Quote of the week…

—-Chancellor Olaf Scholz, in Davos, caught between radical environmentalists on one hand and pressure from Ukraine for Leopard heavy tanks on the other, sought to distance himself from the fray. The only head of state of a G7 country to have made the trip to Switzerland this year, he detailed his battle plan to make his country the world leader in the fight against climate change even while restoring its industrial competitiveness. He presented the strategy in martial terms.

"Most importantly, our transformation toward a climate-neutral economy – the fundamental task of our century – is currently taking on an entirely new dynamic," the chancellor said. "Not in spite of, but because of the Russian war and the resulting pressure on us Europeans to change." As proof of his country's dynamism and of Russian President Vladimir Putin's failure, he emphasized that Germany, which had been dependent on Russian gas supplies in the run-up to the offensive, had managed to become almost completely free of them in less than a year. (Le Monde)

What is Artificial Intelligency?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the ability of a computer or a robot controlled by a computer to do tasks that are usually done by humans because they require human intelligence and discernment. Although there are no AIs that can perform the wide variety of tasks an ordinary human can do, some AIs can match humans in specific tasks.

Bringing a human touch to digital innovation in Europe

The artist in the science lab

The S+T+ARTS programme funds collaborations between science, technology and the arts. It’s enabling artists to tackle urgent issues, including our relationship to nature, big data and artificial intelligence.

by Maya Jaggi 

January 2023

Le Monde Diplomatique

Egor Kraft’s ‘Content Aware Studies’ series uses AI-generated videos and 3D printing to explore how machine learning reconstructs damaged antiquities

Trevor Good, courtesy of the artist and Alexander Levy Gallery, Berlin

When climate change protesters hurled tomato soup at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers in London last October, they shouted, ‘What is worth more? Art or life [and] the protection of our planet?’ One Just Stop Oil activist claimed the protests kickstarted the conversation ‘so that we can ask the questions that matter’.

Whatever the publicity from these symbolic acts of vandalism, the implied opposition between art and environmental ethics is misleading. Artists have long been in the vanguard of raising public awareness of the fragility of nature. Judging by the fruits of a Europe-wide scheme to immerse artists in cutting-edge science and technology (roughly half these EU projects involve ecology) (1), the questions posed by this rising avant-garde are arguably more nuanced, profound and conducive to behavioural and political change than protesters’ shock tactics.

At the Bozar Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels last month, laboratory-like installations by Haseeb Ahmed, an American artist based in Belgium, warned of the pharmaceutical pollution of water through human urine — a counterpoint to the city’s landmark Manneken Pis fountain with its urinating cherub near the Grand Place. One of these, The Fountain of the Amazons (alluding to legendary female warriors), demonstrates unintended effects on aquatic life of contraceptive hormones entering the water system: an artificial vagina squirts a pill per day into a vat of orange urine in which a mutant creature floats as though plucked from a Hieronymus Bosch painting.

In a companion artwork, A Fountain of Eternal Youth, human growth hormones ingested for their putative anti-ageing properties are dripped via an IV tube into a circular pool whose mirror surface (evoking Narcissus) invites viewers to weigh the costs of their own habits and desires.

Ahmed’s artistic ‘scenarios’ convert research on large-scale phenomena ‘to a scale the body can experience, addressing our senses,’ he told me. His aim is not protest ‘art against pharmaceuticals, because it’s complex; we rely on them to maintain our quality of life. The pill brought social freedom for women, but it’s also affecting the androgynisation of fish. So I create machines to help us think together about our ambivalence.’

‘Thinking machines’

Ahmed’s intriguing, disturbing ‘thinking machines’ were part of a Bozar group show, Faces of Water, resulting from artists’ residencies with scientists and engineers around Europe to explore phenomena from toxins to melting glaciers. He worked closely with pharma companies, and also water treatment and public policy experts: ‘Because knowledge has become hyper-specialised, we’re trying to tie knots between fields, to understand the world we’re producing.’ While not without friction, these collaborations can spark dialogue. One company, he recalled, was ‘unhappy with an accusation in the press that they’re not doing enough, so they took out an ad to say what they are doing.’

