The conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia is the future of warfare

The article was originally published on the Young Fabians blog.

Tensions between Azerbaijan and Armenia, two neighbouring countries in the Caucasus region, go back to at least the beginning of the twentieth century, when the Armenians were expelled from the Ottoman Empire. In 1991, the ethnic Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan declared its independence as the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic. However, it has never been recognized by the international community, including Armenia. As a result, a local war broke out that ended with a ceasefire in 1994. The Armenian military captured parts of Azerbaijan, forcing 600,000 Azerbaijanis to flee and lose their homes. It was just a matter of time before this frozen conflict erupted again. 

This past spring, the self-declared Armenian government in Karabakh organised an election that provoked Azerbaijan and drew international criticism. As a result, clashes flared in the region, killing more than a dozen people. In July, further skirmishes broke out between the Armenian and Azerbaijani armed forces, killing another 17. Even though the definitive catalyst for the border clashes is still unclear, in response, thousands of Azerbaijanis called for war with Armenia. By September, a full-scale war had broken out between the two over the Nagorno-Karabakh region. To make matters worse, any renewed Armenian-Azerbaijani confrontation carried the possibility of sparking a wider war because of the long-running Russia-Turkey proxy conflict in the region. And tensions between Russia and Turkey have grown increasingly hostile this year: Following a Russian airstrike in Syria that killed Turkish soldiers earlier this year, “Turkey soon appeared on the battlefields where Russia was vulnerable”. Turkey later deployed military advisers, armed drones, and Syrian proxy fighters to Libya to counter a Russian-supported opposition group there. Both Turkey and Russia did eventually get involved with their smaller neighbours. Turkey sent troops to Azerbaijan for military exercises this past summer. Armenia later claimed a Turkish F-16 fighter shot down an Armenian jet until Russia brokered a peace deal on 9 November after Azerbaijan conquered large swathes of territory.

A conflict that has been simmering for decades was this time decided within weeks. Nobody was surprised that the conflict broke out again. What is surprising though is the extent to which advanced technologies impacted the conflict. Although Armenia bought $40 million worth of radar systems from India in March, they did little to counteract Azerbaijan’s armed drone fleet. Armenia’s outdated 1980s-era air-defence system also was helpless in fighting off Azerbaijan’s drones. Although military experts claim the Armenian armed forces are well-trained, generally capable and possess agile leadership, none of this mattered much when the other side’s technology was much more advanced. 

Azerbaijan won the war because its drones roamed freely without any interruption, easily gaining significant intelligence on Armenian positions. “Azerbaijan was able to purchase weapons from Israel, Russia and Turkey to attain a substantial military edge”, said Michael Kofman, director of the Russia Studies Program at CNA, a US-based national security research organisation. The drones allowed them to detect Armenia’s forward positions as well as the location of their support units. With Israeli-made LORA ballistic missiles, for example, Azerbaijan was able to sever Armenia’s front lines from their reserves by destroying the critical infrastructure connecting them, like roads and bridges. Day after day, the Azerbaijanis isolated the Armenian front until they were completely cut off. 

This hybrid use of drones coupled with effective military strategy enabled Azerbaijan to clearly control the battlefield. This tactic has typically been employed by Turkey, Azerbaijan’s patron, in the past. “Having high-tech military equipment is not the same as using it properly. Given the competence that they are showing, it’s obvious that they have received significant levels of advice from Turkey,” said Jack Watling, a research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a UK-based defence think tank.^[1]

However, the quarrel between Azerbaijan and Armenia is not the only regional conflict that has existed for decades. Closer to Europe, Ukraine and Cyprus are both home to long-simmering tensions, where we don’t know when or how hostilities could boil over in the future. And we shouldn’t believe Europe is better equipped to counter potential assaults made by armed drones. According to Gustav Gressel, Senior Policy Fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, no European army has an armoured air-defence system that could protect its own forces, and most EU armies would have performed just as badly as Armenia in a similar situation.

The development of drones has occurred at an extremely rapid pace, and their use is increasingly manifold. The war between Armenia and Azerbaijan shows that with some help from regional allies, fighting can end surprisingly quickly, with unforeseen consequences. Western countries need to level-up their skills, knowledge, and equipment in emerging technologies to not only prepare but catch up to fight twenty-first century conflicts. The questions now are who decides how we will fight in the future and who controls the multidimensional battlefield. The war between Azerbaijan and Armenia, being heavily influenced by Russia and Turkey, demonstrates the most recent example of how drones offer a significant advantage the largest artillery pieces cannot offer: intelligence that puts you one step ahead.

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Policy Paper in response to the Environmental Audit Committee’s call for evidence on fast fashion

“News to Reuse” and “I have a voice” submission to the Environmental Audit Committee’s inquiry on the progress made on the environmental and social impact of the fashion industry since the 2018 Fixing fashion: clothing consumption and sustainability. It was originally published here. A blog post on this issue is published on the Young Fabians blog.

Executive Summary:

1. “News to Reuse” is a youth-led anti-fast-fashion campaign that sits within the social enterprise “I have a voice”. The campaign aims to chiefly advocate for clothing companies to create product labels that inform customers about their clothes’ environmental footprint and the human rights conditions of workers in their supply chains. It is also working to educate young people about the consequences of fast fashion and include it in the National Curriculum.

2. According to the World Bank, the fashion industry comprises 10 percent of all global carbon emissions annually. Without intervention, emissions from the fashion industry  will increase by 50 percent by 2030. Furthermore, according to The Waste and Resources Action Programme, roughly 350,000 tonnes of clothes go into landfill each year. It is urgent that the fashion industry drastically changes the way it produces clothing, waste management systems do more to recycle textiles, and consumers are encouraged to avoid fashion as it is not sustainable. 

3. In light of the Covid-19 pandemic, we believe that supporting second-hand shops will benefit the UK’s economy and those households who have been particularly affected by the pandemic’s negative economic impact. On the one hand, the pandemic has caused an exceptional amount of fashion waste, with 73 percent of British fashion brands experiencing cancelled orders from wholesale partners. UK clothing sales fell by 34 percent in March 2020 alone, resulting in an unprecedented inventory crisis. On the other hand, the bottom three deciles of UK households have lost a significant amount of household income due to job losses and being furloughed. This makes it more difficult to afford suitable and warm clothes, especially as the winter season is approaching. We urge the Committee to call for the Government to allocate financial subsidies to second-hand stores and independent companies which focus on sustainable fashion in order to tackle fast fashion and fashion waste. Furthermore, companies should be required to either donate unsold stock for charity purposes, or recycle them for their future products. That way, companies will also receive an incentive to use textiles that can be well recycled. At the same time, this will ensure that the UK is shifting to a more sustainable economy and supporting the households hit hardest by Covid-19.

4. The Sustainable Clothing Action Plan is a key instrument for fostering the transition to a more sustainable fashion industry. Its revised version should consist of criteria defining a sustainable and ethical supply chain. The plan should also encourage companies to focus on educating the public, especially people under 35, on the impacts of fast fashion and its sustainable alternatives. Following other fashion companies, stakeholders of the plan should include QR codes on clothing labels that inform the consumer about the environmental impact and human rights conditions of workers. Benchmarking for measuring the carbon footprint of goods and human rights within the supply chain already exist and provide a useful starting point.

5. We have limited our response to those questions where we have evidence or views.
   

Q2. What impact has the pandemic had on fashion waste?

6. According to The British Council’s Institute of Positive Fashion and research undertaken by Oxford Economics, the Covid-19 crisis has led to 73 percent of British fashion brands experiencing cancelled orders from wholesale partners. Furthermore, UK clothes sales fell by 34 percent in March 2020 alone, resulting in an unprecedented inventory crisis. 

7. As retail stores depend heavily on seasonal fashion, the question arises as to what companies will do with the incredible amount of ‘deadstock’, meaning clothes that have not been sold. On the one hand, the pandemic has caused an exceptional amount of fashion waste. On the other hand, the bottom three deciles of UK households have lost a significant amount of household income due to job losses and being furloughed, which makes it more difficult for families to afford suitable and warm clothes, especially as the cold season is approaching.

8. News to Reuse urges the Committee to call for the Government to implement incentives to recycle and upcycle fashion waste and deadstock as it is a more urgent and pressing issue than ever before. We have included examples of how this could be achieved throughout our response.
   

Q6. What would be the most effective measures industry or Government could put in place to ensure that materials or products made with forced or prison camp labour are removed from the supply chain?

9. One idea that we have to ensure that no fashion companies make use of forced or prison camp labour within their supply chain is for all clothing labels to have a QR code. When consumers scan the code, they would be able to see in which countries the clothes were made, and in which factories. Over time, this could include a quality mark or rating system that provides consumers with assurance that the working conditions throughout the supply chain meet a pre-agreed definition of human and worker rights, e.g. number of working hours and whether it pays a living wage. Clothing companies such as Another Tomorrow or ASOS have already introduced the QR code on labels to inform its customers about the clothes’ country of origin, carbon footprint, and the story behind the design. The Corporate Human Rights Benchmarking Alliance provides a comparative snapshot year-on-year of the largest companies on the planet, looking at the policies, processes, and practices they have in place to systematise their human rights approach and how they respond to serious allegations. The results and methodology are made a public good for all stakeholders.

10. That way, consumers receive the opportunity to make informed decisions rather than relying on brand marketing and the cost of clothes. The majority of consumers would not expect their clothes to be made by forced or prison camp labour. It is our view that consumers will put pressure on fashion brands by moving away from those brands that are knowingly using factories with forced labour, or in regions known to violate human rights.

11. We believe in many instances this information is already available as advocacy groups have the ability to hold companies accountable on their actions based on publicly available and easily accessible information. For example, Uyghur rights groups have put pressure on clothing companies in July 2020 by publishing a press release and a list of companies who have benefitted from Uyghur forced labour. Jasmine O’Connor OBE, CEO of Anti-Slavery International said, “Now is the time for real action from brands, governments and international bodies – not empty declarations. To end the slavery and horrific abuses of Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other Turkic Muslim peoples by the Chinese government, brands must ensure their supply chains are not linked to the atrocities against these people. The only way brands can ensure they are not profiting from the exploitation is by exiting the region and ending relationships with suppliers propping up this Chinese government system”.

12. An independent public body comprised of elected positions, and people with experience in fashion as well as human rights should scrutinise the information that companies provide through the QR code. That way, the UK will uphold its responsibility to protect human rights internationally and not allow companies to make profit off of forced labour. Only if companies are being held accountable by the public through thorough audits and transparency for consumers will fashion brands feel the urgency to end supply chains connected with forced labour.
    

Q7. How can any stimulus after the Coronavirus crisis be used to promote a more sustainable fashion industry?

13. Firstly, “News to Reuse” is convinced that the Government needs to implement economic stimulus now. If financial incentives and support are provided after the economy has already suffered, it will reach people after they have already lost their jobs and businesses, and the economy has contracted significantly. Furthermore, the Government will have to invest even more, as the more damage will already have been done. As Carolyn Fairbairn, outgoing Director General of the Confederation of British Industry, said, “By the time you put in place all the sensible measures you might want, people will have already lost their jobs”.

14. People have been cleaning out their wardrobes during lockdown. As a result second-hand and charity shops have experienced a surge in donations up to the point where they had to stop accepting clothes due to a lack of storage. This is the right time for the Government to focus on supporting second-hand and charity shops in order to promote sustainable consumer behaviours. “News to Reuse” strongly believes that with the right financial support, second-hand shops can provide an effective way to promote sustainable fashion among a large part of society and fundamentally change the way we consume fashion.

15.  The Government can play a substantial role in facilitating a transition towards a sustainable fashion trend through stimuli such as significant rent reductions, no incidental wage costs, and free advertising space, for example on public transportation. These incentives could be reserved for second-hand and charity shops, as well as those retailers who can clearly demonstrate a commitment to sustainable fashion and with a very limited stock of fast-fashion. If these retailers have the means to offer their clothes at a competitive price, repair them if necessary, and advertise their stores prominently, we believe that charity and second-hand shops can become real competitors to major fashion companies. Research by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation suggests that “77% of the UK population wants to shop second-hand, but only 27% actually do”.

