Thomas L. Friedman

<h1>As the 2020 campaign gets underway, we’ve heard about a Green New Deal, Medicare for all, breaking up Amazon and universal basic income — to name but a few of the ideas raised by Democratic presidential hopefuls. </h1>

But one issue has been largely absent: foreign policy — the potential use of force, great-power competition and the management of alliances that will be more important during the next presidency than it has been in three decades.

Maybe I missed it, but I haven’t heard any of the Democrats running on the argument that he or she is the best person to answer the White House crisis line at 3 in the morning. They all seem inclined to let that call go to voicemail. I hope that doesn’t last, because that phone will be ringing. This will be an extraordinarily volatile and confusing time for U.S. foreign policy.

We’re in the post-post-Cold War era — an era when being secretary of state, let alone president, has become a terrible job. (If anyone asks you to become secretary of state, say you had your heart set on secretary of agriculture.) The post-Cold War era had its issues — 9/11, Iraq and Afghanistan, to be sure — but it was in many ways a unipolar belle epoque, in which an American hegemon stifled any serious great-power conflict.

The post-post-Cold War era, which has been slowly unfolding since the early 2000s, requires a president to manage and juggle three huge geopolitical trends — and the interactions between them — all at once.

The first is the resurgence of three big regional powers: Russia, China and Iran. Each is seeking to dominate its home region and is willing to use force for that purpose. This trend is compellingly described in a new book by Michael Mandelbaum, the Johns Hopkins emeritus professor of U.S. foreign policy, titled “The Rise and Fall of Peace on Earth.”

As Mandelbuam notes, in Europe, Russia has occupied part of Ukraine. In East Asia, China has claimed most of the Western Pacific as its own territory, contrary to international law; has built artificial islands there; and has placed military installations on them. In the Middle East, Iran has trained and funded proxy forces in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen and has pursued nuclear weapons.

“The three have an important motive in common: All are dictatorships trying to generate support among those they rule through aggressive nationalism, at the expense of their neighbors,” Mandelbaum (with whom I co-wrote a book in 2011) remarked to me.

“The combination of their insecurities and their ambitions has revived political and military competition among the strongest countries in the world. Indeed, the world of 2019 more closely resembles the world of the Cold War than of the 25 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.”

If this first trend requires a president who can manage strength — ours and that of Russia, China and Iran — the second trend will require a deft touch at managing weakness. We are going to see more and more weak states — like Venezuela, Libya, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and many in sub-Saharan Africa — either fall apart or hemorrhage lots of their people, because they are unable to manage the stresses from climate change, population explosion, ecosystem breakdowns and the rapid accelerations in globalization and technology.

If you think managing strength is hard, try managing weakness — try attempting to put broken countries back together. It’s hell on wheels. But that will be a big challenge for the next president because the mass migrations of people away from these disorderly and failing states to zones of order, which is what is driving the current U.S. and European border crises, are not going away.

Consider this Washington Post report last week: “The number of people taken into custody along the Mexico border jumped an additional 31 percent last month as an unprecedented mass migration of families from Central America pushes unauthorized crossings to the highest levels in a decade, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection figures.”

The story added that last month, the busiest February at the border since 2007, authorities detained 76,103 migrants, up from 58,207 in January, and it quoted Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan as saying: “The system is well beyond capacity and remains at a breaking point.”

For the third trend, the next president will have to manage not only rival superpowers and disorder but also super-empowered small groups and individuals, because of how technology acceleration is putting incredibly powerful, cheap, small tools — for cyberwarfare, election hacking and financial hacking — into the hands of small units, vastly expanding their attack surfaces.

These cyber tools are all getting fast, cheap and deep. That is, they can go deeper inside your company, your email, your election, your power grid or your bank account — every single day. This makes them easier to be weaponized by small units (like North Korea) and individuals so they can have outsize effects through deep fake, deep surveillance, deep cyber theft.

Which brings us back to the thesis of “The Rise and Fall of Peace on Earth.” The resurgent competition between us, China, Russia and Iran means that instead of our having their cooperation “to try to manage state failure and the technological tsunami, the three revisionists are making them worse,” Mandelbaum told me.

“Russia and Iran took the lead in devastating Syria, producing a flood of refugees that has, among other things, destabilized Europe. And all three have weaponized the new technology, hacking the U.S. and Europe and, in the case of Russia, even interfering with an American election.”

This means there will be even more pressure on the next president to find allies and build alliances to maintain order. Only the U.S. has the ability to organize coalitions to deter Russia, China and Iran, Mandelbaum argues. Only the U.S. has the resources and the experience to lead a global effort to try to cope with state failure. “And since much of the new technology was invented and applied here, the U.S. is in the best position to figure out how to cope with it.”

Among President Donald Trump’s greatest foreign policy weaknesses is his inability to build and maintain alliances. Few other countries want to follow him into battle.

The winner of the 2020 election, whether Trump or someone else, is going to pay for the way Trump has allowed our traditional alliances to wither and has made the U.S. administration (not people) so unpopular with populations from Canada to Mexico to Europe to Asia to the Middle East that many of their leaders do not feel comfortable standing with our president, even if they are so inclined.

That is not Trump’s only poisoned legacy. The other is that he shows no interest in democracy promotion, and that, too, is more important than ever, because democracies are much less prone to war. But we’re in a democracy recession now. Leaders from China to Egypt to Uganda to Turkey are all making themselves presidents for life.

