AI-Geopolitics

Acknowledging the people behind the AI curtain Artificial intelligence is usually sold as a miracle of software. It is cleaner than that, shinier than that, and more comfortable than that. But behind the polished interface is a global workforce of people who label, rank, sort, filter, clean, moderate, and evaluate the material that makes modern … Read more

COVID, Algorithmic Intimacy, and the New Infrastructure of Dependence COVID did not invent the AI era. That is worth saying plainly, because the timeline matters. Neural networks, cloud platforms, recommender systems, voice assistants, logistics algorithms, medical models, surveillance tools, and automated decision systems were already here before the virus arrived. The machinery had been built. … Read more

The Question That Won’t Go Away Every few months, the question comes back around. Is the chatbot conscious? Will the next model be? How would we know if it were? You can read a hundred essays on it and walk away with the same uneasy feeling you started with, because nobody can answer the question … Read more

Greenland, Davos, and the Alliance After the Blow When Donald Trump first floated the idea of buying Greenland in 2019, most observers treated it as an eccentric aside. Trump returned to the subject immediately after winning re-election in November 2024, and this time the framing was different. He was no longer musing about a real … Read more

Russia’s AI Supply Chain and the Architecture of Its Development Partnerships Russia entered the artificial-intelligence era with the rhetorical ambition of a great power. Its National AI Development Strategy, adopted by presidential decree in October 2019 and substantially revised in 2024, pledges to raise AI’s contribution to Russian GDP to eleven trillion rubles by 2030 … Read more