16. The Government should use similar financial incentives as introduced above, for independent stores or companies who offer to rent clothes in order to tackle fast fashion. As thousands of UK households have experienced a significant income loss due to the pandemic, renting clothes, especially for children, is a cost effective and sustainable way to approach fashion. Censuswide, on behalf of Barnardo, reported that in 2019, Britains would potentially spend £2.7 billion on clothing that will only be worn once. Many people still don’t feel comfortable wearing the same outfit twice, for example, if they had already worn it to a wedding. Many clothes are also bought to go on holiday, and Censuswide finds these clothes are never worn again. Renting clothes would counter this trend and encourage more sustainable behaviours while appreciating that some people might not want to repeat outfits for special occasions or in the case of young children they may grow out of them quickly. 

17. Government subsidies should only be given to those companies and shops who comply with at least one of the following criteria:

1. Predominantly producing fashion products using biodegradable (such as Pinatex), or recycled materials, or those with a low environmental impact such as Lyozell or bast fibres; selling predominantly second-hand items or renting out clothes.
2. Clothing companies who accept the return of clothes in order to recycle them. For example, companies such as H&M, Charles Tyrwhitt, and M&S already do this. However, big fashion corporations should be exempt from Government subsidies due to their high revenue. 

Companies would also need to show proof of an ethical supply chain; including no child labour, living wages, and sufficient breaks.

Q8. Is the Sustainable Clothing Action Plan adequate to address the environmental impact of the UK fashion industry? How ambitious should its targets be in its next phase?

18. “News to Reuse” does not believe that the current Sustainable Clothing Action Plan (SCAP) is adequate. The statistics mentioned in the plan are from 2007 and therefore outdated, and no measurable targets have been set.

19. We believe that the targets for the plan’s next phase should comprise the following: 

1. Gathering the latest evidence, and setting quantitative targets for companies to achieve within a certain timeframe. For example, companies wishing to be stakeholders should pledge to achieve zero carbon emission in the production of their clothing products within the next 20 years and provide evidence of the steps they are taking in their annual reports.
2. Stakeholders of SCAP should aim to use predominantly environmentally compatible fibres for their products. The steering and expert groups will be responsible for identifying which fibres fall under this category and setting the percentage of how much environmentally compatible fibres should be used in each product category. 
3. In order to incentivise fashion companies to become stakeholders of SCAP, Defra should grant certified sustainable labels for fashion companies that fulfill at least one of the points introduced in Q7.17. of this response, and that pledge to follow SCAP’s roadmap.

3. The project steering group’s category of “Public Understanding of Sustainable Clothing” should introduce projects that research how the public can be educated on sustainable clothing. We would particularly appreciate it if the steering group introduced presentations and workshops for high school students to learn more about sustainable clothing in order to change their consumption behaviour at an early stage. This age group will be the most effective to target, as currently, people aged between 18 and 34 throw away their clothes after wearing it fewer times than those aged 35 and above. At the same time, Deloitte reported that in 2019, “42 percent of millennials said they have begun or deepened a business relationship because they perceive a company’s products or services to have a positive impact on society and/or the environment; and 37 percent said “they have stopped or lessened a business relationship because of the company’s ethical behavior.” In conjunction with the global Friday for Future protests as well as our own perceptions representing Millennials and Generation Z, we strongly think that educating high school students on sustainable clothing as well as how to repair, reuse, and recycle clothes, will make a significant and long lasting positive impact. 
4. “News to Reuse” would also appreciate it if SCAP included a target for companies to publish information on the environmental impact and labour conditions within their supply chain on their clothes labels, as introduced in Q6.9. of this response.

20. The European Commission has established the Green Public Procurement (GPP) as a voluntary instrument to foster sustainable production, consumption, and innovation. In order for the GPP to be successful, the European Commission introduced verifiable environmental criteria for products and services in the public procurement process. The most recent updates have been made in July 2020 with its aim to continuously update the criteria according to latest research and innovations. Despite the UK leaving the European Union (EU) in 2021, “News to Reuse” urges Defra and the steering and expert groups to ensure the UK keeps pace with the EU GPP and its ongoing developments. This will ensure a level playing field for fashion companies across the European market and make it easier for UK companies to continue selling their clothes in multiple European countries. We believe that fashion companies would find it more efficient to sell their clothes in countries with similar quality standards, which the EU GPP aims to achieve. In light of Brexit and the UK’s ongoing trade negotiations with the EU, we see a risk that companies are less willing to sell their goods in the UK due to its potentially divergent environmental standards and the resulting higher costs.

Q9. What actions could the Government take to improve the collection of fashion waste?

21. “News To Reuse” appreciates that many UK councils have partnered with the charity Traid to collect used clothes in order to resell or recycle them in order to counter fashion waste. However, there are still major areas across the UK, especially in West England and north of Leeds, where Traid’s services are not represented at all. The Government needs to encourage more councils to further develop accessible public garment collection points in residential areas. That way, fabrics are not thrown away but kept in the system. 

22. While Traid puts a great emphasis on reselling clothes through charity shops, it lacks the possibility to reuse fabrics in the production of new clothes. The Government should offer fabrics for free to companies which will recycle them either through Traid or local councils. 

23. Furthermore, deadstock, as mentioned in Q2.7. of this response, is a major problem in the fashion industry. The UK should follow France in introducing a ban on throwing away unsold stock. Companies should be required to either donate these items for charity purposes, or recycle them for their future products. That way, companies will also receive an incentive to use textiles that can be well recycled.

Q10. What actions could the Government take to incentivise the use of recycled or reused fibres and materials in the UK fashion industry?

24. Production of recycled materials is more expensive than using new materials, therefore, the Government needs to implement financial incentives and policies that encourage companies to use recycled fibres for their production. One way is to give subsidies and allow tax relief to companies that use recycled garments for their fashion products. This could be financed by introducing a “fashion waste tax” on companies who sell their fashion products in the UK, but do not comply with the criteria outlined in Q7.17. of this response.

25. As mentioned in Q9 of this response, either on a local or a national level, governments should provide collected used textiles to companies which will recycle those fabrics for free.

Q11. How could an Extended Producer Responsibility scheme for textiles be designed to incentive improvements in the sustainability of garments on sale in the UK?

26. The UK Government needs to ensure that low tariffs apply on imports of sustainable materials and fashion products from the EU due to short transport routes and therefore low carbon emissions and well regulated labour rights across the EU.

27. The Government also needs to provide criteria on what defines a sustainable and ethical supply chain (such as low CO2 emissions, use of sustainble materials, no child labour, sufficient breaks during work and weekly working hours, fair payment, maintenance of industrial health and safety standards). The Government can then allocate funding and subsidies to stores and independent companies who comply with these criteria.

28. “News to Reuse” suggests that if fashion businesses are part of the Sustainable Clothing Action Plan as well as the Extended Producer Responsibility scheme, these companies and second-hand stores should receive a quality mark that allows consumers to make better and more informed decisions, as well as independent stores and companies to stand out and promote their products’ quality.

29. Producers should be given responsibility for either recycling their clothes or reusing them by donating them to second-hand stores, as opposed to them being able to externalise the environmental impact of their products. This can either be done through a partnership with local governments and Traid, as introduced in Q9 of this response, or through independent clothing collection points organised by the respective company or store. France translated a similar policy into law in 2006, and the European Parliament suggested a related idea in 2019. 

30. As introduced and outlined in Q7.16. of this response, the Government should provide financial incentives for companies and stores that offer to rent clothes in order to tackle fast fashion and for those following Government criteria regarding an ethical and sustainable supply chain.

31. “News to Reuse” would also like to see the same points as laid out in Q6 of this response in the Extended Producer Responsibility Scheme. Following other fashion companies, businesses should include QR codes on clothing tags that inform the consumer about the environmental impact and human rights conditions of workers. An independent public body comprised of elected positions, and people with experience in sustainable fashion as well as human rights should scrutinise the information that companies provide through the QR code. 

Redefining Progress

Click here to read the full pamphlet in pdf:Herunterladen

SHOULD THE UK INTRODUCE A FOUR-DAY WORKING WEEK? 

By Hannah Fuchs

The idea of a four-day working week, meaning people work four days a week without a pay- or benefit cut, is gaining momentum again. In July 2020, Members of Parliament (MPs) and campaigners sent a letter to Chancellor Rishi Sunak proposing a four-day working week for the UK, inspired by New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who suggested employers in her country could consider a four-day working week to boost the tourism industry in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Already during the last general elections in December 2019, the Labour Party included a four-day working week in their electoral manifesto. Since 2010, when David Cameron succeeded Gordon Brown as Prime Minister, the UK’s GDP per hour worked (measuring labour productivity) has been lower than the OECD average and over the last decade, this gap has only widened. It is time to recognize that British labour productivity needs rejuvenation in order to successfully overcome major economic and societal disruptions, such as Covid-19, leaving the European Union, and the rapid pace of digitalization transforming the global economy. One answer to these dilemmas is to introduce a four-day work week. 

Throughout the past several years, case studies in different countries have shown that a four-day working week does not reduce productivity, but rather increases it while companies save money at the same time. It is important that both industry and policymakers recognize that high productivity is not the same as working long hours. Most recently, Microsoft Japan announced positive results on a trial it was running in early 2019. 

In March 2018, the New Zealand trust management company Perpetual Guardian started a four-day working week trial for eight weeks. The company reduced the hours of its employees from 37.5 to 30 hours per week while it made no changes in their salary. The results of the trial show ostensible positive results with employees’ job performance being completely maintained. Further findings show, for example, that staff stress levels lowered from 45 percent to 38 percent. Supervisors were asked about different productivity aspects of other employees, such as attendance, behaviour that is not expected from employees but is seen as positive, service performance, and creation and innovation. In all categories, employees scored significantly higher after the trial than before, saying that they spent their time with families, friends, re-discovered hobbies, and overall, lived a more satisfying life, which was reflected in their attitude and performance at work. 

Another example is the Swedish retirement home Svartedalen, which demonstrates that even in sectors where a strict four-day working week is not possible, working reduced hours while improving productivity certainly is. For 23 months, all nurses worked six-hours shifts: 30 hours, five days per week, with no reduction in pay. In order to compensate for the reduced hours, 15 extra staff members were hired. Nursing homes are particularly short on staff while their work requires crucial attention and time in order to adequately care for their residents. The trial conductors concluded that the changes improved the nurses’ health, but also increased their quality of services. For example, the perceived level of energy left when nurses came home improved by 143 percent, their stress levels improved by 105 percent, and 4.7 percent fewer sick days were taken. At the same time, nurses reported to have done “more activities with the residents, such as walking outside, singing or dancing”.

Both examples illustrate that working less hours per week can have a positive impact on employees’ health. Especially amidst the Covid-19 pandemic, people’s health should be a priority for businesses and the government as it is the cornerstone of a functioning society. Statistics provided by the Health and Safety Executive, a government agency regulating work-related health and safety measures, state that in 2017-2018, 15.4 million working days were lost due to work-related anxiety, depression, and stress. The same days could be used to reduce stress by pursuing hobbies, spending time with friends and family, volunteering, or simply managing life. That will prevent stress and anxiety and as shown in the case studies, fewer sick days could be claimed. 

At the same time, employees will be more energetic and focused at work because they have more time to recharge. All these factors feed into being more productive at work long term. Andrew Barnes, owner of Perpetual Guardian said, “You’re not just getting the same productivity, you’re getting higher productivity.” A Deloitte study conducted in 2017 suggests that poor mental health conditions cost UK employers £33-42 billion each year, counting absence (£8 billion), presenteeism (£17-26 billion), and turnover costs (£8 billion). While it might seem more obvious that employees would advocate for a four-day working week, research conducted by Raconteur has shown that UK employers who have tried a four-day week have come to similar conclusions. 78 percent said that their employees are happier and 64 percent stated they get more work done because they are more productive; 63 percent say their employees produced better quality work than they did when they were working a longer week. Besides employees’ health benefits, there are clear economic incentives from an employer perspective as well. 