The residencies were instigated by S+T+ARTS, a European Commission programme funding collaborations between science, technology and the arts since 2016. The aim of embedding artists in R&D teams in industry and universities is not only to raise awareness of global challenges through exhibitions, but to act as a catalyst to tomorrow’s digital innovations. ‘It’s important to bring in new ideas to change mindsets,’ said Ralph Dum of DG Connect (the EC’s directorate general for information and communications technology). Dum, the founding head of the S+T+ARTS programme, is a quantum physicist who joined the Commission 20 years ago, pioneering interdisciplinary programmes that combined experts, such as biologists with data scientists. ‘Now it’s standard, but that didn’t exist then.’

It's important to bring in new ideas to change mindsets ... Artists profit from technology but engineers also profit from artistsRalph Dum

In the Renaissance and Baroque Kunst- und Wunderkammer (the cabinet of arts and curiosities that presaged the modern museum), art objects were viewed alongside scientific instruments and natural marvels. However, 18th-century Enlightenment rationalism and empiricism sundered arts from sciences. By 1959 the British scientist and writer CP Snow, in his famous Cambridge lecture The Two Cultures, lamented the ‘gulf of mutual incomprehension’ between science and the humanities; even engineers and pure scientists were unable to communicate. Now, Dum said, ‘people know more and more about less and less ... it’s almost impossible to bridge the gaps.’ Yet, he argued, ‘science and art are not so different; both relate to curiosity.’

The Manneken Pis fountain was a 17th-century sculptor’s solution to the challenge of providing urban drinking water — a union of aesthetics and engineering explicitly embraced by the Bauhaus movement in 1920s Germany. For Dum, ‘artists are very practical people; they address issues in concrete ways.’ He cites a product emerging from Project Alias by Bjørn Karmann and Tore Knudsen, tackling the invasion of privacy of smart home assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa: ‘There’s no way of making Alexa deaf. So they manipulated the software to ensure Alexa only listens when you want.’ That project won the S+T+ARTS annual Grand Prix for Artistic Exploration in 2019. The previous year’s winning project for Innovative Collaboration, the 3D-printed steel MX3D Bridge,now spans an Amsterdam canal. Besides S+T+ARTS funding for research projects and residences (150 to date, with 70 more this year), more than 200 prizewinners have been chosen from among 15,000 open-call submissions.

For Gerfried Stocker, artistic director of Ars Electronica, at the interface of culture and tech in the Austrian city of Linz since 1979, S+T+ARTS has become a ‘driving force influencing how Europe is going into the digital future. It’s reached critical mass. Art-and-science is cool now.’

‘Artists see things we don’t’

Until the pandemic, S+T+ARTS prizewinners were exhibited annually at Bozar. Emma Dumartheray, exhibitions coordinator for Bozar Lab, views the programme’s residencies as a distinct model of art sponsorship, with companies donating employees’ time and knowledge. Partners such as Ars Electronica contribute experience of brokering collaborations, negotiating patent agreements in case of lucrative breakthroughs. For Dum, ‘artists profit from technology but engineers also profit from artists. Now people understand we don’t interfere with the art.’

‘Artists see things we don’t ... because you need distance,’ Christophe De Jaeger, director of another key partner, Gluon in Brussels, told me. Before starting Bozar Lab in 2017, he founded Gluon (in 2009) to send artists into industrial R&D labs. ‘Employees gain holistic perspectives, talking to other experts in a non-competitive environment; artists can be very weird — emotionally engaged, radical, intuitive, serendipitous, and they don’t care if they make mistakes ... they don’t have to prove things.’ Art ‘can only be useful if it’s allowed to be totally useless,’ said Stocker, who sees the programme’s unique value as enabling experimentation free from ‘a creative industries focus on going to market’.

We rely on pharmaceuticals to maintain our quality of life. The pill brought social freedom for women, but it's also affecting the androgynisation of fish. So I create machines to help us think together about our ambivalenceHaseeb Ahmed

‘It’s not just about painting the iPhone pink,’ Dum told me. Instead of using regulation and ethical committees to rein in technology, the goal is for artists to ‘humanise its whole development’, raising ethical and green concerns at each stage of innovation. In shaping interaction between people and machines, ‘engineers are sometimes very nerdy; they don’t have the human touch.’ Yet do artists necessarily introduce moral perspectives? ‘It’s a touchy subject,’ the physicist replied. ‘I wouldn’t claim artists are more moral than scientists, but they’re very critical in different ways.’

