AI and Bio-weapons By Gwynne Dyer ‘Artificial intelligence’ based on Large Language Models is shaping up to be the most efficient destroyer of value since the South Sea Bubble. After the Crash, some specific functions of AI will eventually turn out to be genuinely revenue-generating, and a lot of jobs will duly disappear. But the […]
Venezuela: Unfinished Business By Gwynne Dyer Experienced imperialists understand that you can’t just take over a country over and expect it to run itself. It takes time and work to turn it into an obedient and profitable colony, and two months is not enough. Donald Trump moved on to his next target too soon, and
Cyril Ramaphosa and the Law By Gwynne Dyer It’s outrageous. You’re at your hobby farm in the country, just pottering around, so you stuff the $580,000 in your pocket under the sofa cushions temporarily just to get it out of the way. Then you forget it when you are gathering things up to go back
Climate: What To Do Now By Gwynne Dyer I was reading an article about the current wildfires written in a reputable paper by a recognised ‘environmental journalist’, but I stumbled to a halt when I read the following sentence: “While the skies over North America and Europe will eventually clear, this climate change-driven era of
Russia: Home of the Potemkin Nuclear Weapons? By Gwynne Dyer There’s a lot of performative militarism in Russia at the moment, which is unsurprising given that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is still stalled halfway through the fifth year of the war. The style is more Mussolini than Hitler, however, and the effect is more
War-Weary By Gwynne Dyer I have been writing this column twice a week for a long time, so I have a finely developed sense for when the audience is sick of a subject. We have definitely crossed that boundary with regard to the wars currently being fought up and down the strip of land between
It’s Not The Weather. It’s The Climate By Gwynne Dyer Last week it was Europe’s turn, with a slow-moving ‘heat dome’ that gave almost everybody from the United Kingdom to Poland three consecutive days of record-breaking temperatures. In Germany it hit 41°Celsius. That’s 106° Fahrenheit, if you live in the one country that still clings
Trump and the Threshold of Pain By Gwynne Dyer It would be so easy for Donald Trump to escape from the trap he has built for himself in the Persian Gulf. Just declare a victory and leave. So what if the Iranians also declare a victory (with a lot more accuracy)? The ‘nuclear weapons’ that
Courts Are the Last Defence Against Tyranny By Gwynne Dyer India and the United States are the world’s two biggest democracies, and both of them seem to be in danger. In each of them populist federal governments are deliberately polarising the population, radicalising the politics, and seeking to undermine the impartial rule of law. In
It’s a Shame They Can’t Both Lose By Gwynne Dyer The last time oil-tankers were being shot up in the Persian Gulf, back in the 1980s, it was Saddam Hussein’s brutal tyranny in Iraq versus Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolutionary Islamist regime in Iran, and people used to say “It’s a shame that both sides can’t lose.”