“The principal disturbers of the peace — Russia, China, and Iran — are all dictatorships that seek popular support, can no longer get it through economic growth, don’t have the option of getting it through democracy, and in fact fear that democratic demands and democratic forces will unseat them,” Mandelbaum said. “Their aggressive policies are designed to protect their regimes against, most of all, democracy.”

So hold onto your hats: Great-power conflict is in, but U.S. democracy promotion is out. We need allies more than ever, and we have fewer than ever. And some guy in Moldova with a cellphone and a few cyber tools can now shut off the power grid in Montana.

No wonder no one wants to boast being the best person to answer the White House crisis line at 3 a.m. They all prefer to let it ring and hope that it’s a wrong number.

This article originally appeared in <a id="973f3d88-5fa8-4787-839f-0b79e2b8684c" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/opinion/foreign-policy-crisis-democrats-2020.html">The New York Times</a>.

Who to elect for a foreign policy crisis at 3 A.M.?

Maybe I missed it, but I haven’t heard any of the Democrats running on the argument that he or she is the best person to answer the White House crisis line at 3 in the morning.

<h1>I’ve been watching with more than a little interest the controversial statements about Israel and the Israel lobby by Ilhan Omar, a freshman Democratic congresswoman from the 5th District of Minnesota, because it turns out that we have a lot in common — up to a point.</h1>

The first thing we have in common is that I was raised in the 5th District of Minnesota, specifically the Minneapolis suburb of St. Louis Park. I lived there until I was 20. It was a freaky place — a crazy mix of Minnesota Jews (we called ourselves “the Frozen Chosen”) and Scandinavians that produced a uniquely tolerant civic culture and an interesting group of neighbors: Al Franken, the Coen brothers, Peggy Orenstein, Norm Ornstein, Michael Sandel, Sharon Isbin, Marc Trestman and lots of others you can find on the St. Louis Park Wikipedia page. Our little town was immortalized in the Coen brothers’ 2009 movie “A Serious Man.”

I still feel very close to the community there and go home often. St. Louis Park welcomed Jews who wanted to get out of the inner city of Minneapolis back in the 1950s — when other suburbs still had restrictions on selling homes to “Hebrews.” So I was proud to see St. Louis Park also welcome Muslim Somali refugees like Omar a half-century later, and then elect her to Congress.

The other thing that Omar and I have in common, as others have noted, is that we both don’t like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) — the organization at the center of the Israel lobby — and have spoken in very blunt language about its strong-arm political tactics.

But that is also where our differences begin.

I don’t like AIPAC because I strongly believe in the right of the Jewish people to build a nation-state in their ancient homeland — a nation-state envisaged by its founders to reflect the best of Jewish and democratic values. And I believe AIPAC for many years has not only become a rubber stamp on the right-wing policies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which has resulted in tens of thousands of Israeli settlers now ensconced in the heart of the West Bank, imperiling Israel as a democracy. AIPAC has also been responsible for making support for Israel a Republican cause, not a bipartisan issue, which poses a real danger to Israel’s support in America in the long run, and particularly on college campuses.

I dislike AIPAC because I am devoted to Israel as a Jewish democracy and because I believe that only a two-state solution between Israelis and Palestinians can ensure that. Given how AIPAC has let itself become the slavish, unthinking tool of Netanyahu, who opposes a two-state solution, I believe AIPAC works against Israel’s long-term interests.

AIPAC is a self-appointed lobby that does not represent my feelings as an American Jew. But neither does Rep. Omar.

Everything I have heard from her leads me to conclude that she dislikes AIPAC because she dislikes Israel, because she does not really believe the Jewish people have a right to an independent state in their ancestral homeland. She seems to support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, known as BDS.

When Omar was asked at an August primary debate held in a St. Louis Park synagogue about her stance on BDS, she said that the movement was “not helpful in getting that two-state solution,” Haaretz reported on Nov. 14.

But after she was elected, Muslimgirl.com reported that on Nov. 11, her campaign told a reporter for the website that “Ilhan believes in and supports the BDS movement and has fought to make sure people’s right to support it isn’t criminalized. She does, however, have reservations on the effectiveness of the movement in accomplishing a lasting solution.”

According to Haaretz, her campaign confirmed that she had voted against an anti-BDS bill while she was a member of the Minnesota House of Representatives, explaining that she was inspired by how BDS had worked to undermine apartheid in South Africa. “I don’t want to be part of a vote that limits the ability of people to fight towards that justice and peace,” she had said.

I am not a BDS supporter. The movement’s main website says that it “does not advocate for a particular solution to the conflict and does not call for either a ‘one state solution’ or a ‘two state solution.'” Rather, it calls for ending the Israeli “occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall, recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality” and “respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN resolution 194.”

By being specific about the rights of Palestinians to return to their home and not unequivocally committing to a two-state solution, the movement leaves me and many others to believe that BDS is just code for getting rid of the state of Israel. I do not believe in passing laws against BDS — people can boycott whomever they want — but I do believe it is not a helpful movement at all. And I believe Omar’s waffling on the issue, depending on her audience, is equally unhelpful and troubling.

