Irish Examiner view: When the world is a powder keg

Israeli military and people look at a damaged school building that was hit in Iran's missile attack in Gedera. Israel is now threatening to retaliate against the Islamic Republic, with oil and nuclear facilities touted as targets. Picture: Ohad Zwigenberg/AP

The world seems like a powder keg, given the number of wars which feel like they’re exploding out of control.

We felt it first in Ukraine with the Russian invasion, where there was a fear it could become a showdown between Russia and Nato. 

But eyes now are more focused on Israel, which has the most capable military in the Middle East and is now fighting on the ground in both Gaza and Lebanon, where it says it is trying to destroy Hezbollah infrastructure.

Iran, which has been trying to shape regional power by supporting Hamas and Hezbollah, fired 180 missiles at Israel in response, ratcheting up tensions. Israel is now threatening to retaliate against the Islamic Republic, with oil and nuclear facilities touted as targets. Iran, for its part, says its intervention is over. Whether it will maintain that position if critical infrastructure is destroyed seems doubtful.

That October 2 marked the International Day of Non-Violence is not without irony. Marking the birth of Mahatma Gandhi, its intention, as per the UN Assembly resolution that created it, is to “reaffirm the desire for a culture of peace, tolerance, understanding, and non-violence”. One does not have to be an expert on geopolitics to see that humanity has a very long way to go to establish that sort of culture.

While Gandhi’s views were nuanced — to him, violence was still preferable to cowardice in certain circumstances, though he was critical of Irish nationalism’s use of it — it is nonetheless a worthy aspiration. Hate begets hate, after all, and war begets war as the revenge impulse takes hold.

Monday will mark 12 months since Hamas’s attack on Israel, when 1,200 Israelis were killed. Since then, more than 40,000 Gazans have died, most of them civilians — and some estimates put it as much as 10 times that figure.

With hundreds now dead in Lebanon as a result of Israeli military action and potential outright conflict with Iran there is no real sign of, or seeming interest in, coming back from the brink.

So a spark becomes a flame which becomes a blaze.

And yet we only have to look at the history of our own island to see that such blazes can be contained, even extinguished.

In a world that seems to be constantly aflame, it is worth keeping in mind that we can constrain our natural impulses, as long as the will is there to do it.

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Environmental scorecard

With humanity’s predilection for war manifest on almost every continent, it’s really not surprising that we have taken to waging war against the natural world.

However, it should not take yet another EPA report to tell us that biodiversity is paying the price in this country.

And yet the latest one is stark and sobering, highlighting not just the damage to the environment but how it has become a threat to human health.

“In all cases, the outlook is not positive,” the report says of the country’s environmental scorecard.

The decline in air quality is worrying, and the report urges action on reducing particulates from pollution and nitrogen dioxide — the leftovers from cars burning fossil fuels. In this, the Government’s failure to restore grants for buying private EVs, focusing instead on company cars in a peculiarly troubling sense of trickle-down economics to increase the number of secondhand electric vehicles, seems like an open goal missed.

There is, though, some hope in that it’s possible to make sustainability pay, to make it a solid foundation for business as well as the communal good.

Yesterday’s Irish Examiner, in a page written by Joyce Fegan, profiled two companies that have embraced a green ethos that has paid dividends, as well as a climate action group in Cork’s Turners Cross that has helped to regenerate and clean up a 7km stretch of river.

We are a pugnacious, stubborn species. But there is a time when that doggedness comes to the fore, and when it comes to salvaging the environment in the face of climate collapse, the time to lean into that stubbornness is most certainly now.

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Pitfalls of AI

Given that our species seems hellbent on destroying the natural world, it seems inevitable that the race to develop artificial intelligence is only exacerbating things. So much electricity is needed to run the AI training farms that Microsoft recently agreed a deal to take all the power from a recommissioned nuclear power plant at Three Mile Island.

All of this for technology that, regardless of its widespread use, falls desperately short in many regards. The tools have great application in fields like medical research, but anybody who has used one of the generative apps will have experienced their hallucinations, where the tool invents an answer that it thinks will fulfil the question.

Now, it is reported that the latest models of generative AI — the ChatGPTs of the world — are more likely than before to simply invent things than say they don’t know the answer.

The research by Spain’s Universitat Politècnica de València, published in the journal Nature, found that while accuracy has improved, as has the ability to answer complex questions, the models are also failing at more basic queries and are less transparent on whether or not they need more information to give an answer.

Add in that these ever more complex tools are running out of quality original content to train on (some would say steal, ignoring copyright), one wonders how AI trained on AI will amount to the holy grail super-system that OpenAI’s Sam Altman thinks may only be “thousands of days away”.

One wonders if any of the tech companies have considered the virtue of applying AI development to climate sustainability or conflict resolution, rather than the endless quest for profit.