K-Drop: US-China Relations. China-Russia. Governing #AI and Robots! Plus More! #166
Grüezi! I’m Adrian Monck, and welcome to this newsletter featuring seven things that caught my attention this week.
Also in this edition – Boomers and Xers vs Gen Z and Millennials in the workplace, ESG flags – and is this the best you can do?
I’m taking a break next week – see you in a fortnight!
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1️⃣ How do the US & China Get Back on Track?
A 100-year-old man might know.
Henry Kissinger is a divisive figure.
Young Heinz was a 9-year-old living near Nuremberg when Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany. He was 50 when he became Nixon’s Secretary of State having engineered the US rapprochement with China.
Reconciliation rested on a deal Nixon jotted down at the time:
“Taiwan = Vietnam = trade-off ... [We] won’t support Taiwan independence.”
Today the Taiwan bargain is unravelling and some question Kissinger’s wisdom.
But what’s not in doubt the centenarian’s intimate knowledge of global decision-makers and their motivations.
His reflections on China are worth listening to:
“Having lived in Nazi Germany, I know that war was inevitable because Hitler needed it. I don’t think the Chinese need it.
“They’re not heading for world domination in a Hitlerian sense. That is not how they think or have ever thought of world order.
“[To them,] world order means they are the final judges of their interests. What they want is participation in how the rules are made.”
Today, Kissinger calls for a cooling of the heated rhetoric over China and US relations. He still speaks in chancelleries and embassies – but will he be listened to?
⏭ Maybe. President Biden says he expects relations to thaw soon.
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2️⃣ China and Russia – the Original ‘Frenemies’
There’s no pals in power politics. Cheers!
Another fascinating example of the new China-Russia relationship.
Russia’s Pacific port of Vladivostok is opening to China 163 years after a Qing emperor was forced to hand it over to Russia’s Tsar.
My travels have taken me to Vladivostok (along with Pamela Anderson, but that’s another story) and so have Henry Kissinger’s, as he told China’s Deng Xiaoping back in 1974:
“Deng asked how I found Vladivostok, and I said that my overpowering impression of Vladivostok was the cold: ‘I’ve never known it could get so cold in this world.’
“And then—tactlessly—I said, ‘Now I know why you Chinese never went up there.’
“And Deng said, ‘What do you mean never went up there, it’s ours! And it’s called’—whatever it’s called in Chinese—‘and all the cities around there are all ours.’
China had a hundred years of being kicked around by Western imperial powers. Russia was one of them. And as Kissinger – again in that fascinating Economist interview – says:
“I have never met a Russian leader who said anything good about China. And I’ve never met a Chinese leader who said anything good about Russia...”
⏭ A post-Putin Russia might ‘rethink’ its China relationship.
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3️⃣ The Boomer Work Crisis
They don’t get why Gen Z and Millennials don’t want to come back to the office.
The FT’s Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson warns about something that’s on a lot of C-suite minds lately:
“A Covid-scarred microgeneration is landing in workplaces without the usual social skills.”
And the way to restore those lost social skills?
Bring people back to the office.
Even Elon Musk has a point of view.
Young people obviously don’t all feel they’re missing out on professional rites of passage, like co-worker hazings, patronising bosses and possible harassment.
According to a survey:
Three-quarters of Gen Zs and millennials “who are currently in remote or hybrid roles would consider looking for a new job if their employer asked them to work on site full-time.”
⏭ Will the office win? The answer will likely be a compromise. OOO.
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4️⃣ The Shine Comes off ESG
2022’s beloved buzzword is 2023’s box-tick bingo.
Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) were 2022’s #1 organizational priority.
This year? They’ve dropped to third place in a big survey of execs.
Cost-cutting in a tough economy has led companies to scale back their sustainability commitments.
Shortsighted short-termism perhaps.
Still, investment funds haven’t taken their eyes off the fact that their money will go up in smoke if the climate crisis continues apace.
⏭ Just six months until the EU’s new ESG rules come into play.
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5️⃣ Governing #AI
Who will police artificial intelligence?
AI destroying the world? I know there’s a Henry Kissinger theme to this week’s newsletter – but yes! – the world’s oldest PolSci prof is worried:
We may well wind up destroying ourselves. And a point is now quite reachable where the machines can refuse to be shut off.
No surprise then that companies like Google and OpenAI have jumped on to the Artificial Intelligence governance bandwagon AKA standards to stop ‘Killer AI.’
Here’s ChatGPT on the OpenAI idea:
It proposes an international authority like the IAEA, but doesn’t provide specifics on how it would be set up or operate. Similarly, public oversight is proposed, but with no mechanisms for how this would be done.
Google’s doc?
Assumes a high level of international cooperation and alignment in the governance of #AI. This may not be realistic given the current geopolitical landscape and the competitive nature of AI development.
Don’t expect a “Global AI Authority” any time soon.
⏭ Who is going to regulate AI?
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6️⃣ Meet Our Robot Overlords!
AI is nothing without a sinister robot body – and Tesla is on it!
Tesla’s Bots may look menacing, but given its cars can’t really drive themselves, these robots might not be able to cross busy roads on their way to taking over the world.
But it’s getting busy in robot-land. A rival engineer posted his company’s robot on twitter:
⏭ Amazon has a home robot in development.
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7️⃣ Is That the Best You Can Do?
Really?
Last Kissinger story, via Lee Howell, from Walter Isaacson’s biography.
An ambassador works for days on a report for Kissinger.
He gives it to the Secretary of State, and is told: “Is this the best you can do?”
Works on it again, rewrites it, hands it in. Same response.
The ambassador redrafts it one more time and hands it to Kissinger.
“Is this the best you can do?” The ambassador snaps. “Damn it, yes, it’s the best I can do.”
“Fine,” Kissinger says. “Then I guess I’ll read it this time.”
⏭ Challenging reading on Bea’s book club podcast.
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If you enjoy this newsletter – please recommend it!
Best,
Adrian
Great 7 this week, Ad.
And for me, AI is terrifying.