A four-day work week can also contribute to more gender equality. At the moment, women perform 60 percent more unpaid work than men and 41 percent of women in employment work part-time, compared to 13 percent of men. If there was generally more time outside of work, no parent would have to make compromises on their career. The 40-hour work week is based on the premise that one parent is staying at home to manage the household and care for children and other relatives. Our societal values have moved away from this idea though: women should have the same opportunities as men without the need to work less hours and hence get a pay cut and difficulties pursuing a career. As our population is aging and parenting has become more challenging, bringing children to music lessons, sports, or tutoring, increasingly more unpaid work will be needed. A four-day working week enables parents to better split their time to complete unpaid work and so allow women to focus more on their careers. 

Amid multiple economic disruptions such as Covid-19 and Brexit, a four-day working week can help mobilize the economy and make it more resistant as well as adaptive to future developments. It urges companies to hire more people to compensate for the fewer hours worked by current staff and creates more jobs. While companies might experience a decrease in profits at first due to increased investments in labour, this will pay off in the long run as research shows that staff is more productive and innovative when working four days a week. Hiring more people implies an increase in jobs created and alleviates unemployment, whereby the state saves paying unemployment benefits and collects more taxes. People would have the capacity to pursue further education, inform themselves about current affairs, and therefore are better equipped to contribute to a living democracy. 

With a four-day working week, we would experience a systematic redistribution of income. Companies would give up a stake of their profit to pay workers higher hourly wages and invest in human capital, giving workers a fairer share of the economic output. As outlined above, companies would still profit from the four-day working week concept with employees being more productive. As economist and Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz stated in a 2018 interview with The Guardian: “By changing the rules, we could wind up with a richer society, with the fruits more equally divided, and quite possibly where people have a shorter working week. We’ve gone from a 60-hour working week to a 45-hour week and we could go to 30 or 25.”

For a large part of society, the fourth industrial revolution, and the automated technologies driving it, brings the fear of job losses. Andy Haldane, Chief Economist at the Bank of England, warned that artificial intelligence (AI) and other technological developments will automate more jobs and likely force more people into unemployment. However, the revolution isn’t bad per se. The main issue policymakers, economists, businesses, and society at large need to face is that of switching from one job to another, learning new skills and adapting to new situations. To engage with new subjects takes time and energy, which people with 40-hour work weeks, children, relatives to care for, and maybe a hobby, often don’t have. A four-day work week would allow people to gain new skills and help them prepare for potential career changes. In order to accommodate an equal opportunity for everyone to upskill, the government needs to ensure that courses are created for people of all kinds of backgrounds. A single mother should have the same opportunity to learn coding as a 25-year-old college graduate. 

Different research reports, published, for example, by the OECD, PwC, and the Institute for Public Policy Research suggest that one of the reasons for the UK’s low productivity rate is its lack of investment in automated technologies. A 2017 study from PwC found that investment in artificial intelligence technology could generate a 10.3 percent increase in UK national GDP by 2030. British companies tend to prefer using low wage labour, often workers from the EU, rather than investing in technologies that could perform the same job.15 While one counter argument could be made here that a technology shift would lead to job losses, we have to look at the problem from a different perspective. The fourth industrial revolution needs to happen together with workers, not against them. Automated technologies and robots generate an increasing profit for companies, but they don’t receive salaries. Employees who would otherwise lose their position due to automation could continue to work four days a week, receive their salary stemming from the accrued profit generated by automated processes while receiving training to upskill and hence remain relevant to the company and industry overall. 

Policymakers should focus on the following areas to allow for a successful transition to more automated processes and a four-day working week. It needs to be ensured that people’ jobs are guaranteed despite future adoption of automated technologies. Workers need to receive the opportunity to upskill, so they remain relevant to the industry and work together with automated technologies rather than compete with them. The government also needs to implement incentives for companies to invest in both: workers and the adoption of automation technologies to encourage a more digital economy and a time-rich society. That way, the UK can increase its productivity, counter potential job losses, and prepare its workers for the fourth industrial revolution. The UK cannot simply look away from a digital economy anymore. 

Besides a few curious companies trailing four-day working weeks and interviews, the model is still rare. The government should encourage and engage consultants and academics to conduct qualitative and quantitative research and introduce measures of success so that other companies can transition smoothly to a four-day work week with minimal disruption. Because it is still a rather new concept, it is important that policymakers offer a platform to share best practices and respond to companies’ and employees’ feedback who have gone through a trial before. For example, all-party parliamentary groups, consisting of MPs with knowledge in that area, as well as interested organisations, can present such a platform. A select committee on alternative working models can check and scrutinize the work of the Department for Work and Pensions to ensure that employees’ interests are represented accurately. 

In conclusion, the four-day working week is a concept that holds plenty of opportunities that need to be explored and analysed. Those companies that provide case studies have reported predominantly positive feedback and understand the transition as work in progress. As this is a rather uncharted working model, it is crucial that all stakeholders involved have a voice to shape it. The government’s role is to encourage companies and organisations to spearhead the idea, making the transition as smooth as possible while ensuring that nobody is left behind. It is an opportunity to redefine how we work and the way our society wants to live.

Global Leader in Ethical AI

Young Fabians Tech Network: Global Leader in Ethical AI

(Click below to jump to my chapters of the paper)
AMERICA: Birthplace of the Internet

By Hannah Fuchs 

It is vital to recall that the Internet, radar, bluetooth, mobile phones, etc. were all US state-supported inventions. The US state helped cement global dominance in those emerging fields through funding research and building AI technologies. The Internet itself was funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), part of the Department of Defense and nowadays referred to as DARPA. Created by the Eisenhower administration in 1958, it led to a new industrial revolution. Most of DARPA’s spending is part of the Pentagon’s infamous black budget. It would not even confirm programme code names “or confirm estimates of the agency’s bottom line.” Since 2005, DARPA has been more transparent. In 2019, its enacted budget was $3.427 billion. 

In 1956, the US computer scientist John McCarthy organised the Dartmouth Conference, where the term ‘Artificial Intelligence’ was first adopted. Since then, researchers have tried to build intelligent machines but have failed, partly due to a lack of required large amounts of data (computers up until the early 1990s didn’t have the capacity to store and process the amount of data needed). 

Over the past few decades, research and development of many AI technologies in the US have moved from state-funded projects to private companies that benefit from the positive feedback loop of having exclusive access to an outstanding amount of data. The US state doesn’t regulate the use of that data to a large extent (and what regulation exists is splintered over hundreds of individual state and federal laws) and lacks in antitrust enforcement, making it easy for these conglomerates to simply buy out their smaller competitors. It is nearly impossible for start-ups to compete alongside Amazon, Google or Facebook. Sooner or later, they will receive an inquiry about selling their company. 

The lack of state intervention (i.e. the regulation to protect private citizens) and the power that US companies using AI have, demonstrates the ethical risk of a positive feedback loop: the more data companies gather, the more of a monopoly is created. They can then drive down prices and eliminate competition. This concentration of power will feed into social inequality. It is therefore important to strengthen a diverse AI industry where small start-ups have a chance to compete on the market. 

The increase of ‘gig economy’ or ‘gig workers’ has led to a real issue in the US. Gig workers are not a strictly defined category so assessments of their number vary. Generally speaking, gig workers are freelance workers that more and more often work in the platform economy, such as for Uber, Lyft or food delivery companies. Because those companies offer a platform where supply and demand meet, they do not see themselves as conventional employers and shirk their responsibility to provide platform workers with health insurance, minimum wage and paid leave. They also often don’t receive unemployment insurance from the government as their status (whether they’re an employee or freelance workers) is ill-defined. Gig workers find themselves in a gray zone with very few rights. In response to that, the state of California passed a law at the end of 2019 that classifies workers in the platform economy as employees, enabling them to receive valuable workers’ benefits. The traditional employer-employee relationship starts to blur with artificial intelligence. When apps, or algorithms, make the decisions, then who is accountable for their impacts? 

Policymakers need to understand the economic disruption that comes with AI. Rather than looking away, the most beneficial outcome for society is for national as well as regional governments to understand new economic opportunities and proactively create jobs that allow employees to work with AI rather than have AI replace jobs. Innovations often come along with economic disruptions. The government should not be facing mass unemployment, but instead, mass redeployment. 

Governments also need to ensure that people don’t end up in gray zones with little rights. Instead, as mentioned earlier, minimum wage, health insurance, pension, as well as paid leave should all be guaranteed for so-called ‘gig workers’. The definition of this group needs to be revised regularly due to the fast changes happening in this industry. 

The UK government needs to ensure that monopolies are properly identified and regulated so that a healthy competitive environment can exist alongside workers’ rights. This can be done, for example, by institutionalising a wide range of easily-accessible and low-threshold funding opportunities for start-ups, and redistributing the resources of large tech companies that already have access to an extraordinarily large pool of data. Those resources can then be used to retrain people, create new job sectors for those whose jobs are at risk, and invest in smaller start-ups. 

In an ever more globalised world, there is a great need for international cooperation on taxing tech companies to reduce inequality on a national as well as an international level (e.g. avoiding tax havens). 

Currently, the US remains the global leader in AI, especially in chip development. China is well aware of that dependence on US-developed chips and is eager to catch up in that field, fueled by the US-China trade war and accusations against Huawei, a Chinese telecommunications company, which allege that the company helps the Chinese government steal foreign AI technology and allows Chinese intelligence agencies to use their telecommunication networks to spy on foreign countries. A recent study indicates that the US is going to fall behind China in five to ten years in the areas of innovation, implementation, and investment of AI. In the same study, the UK follows China ranking third. Research on the US AI workforce conducted by the Center for Security and Emerging Technology states that more US companies are moving their AI research and development (R&D) abroad and 70% of computer scientists studying in the US were born abroad. 

In light of Brexit, the UK government will need to consider its immigration policies and create an inclusive environment both for national and international students. It should encourage UK residents along with international students to enroll in STEM programmes to improve and encourage diversity in the industry and ensure that the sector reflects the makeup of the general population. 

As China catches up in AI research and development, the lead that the US has, is being slowly eroded. Experts and scientists have been criticizing this development, urging the US government to take action. In response, in 2019, President Donald Trump issued an executive order to make AI research and development a national priority. Part of that is a budget proposal intending to raise DARPA’s spending on AI research and development to $249 million from its current levels at $50 million. The proposal also includes a budget increase for the National Science Foundation from $500 million to $850 million for AI matters. For many years, the US government has not only lost highly qualified data scientists and start-ups to China, but also to its private US-based companies such as Google. With the overall $4.8 trillion heavy budget proposal, the US government aims to attract well-trained scientists and drive research in a direction that benefits national security and other public areas such as energy. 

The US government struggles to keep on top of its US-based tech companies such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon. Most innovation has happened in the private sector and the US government does not seem to understand the consequences of AI in order to regulate it accordingly. At the moment, it looks like AI is regulating the government rather than vice versa. Governments need to understand AI and its impacts to the best extent possible in order to effectively promote and regulate it at the same time. 

While the US government’s R&D has lagged behind the private sector, its willingness to cooperate with it exists, raising questions on human and civil rights. For example, the technology company Palantir Technologies provides AI database management to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), in order to record, target, and detain undocumented immigrants. They were able to do so due to a cooperation with the FBI, where they used an unprecedented surveillance infrastructure that was based on facial recognition technology. 

This raises the question of how far governments can use their power on their own citizens. For example, do a vast majority of undocumented immigrants represent a threat to national security? Or have undocumented immigrants actually contributed to their communities, and aimed to have a better life? Eventually, similar AI-based procedures will most likely be used on US residents as well, questioning the transparency, and legality of its usage. It bears the risk that people’s lives will be heavily influenced by nontransparent algorithmic calculations rather than people’s individual choices. 