[Hours after this column was published, Omar’s spokesman Jeremy Slevin called me and shared this statement: “As she has said before, Representative Omar supports a two-state solution, which allows for both Israelis and Palestinians to have their own sanctuaries and self-determination."]

If she thinks the only reason that Americans support Israel is because of AIPAC and campaign contributions, she is dead wrong. Americans’ affinity with Israel is rooted in a respect for Israel’s ability to maintain a democracy, albeit with flaws, in a sea of autocratic regimes; it is rooted in a Judeo-Christian religious affinity; and it is rooted in respect for Israel’s contributions to technology, medicine and science. AIPAC is the beneficiary of that support, not the cause of it.

But AIPAC has abused that privilege. And it is utterly fooling itself if doesn’t understand that there are more than a few Americans, especially on college campuses but not only there, who are enjoying watching Omar give it a punch right in the face. She is saying something others want to say but are afraid to do so — including some members of Congress, I am sure.

Why? Maybe it’s because they watched how President Barack Obama put together a $40 billion, 10-year military aid package for Israel — a high-tech powerhouse that is not poor — and rather than receiving effusive thanks from Netanyahu, Obama was criticized by Bibi and his cat’s paw, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, as “not generous enough,” because it required that aid to be spent purchasing American arms, benefiting our workers, not on Israeli-made arms. AIPAC went along with Netanyahu’s ungratefulness.

As Haaretz reported on July 28, 2016, “Last week, Graham visited Israel and met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The prime minister said he was unhappy with both the level of aid the Obama administration was offering in the new deal and the conditions the administration was attaching to it.”

With AIPAC’s support, Netanyahu also got the Republican House to invite him to give one of America’s highest honors — a speech to a joint meeting of Congress — over the objections of Obama. Netanyahu used the opportunity to castigate the White House at the height of both the Iran negotiations and Netanyahu’s own re-election campaign. That really made me mad as an American. Netanyahu used our Congress to attack our president and further his re-election campaign. No other foreign leader would have dared to do that.

Around 60 Democrats boycotted the speech, saying it was an overreach by Speaker John Boehner, Netanyahu and AIPAC — one also designed to make it look as if Republicans were more pro-Israel than Democrats.

According to Talking Points Memo, the Israelis and Republicans worked out the details of Bibi’s congressional speech “without notifying the White House,” so that, Boehner said, “there was no interference” from the administration. Not only did that violate diplomatic protocol — an opposition party working directly with a foreign government — but of political protocol as well, with congressional Republicans developing their own foreign policy independent of, and at odds with, the White House.

Plenty of Americans resent that kind of overreach. And it was enabled by AIPAC. On Feb. 28, 2015, The Washington Post reported: “Worried that lawmakers might boycott the speech altogether, a board member of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee prodded local AIPAC activists to apply pressure on Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) to attend.”

But I come back to Omar. She is a brand-new member of Congress. She is free to raise any issues she wants. And one issue she seems to have seized on is the alleged dual loyalty of Jews to America and Israel. I am not dual loyal. I always put America first, but I want to see Israel thrive — just like many Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, Indian-Americans and others feel about their ancestral homelands.

When I see that dual-loyalty charge coming from a congresswoman who first signaled opposition to BDS and then support for it, when I see it coming from a congresswoman who has never been to Israel, when I see it coming from a congresswoman who, to my knowledge, has never criticized the Palestinian leadership for its corruption and failure — time and again — to seize on peace overtures from Israeli leaders who, unlike Netanyahu, actually wanted to forge a two-state solution, when I see it coming from a congresswoman who seems to be obsessed with Israel’s misdeeds as the biggest problem in the Middle East — not Iran’s effective occupation of four Arab capitals, its support for ethnic cleansing and the use of poison gas in Syria and its crushing of Lebanese democracy — it makes me suspicious of her motives.

So let me end where I started. Ilhan Omar represents, among other neighborhoods, a significant and liberal Jewish community — my hometown. I can tell you that a vast majority of Jews there would be proud if their congresswoman used her links to American Jews and Muslims to be a bridge builder for peace in the Middle East and America, not just another AIPAC/Israel basher. She is young and very new to the national spotlight. Friends of mine back home tell me her humanistic instincts are impressive and authentic. I don’t know if it’s her or her advisers, but she’s gotten herself into a bad place — a huge missed leadership opportunity.

Which only reinforces a fundamental rule I have: I love the Israelis and the Palestinians, but God save me from their American friends. When they recreate and fuel their conflict here in America, and on college campuses, they only sow more division, distrust and make things worse. And that’s the last thing the good people in Israel and Palestine need.

This article originally appeared in <a id="ef66a7c6-3220-494c-83f2-c2ab387c16a8" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/06/opinion/israel-ilhan-omar.html">The New York Times</a>.

The first thing we have in common is that I was raised in the 5th District of Minnesota, specifically the Minneapolis suburb of St. Louis Park.

Ilhan Omar, AIPAC and me

<h1>Goodness knows I’m loath to write anything these days that would feed Donald Trump’s ego. But this time it’s unavoidable. There is a new global political era emerging that, while not entirely attributable to Trump, his party and his administration, they’ve surely played a huge role in fostering. A variety of analysts have now given this era the same name: “Anything goes.” And for good reason.</h1>

Look around the world and not only do you see a democratic recession — the number of democracies abandoning their democratic bona fides with sham elections is steadily mounting — but you see something much more grotesque: Leaders are grabbing power for life, murdering or jailing even the mildest of critics and shamelessly building coalitions with openly racist and bigoted parties.