The artist’s critical eye is ubiquitous in Navigating the Digital Realm, (2) a S+T+ARTS group exhibition at DG Connect until 28 February, which explores frontier technology and big data — from deepfakes, surveillance and dating apps to Artificial Intelligence (AI). The AI-generated videos of Egor Kraft’s Content Aware Studies (2019) show how machine learning reconstructs lost fragments of classical sculptures using datasets of thousands of scanned antiquities. The ‘speculative restorations’ are 3D-printed and CNC-routed in marble and synthetic materials but the algorithms can produce grotesque errors, such as creating a face on the back of a caryatid’s head. One of his aims, Kraft told me, was to ‘destroy the romanticism of AI’ — a fabulous but dangerously fallible tool.

New avant-garde is ‘proposing alternatives’

‘It’s not just artistic commentary; they’re also proposing alternatives,’ Stocker said. Between the ‘super data capitalism of the US’ and the ‘electronic totalitarianism of China,’ he asked, ‘what remains for Europe? We can try to do it differently.’ Climate change and CO2 emissions have become paramount concerns as the EU strives through the European Green Deal to create the first climate-neutral continent. ‘The Internet, AI, blockchain,’ De Jaeger said, ‘all these technologies might have positive or negative impacts on the larger challenges of climate justice, equality, migration.’

Pre-Enlightenment Wunderkammern projected the power of their collectors, but were also cabinets of wonder. They may share something with a 21st-century avant-garde that aims through frontier technology to revive awe and respect for nature. Olga Kisseleva’s Cities Live Like Trees: Green Index Formula drives an app that connects citizens to green zones in their city, based on ‘deep listening between humans and trees.’ John Palmesino, co-founder of Territorial Agency, uses open-access data (‘sensors accumulating trillions of terabytes every day’) to help create a new understanding of the ocean as a ‘sensorium’ of human activity.

‘All life in the universe exists in a thin layer of atmosphere which has its dynamic,’ said Ahmed, whose solo show 18 Winds uses AI and wind machines to track the cultural and historical connotations of the Sirocco, and other winds. ‘How do we relate to natural environments without imposing ourselves?’ he asked me. These are vital questions: ‘By separating nature from what we make it mean to us, maybe we can start to think again.’

Maya Jaggi is a writer, critic, artistic director and cultural consultant. She was a DAAD Art and Media fellow in Berlin and is a judge of the 2023 EBRD Literature Prize.

Scholz details acceleration of Germany's energy transition at Davos

The German chancellor, the only leader of a G7 country present at the World Economic Forum, presented his plan on Wednesday in Switzerland.

Le Monde by Philippe Escande

Published on January 19, 2023

The controversy had to be washed away. Climate activist Greta Thunberg had been arrested by the German police during a demonstration against the expansion of a lignite coal mine on Tuesday, January 17, which was inconsistent with a country in which the Greens form part of the executive, even if they share power with the liberal Free Democrats (FPD) and Social Democrats (SPD) allies. Half an hour before the head of the German government took to the podium at the World Economic Forum in Davos on January 18, former US vice president Al Gore, a veteran of the climate movement, had given his support to the demonstrators.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz, caught between radical environmentalists on one hand and pressure from Ukraine for Leopard heavy tanks on the other, sought to distance himself from the fray. The only head of state of a G7 country to have made the trip to Switzerland this year, he detailed his battle plan to make his country the world leader in the fight against climate change even while restoring its industrial competitiveness. He presented the strategy in martial terms.

"Most importantly, our transformation toward a climate-neutral economy – the fundamental task of our century – is currently taking on an entirely new dynamic," the chancellor said. "Not in spite of, but because of the Russian war and the resulting pressure on us Europeans to change." As proof of his country's dynamism and of Russian President Vladimir Putin's failure, he emphasized that Germany, which had been dependent on Russian gas supplies in the run-up to the offensive, had managed to become almost completely free of them in less than a year.

Great national cause

"It took us a few months to install two liquefied gas import terminals when we took 20 years to build the Berlin airport," said German Finance Minister Christian Lindner the day before, also at Davos. The great national cause is now that of renewable energies and hydrogen. By 2030, 80% of the country's electricity will be generated by renewables.

Scholz qualified that "at the same time, our electricity requirements are increasing – from 600 terawatt hours today to 750 by the end of the decade. And we are expecting them to double, yet again, in the 2030s." This development is driven by the needs of its powerful industrial sector. According to him, this represents an investment of €400 billion.