When such significant decisions about humans’ lives are made, they shouldn’t solely be based on algorithmic determinations. Instead, decisions should also be made in conjunction with ethical and moral stances that are transparent enough so that third parties, such as civil rights organisations, can ask questions and receive answers. Public institutions should also lay out on which premises their decisions were made to ensure transparency and allow the public to understand them and give the opportunity to question these decisions. 

Eventually, consistent with the model in existing western liberal democracies, the US ought to move towards a model where the ethical boundaries surrounding the applications of AI are representative of the general public. Whether it can achieve that goal with its existing political system is another matter.

EAST ASIA: POWERFUL STATES 

Singapore: The Lion City 

Even though Singapore might not be at the top of the list when we think about AI, the city-state shows examples of how states can engage productively with the rise of AI. Similarly to the US and China, Singapore understood early on that AI could be a key driver for economic growth. In 2017, the Singaporean government set up a national programme to invest $150 million into AI for the next five years. Its three key sectors are finance, city management and healthcare. 

One year later, in 2018, an advisory council for the government was established, led by former Attorney General Vijaya Kumar Rajah. Its purpose is to advise the government on AI and work together with the ethics boards of businesses. Leaders from Google, Microsoft and Alibaba are part of the advisory council. The potential economic gains from AI can conflict with the need for independent and universal ethical standards. 

In November 2019, the government expanded the scope of its focus on AI and defined five key sectors: transport; smart cities; healthcare; education; and safety and security. Part of its national AI strategy is its Model AI Governance Framework whose second edition was launched in January 2020. The platform is aimed to democratise AI technologies and their use by implementing four principles: 

1. Ensuring transparent internal governance structures and regular staff training within organizations 
2. Determining the level of human involvement in AI-augmented decision-making so that organisations minimise the risk of harm to individuals 
3. Minimising their biases in data and models 
4. Communicating openly and accessibly with their stakeholders and allowing feedback 

Even though it remains an open question as to how effectively this framework will be implemented, the principles should be adopted by all public and private organisations to ensure AI is used in a transparent and democratic way. In the midst of success due to AI, following ethical guidelines can often be overlooked by private companies as well as the government.

China: from an agrarian state to the United States’ biggest competitor in AI 

Well into the latter part of the 20th century, China was still considered an agrarian state. Today, China is the world’s largest producer of digital data, a gap that is widening daily. While China is well aware that in order to be able to compete in AI, it needs highly educated technical talent, it also knows that highly educated data scientists will reach a certain threshold whereby they begin to show diminishing returns. Beyond that point, data makes all the difference as it is the fundamental component without which AI could not exist in the first place. 

According to Kai-Fu Lee, Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Sinovation Ventures, and the former president of Google China as well as executive at Microsoft, SGI, and Apple, China identified the four components to be successful in AI: entrepreneurs, enormous amounts of data, highly educated AI engineers, and a government that is eager to support and use AI technology. 

China has more internet users than the US and Europe combined. It has also started earlier in collecting a high quality of data which will be more useful for creating AI driven products. “Qualitative” data implies information collected from the real world, that is, physical purchases, meals, makeovers, transportation, etc. The higher the amount and the more wide-ranging the data, the better the data-fueled algorithms and models for future products will be. 

The mobile app WeChat is one example of a successful product in China that is based on a data ecosystem. The app reflects the network effect stemming from its ecosystem. As WeChat affects almost all parts of Chinese life, the app constitutes an ecosystem. It is so tightly interwoven with day-to-day activities that it is challenging for a Chinese resident to not be part of this network. Additionally, because WeChat has a large amount of users sharing their data in so many areas of life, it can build on that network of information to further improve the app’s services, or improve targeted advertising. 

WeChat became a data powerhouse and, critics say, a tool for “remote control” of people’s lives within just five years of launch as it enables messaging, media, marketing, gaming, payments at restaurants and your taxi driver, unlocking shared bikes, managing investments, booking GP appointments and having prescriptions delivered to your door. 

During the Covid-19 lockdown in China, the State Council introduced an app based rating system together with two major tech firms, Alibaba and Tencent, to control people’s movements during the outbreak. People log their recent locations and health statuses and the app is able to link all entries together. Based on that information, the users receive coloured badges (green, yellow, and red) and a QR code to show when, for example, they enter a building. Tencent and Alibaba appreciate the traffic on their systems but claim to not have any access to personal data. This use case is an example of one of the potential drawbacks of AI – opaque decision making. The Wall Street Journal reported on the case of a man who was granted a red badge despite following all instructions. Additionally, since the system’s core operation is managed by the Chinese government, which means that the state now has (in China’s case, virtually uninhibited) access to this powerful tool. For example, the provincial Hangzhou government accused 16 people of lying about their health conditions and immediately gave them red badges. 

Because people use WeChat for every aspect of their lives, all their behaviours, patterns, and choices are recorded and centralised on the app. Every move, every decision, and even every thought that you type out and send to your friends, will be stored and used in an unknown way and by unknown people. That extreme centralisation of people’s lives’ data in one place is unique and creates a positive feedback loop; more services offered in one single place or app leads to more centralised data which leads to better products, which leads to more users, and so on. 

The rise of WeChat, an app with an enormous ecosystem, also spearheaded e-commerce in China. Targeting customers became effective and efficient because all their data was already provided through other applications within WeChat. China’s digital transaction value in 2019 amounted to $1,595,513 million, compared to $152,897 million in the UK. China’s mobile transaction penetration rate is higher than in any other country (35% vs. 6.6% in the US). That means 35% of people using a mobile phone also pay by using their phones – about half a billion people in China make their daily purchases by phone. Their average annual transaction value ($1,662) is lower than that of the US ($2,993) or UK ($2,464). Although this figure is lower than those for the West, it is worth remembering that Chinese incomes are significantly lower than Western ones in absolute terms, making these figures all the more surprising. It reflects the increasing trend in China to pay all your daily purchases, no matter how small, with your mobile app. This development leaves behind an enormous amount of digital footprints of everyday behaviour that is stored in, centralised in, and thus made available to apps beholden to the Chinese state. 

WeChat uses people’s data from their everyday lives for extremely targeted advertising. How are WeChat users able to make critical, informed decisions if they get recommended products and services that seem plausible to them? And who designs those algorithms that offer you exactly that product that you allegedly have been looking for? The growing shift from contextual to behavioural targeting results in a continuous subtle influence of showing people certain products, services, news headlines, or bargains over and over, thereby influencing the way they perceive the world and make decisions. Global conglomerates can dominate the market by paying enough money and using their large sets of available data as barriers to entry for startups. At some point, smaller companies most likely won’t be able to compete anymore if no regulations cut off this cycle of data collection and competitive advantage entrenchment. 

In 2014/15, the country became a real competitor to Silicon Valley with China’s mass innovation campaign by focussing intensively on the following policy areas: 

1. The state started directly subsidising technology entrepreneurs. 
2. Public venture capital funding jumped tremendously and became almost equal to the US in 2018. Kai-Fu Lee points out that in America, people predominantly believe in private rather than public venture capital, as they tend to believe the latter is highly inefficient.
3. The establishment of entire cities focussing on AI. While the direction originated from the central government, ambitious mayors implemented the strategy widely. They aimed to establish their towns to be centers for AI by investing in local AI companies, offering research grants, opening AI training institutes, free company shuttles, securing places at schools and special accommodation for people who work in the AI industry. 
4. The amount of technology incubators was rapidly increased. “Entrepreneurship zones” were created and government-backed funds were launched to attract more private venture capital. The government also granted tax incentives for people and businesses working in the technology sector and generally made it easier to start a business.
5. Even though it sounds like a promising and successful strategy, how far can a government go in directing national industrial strategies? The above scenario bears the risk of a two-class society; those who work in AI and those who don’t. While these policies should be incorporated in the UK’s AI policy strategy, policymakers will have to ask themselves how far they can incentivise one area without groundlessly disadvantaging people at the same time.

Online to offline revolution 

The development outlined above, with the rise of WeChat, and what is part of the AI revolution is the introduction of the online to offline, or O2O Revolution; offline and online would merge together and there would be no more differentiation between what was online and what offline. The US introduced the first transformational O2O model: ride-sharing, thanks to Uber and Lyft. China quickly copied that model with Didi Chuxing and accustomed it to local conditions. WeChat then accelerated the O2O trend. An increasing amount of activities you do offline is managed online in one single app, offering all the services you need and thereby transforming the data environment. 

As we know, WeChat centralised all its data gathering on consumption patterns and personal habits. That ecosystem differentiates China from the US, which doesn’t centralise multiple services but instead, splits them up, offering multiple services across their different platforms. Facebook is an US example that splits its services into the Facebook app, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram. Facebook even has its own app for managing pages and groups. All of these platforms seem to be independent and yet, all are owned by Facebook. On the other hand, Yelp bought Eat24, a food delivery platform, trying to follow the example of Chinese companies. However, it failed to properly fuse all of the logistical services onto one platform like Chinese companies do. Specifically, the restaurants still had to handle the deliveries themselves, which gave little incentive to join Eat24 and thus, the business never succeeded. 

China was also able to catch up with the US so quickly because AI researchers around the world are relatively open to sharing their data, algorithms, and results with the public. Open source platforms (such as well-known Wikipedia) have become more and more popular. Publicly available knowledge across the world fosters competition on an international level. China put that to good use and proved to be a serious competitor in the field. 

Another central component for AI is chip development (e.g. for facial recognition or self-driving cars). Even though Silicon Valley remains the clear leader in AI chip development, Chinese cities have become AI development hubs due to the following supportive policies: 

1. Easily accessible subsidies for research 
2. Venture capital funding and grants for AI companies 
3. Government contracts promising to buy products and services developed in local AI cities 
4. AI incubators 
5. AI training institutes 
6. Clear schemes to set up and register a company 

The measures taken by the Chinese government raise questions about how independently firms can really operate. For example, an official statement laid out that government representatives would be assigned to 100 big tech companies including Alibaba in order to strengthen government relations and information exchange. It is not clear though to what extent the Chinese government is controlling these companies on the management side. This is a democratic and transparency issue. 

While the government does play a crucial role in helping start-ups to become successful, the public has a right to know by whom AI companies are funded and supported by. Knowing who controls the data collection and builds the algorithms is essential for ethical AI practice. 

One particular categorisation of AI splits it into four. First, Internet AI uses data for algorithms to develop recommendations for users, such as seen with Youtube videos and Spotify songs. Second, companies use business AI to learn more about their customers to improve their services. For example, banks give out loans, insurance companies sell policies, or supply chains and inventories are getting optimised based on structured data that identifies certain patterns. Here, the US is the clear leader where companies specialise in helping other businesses improve their services through artificial intelligence software. China has so far been lagging behind here. Third, perception AI digitises the physical world, and how we perceive and experience it. It incorporates our daily routines, behaviour, and conversations by deep learning algorithms into data sets that can then be used in a wide variety of ways. Examples are Alexa, Siri, or the leading speech recognition company iFlyTek from China. Fourth and final, autonomous AI is slowly developing, such as self-driving cars, autonomous drones, and intelligent robots. 

Ethics plays an especially crucial role in perception and autonomous AI. By gathering data in public spaces, questions arise such as how people give consent. Who can use that data and for what purposes? How would checks and balances work? Among Western countries, the UK is already a leading country in public surveillance through the amount of closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras in public spaces that feed the information into facial recognition software. The system has attracted heavy criticism over the years, including a 2018 judgement by the European Court of Human Rights ruling that the way data is collected has been unclear and therefore violates human rights. After Beijing, London is the city with the highest amount of CCTV cameras with around 420,000 cameras in 2019. 

China is also advanced in autonomous drone production. The world’s leading consumer drone maker, DJI, is based in Shenzhen and holds an estimated 70% global market share. The US has become sceptical about using their drones for government purposes due to security risks and DJI’s alleged links to the Chinese government. 