Most important, they’re doing it with utter impunity — confident that either no one is watching or no one will meaningfully call them out.

This is what happens when people think America isn’t looking, doesn’t care or, worse, has a president, himself having uttered more than 9,000 lies and misleading statements, who has zero moral authority to call out others. When it comes to being a global watchdog that tries to enforce some basic norms of decency, America under Trump is out to lunch — and a lot of people have figured that out, and so anything goes.

“It’s not just that liberal democracy is retreating under pressure from demagogic politicians exploiting the stresses of globalization, rising inequality, economic insecurity, job displacement, immigration and so on,” argues Larry Diamond, author of a prescient new book, “Ill Winds: Saving Democracy From Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency.” “It’s that authoritarian forces everywhere perceive that there is no longer any price to pay for ruling as nastily as they want.”

So, today, “every type of regime is getting worse,” Diamond adds. “Liberal democracies are becoming more intolerant. Illiberal democracies are electing authoritarian personalities like President Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, who are purging judges and locking up journalists who dare to criticize them. Authoritarian regimes that once coexisted with pockets of opposition no longer see the need to bother. In Cambodia, the party of the long-ruling dictator, Hun Sen, now controls every seat in parliament. And China is now constructing the first truly Orwellian surveillance state.”

It all makes some of the lyrics of Cole Porter’s classic song seem so before their time:

The world has gone mad today/ And good’s bad today/ And black’s white today/ And day’s night today/ And that gent today/ You gave a cent today/ Once had several chateaux .../ Anything goes.

Just think of those shocks you’ve got/ And those knocks you’ve got/ And those blues you’ve got/ From that news you’ve got/ And those pains you’ve got/ (If any brains you’ve got) .../ ‘Cause Franklin knows/ Anything goes.

When America, the world’s most influential democracy, has a leader without shame, who is backed by a party without spine willing to prostitute itself to Trump no matter how low he goes — and both are protected by a virtually state-run network without integrity, called Fox — it becomes a hunting license for leaders everywhere to go after their own domestic opponents and cross any human rights red line to stay in power.

And we’re talking about some close allies. Last week, Israel’s attorney general recommended that Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu be indicted on charges of fraud, bribery and breach of trust in connection with three different corruption cases. This comes just after Netanyahu forged a political alliance with an openly racist, anti-Arab party.

Netanyahu’s new political ally, the Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) party, traces its lineage to Rabbi Meir Kahane’s outlawed Kach Party, which advocated annexing the West Bank, expelling the Palestinians who lived there and resettling Israeli Arabs in Arab countries. Otzma’s leader, Michael Ben-Ari, with whom Bibi made his alliance, was denied a visa to the U.S. in 2012 on the grounds of being associated with a violent extremist group.

Among Otzma’s leaders, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported, “is former Kahane aide Baruch Marzel, a resident of Hebron who holds a party every year at the grave of Baruch Goldstein, who in 1994 massacred 29 Palestinians at the Cave of the Patriarchs.”

These are the people Netanyahu wants to bring into his government. Why not? Bibi knows that no matter how low he sinks, Trump will always have his back.

Yes, politics can be a dirty business, “but there are sacred areas in which you don’t play politics, where there has to be a boundary,” says Hebrew University philosopher Moshe Halbertal. And making an alliance “with a racist party is one of them. Because when you do that, you actually inflate them and send a message about what kind of speech is permissible.”

You may think that “they are just a means to your ends,” adds Halbertal. “But in the end, they will control you, they will dominate your identity,” and, in Bibi’s case, “they will define who he is, who is Israel, who is Israel in the eyes of world Jewry and who is Israel in the eyes of the world.”

Our enemies and rivals are also worse than ever. Iran has been deeply complicit in the ethnic cleansing of Sunnis in Iraq and Syria, in the use of poison gas by Syria’s regime and in the crushing of Lebanese democracy through its proxy the Hezbollah militia.

But Iran gets away with it. The Iranians know that U.S. human rights activists are so focused on Saudi Arabia’s vile murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi and its bombings in Yemen that they’re ignoring Iran’s misbehavior. So anything goes.

China’s government has felt free enough to admit that it’s been forcing religious minorities, particularly Chinese Muslims, into “re-education camps” to eliminate “extremism.” But news seeping out of these camps indicates they have “a lot more in common with concentration camps. Thousands of guards carrying spiked clubs, tear gas and stun guns surveil the government’s ‘students,’ who are held in buildings ringed with razor wire and infrared cameras,” said Vox, citing a recent report by Agence France-Presse.

Allies of Egypt’s president, Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, are well on their way to amending the Egyptian Constitution to make him, in effect, president for life, or at least until 2034, and give even more power to the military. El-Sissi, who made this power grab after a visit from and praise by U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, has also arrested far more Egyptians for the mildest of criticism, and snuffed out far more press freedoms, than his predecessor Hosni Mubarak — without a peep out of America.

In Uganda, 74-year-old President Yoweri Museveni got age limits abolished so he can, in effect, also become president for life, after sending troops onto the floor of Parliament to beat up opposition lawmakers objecting to the move.

