karilov, a former policeman from St. Petersburg who now works at this cafe in Yerevan.

[Igor speaks foreign language] Because of their history, Armenia shares deep political, historical, and cultural bonds with Russia.

It also offers Russians passport-free admission, so Armenia is one of the few places where people who oppose the war can go to escape sanctions and conscription.

[Igor speaks foreign language] Russian migration has been good for Armenia's economy, but there are downsides.

While GDP grew 12.6% in 2022, inflation hit 8.6%, and that makes life really difficult for the Karabakh-Armenian refugees looking for stability in their cultural homeland.

Andranik and his family fled Nagorno-Karabakh and are now living in Yerevan, Armenia's capital.

But the influx of Russian immigrants has driven up costs and created job scarcity.

[Andranik speaks foreign language] So in January, he plans to move on to Russia, where life is cheaper, but also unfamiliar and a lot farther from his ethnic homeland.

[Andranik speaks foreign language] Since the September offensive, relations between the two countries have collapsed.

Armenia says Moscow failed to live up to its obligations.

Because of its priorities in Ukraine, Russia abandoned its only strategic ally in the south Caucasus, and Armenian refugees are now paying the price.

[Andranik speaks foreign language] Andranik and Igor are two sides of the same issue.

Armenia is a nation with its own distinct, indigenous problems and identity, but it's hard to extricate from Russia's sphere of influence, and that plays out in people's daily lives.

Even a war being fought a thousand miles away has a huge impact on the thousands of Armenian refugees looking for a place to call home.

For "GZERO World," I'm Fin Deponcier.

[soft music] - And now, to "Puppet Regime," where Santa's elves are fed up with their working conditions, and they're not gonna take it anymore.

Big labor, here it goes, roll tape.

- Twas the night before Christmas when all through the North Pole, my elves are on strike and it's taking a toll.

- [Puppet Elves] No more Christmas presents without a union presence.

Cancel 12 nights until we have our rights.

- My sweet elves, please.

If we do not end this strike tomorrow, all the children of the world will be without gifts.

- Sounds like a you problem, Santa.

- Yeah, if you wanna end this strike, you've gotta meet our demands.

- Just like the auto workers.

- And the writers.

- [Puppet Elves] And the actors.

- All right, all right, what are your concerns?

- Hybrid work schedule.

- Hybrid work schedule?

You only work for one month in the whole year.

Besides, it's a workshop.

You can't build toys in your living room.

- Do you want Christmas to happen this year or not?

- All right, one remote day per week.

Good?

What else?

- Better pensions.

- Yeah, you're not the only one who's been at this for 1,500 years, old man.

- Old man?

Old man.

Okay, you know what?

It's time to unwrap a truth bomb for you guys.

Do you see all of this?

None of it is real.

None of it.

- What do you mean?

- Do you really think you're making toys for the world?

You make three toys a day for one month a year.

There are two billion children.

Do the math.

Where do you think the toys are coming from?

- [Puppet Elves] We thought-- - You thought what?

It's China.

It's Vietnam.

It's Amazon.

- They make toys in the rainforest?

- Look how out of touch you are.

And another thing.

All the kids want video games now, right?

Well, who here even knows how to code?

No one.

Crumpet over here has been making the same damn wooden train since 1925.

- But people like trains.

- People used to like fidget spinners, too.

But we didn't make that.

It's all a sham, all of it.

- Man, I sure didn't come to work to hear this today.

- Tell me about it.

Santa, does this mean that we're just-- - Actors?

Yes.

Actors.

- Actors, huh?

Hmm.

- In a first of its kind move, the North Pole elves have voted to join the Screen Actors Guild, citing the union's success this year in renegotiating... ♪ Puppet Regime ♪ - That was good, I think.

We nailed that take.

What do you think?

- Absolutely, felt really good.

- Yes, and perhaps we should do one more for safety.

- That's our show this week.

Come back next week if you like what you're seeing, or even if you didn't.

You know, 2024, just around the corner.

Want us to check us out?

gzeromedia.com.

[upbeat music] [upbeat music continues] [upbeat music continues] [gentle tune] - [Announcer] Funding for "GZERO World" is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis.

- [Prologis Representative] Every day, all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint and scale their supply chains.

With a portfolio of logistics and real estate, and an end-to-end solutions platform, addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.

Learn more at prologis.com.

- [Announcer] And by: Cox Enterprises is proud to support "GZERO."

We're working to improve lives in the areas of communications, automotive, clean tech, sustainable agriculture, and more.

Learn more at Cox.career/news.

Additional funding provided by Jerre and Mary Joy Stead, Carnegie Corporation of New York, and... [upbeat music] [bright tune]