In general, Kai-Fu Lee argues that the US and China have different approaches to entering the market. The US is a “perfectionist”, working on a product in Silicon Valley until it is nearly flawless, before it is rolled out around the world as an “one size fits all” product. China, on the other hand, uses a more diversified approach by investing in dispersed small local start-ups around the world, adapting the product’s algorithms with local data, and tailoring it to local circumstances. 

China has been successful in catching up in AI with an extreme pace, but that isn’t to say that all developments in AI in China have been good. For example, the Chinese national police use facial recognition technologies to target Uighurs, a minority group in China. In 2019, The New York Times reported that “Almost two dozen police departments in 16 different provinces and regions across China sought such technology beginning in 2018, according to procurement documents. Law enforcement from the central province of Shaanxi, for example, aimed to acquire a smart camera system last year that ‘should support facial recognition to identify Uighur/non-Uighur attributes.’” While this is an example of discrimination, the Chinese start-up CloudWalk openly advertises that its surveillance system can “identify sensitive groups of people’’. As Clare Garvie, an associate at the Center on Privacy and Technology at the Georgetown University Law Center states, “If you make a technology that can classify people by an ethnicity, someone will use it to repress that ethnicity.” 

While China’s approach in catching up with AI shows a holistic approach, and drives the development of AI on multiple levels and with incredible speed, the use of power China gained in AI remains rather questionable. Authoritarian states have an advantage in collecting data as they face less legal constraints. Gregory Allen, a political scientist and Chief of Strategy and Communications at the DoD Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, says “essentially all major technology firms in China cooperate extensively with China’s military and state security services and are legally required to do so. Article 7 of China’s National Intelligence Law gives the government legal authority to compel such assistance, though the government also has powerful non-coercive tools to incentivize cooperation”. 

The UK will have to consider how to interact with China on AI matters: 

The private as well as public sector need to stay aware of AI developments in China, knowing that companies collaborate closely with the Chinese government. This means looking at the import and export of products and services to and from China, but also other states that knowingly have been supported by Chinese AI companies. 

The UK should have clear standards on human rights violations. While it is crucial to remain diplomatic relationships, the UK should openly speak up on human rights abuses. 

With the right set of policies that foster AI R&D, wealth distribution and the support of start-ups and small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), the UK should cooperate with other nations and multilateral institutions to establish a level playing field that allows fair competition and protects human rights. 

By introducing the above point, the UK should aim to avoid a trade or proxy war with undemocratic states such as the US has been with China.

AI IN FOREIGN POLICY 

Artificial Intelligence is not only used for commercial purposes: the mobile phone, bluetooth, GPS, and the Internet are examples of inventions massively funded by and for the US military. 

The uses of AI in foreign policy have been recognised and actively utilised by a few states for decades. Just like companies can become monopolies in AI due to an extremely large pool of data, so too can world powers shift, vacuums be created and new tools of foreign policy established. 

Democracy, sovereignty and ethics 

China has become a significant investor in American start-ups that are working on technologies with potential military applications. These start-ups focus, for example, on rocket engines for spacecraft, sensors for autonomous ships, and printers that make flexible screens that could be used in fighter-plane cockpits. Many of these Chinese investor companies are state owned or have connections to Chinese leaders. Not only does that mean Chinese investors have significant control in the start-up’s decision making, and deciding in which direction the start-up should go, it also opens the door for intelligence gathering and obtaining the technologies themselves. Especially when it comes to military purposes, this can become critical. 

Foreign direct investment (FDI) should not be underestimated as a foreign policy tool. In terms of the ethical use of AI, the public of one country (here the case of the US) often doesn’t know (yet has a right to know) that the company they’re giving their data to (here, China) is owned by the (Chinese) government. 

Because data can be used in such a wide variety of ways and the line of when AI becomes harmful is often blurry, it is extremely important to oversee who collects the data and how it is used. 

Policymakers and public servants are obliged to work in the public interest. If foreign states decide to interfere through FDI and have the ability to shift foreign policy tools without the oversight of domestic policymakers, then this raises questions on the ethical use of AI, and the undermining of public trust and democratic processes. 

The UK’s foremost AI company, DeepMind, has some of the world’s leading AI scientists. In 2014, it was acquired by Google. 

The UK government should invest in and protect independent and UK-based AI companies in order to increase their global competitiveness. 

It should also remain in control of how the wealth generated through these companies is distributed throughout British society. After all, AI companies generate their wealth through taxpayers’ data. 

Large AI companies need to be taxed to ensure a competitive market: first, to ensure enough is “paid” to users for their data that they are supplying to AI companies, and second, to counteract monopolies created through the positive feedback loop introduced earlier in order to support a wide variety of AI start-ups. This payment ideally takes the form of market-determined negative prices or in the form of data to ensure a level playing field (see Conclusions: Policy Proposals). 

Hacking foreign democracies poses another threat in foreign policy. Russia did so in the US elections in 2016 and in 2014 Chinese hackers stole files of 22 million people from the US government’s Office of Personnel Management. China now could use this well-structured data to create algorithms in an extremely large variety of ways, thereby strengthening their cyberwarfare capabilities in many ways. In the 2016 US presidential election, bots were able to alter entire national public debates, and change people’s opinions (see AI and Disinformation). In the 2020 US presidential election, presidential candidate Joe Biden has faced hacking attempts by Chinese hackers, targeting the personal emails of his campaign staff members. Bots can work 24/7 and process data as well as develop content in a much more efficient manner. The fact that an entire democratic system can be undermined by such attacks so easily shows how vulnerable societies are and how urgently states need to work on protecting the essential principle of societies living together: democracy. 

This new form of AI attacking is called cognitive hacking, “a form of attack that seeks to manipulate people’s perceptions and behavior, takes place on a diverse set of platforms, including social media and new forms of traditional news channels”. Cognitive security, on the other side, aims to defend such attacks. Cognitive hacking abuses a large amount of innocent people and their data and engages them in operations of foreign states without their knowledge. 

In 2017, Google signed a contract with the US Department of Defense (DoD) for a military project called ‘Project Maven’, which deploys AI to “automatically label images, buildings, and other objects captured by cameras on drones, helping [US] Air Force analysts identify unique targets.” It is an attempt to incorporate AI into battlefield technology. When the contract became publicly available, Google employees protested, and some quit their jobs while others started a petition to urge Google to distance itself from warfare technology and cancel the contract. At first, Google tried to play down the significance of the contract, saying it was “only” a $9 million project. However, it was soon revealed that the contract with Project Maven was worth around $250 million a year. In June 2018, Google announced it would let the contract for Project Maven expire when it ended in March 2019. 

Employees should have the right to easily opt out of projects which go against their moral beliefs without consequential disadvantages for their career. This also raises the question of how strictly divided the lines between private companies and the government should be. Is Google allowed to share its users’ data with the Pentagon without the users’ consent? If so, how many third parties are allowed to access and use that data, and then use it for what purposes? Or should it not be possible for Google to share the data at all? 

Google is also an international company with offices across the world, which entails two kinds of risks. First and foremost, Google collects data from countries all over the world. Despite GDPR rules, there is leeway for Google to use data from its users in foreign countries for US military purposes. The second risk is that classified information could get into the wrong hands, outside of the US, especially when the employees working on that project have never intended to work on military projects and so are more willing to leak information. 

In order to cooperate on a multilateral level, in May 2019 the OECD published its AI Principles and AI Observatory, outlining principles and recommendations for governments in order to develop a level playing field. All 36 OECD countries together with a few others have signed the document. However, the US has signed the principles under President Trump, who has continuously been expressing animosity towards international cooperation. China and Russia are only part of a consensus agreement stating they will support the efforts more broadly.

Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems

An emerging and growing part of the foreign and defence policy discussion are lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS). In 1988, a US guided missile cruiser shot down an Iranian passenger jet in the Persian Gulf, killing all 290 people on the plane. Even though the plane gave every indication to be a civilian airplane, the missile cruiser’s Aegis system, programmed to target Soviet bombers, misidentified it. Nobody in the Aegis crew challenged the decision and so passively authorised the firing of the missile. A more recent example of LAWS is the Isreali drone ‘Harpy’. It can stay high up in the air, observing a large radius of ground. When it detects a radar signal from the enemy, it crashes itself into the radar’s location, destroying itself and everything around it. 

When it comes to the fundamental question of life or death, it is questionable whether we really want to give a machine the full authority and control of that decision. In war, actions are time-sensitive and some might argue that these machines can take into account more information at a faster pace than any human could ever do. But the decision to take away people’s lives goes beyond purely rational calculations. War has become more complex and it has become more difficult to differentiate between civilians, enemies and allies. AI operated weapons are based on data, but what if that data is not sufficient? What if things have changed just the other day or hour and the programme is operating under false premises? Another argument against LAWS is one of responsibility and accountability. Who is responsible if something goes wrong and innocent people die? The scientist who programmed it? The commander who decided to use the weapon? The responsible government department which bought it? If responsibility defuses and the risk of being held accountable decreases, this can lead to decisions to kill people being made with less questioning. Lastly, because LAWS can be deployed with less risk to military personnel, the proliferation of such weapons might lower the bar for conflicts. 

Following the moral arguments to ban LAWS, activists, over 110 nongovernmental groups, the European Parliament, 26 Nobel prize winners, more than 4,500 AI scientists and 30 different countries have joined a global campaign addressing the UN to ban LAWS. However, governments who drive the development of LAWS and profit from it have so far voted against the ban, which needs an unanimous vote in order to pass at the UN. 

In the end, machines differ from humans as they don’t have a moral compass. Morality itself is so complex and diverse that no machine will be able to be programmed with a moral compass. Guilt, shame, empathy, a feeling of responsibility and accountability are attributes that arise in a person when they do, see, or decide certain things. It will be very unlikely that machines, algorithms, or complex softwares replace these powerful human emotions. That is why it is so important not to give machines the power to make final decisions, or shirk from making decisions and taking actions just because the machine has chosen its course. An open, public discourse about morality in all aspects of life should take place to understand the distinction and uniqueness of humans and their difference to machines. 

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Can Kasapoğlu and Bariș Kirdemir. “Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Conflict.” Essay. In New Perspectives on Shared Security: NATO’s next 70 Years. Accessed June 3, 2020. https://carnegieeurope. eu/2019/11/28/artificial-intelligence-and-future-of-conflict-pub-80421. 

“Chart: China’s Mobile Payment Adoption Beats All Others …” Statista. Accessed June 3, 2020. https://www. statista.com/chart/17909/pos-mobile-payment-user-penetration-rates/. 

“China Turns to Health-Rating Apps to Control Movements …” Statista. Accessed June 3, 2020. https:// http://www.wsj.com/articles/china-turns-to-health-rating-apps-to-control-movements-during-coronavirus-outbreak-11582046508. 

Clement, J. “Number of Internet Users in Selected Countries 2019.” Statista, January 7, 2020. https://www. statista.com/statistics/262966/number-of-internet-users-in-selected-countries/. 

Conger, Kate, and Noam Schreiber. “California Bill Makes App-Based Companies Treat Workers as Employees.” The New York Times, September 11, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/11/technology/california-gig-economy-bill.html. 

Cussins Newman, Jessica. “A Global Reference Point for AI Governance.” Essay. In AI GOVERNANCE IN 2019 A YEAR IN REVIEW. Accessed June 3, 2020. https:// http://www.aigovernancereview.com. 

Department of Defense. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency – Budget, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency – Budget §. Accessed June 7, 2020. https://www.darpa.mil/about-us/budget. 

“Digital Payments – China: Statista Market Forecast.” Statista. Accessed June 7, 2020. https://www.statista. com/outlook/296/117/digital-payments/china. 

Elstrom, Peter. “China’s Venture Capital Boom Shows Signs of Turning Into a Bust.” Bloomberg, July 9, 2019. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-09/china-s-venture-capital-boom-shows-signs-of-turning-into-a-bust. 

Fang, Lee. “Google Hedges on Promise to End Controversial Involvement in Military Drone Control.” The Intercept, March 1, 2019. https://theintercept. com/2019/03/01/google-project-maven-contract/. 