Larry Diamond says, “A leading Ugandan human rights lawyer wrote to me that with Trump in the White House and Europe silent and democratic norms generally in retreat, African rulers like Museveni now feel emboldened to rule as long and as brutally as they want.”

Again, whether it is the presidents of China, Egypt, Uganda, Russia and Turkey all basically making themselves into presidents for life, or Bibi forging an alliance with a racist politician banned from America so that he can cling to power in Israel, or the Saudi crown prince’s team murdering moderate journalist/critic Jamal Khashoggi, or allies Poland, Brazil and Hungary all drifting away from democracy under the sway of power-hungry nationalists, it’s obvious that none of them, none of them, ever bothered to ask themselves before their respective moves, “But what will the Americans say if we do this?”

They knew the answer: Anything goes.

This article originally appeared in <a id="5432ad1e-85d8-47ae-bdd7-c23e7bfe7b4f" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/05/opinion/trump-netanyahu.html">The New York Times</a>.

Most important, they’re doing it with utter impunity — confident that either no one is watching or no one will meaningfully call them out.

The Trump musical: 'Anything goes'

<h1>BANGALORE, India — Fifteen years ago, I came to Bangalore, India’s Silicon Valley, to do a documentary on outsourcing. One of our first stops was a company called 24/7 whose main business was answering customer service calls and selling products, like credit cards, for U.S. companies half a world away.</h1>

The beating heart of 24/7 back then was a vast floor of young phone operators, most with only high school diplomas, save for a small pool of techies who provided “help desk” advice. These young Indians spoke in the best American English, perfected in a class that we filmed, where everyone had to practice enunciating “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers” — and make it sound as if they were from Kansas not Kolkata.

The operations floor was so noisy from hundreds of simultaneous phone conversations that 24/7 installed a white-noise machine to muffle the din, but even then you could still occasionally hear piercing through the cacophony some techie saying to someone in America, the likes of: “What, Ma’am? Your computer is on fire?”

Well, 24/7’s founders — P.V. Kannan and Shanmugam Nagarajan — invited me back last week for an update. Their company is now called [24]7.ai, and their shop floor is so quiet that the operators are encouraged to play their own music. The only noise is from the tapping on keyboards, because every query — from customers of U.S. retailers, banks and media companies — is coming in by text messaging from smartphones, tablets, desktops and laptops.

These text queries are usually answered first by a [24]7.ai chatbot, or “virtual agent,” powered by AI (artificial intelligence) and only get handed over to a person using HI (human intelligence) if the chatbot gets stuck and can’t answer. The transformation of [24]7.ai from perfecting its accents to perfecting its insights illustrates in miniature how AI is transforming the whole work landscape.

In a nutshell, the U.S. and Indian middle classes were built on something called the high-wage, middle-skilled job. In an AI-driven world, such jobs are becoming extinct. Now there are mostly high-skilled, high-wage jobs and low-skilled, low-wage jobs, and a dwindling number in between.

Virtually all of the [24]7.ai human operators today have college degrees because they need to be able to text with good grammar in English, understand the interaction between the chatbot and the person calling for service and communicate with expertise and empathy when the chatbot runs out of answers.

At the training class I sat in on last week, Peter Piper was gone. He was replaced by a competition among trainees over who could grasp first exactly when the chatbot — which [24]7.ai calls by the woman’s name Aiva, for Artificially Intelligent Virtual Assistant — could no longer understand the “intent” of the customer and what that intent actually was.

It’s at that critical point that the human agent not only has to step in and answer the question that Aiva couldn’t but also has to “tag” the customer’s queries that stumped the bot and feed them to [24]7.ai’s data scientists, who then turn them into a new, deeper layer of artificial intelligence that enables Aiva to answer this more complex query the next time. (Kannan is about to publish a book on AI called “The Age of Intent.”)

The data scientists who figure out the upgrades for chatbots that handle text are called “digital conversation designers.” For another, small part of the business, data scientists for chatbots that speak in computer-generated natural language are called “voice conversation designers.”

“It’s a cool job,” Santhosh Kumar, a 45-year-old conversation designer, who came up through the 24/7 system, said to me. “You are designing what the chatbot should be saying to the customers.” It is all about “how to make a computer sound like a human.” Banks want their bots to be formal; retailers prefer more conversational bots.

Another new term I learned here was “containment.” That measures how deep into a conversation your chatbot can go without having to hand the customer over to a human agent. A company’s “containment rate” is like its AI batting average.

Today, 24/7.ai’s containment rate ranges from 20 percent to 50 percent of queries, depending on the company it is serving. Its goal is 80 percent. As the bots grasp more of each customer’s intent, the skilled humans are redeployed to more complex services and sales, and that, said Kannan, “turns into better sales and keeping customer satisfaction high.”

His chatbots, Kannan explained, are built with a “negative sentiment detector” to identify angry customers, so “we auto-generate sympathy when we can,” but for the most part “complexity and empathy” are left to the humans.

Hollywood and Bollywood movies lately “have created a really bad impression that robots are going to take over,” said Irene Clara, a trainer. “I don’t think that fear is justified. I think we grow together. When you’re teaching Aiva, you’re getting skilled yourself and, without that, Aiva becomes incompetent.”