In order to increase the number of solar and, above all, wind power installations, the government has passed its own energy transition acceleration law, similar to the one passed in France on January 10. The law aims to reduce administrative formalities and shorten the granting of authorizations for connection to the network by two years. "The obstacles have been swept aside," the chancellor said. The government will support what Scholz called an "electrolysis boom," a hydrogen economy that will make Germany, and Europe behind it, independent of fossil fuels.

In the short term, until mid-2024, the government will maintain its €180-billion tariff shield so that companies no longer suffer the pangs of skyrocketing prices: "It is now crystal-clear to each and every one of us that the future belongs solely to renewables," said Scholz. "For cost reasons, for environmental reasons, for security reasons, and because in the long run, renewables promise the best returns."

Preventing industrial relocation

With some companies such as BASF threatening to relocate to the US because of energy prices, the pressure for domestic industry to stay on German soil was evident. Similarly, in order to alleviate job shortages that will be exacerbated by demographic decline, the Scholz government will modernize its immigration legislation before the end of the year.

"If we want to remain competitive as a leading industrial nation, we need experienced practitioners – qualified engineers, tradesmen and mechanics," said Scholz. "Those who want to roll up their sleeves are welcome in Germany."

It is no coincidence that the German chancellor remains a regular at Davos when the other big shots are away. He is also one of the last unconditional supporters of free trade and dislikes the concept of trade between friends, or "friendshoring," popularized by the Americans to mean that everyone must choose sides.

Although the country is hesitating about sending its battle tanks to Kyiv, Chancellor Scholz gathered international experts in October 2022 to think about a "Marshall Plan" to help rebuild the country. It was a bold proposal but also amounted to yet another opportunity for German industry, something that a worthy chancellor always keeps in mind.

'International climate aid is insufficient, ineffective and unfairly allocated'

After COP27, held in Egypt in November 2022, four economists analyze the true impact of international aid funded through climate negotiations.

Le Monde by Group letter

Published on January 19, 2023

Participants are pictured at the Sharm el-Sheikh International Convention Center during the COP27 climate conference, in Egypt's Red Sea resort city of the same name, on November 9, 2022. MOHAMMED ABED / AFP

It is now well established that the world's least developed countries and island countries are most affected by climate change while bearing the lowest historical responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions.

To address this injustice, developed countries have set up so-called "climate aid" transfers to help developing countries protect themselves from the effects of climate change and encourage them to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Yet international climate aid is insufficient, ineffective and unfairly allocated. In particular, the most vulnerable countries receive less aid than developing countries. Between 1995 and 2020, the countries that received the most aid were India, Indonesia, Vietnam, Bangladesh and China. How can we explain this disparity between less developed countries' needs and the aid they receive?

Commercial interests

To restore climate justice, rich countries attending the 2009 climate negotiations in Copenhagen committed to mobilizing jointly $100 billion per year (about €93.20 billion) in new and additional aid to address climate change issues, in addition to development assistance already provided.

In the 2015 Paris Agreement, developed nations confirmed they would renew this yearly aid of at least $100 billion until 2025. The latest figures show that donors did not keep their promises: Only $83.3 billion was mobilized in 2020, and that sum includes private financing mobilized by the public sector. Public funding amounted to only $68.3 billion in 2020.

Aid transfers for climate change adaptation accounted for only 34% of the $83.3 billion. This percentage is larger for island and least developed countries, but mitigation remains the primary climate aid for these countries, whose emissions are low. These numbers should be compared to United Nations Environment Program estimates that developing nations will need $140 billion to $300 billion by 2030 for annual climate adaptation costs.

We can draw some lessons from this climate aid.

First, there is a link between the allocation of bilateral climate aid and the commercial interests of donor countries, particularly their export levels. Is this aid being diverted from its initial target? It appears that climate aid, like other development aid, builds on historical, cultural and commercial links (former colonies, migration, etc.).

'Greenwashing'

Climate aid allows developing nations to rebuild production structures damaged by climate change, structures that affect the production of goods consumed by rich countries. Such aid also helps poor countries maintain their incomes and thereby keep buying goods produced by rich countries. This comes dangerously close to being disguised aid to exporting companies. In any case, it cannot be considered entirely neutral.

Secondly, studies have not been able to show that climate aid effectively reduces emissions or increases resilience to climate change or leads to adopting ambitious climate policies. One explanation for this lack of results could be that allocations are too modest: Since the projects financed are small-scale or unambitious, their effects are negligible. The content of climate aid could also explain why its effects are so limited or even nonexistent.