Franke, Ulrike. “Harnessing Artificial Intelligence.” European Council on Foreign Relations, June 25, 2019. https://www.ecfr.eu/publications/summary/harnessing_ artificial_intelligence. 

Galston, William A. “Why the Government Must Help Shape the Future of AI.” Brookings. Brookings, October 25, 2019. https://www.brookings.edu/research/why-the-government-must-help-shape-the-future-of-ai/. 

Gansky, Ben, Michael Martin, and Ganesh Sitaraman. “Artificial Intelligence Is Too Important to Leave to Google and Facebook Alone.” The New York Times, November 10, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/10/opinion/artificial-intelligence-facebook-google.html. 

Harwell, Drew. “FBI, ICE Find State Driver’s License Photos Are a Gold Mine for Facial-Recognition Searches.” The Washington Post, July 7, 2019. https://www. washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/07/07/fbi-ice-find-state-drivers-license-photos-are-gold-mine-facial-recognition-searches/. 

Kessel, Jonah M. “Killer Robots Aren’t Regulated. Yet.” The New York Times, December 13, 2019. https:// http://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/13/technology/autonomous-weapons-video.html. 

Lin, Chia Jie. “Singapore Sets up AI Ethics Council.” GovInsider, June 7, 2018. https://govinsider.asia/innovation/singapore-sets-ai-ethics-council/. 

Lin, Liza. “China Turns to Health-Rating Apps to Control Movements During Coronavirus Outbreak.” The Wall Street Journal, February 18, 2020. https:// http://www.wsj.com/articles/china-turns-to-health-rating-apps-to-control-movements-during-coronavirus-outbreak-11582046508. 

Lucas, Louise. “China Government Assigns Officials to Companies Including Alibaba.” Financial Times, September 23, 2019. https://www.ft.com/content/055a1864-ddd3-11e9-b112-9624ec9edc59. 

McGee, Patrick. “How the Commercial Drone Market Became Big Business.” Financial Times, November 27, 2019. https://www.ft.com/content/cbd0d81a-0d40-11ea-bb52-34c8d9dc6d84. 

Metz, Cade. “White House Earmarks New Money for A.I. and Quantum Computing.” The New York Times, February 10, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/10/ technology/white-house-earmarks-new-money-for-ai-and-quantum-computing.html. 

Mozur, Paul. “One Month, 500,000 Face Scans: How China Is Using A.I. to Profile a MinorityPaul.” The New York Times, April 14, 2019. https://www.nytimes. com/2019/04/14/technology/china-surveillance-artificial-intelligence-racial-profiling.html. 

Mozur, Paul, and Jane Perlez. “China Bets on Sensitive U.S. Start-Ups, Worrying the Pentagon.” The New York Times, March 22, 2017. https://www.nytimes. com/2017/03/22/technology/china-defense-start-ups. html. 

Nuttal, Chris. “London Sets Standard for Surveillance Societies.” Financial Times, August 1, 2019. https:// http://www.ft.com/content/70b35f8a-b47f-11e9-bec9-fdcab53d6959. 

Ray, Shaan. “History of AI.” Towards Data Science (blog). Medium, August 11, 2018. https://towardsdatascience.com/history-of-ai-484a86fc16ef. 

Rosenbach, Eric, and Katherine Mansted. “How to Win the Battle Over Data.” Foreign Affairs, September 17, 2019. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2019-09-17/how-win-battle-over-data. 

Sanger, David E., and Nicole Perlroth. “Chinese Hackers Target Email Accounts of Biden Campaign Staff, Google Says.” The New York Times, June 4, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/04/us/politics/china-joe-biden-hackers.html. 

“Some Aspects of UK Surveillance Regimes Violate Convention.” European Court of Human Rights, September 13, 2018. European Court of Human Rights. https:// hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng-press#{“sort”:[“kpdate%20Descending”],”itemid”:[“003-6187848-8026299”]}. 

“The Campaign To Stop Killer Robots.” The Campaign To Stop Killer Robots, 2020. https://www.stopkillerrobots.org/. 

“The Global AI Index.” Tortoise. Accessed June 1, 2020. https://www.tortoisemedia.com/intelligence/ai/. 

“The War Against Immigrants – Trump’s Tech Tools Powered by Palantir.” Rep. The War Against Immigrants – Trump’s Tech Tools Powered by Palantir. Palantir and Mijente, August 2019. https://mijente.net/wp-content/ uploads/2019/08/Mijente-The-War-Against-Immigrants_-Trumps-Tech-Tools-Powered-by-Palantir_.pdf. 

Wheeler, Tom. “History’s Message about Regulating AI.” Rep. History’s Message about Regulating AI. Brookings, October 31, 2019. https://www.brookings.edu/research/historys-message-about-regulating-ai/. 

Wu, Tim. “America’s Risky Approach to Artificial Intelligence.” New York Times, October 7, 2019. https://www. nytimes.com/2019/10/07/opinion/ai-research-funding. html. 

Yang, Yuan. “The Chinese Internet Boom in Charts.” Financial Times, August 21, 2018. https://www.ft.com/ content/ef80e27c-a500-11e8-8ecf-a7ae1beff35b. 

Zwetsloot, Remco, Roxanne Heston, and Zachary Arnold. “Strengthening the U.S. AI Workforce.” Strengthening the U.S. AI Workforce. Center for Security and Emerging Technology, September 2019. https://cset. georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/CSET_U.S._AI_ Workforce.pdf. 

The UK needs to expand its bicycle network

This article originally appeared on the Young Fabians blog.

The Covid-19 pandemic has forced us to urgently rethink and change our current transportation system. As crowded subways should be avoided, many worry that increasing numbers of people will use their cars, like what happened in Wuhan, China. If this happens, UK cities and highways will grow more congested, polluted, and noisy than they already are. All these issues also present wider impacts, as road congestion, pollution and noise are proven to harm our physical and mental health. In 2017, UK drivers spent the most time in road congestion among all EU countries, indicating that there is room for the UK to improve. The pandemic presents an opportunity to develop and encourage a transportation system that tackles these issues. Despite Senior Transport Adviser Andrew Gilligan’s recently proposed walking and cycling programme that gives residents more say, it is time to implement a coherent and large-scale cycling network and introduce policies that encourage people to use bikes as their main form of transportation.

The transport sector is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than any other sector in the UK. By cutting down the sector’s emissions, the UK can build a more sustainable environment, reduce health risks, and have a more efficient transportation network due to less congestion. Even though the government has been updating its Walking and Cycling Investment Strategy and the Department for Transport introduced a £2 billion package to improve cycling and walking across the UK in May, there has been no focus on creating a nationwide cycling lane network that is inclusive and easy to use for both citizens and industry. No clear results will be reached if people and companies do not have the infrastructure to use their bikes on a daily basis, safely and efficiently connecting the places they need to go to.

The Department for Transport’s £2 billion package, for example, separates cycling responsibility between councils even though most major bike lanes would go through multiple localities. Instead, widely connected cycling networks should be introduced, that allow people to commute to, for example, London’s city centre from all over Greater London. Secure, wide enough bike lanes need to be established in order to create safe options for people riding bikes not living in the city centre. As part of this, showers should be available wherever possible. Part of the already existing Cycle to Work scheme should therefore include a government fund for employers to build showers in office buildings to encourage their employees to cycle to work.

The amount of delivery vans on the UK’s roads has increased, especially since the Covid-19 pandemic. The Department of Transport’s £2 million eCargo Bike Grant Fund was distributed to 18 local authorities in England following a bidding competition. As a public service, the funding should be available unconditionally and to all regional governments. The shared public bike scheme run by Transport for London (TfL) and sponsored by Santander has been the primary supplier of shared bicycle rides. Its service focuses on the city centre, and its range barely exceeds zone 2 in London. While this is helpful for tourists and people already living in urban cores, this service and others like it should attempt to attract people who might use it to cycle to the train or ride a bike to drop it off by their workplace.

Critics might say that if you have to share roads between vehicles, bikes, and pedestrians, then congestion will only increase. However, bikes need less space than vehicles and if fewer vehicles were on the road, there would be enough space for everyone. In 2018, 60 percent of 1-2 mile trips in England were made by car; this could easily be replaced by bike rides.

If the UK wants to tackle the climate crisis, its congestion issues, and improve its citizens’ mental and physical welfare, national and regional governments need to establish a more efficient transport system. Constructing a coherent nationwide bicycle network is a step in the right direction.

Covid-19 sheds light on the UK’s precarious immigration system

The article was first published for the Policy Network’s Aftershock series.

Plenty of migrants in the UK have not only experienced the immediate threat of the pandemic, as many serve as frontline workers, but the pandemic has also reminded them of their precarious status. Migrants must often contend with high visa costs, low salaries and incomes, and minimal access to social security protection. Thus, while a disproportionally large number of migrants are working to save the UK, the UK is not saving them.

According to a House of Commons briefing paper, as of June 2020, the number of migrants living in the UK who were born in a different country exceeds the amount of people born in the UK that have a different nationality. “In 2019 there were approximately 6.2 million people with non-British nationality living in the UK and 9.5 million people who were born abroad.” In 2019, 19 percent of the UK’s population was born outside the UK. That is almost a fifth of the population and it is hard to imagine how the UK would be able to function with 20 percent fewer people. As of January 2020, almost 14 percent of NHS staff have a non-British nationality (170,000 out of 1.28 million) and as of 20 April, at least 106 of them have died with COVID-19, according to a paper from the UK Parliamentary home affairs committee.

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed and confirmed that people from all kinds of nationalities are risking their lives to save others. Already before the pandemic, the NHS has been struggling with staff shortages. Hundreds of thousands of migrants working in the health and care sectors, in food production and agriculture, or in cleaning and transportation, risk their health and that of their families and loved ones, yet the pandemic has exacerbated the precarious situation many immigrants find themselves in. For example, The Guardian has reported on how, In the East Ham area of London, 57 percent of the population was born outside of the UK, and Labour councillor Lakmini Shah has been distributing food and essential items donated by businesses to local families since the end of March. 

Migrants living in the UK with a visa are left to decipher the British government’s often confusing and even contradictory statements. Nicholas Paines QC, the public law commissioner and part of the Law Commission – a statutory body that advises the UK government regarding law reforms – said about the UK’s immigration system: “Their structure is confusing and numbering inconsistent. Provisions overlap with identical or near identical wording. The drafting style, often including multiple cross-references, can be impenetrable. The frequency of change fuels complexity.” While the government has announced that it will grant an automatic visa extension for NHS workers, major loopholes have also been discovered. For example, many frontline workers, including social care workers, cleaners, or bus drivers, don’t fall under any of the categories mentioned by the government. Also, many of these workers are not directly hired by the NHS. Instead, they are hired through a third party agent, work for a private hospital, or in another private care institution. Given the wide impact of the pandemic, none of these categories of frontline workers should be excluded from the government’s visa extension scheme. Regarding the scheme, a statement by the Home Office reported that “we are subject to some difficulties in terms of understanding and knowing the immigration background and status of individuals, particularly those who have not come through the tier 2 [visa] route.

The COVID-19 pandemic reveals that there is a need for the UK government to introduce clear routes through which people can come to live and work in the UK so that the government, individuals, and their employers have a coherent understanding of the terms and conditions that apply. 

As the current crisis shows, the category of “low-skilled workers” needs to be revised. While we classify cashiers, rubbish collectors, postal workers, bus drivers, and cleaners as low-skilled or even unskilled workers, these categories of workers have clearly been performing essential services, and have risked their health and that of their families and loved ones by continuing to work throughout the lockdown. People working to stack shelves, to keep the peace, or treat the sick are absolutely “essential workers”. The automatic visa extension scheme needs to apply to many more groups of people.

Furthermore, visa application fees are expensive for many migrants and their families. For example, a Tier 2 working visa costs £704 per person and each family member has to pay additionally. The visa is valid for up to three years after which renewal costs have to be paid. The UK’s new immigration system needs to significantly lower these fees, and adapt them in accordance with a person’s earnings and family situation.