So — for now — if you have critical thinking and empathy skills, Aiva is your friend. But I wonder what happened to all those Indian high school grads I met 15 years ago. Because if you don’t have those skills — and just have a high school diploma or less, which applies to hundreds of millions of Indians — or you are doing routine tasks that will be easily roboticized, well, Aiva the robotic fruit picker, Aiva the file clerk or Aiva the trucker will not be your friend.

So what will a country like India, with so much unskilled labor, do about this challenge? It’s coming. But so is a possible savior. It’s also called technology and AI.

While technology taketh it also giveth. India’s newest high-speed mobile network, Jio, in just the past couple of years dramatically slashed the price of cellphone connectivity. This has taken smartphone diffusion much deeper into Indian society than ever before, connecting those making only a few dollars a day to the mobile network and creating a vast new tool kit to lift them from poverty.

In Mumbai, for example, I met with Sagar Defense Engineering, founded by Nikunj Parashar, which is using technology spun off from the defense industry to create a simple vessel, connected to satellites, that rag pickers, the poorest of the poor here, can be quickly trained on to target and collect the pools of waste that float atop so many Indian rivers and lakes — and get paid for it by the ton.

I also met with LeanAgri, founded by Siddharth Dialani and Sai Gole. It is using AI to create a simple cellphone-based app to make poor Indian farmers more successful. The app creates a “dynamic calendar” that tells each farmer which and how much seed and fertilizer to use, the quantity of water to apply and at what time based on changing climate conditions. LeanAgri’s pilot has been serving 3,000 farmers in three Indian states, where some have already seen tenfold increases in their incomes, the company said.

In Bangalore, I visited the EkStep Foundation. It was started by Nandan Nilekani, a co-founder of Infosys; his wife, Rohini; and social entrepreneur Shankar Maruwada. EkStep (“One Step” in Hindi) argued that if India’s current youth bubble gets left behind by globalization and technology, India’s future will be tied to a giant ball and chain for the rest of the century.

EkStep has created a free, open-source digital infrastructure called Sunbird for making personal learning platforms. The Indian government leveraged it to create a national teachers platform, Diksha, which enables different states to put QR codes linked to all kinds of topics in their millions of old paper textbooks.

Now, all that a student or teacher or parent has to do is point a cellphone at the paper QR code and it opens up a universe of interactive content — lesson plans for teachers and study guides for students and parents — giving India a chance to improve numeracy and literacy at a whole new speed and scale.

So don’t write the conclusion of this story yet. Thanks to AI, Peter Piper just might be able to pick a lot more than a peck of pickled peppers — so many more that not only the top of India’s society will rise but also the bottom.

This article originally appeared in <a id="a21b9d75-c468-44bb-b432-76723a877261" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/26/opinion/artificial-intelligence.html">The New York Times</a>.

The beating heart of 24/7 back then was a vast floor of young phone operators, most with only high school diplomas, save for a small pool of techies who provided “help desk” advice.

AI still needs HI (Human Intelligence)

<h1>In case you haven’t noticed, long-established political parties across the democratic world are blowing up, with Britain’s Labour Party just the latest to fracture. Could America’s parties be next?</h1>

Could we have our first four-party election in 2020 — with candidates from the Donald Trump far right, the old GOP center right, the Joe Biden center left and the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez far left all squaring off, as the deepening divides within our two big parties simply can’t be papered over any longer? It’s not impossible.

Indeed, two phrases recently in the news that touch on core principles of the Democratic and Republican Parties are like fuses that could ignite much larger explosions in the coming year. Those phrases are: “unwilling to work” and “national emergency.”

On Feb. 7, Ocasio-Cortez’s congressional office sent out an explainer of the Green New Deal that she’s proposing. The initiative aims “to mobilize every aspect of American society ... to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions and create economic prosperity for all.”

I admire that goal and the huge energy she’s brought to it among young people. But one version of her office’s FAQ stated that the Green New Deal would guarantee, among other benefits, “Economic security to all who are unable or unwilling to work.”

Economic security for people “unwilling to work”? Who’s going to sign up for new taxes to support people unwilling to work or be retrained?

When some commentators called this out, Ocasio-Cortez’s team said the FAQ was an unfinished draft that never should have been released. I don’t buy it. It was also too late. That phrase — economic security even for people “unwilling to work” — was not just noted by conservatives. It rattled some center-left Democrats as well, because it hinted that the party’s base had moved much farther to the left in recent years than they’d realized, and it highlighted the most important fault line in today’s Democratic Party — the line between what I’d call “redivide-the-pie Democrats” and “grow-the-pie Democrats.”

Grow-the-pie Democrats — think Mike Bloomberg — celebrate business, capitalism and startups that generate the tax base to create the resources for more infrastructure, schools, green spaces and safety nets, so more people have more opportunity and tools to capture a bigger slice of the pie.

Grow-the-pie Democrats know that good jobs don’t come from government or grow on trees — they come from risk-takers who start companies. They come from free markets regulated by and cushioned by smart government.

The wisest grow-the-pie Democrats have also learned something from the past few years: The benefits of NAFTA, open trade with China and the rise of the digital economy — while vital for creating economic growth — don’t just automatically trickle down, any more than Republican tax cuts did. They require trade insurance and surge protectors, free community college, portable health care coverage and pensions, and a very intentional strategy to more equitably spread the benefits of growth among bosses, workers and shareholders.