Perhaps the most worrying aspect, if we look at the details of the projects financed under the climate aid label, is that many of them have no link, direct or indirect, with climate issues. Donor countries declare as "climate projects" various development, education or health projects that may be beneficial but have no climate component.

For example, in 2018, a donor country cited a project to support elections and oversight institutions in Kenya as a climate change initiative. This can be construed as the "greenwashing" of climate aid: The donor country presents development aid as climate aid to boost its pro-environmental reputation without actually meeting the "additional" climate aid requirement.

Just words?

Countries attending the climate conference, held November 6-18, 2022, in Sharm El-Sheikh, agreed to establish a "loss and damage" fund to compensate least developed and island countries already suffering from the effects of climate change.

While this is a step in the right direction, it only partially solves the problem, since it simply creates a new international fund on top of existing funds (Adaptation Fund and Green Climate Fund), without correcting the flaws in climate aid design.

This decision also raises questions about implementation. Who will contribute to this new mechanism and what will be the amounts and origins of funds? To be precise, will they be private investments or real subsidies from rich countries to the most vulnerable countries?

Why not increase the amount of aid for climate change adaptation and set quotas for the most affected countries? The vagueness surrounding the creation of this new fund makes us fear it is all just words. A proposal for the organization of this fund will be presented at the COP28 in December 2023, and we hope it will prove us wrong.

Signatories: Basak Bayramoglu, research director at the French National Institute of Agronomic Research (INRAE) and deputy director of the Paris-Saclay Applied Economics (PSAE) unit; Jean-François Jacques, professor at the Université Gustave-Eiffel and attached to the Erudite unit; Clément Nedoncelle, research fellow at INRAE and attached to the PSAE unit; Lucille Neumann-Noël, doctoral student at the Université Paris-Saclay and INRAE, and attached to PSAE.

Biden Says He Has ‘No Regrets’ About Not Disclosing Documents Quickly

“I think you’re going to find there’s nothing there,” the president told a reporter who asked if he regretted not divulging that classified material was found at his office before the midterms.

NYT by Katie Rogers

Jan. 19, 2023

WASHINGTON — President Biden said on Thursday that he had “no regrets” that the White House did not disclose before the midterm elections that classified documents from his time as vice president were found in his private office in early November.

After Mr. Biden toured Capitola, Calif., a beach town that has been ravaged by weeks of winter storms, the president took a question from a reporter, saying he felt that the “American people don’t quite understand” why journalists were asking about the documents and not his tour, which was focused on storm recovery.

“As we found a handful of documents were failed, or filed, in the wrong place, we immediately turned them over to the archives and the Justice Department,” Mr. Biden said, referring to the National Archives and Records Administration. “We’re fully cooperating, looking forward to getting this resolved quickly. I think you’re going to find there’s nothing there. I have no regrets. I’m following what the lawyers have told me they want me to do. It’s exactly what we’re doing. There’s no ‘there’ there.”

Mr. Biden and his advisers, who were at first reluctant to release information about the discovery of the documents, have faced an onslaught of questions about why the White House kept quiet about the material for so long. Mr. Biden’s lawyers discovered the first batch of classified papers on Nov. 2, six days before the midterm elections, and later found a second set in a room next to the garage in his home in Wilmington, Del., in December.

The existence of the documents became public only last week.

Last Thursday, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland appointed a special counsel, Robert K. Hur, to investigate how the documents were handled.

The White House has tried to draw a clear contrast between Mr. Biden’s retention of classified documents and a case surrounding former President Donald J. Trump. Mr. Trump is under criminal investigation for taking several hundred documents with classified markings from the White House to Mar-a-Lago, his private residence in Palm Beach, Fla., and failing to fully comply with a subpoena.

Mr. Biden’s team appears to have acted swiftly and in accordance with the law upon the discovery of the documents, immediately summoning officials with the National Archives to retrieve the files. The archives then alerted the Justice Department. Officials have described the documents found at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, the think tank established as Mr. Biden’s private office after leaving the vice presidency, as “a small number of documents with classified markings.”

Mr. Biden’s remarks on Thursday closely echoed those made earlier in the week by Ian Sams, a spokesman for the White House Counsel’s Office, who assured reporters that Mr. Biden was fully cooperating with the investigation.

“It’s important to really understand the distinction here: President Biden is committed to doing the responsible thing and acting appropriately,” Mr. Sams said on Tuesday. “His team acted promptly to disclose information to the proper authorities and is cooperating fully.”