The pandemic highlights another critical immigration policy, namely “no recourse to public funds” (NRPF), a status given to migrants living on a temporary visa. This applies, for example, to people with a general work visa (Tier 2), a student visa (Tier 4), or a family visa. The government should see the current pandemic as a wake-up call to revise its NRPF policy. As the Migrant Journey 2019 report states, 86 percent of migrants originally granted a family visa in 2014 had valid leave or settlement status at the end of 2019, compared to 24 percent of those who came with work visas and 17 percent who were on study visas.

Not only does this show that most people with temporary status aim to fully establish a life in the UK, but they are also paying taxes throughout their time in the country. Immigrants with NRPF have to pay thousands of pounds to apply for their visa to be renewed every two-and-a-half years. As many migrants have no form of unemployment insurance, many families are faced with severe hardship as a result of this. That this can leave children, whose parents have paid taxes since the day they arrived in the UK, to grow up in poverty is a scandal. In the long-term, it would arguably cost the government and taxpayers more to repay the damage created by such neglect, than it would to rethink its “no recourse to public funds” scheme. 

In response to public pressure, the work and pension select committee has recommended to suspend the NRPF during the pandemic and future times of crisis. But this is not enough, and this problem is not a short-term one restricted to the crisis. Rather, it is a systematic one that can only be addressed with wholesale change to the UK’s immigration system. The suspension won’t make a significant change in the longterm if visa costs remain unreasonably high, especially given that applicants cannot typically claim public funds ceteris paribus (i.e. with other things being equal). For example, if an applicant household includes a family member with a disability, they cannot claim disability living allowance. But disabilities don’t usually just happen during a crisis, and can be tied to life-long financial expenses. Therefore, the NRPF policy needs to be removed, not just suspended during times of crisis. A welfare state must not deny access to crucial services for people and their families who have been working, paying taxes, and who have established their lives in this country.

The UK’s immigration system does not show difficulties just during the pandemic. Rather, the current crisis has highlighted problems that migrants have been facing for decades. It is clear that the functioning of our social and public system depends on immigration as well as on British citizens. Many families who migrated to the UK are eager to stay and to contribute to British society. Just as these people contribute to the system, they deserve to be treated as an integral part of this country. 

Austria’s New Government – The Heart of Europe becomes its Crucible

Sebastian Kurz, Europe’s youngest chancellor and his vice-chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache from the far-right party form the new Austrian government. Not only will this bring great change for Austria but also for Europe and the EU. Read further the reasons and implications of the new, exceptionally young and right learning Austrian Government.
(available in German and English)

Zwei Welten

Die letzten Monate sah meine Welt folgendermaßen aus…
Ich bin umgeben von Beton… von Steinen, Mauern, vielen Menschen, schicken Geschäften, von Bussen, Autos, Flugzeugen und sterilen Flughäfen. All die Menschen um mich herum sind voll mit Plänen, mit Terminen und Verpflichtungen… Verpflichtungen anderen Menschen gegenüber die wiederum mit anderen Menschen in mächtigen Bauten zu tun haben und entweder das Innere des Gebäudes zu Gesicht bekommen oder hektische Straßen, vollgestopft mit Autos, die einen permanenten, penetranten Lärm produzieren und den gesamten Staub um sich aufwirbeln.
Und inmitten des Hastens von einem Betonblock zum Nächsten bleibt ab und zu ein wenig Zeit für ein ausgefallenes Eis… ob in schwarzer Farbe, vegan, mit Heumilch oder den Sorten wie Kürbiskern-Chili ruft es im Mund einzigartige Geschmacksexplosionen hervor, während man sich in der grauen, lauten, schnellen Welt plötzlich und ganz schnell wieder wohl fühlt. Ist doch eigentlich ganz cool hier. Außergewöhnliches Eis, außergewöhnliches Leben.
Das Dahinschmelzen des Eis’ zeigt einem zugleich wie schnell die Zeit vergeht… dass man schließlich und eigentlich gar keine Zeit hat. Und weil die Zeit einem überhaupt und generell davonläuft, läuft man ihr nach, versucht sie in immer schnelleren Schritten einzuholen. Versucht aufzuholen. Und man beginnt eilig zwischen den grauen, harten Betonbauten herumzulaufen, schnell voranzukommen, am besten nimmt man gleich die U-Bahn, die alle zwei Minuten kommt und man sich dennoch ärgert, wenn man sie verpasst hat, weil das bedeutet, ganze zwei Minuten lang nichts zu tun, nichts tun zu können außer zwangsweise den beißenden, muffigen Geruch der U-Bahn Station in der Nase und merkwürdige Menschen im Blickfeld zu haben. Das nervt und es stresst, weil es nicht in den Plan passt, weil es unangenehm ist und nicht schön. Man möchte eben nur mit schönen Dinge in seinem Leben umgeben sein. Sich etwas aufzwingen zu lassen widerspricht dem freien Geist unserer Zeit. Hier lassen wir uns nichts mehr vorschreiben, jeder macht das Seine, was jeder einzelne für richtig hält. Freiheit ist die Abwesenheit von Zwang. Ende. Der Mensch muss frei sein. Zwei Minuten zu warten engt ihn in seiner Freiheit ein, macht ihn nervös.
Es ist eine Welt, in der ich mich bewegt habe, die geschlossen für sich lebt. In der alles und jeder funktionieren muss. Viel gewusst, viel geredet, aber wenig getan.

Und dann fahre ich zu meinen Großeltern auf’s Land… und es wird wenig geredet und viel getan. All die grauen, schweren Häuser sind vergangen. An ihre Stelle haben sich Äpfel-, Birnen- und Nussbäume gestellt. Die staubigen Straßen sind nun saftige Wiesen, die sich zwischen den Zehen ganz weich anfühlen. Der Lärm ist verklungen. Nur ein paar Vögel zwitschern, während ein lauer Wind leise vorbei weht. In der Spätsommersonne lässt es sich wunderbar auf der Holzbank vor dem Haus meiner Großeltern sitzen, überschattet von einem Birnenbaum. Meine Oma sitzt auf dieser Bank und brockt gemächlich Holunderbeeren… sie sind dieses Jahr so unregelmäßig reif geworden, dass meine Oma alle durchgeht und die guten von den schlechten trennt… “Naja, muss man eben machen.” Sie zuckt die Schultern und lächelt mich an, ihre klaren blauen Augen werden durch das Lächeln und die Sonne klein und Lachfalten machen sich auf ihrem weichen Gesicht breit.
Mein Opa ist mit meinem Onkel bei den Maschinen… Arbeit gibt es immer. Aber niemand rennt, weil es für alles Zeit gibt. Es gibt die Zeit zum Säen und die Zeit zum Ernten. Es gibt die Zeit des Ruhens und die Zeit zum Ackern. Die Zeit läuft nicht davon, sie ist stets da, mit einem selbst und seiner Arbeit verwoben. Die Zeit ist nicht verwoben mit den Menschen und ihren erdrückenden Verpflichtungen. Vielmehr sind die Menschen, ihre Arbeit und die Zeit allesamt mit der Natur selbst verwoben. Mit dem Regen, der ihnen die Felder gießt, dem Wind, der zerstören kann. Sie sind verwoben mit dem Feld, der Erde und den Samen, aus denen die Früchte ihrer Arbeit entstehen. Sie müssen das Wetter nutzen, wenn es günstig ist und warten, wenn die Natur selbst genug zu tun hat. Es wird nicht gegen die Zeit gearbeitet, sondern mit der Zeit, im Rhythmus und Kreislauf der Natur. Jeden Tag gibt es neue Herausforderungen, neue Arbeit, der man sich stellen muss.
“Gezwungen von der Natur” würde man in meiner Welt wohl sagen. Ich denke jedoch, dass sie mit der Natur zusammenarbeiten, dass sie konfrontiert sind mit ihren Eigentümlichkeiten und geben müssen um von der Umwelt nehmen zu können. Ich bin fasziniert, mit welcher Überzeugung und Selbstverständlichkeit hier gearbeitet wird. Meine Großeltern könnten nicht einfach nichts tun, denn der Hof ist ihre Arbeit und ihre Arbeit ist leiblich… mit Leib und Seele. Und so werkt mein Opa unermüdlich und unerschöpflich an den Maschinen und lernt immer wieder Neues über deren Techniken von meinem Onkel. Währenddessen geht meine Oma langsam und doch beharrlich wie jeden Tag zu den Hühnern, gibt ihnen frisches Wasser und reinigt ihren Stall, bevor sie sich an den Küchentisch setzt und in aller Ruhe Zwetschgen entkernt.
Jede Arbeit hat ihre Zeit. Und ich hatte die Zeit, durchzuatmen, das weiche Gras zwischen meinen Zehen und die Spätsommernachtssonne auf meiner Haut zu spüren… bis die Sonne untergegangen ist, von einer kühlen, frischen Luft abgelöst wird und es Zeit ist, ins Haus hineinzugehen.

Am Ende finde ich jede dieser beiden Welten auf ihre ganz eigene Weise schön. Sie bedingen sich letztlich einander, sind aufeinander angewiesen. Dennoch wissen sie leider viel zu wenig voneinander… sind sich fremd… eben zwei verschiedene Welten.

Generation Y

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While politicians such as Angela Merkel and Martin Schulz consequently hold on to their positions and keep their places reserved, somewhere else a younger generation gains ground to rise a political challenge. Emmanuel Macron in France and Sebastian Kurz in Austria are stars on Europe’s political stage. Macron almost, Kurz certainly though are part of the age group born between 1980 and 1999, also called the Generation Y. How does that Generation look like that will fill the vacancies in the upcoming years?

The Generation Y in Europe mainly grew up in peace. While the generation of the grandparents were still broken and shattered from war and have hoped simply to survive, the following generation focused on having a good job and a secure income. After weathering post-war years and through market-opening businesses they faced more economic opportunities. In the 60’s and 70’s the economy was booming and corporate growth as well as labour was ensured. The parents’ generation kept in mind that upswing after the end of the Second World War and passed it on to their children. So to speak optimism began in the cradle of the Generation Y.

The parents euphoria thinking their children will have a better life than them goes along with an overwhelming comfort that everything the child does has to be extraordinary and absolutely meaningful. The laissez fair education style was trending whereby the children had more to say in parenting. Authority was out. Hence those children have developed qualities that are seen as quite negative from older generations; too much self-confidence, less ambitious in working life, egocentric and narcissistic. They are too self-determined, used to be asked and to have the choice. They want both, a meaningful job with which one can afford a comfortable standard of living as well as enough free time to raise children and have hobbies in order to keep in balance. Employers are concerned that their future staff will come with little diligence and ambition. However, one should not see that young generation so negative.

Looking at the “hierarchy of needs” of the psychologist Abraham Maslow in a more historical context it can be seen that each generation was able to work itself “up”. The generation of the grandparents still have war stuck in their bones and the biggest crisis was hunger. Meat and sweets was luxury and only few could afford a vacation. That was all normal.

The following generation was, characterized by the war stories of the family and the more distanced view on it convinced to never experience war. The physical security as the fundamental stage of the hierarchy of needs was given. By the opening market one did not only want basic food products – rather did everyone strive for possession and property. The market liberalisation and the economic success entailed that consumption got prioritised. Everyone needed to own a car and a house. Property and possessions meant security and social recognition. The founding countries France, Germany, Italy as well as the Benelux countries grew together with the initial EEC. That assured economic security and political peace. This transformation, necessary for societal stability, was, speaking with the sociologist Ulrich Beck, characteristic for the consciousness of that time risk society.