Redivide-the-pie Democrats — think Bernie Sanders — argue that after four decades of stagnant middle-class wages — and bailouts for bankers and billionaires but not workers in 2008 — you can’t grow the pie without redividing it first. Inequality is too great now. There are too many people too far behind.

The decision by Amazon to scuttle its big expansion in New York City marks the first big clash this election season between grow-the-pie Democrats, who insisted that tax breaks for Amazon would pay for themselves, and redivide-the-pie Democrats, who saw Amazon as pitting their community in a race to the bottom with other communities over which could lavish more subsides on a tech behemoth that didn’t need them.

In truth, the episode was a huge failure of imagination by both sides. Virginia got it right, explained Amy Liu, urban affairs expert at the Brookings Institution, in an essay last week in The Times. Yes, it gave Amazon some $500 million in subsidies, but the state offered twice that amount in new investments in local transportation and schools to create a strong pipeline of technically skilled workers — something that will benefit the entire community for years.

As for the GOP, it’s divided between a “limited-government-grow-the-pie” right — but one that wants to just let capitalism rip — and a “hoard-the-pie, pull-up-the-drawbridge” Trump-led far right.

The limited-government-grow-the-pie faction is itself split between the Never Trumpers — who’ve refused to prostitute themselves to Trump’s serial lying, cozying up to Russia and other madness — and those who’ve hitched a ride on Trump’s wagon to get their tax cuts, conservative judges and deregulation.

But Trump’s decision to declare a “national emergency” on the Mexico border has violated the party’s most core principle of limited government. In doing so it’s opened a fissure between the old limited-government-grow-the-pie Republicans and the anti-immigrant hoard-the-pie, pull-up-the-drawbridge Trumpers.

The early signs are that the limited-government types — led by Mitch McConnell — are so morally bankrupt, after having sold their souls to Trump for two years, they’ll even abandon this last core principle and go along with Trump’s usurpation of Congress’ power of appropriation.

Stay tuned. Over the years, our two parties have usually managed to handle deep fractures. This time may be different.

The level of outrage in both bases is sky high: Their ability to express that outrage through weaponized social networks, talk radio and cable television is powerful and pervasive, and the three accelerations we’re going through — in globalization, technology and climate change — are stressing everyone and demanding very different political choices.

So here’s my hunch: The 2020 U.S. election will be unlike any in my lifetime.

Think about it. Ever since World War II until the early 21st century, the major political parties in the West were all built on a set of stable binary choices: capital versus labor; big government/high regulation versus small government/low regulation; open to trade and immigration versus more closed to trade and immigration; embracing of new social norms, like gay rights or abortion, and opposed to them; and green versus growth.

Across the industrial world, parties mostly formed along one set of those binary choices or the other. But that is no longer possible.

What if I am a steelworker in Pittsburgh and in the union, but on weekends I drive for Uber and rent out my kid’s spare bedroom on Airbnb — and shop at Walmart for the cheapest Chinese imports, and what I can’t find there I buy on Amazon through a chatbot that replaced a human? Monday to Friday I’m with labor. Saturday and Sunday I’m with capital.

My point? Many of the old binary choices simply do not line up with the challenges to workers, communities and companies in this age of accelerating globalization, technology and climate change, but national governments are so paralyzed by partisanship that they can’t adapt. And most families are too weak to manage these forces and pass along the American dream to their kids.

Fortunately, though, all is not lost. Creative adaptation is happening in many of America’s counties, cities and towns, where trust is much higher. The most successful are forging what I call “complex adaptive coalitions,” where business, labor, philanthropists, social entrepreneurs, educators and local government all network together to create jobs, attract businesses, grow housing, fix potholes and improve schools.

These coalitions are not focused on splitting the differences between the old right-left binary choices. They’ve actually moved to a totally different grid — one that asks every day on every issue: “What works? Find it and share it, so we can get the best out of these accelerations in technology, globalization and climate change and cushion the worst for the most people in our community.”

Oxford economist Eric Beinhocker recently pointed out to me research that says there are only two ways to cure political tribalism: “A common threat or a common project.” We need a common project, and it’s obvious: Build a new foundation for the middle class. Ultimately that requires the local and the national levels to work together. But for now we should be glad that it’s at least happening at the local level.

Don Baer, who served as President Bill Clinton’s communications director, has a bumper sticker for anyone who wants to run for president in 2020 on the grid of rebuilding our country through complex adaptive coalitions — but it will take your whole bumper:

“Make America work again, for those who are willing to work and for those who are willing to work together.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="fa7249e0-2d50-45bf-86ee-ef0ec0b15eba" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/19/opinion/four-party-america-politics.html">The New York Times</a>.

Could we have our first four-party election in 2020 — with candidates from the Donald Trump far right, the old GOP center right, the Joe Biden center left and the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez far left all squaring off.

Is America becoming a four-party state?

<h1>A few years ago, the leaders of the College Board, the folks who administer the SAT college entrance exam, asked themselves a radical question: Of all the skills and knowledge that we test young people for that we know are correlated with success in college and in life, which is the most important? Their answer: the ability to master “two codes” — computer science and the U.S. Constitution.</h1>

Since then they’ve been adapting the SATs and the College Board’s Advanced Placement program to inspire and measure knowledge of both. Since the two people who led this move — David Coleman, president of the College Board, and Stefanie Sanford, its chief of global policy — happen to be people I’ve long enjoyed batting around ideas with, and since I thought a lot of students, parents and employers would be interested in their answer, I asked them to please show their work: “Why these two codes?”

Their short answer was that if you want to be an empowered citizen in our democracy — able not only to navigate society and its institutions but also to improve and shape them, and not just be shaped by them — you need to know how the code of the U.S. Constitution works. And if you want to be an empowered and adaptive worker or artist or writer or scientist or teacher — and be able to shape the world around you, and not just be shaped by it — you need to know how computers work and how to shape them.

With computing, the internet, big data and artificial intelligence now the essential building blocks of almost every industry, any young person who can master the principles and basic coding techniques that drive computers and other devices “will be more prepared for nearly every job,” Coleman and Sanford said in a joint statement explaining their initiative. “At the same time, the Constitution forms the foundational code that gives shape to America and defines our essential liberties — it is the indispensable guide to our lives as productive citizens.”

So rather than have SAT exams and Advanced Placement courses based on things that you cram for and forget, they are shifting them, where they can, to promote the “two codes.”

In 2016, the College Board completely revamped its approach to AP computer science courses and exams. In the original Computer Science course, which focused heavily on programming in Java, nearly 80 percent of students were men. And a large majority were white and Asian, said Coleman. What that said to women and underrepresented minorities was, “How would you like to learn the advanced grammar of a language that you aren’t interested in?”

Turned out that was not very welcoming. So, explained Coleman, they decided to “change the invitation” to their new Computer Science Principles course by starting with the question: What is it that you’d like to do in the world? Music? Art? Science? Business? Great! Then come build an app in the furtherance of that interest and learn the principles of computer science, not just coding, Coleman said. “Learn to be a shaper of your environment, not just a victim of it.”

The new course debuted in 2016. Enrollment was the largest for a new course in the history of Advanced Placement, with just over 44,000 students nationwide.

Two years later The Christian Science Monitor reported, “More high school students than ever are taking the College Board’s Advanced Placement (AP) computer science exams, and those taking them are increasingly female and people of color.”

Indeed, the story added, “the College Board reports that from 2017 to 2018 female, African-American and Hispanic students were among the fastest growing demographics of AP computer science test-takers, with increases in exam participation of 39 percent, 44 percent and 41 percent, respectively. ... For context, in 2007, fewer than 3,000 high school girls took the AP Computer Science A exam; in 2018, more than 15,000 completed it.”

The AP U.S. Government and Politics course also was reworked. At a time when we have a president who doesn’t act as if he’s read the Constitution — and we have a growing perception and reality that college campuses are no longer venues for the free exchange of ideas and real debate of consequential issues — Coleman and Sanford concluded it was essential that every student entering college actually have command of the First Amendment, which enshrines five freedoms, not just freedom of speech.

Every student needs to understand that, as Coleman put it, “our country was argued into existence — and that is the first thing that binds us — but also has some of the tensions that divide us. So we thought, ‘What can we do to help replace the jeering with productive conversation?'”

It had to start in high school, said Sanford, who is leading the “two codes” initiative. “Think of how much more ready you are to participate in college and society with an understanding of the five freedoms that the First Amendment protects — of speech, assembly, petition, press and religion. The First Amendment lays the foundation for a mature community of conversation and ideas — built on the right and even obligation to speak up and, when needed, to protest, but not to interrupt and prevent others from speaking.”

This becomes particularly important, she noted, “when technology and democracy are thought of as in conflict but are actually both essential” and need to work in tandem.

One must observe only how Facebook was abused in the 2016 election to see that two of the greatest strengths of America — innovation and free speech — have been weaponized. If they are not harmonized, well, Houston, we have a problem.

So the new AP government course is built on an in-depth look at 15 Supreme Court cases as well as nine foundational documents that every young American should know. It shows how the words of the Constitution give rise to the structures of our government.

Besides revamping the government course and the exam on that subject, Coleman and Sanford in 2014 made a staple of the regular SAT a long reading comprehension passage from one of the founding documents, such as the Constitution, or another important piece of democracy, like a great presidential speech. That said to students and teachers something the SAT had never dared say before: Some content is disproportionately more powerful and important, and if you prepare for it you will be rewarded on the SAT.

Sanford grew up in Texas and was deeply affected as a kid watching video of African-American congresswoman Barbara Jordan arguing the case against Richard Nixon in Watergate. What she remembered most, said Sanford, was how Jordan’s power “emanated from her command of the Constitution.

“Understanding how government works is the essence of power. To be a strong citizen, you need to know how the structures of our government work and how to operate within them.”

Kids are getting it: An AP U.S. Government and Politics class at Hightstown High School in New Jersey was credited in a Senate committee report with contributing content to a bill, the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Collection Act, which was signed into law last month.

Sanford cites it as a great example of her mantra: “'Knowledge, skills and agency’ — kids learn things, learn how to do things and then discover that they can use all that to make a difference in world.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="0cb9b52f-d6aa-4d2c-8392-35be0e1fa0d9" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/12/opinion/college-board-sat-ap.html">The New York Times</a>.

Since then they’ve been adapting the SATs and the College Board’s Advanced Placement program to inspire and measure knowledge of both.

The two codes your kids need to know

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