The Generation Y now has physiological and material security. Freedom to travel and free movement of goods are two essential foundations of the EU with which young people have grown up. The market is generally open so that there is the possibility to get products from all over the world – that seems normal and doesn’t have the allure anymore. What is now strived after is personal fulfilment, the highest stage of the hierarchy of needs. And this stage cannot only be fulfilled by work alone but through hobbies, traveling, family and friends. Furthermore there is a demand on jobs that not only bring money but also meaning. That young generation can afford to possess little because they grew up right in the consumption frenzy. They know how it is to possess all different kinds of kitchen appliances but to never use them. They know how everyone gazed at the new family car and how quick the dust fell on it. The status symbol of the car slowly loses its meaning. Instead, cars are shared – zip-car and car-to-go sending their regards. Generally there is a tendency to possess less; instead of DVD’s and TV there is Netflix on the laptop and instead of CD’s there is Spotify – cancellable on a monthly basis, nothing lasts forever.

The identity developed by that generation is mainly universalistic. Grown up with the Internet where there aren’t any geographic boundaries, the world “grew together”. The Generation Y watches American comedians and Japanese Mangas. They do exchange years during High School, Au pair or work-and-travel after graduation and semesters abroad during University. Friends made all over the world are managed by Facebook to – more or less – stay in touch. The identity of those people consists of different cultures, of acquaintances, friendships and love affairs from all over the world.

While those people haven’t experienced war themselves, yet they grew up facing crises. From a political aspect there was 9/11 as from an economic stance there was the financial crisis 2008. Since then they hear about crises from the Middle East, the climate crisis, the Euro-crises and the refugee crises. And while all the news continuously report about the crises, the world keeps turning. It has to continue somehow and the young generation is well aware of that – starting family and retirement still ahead of them. Where nothing is possible also everything is possible. That generation therefore has all kinds of possibilities.

Having possibilities, however, might on the other hand mean to not be able to take the opportunities. The financial crisis 2008, outsourcing of jobs and a digitisation has not made a career start easy. Not only are there poor job opportunities. Also the salary is less than that of the older colleagues. And the housing costs in most cities have risen so much that most young adults stay a little bit longer at their parents house or the shared flat. Optimism looks different.

The Generation Y is, as the letter perfectly is shaped, open but also split. Maybe there aren’t any great movements such as the labour movement or the environmental movement. But the kids of that generation have something that their predecessors haven’t had. As the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben put it in an interview, property is less and less the centre of society; rather is it about the use of something, of entities, instead of simply possessing them. Having left the fetish character of the goods, the Generation Y has all possibilities to take the bold use of incidences in process dynamics in order to reshape and form them. They have to be willing to recognize the immaterial, processual form of incidences so that a socio-political cohabitation can be guaranteed sustainably. While the previous generation lived in a way of a risk society (Beck) and transformation was seen as the essential component, now Beck has established the theory of metamorphose. Significant here is not the change of the existing form but rather the radical change of the form itself.

 

 

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Generation Y

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Während die einen, wie Angela Merkel und Martin Schulz, konsequent an ihren Positionen festhalten und ihren Platz für sich reserviert halten, sind woanders eine jüngere Generation auf dem Vormarsch, die Zügel in die Hand zu nehmen. Emmanuel Macron in Frankreich oder Sebastian Kurz in Österreich sind im Moment die Vorzeige-Jungs auf der politischen Bühne Europas. Macron fast, Kurz aber sicher, sind Teil der Jahrgänge zwischen 1980 und 1999, also der Generation Y, wie sie auch gerne genannt wird. Wie sieht diese Generation aus, die in den kommenden Jahren immer mehr die Posten besetzen wird?

Die Generation Y ist in Europa weitestgehend im Frieden aufgewachsen. Ihre Eltern haben meist eine bessere Ausbildung als die Großeltern erhalten. Während diese noch von den Kriegsjahren zerrüttet waren und um ihr blankes Überleben hofften, waren der darauffolgenden Generation ein guter Job und ein sicheres Einkommen wichtig. Für Unternehmer gab es, nachdem die Nachkriegszeit überstanden war, durch die voranschreitende Marktöffnung immer mehr wirtschaftliche Möglichkeiten. In den 60er und 70er Jahren florierte die Wirtschaft und sowohl für das Unternehmenswachstum als auch für Arbeit war gesorgt. Diesen Aufschwung nach dem Ende des Zweiten Weltkrieges behielt die Elterngeneration im Kopf und wollte es ihren Kindern weitergeben. Optimismus wurde der Generation Y sozusagen in die Wiege gelegt.

Die Euphorie der Eltern, ihren Kindern würde es mit Sicherheit einmal besser gehen, geht jedoch auch in einen überschwänglichen Zuspruch über, alles, was das Kind mache, müsse herausragend und von Bedeutung sein. Der „Laissez-Faire“ Erziehungsstil kam in Mode, womit den Kindern mehr Mitspracherecht in der Erziehung gegeben wurde. Autorität war out. Daraus haben die Kinder dieser Generation Eigenschaften entwickelt, die von älteren Generationen mittlerweile sehr negativ angesehen werden. Zu hohe Selbstsicherheit, wenig Biss im Arbeitsleben, Egozentrismus und Narzissmus. Sie sind selbstbestimmt, gewohnt gefragt zu werden und die Wahl zu haben. Man möchte beides, sowohl einen sinnerfüllten Job, mit dessen Gehalt man gut leben kann, als auch genug Zeit, Kinder großziehen und seinen Hobbies nachzugehen um im psychischen Gleichgewicht zu bleiben. Arbeitgeber fürchten, künftige Arbeitnehmer zu bekommen, die zu wenig Fleiß und Ehrgeiz mitbringen würden. Doch so negativ darf die junge Generation nicht gesehen werden.

Legt man die Bedürfnispyramide nach Maslow in einen historischen Kontext, zeigt sich, dass sich die Generationen immer mehr „hinaufarbeiten” konnten. Zur Zeit der Großeltern saß der Krieg noch in den Knochen und die größte Krise war der Hunger. Fleisch und Süßes waren Luxus. Urlaub konnten sich nur die wenigsten leisten. Das war normal.

Die darauffolgende Generation war, geprägt durch die Kriegsgeschichten der Familie und mit einer distanzierten Sicht auf diese, überzeugt, nie wieder Krieg erleben zu müssen. Die physische Sicherheit als fundamentale Stufe der Bedürfnispyramide war gegeben. Durch den freier werdenden Markt strebte man nicht mehr nur Grundlebensmittel an, sondern sorgte sich nun um seinen Besitz. Die immer größer werdende Öffnung des Marktes und der wirtschaftliche Erfolg brachten mit sich, dass der Konsum hoch erkoren wurde. Man brauchte ein Auto und ein Haus. Besitz versprach sowohl Sicherheit als auch soziale Anerkennung. Die Gründungsstaaten Frankreich, Deutschland, Italien sowie die Benelux-Staaten wuchsen mit der Gründung der anfänglichen EWG zusammen. Dies versprach sowohl wirtschaftliche Sicherheit als auch politischen Frieden. Diese Transformation, notwendig für gesellschaftliche Stabilität, war nach dem Soziologen Ulrich Beck charakteristisch für das Bewusstsein der damaligen Risikogesellschaft.

Nun hat die Generation Y sowohl die physiologische als auch die materielle Sicherheit. Reisefreiheit und freier Warenverkehr sind wichtige Fundamente der EU, mit denen junge Menschen aufgewachsen sind. Die Märkte sind weitestgehend offen und es besteht die Möglichkeit, Produkte aus der ganzen Welt zu erwerben – das ist normal und hat keinen Reiz mehr. Wonach nun gestrebt wird, ist die persönliche Erfüllung, die höchste Stufe der Bedürfnispyramide. Und diese wird nicht nur durch das Arbeiten alleine erfüllt, sondern durch Freizeitaktivitäten, das Reisen, Familie und Freunde. Darüber hinaus soll der Beruf an sich mehr Selbsterfüllung und Sinn bringen, anstatt nur Geld. Die junge Generation kann es sich leisten, wenig zu besitzen, denn sie ist aufgewachsen inmitten des Konsumrausches. Sie weiß, wie es ist, alle möglichen Küchengeräte zu besitzen aber nie zu benutzen. Sie weiß, wie sehr der neue Familienwagen bestaunt, und wie sehr er mit Staub bedeckt wurde. Das Statussymbol des Autos verliert an Bedeutung. Stattdessen werden Autos geteilt oder ausgeliehen, zip-car und car-to-go lassen grüßen. Und auch sonst will man so wenig als möglich besitzen. Statt DVD’s und Fernseher wird am Laptop Netflix gesehen, statt CD’s gibt es Spotify und Kleider werden lieber getauscht als gekauft.

Die Identität, die diese Generation Y entwickelte, ist eine mehrheitlich universalistische. Aufgewachsen mit dem Internet gab es immer weniger geografische Grenzen, die Welt „wuchs zusammen”. Die Generation Y sieht amerikanische Comediens und japanische Mangas. Sie macht ein Austauschjahr während der Schulzeit, ist Au-pair oder macht work-and-travel nach dem Abitur und geht mit Erasmus im Studium ins Ausland. Freundschaften, die so auf der ganzen Welt verstreut geschlossen werden, verwaltet man anschließend auf facebook, um – mehr oder weniger – in Kontakt zu bleiben. Die Identität dieser Menschen setzt sich zusammen aus den unterschiedlichsten Kulturen, aus Bekanntschaften, Freundschaften und Liebschaften aus der ganzen Welt.

Während diese Menschen zwar keinen Krieg am eigenen Leib miterleben mussten, sind sie dennoch geprägt von Krisen. Einschneidende Momente waren auf politischer Seite der Anschlag 9/11 sowie auf wirtschaftlicher Seite die Finanzkrise 2008. Seitdem hören sie von den Krisen im Nahen Osten, der Klimakrise, Wirtschaftskrise, Euro-Krise und Flüchtlingskrise. Und während in den Nachrichten laufend von diesen Krisen berichtet wird, dreht sich die Welt weiter. Es muss irgendwie weitergehen und das wissen die jungen Menschen, die noch ihre Familiengründung und ihre Rente vor sich haben. Wo nichts möglich ist, ist auch wieder alles möglich. Diese Generation hat somit „alle Möglichkeiten der Welt”.

Alle Möglichkeiten der Welt zu haben bedeutet auf der anderen Seite jedoch auch, all diese Möglichkeiten nicht ergreifen zu können. Die Finanzkrise 2008, Outsourcing von Arbeitsplätzen und ein Wandel hin zur Digitalisierung haben den Berufseinstieg dieser Generation nicht sonderlich leicht gemacht. Nicht nur die Jobchancen sind schlecht, das Gehalt ist niedriger als das der älteren Kollegen und die Wohnkosten in den meisten Städten sind so sehr angestiegen, dass man noch etwas länger bei den Eltern oder der WG bleibt. Optimismus sieht anders aus.

Die Generation Y ist, wie der Buchstabe treffend abbildet, sowohl geöffnet als auch gespalten. Vielleicht gibt es keine großen Bewegungen, wie die Arbeiterbewegung oder die Umweltbewegung. Doch die Kinder dieser Generation haben etwas, das sie von ihren Vorgängern unterscheidet. Wie der italienische Philosoph Giorgio Agamben in einem Interview sagt, steht im Zentrum der Gesellschaft zunehmend weniger das Eigentum. Vielmehr geht es um den Gebrauch von etwas, anstatt es bloß zu besitzen. Die Generation Y, aus dem materiellen Fetischcharakter der Ware ausgetreten, besitzt die Möglichkeit, sich dem bloßen, in der Prozessdynamik befindenden Gebrauch von Ereignissen anzunehmen um sie neu zu gestalten und zu formen. Sie muss die Bereitschaft ergreifen, die immaterielle, prozesshafte Form von Geschehnissen zu erkennen um ein sozial-politisches Zusammenleben auch nachhaltig zu sichern. Während die vorige Generation in einer Risikogesellschaft nach Beck lebte und Transformation als essentiellen Baustein ansah, eröffnet sich nunmehr nach Beck die Metamorphose. Wesentlich ist demnach nicht nur die Änderung der bestehenden Form, sondern vielmehr eine radikale Änderung der Form an sich.

Dieser Artikel erschien zuerst bei Cicero in gekürzter Version

 

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