Roy Badaro

Economist-For the common good. Values are the foundations for any nation. Res Publica is my passion-Retweets # endorsements views are my own. لا اجادل على تويتر

[Roy Badaro @roba2010]

في هذه اللحظة المصيرية، لا يمكن الا ان يدعم جميع اللبنانيون موقف #رئاسة_الجمهورية ممثلة بالرئيس #جوزيف_عون المحق والمشرف والذي يثبت مبدأ السيادة.
كذلك نستنكر المواقف والتصريحات الايرانية المهينة لدولتنا ولشعبنا
#ايران_كفى

[Roy Badaro @roba2010]

في هذه اللحظة المصيرية، لا يمكن الا ان يدعم جميع اللبنانيون موقف #رئاسة_الجمهورية ممثلة بالرئيس #جوزيف_عون المحق والمشرف والذي يثبت مبدأ السيادة.
كذلك نستنكر المواقف والتصريحات الايرانية المهينة لدولتنا ولشعبنا
#ايران_كفى

[Roy Badaro @roba2010]

وكل ما يمضي يوم على #النازحين #والمقاتلين، يتحسسون الحقيقة، حقيقة العيش دون كرامة، حقيقة أرقام المداخيل والخسارات، كذبة الايديولوجيا، والحرب دون افق، خسارة عطف كامل اللبنانيين،
لماذا؟؟؟ لمن؟؟؟
#بانتظار_الوعي_الكامل_ان_وجد
#قبل_فوات_الأوان

[Roy Badaro @roba2010]

وكل ما يمضي يوم على #النازحين #والمقاتلين، يتحسسون الحقيقة، حقيقة العيش دون كرامة، حقيقة أرقام المداخيل والخسارات، كذبة الايديولوجيا، والحرب دون افق، خسارة عطف كامل اللبنانيين،
لماذا؟؟؟ لمن؟؟؟
#بانتظار_الوعي_الكامل_ان_وجد
#قبل_فوات_الأوان

[Mike Pompeo @mikepompeo]

What happens in Iran won't just determine the future of the Middle East. If America is not seen to have decisively won this war, we will give a boost not only to the Iranian regime, but to bad actors around the world.

[Alfred Riachi, PhD. @RiachiAlfred]

مبروك، تم إعفاء توم براك..

هيدا الشخص ومع انو "أصله لبناني"، الا انه يعد من اسواء ما حصل للمنطقة. تاجر، لوفكجي، تم اتهامه بقضايا فساد من خلال شركة Colony Capital بالولايات المتحدة لدرجة طلب الادعاء العام وضع اسوارة تتبع إلكتروني بكاحله.. دفع اموال طائلة ليضهر من القصة واسعفه الحظ بمجية صديقه القديم...
بعتقد هيدي من أهم قرارات الوزير روبيو.
وعفكرة هو من بين الاسامي يلي انذكرت بي #ويكيليكس_لبنان والخير لقدام...
Congratulations, Tom Barrack has been relieved of his duties.
Despite his Lebanese roots, he is arguably one of the worst things that happened to the region. A dealmaker and influence peddler, he faced corruption-related allegations through his company named Colony Capital in the United States to the point where prosecutors reportedly sought to have him placed under electronic monitoring. He spent vast sums of money ro save himself and was ultimately aided by the return of an old friend to power.
In my view, this is among Secretary Rubio's most important decisions.
And by the way, Tom Barrack was also one of the names mentioned in #WikiLeaks_Lebanon.
More is yet to come...

[Roy Badaro @roba2010]

@marwanmatni ستظهر اكثر فأكثر الخلافات الداخلية في ايران، واحتمال الاتفاق، في حال هناك اتفاق، فلن يصمد

[Daron Acemoglu @DAcemogluMIT]

A post about Pope Leo XIV's encyclical on AI. Why the Pope is right, but perhaps not right enough.

Artificial intelligence is reshaping the world in front of our eyes: how we communicate, how we access information, how we work, how income and status are distributed among us, and soon how we fight and kill each other. Yet the public conversation about AI remains stuck on the minutiae of competition between labs, or on a false dichotomy between AI as a “stochastic parrot” with no real capabilities and AI as an alien superintelligence poised to take command of humanity.

The more important questions are about what we want from AI, and whether our current mindset, institutions, and control mechanisms are equal to the task of steering it toward our welfare.

It is refreshing, then, that a bold and powerful voice has weighed into this debate: Pope Leo XIV. As an economist who has long argued that technology is a matter of choice rather than fate, I find Leo’s intervention welcome and, on most points, on target. But on the most consequential question of what AI should actually be designed to do, Leo stops short.

Secular readers may bristle at the encyclical’s opening invocation of the Tower of Babel. They would be mistaken to stop reading there. Leo goes much further than most pundits, journalists and policymakers in the United States by recognizing that what happens to AI, and hence to humanity, is a under our control. There are multiple possible paths for AI, and which one we take will have sweeping consequences. He is also ahead of many commentators when he writes forcefully and unequivocally that “technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate, and use it.”

These were the central themes of the book I wrote with Simon Johnson, Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle over Technology and Prosperity. It is heartening to hear them taken up by a voice with Leo's reach.

The Pope is also right to question the current trajectory of AI in warfare and law enforcement. What was taboo only a few years ago – AI-driven mass surveillance, algorithms selecting targets for killing – has become routine. Many in Silicon Valley are now calling openly for a new military-algorithmic complex centered on AI as an instrument of American hard power. Leo captures something deep and too often ignored: “Any technology that facilitates attacks without seeing the face of human beings lowers the moral threshold of conflict.”

His call for the “disarmament of AI” follows directly from these observations. As he explains, disarming AI means “freeing it from the mentality of ‘armed’ competition, which today is not limited simply to the military context, but is also an economic and cognitive phenomenon.” His moral clarity in stating that “there is no algorithm that can make war morally acceptable” should be a warning to technologists rushing to design new weapons of mass destruction.

Underneath these specific concerns lies a more fundamental claim: that what is technically feasible is not the same as what is good for humanity, and that the difference depends on who controls the technology and what ideology and interests guide them.

Leo edges toward what I take to be the most important point about AI's future when he observes that “while AI promises to boost productivity by taking over mundane tasks, it frequently forces workers to adapt to the speed and demands of machines, rather than designing machines to work with those who work.”

But here he does not go far enough. He stops short of questioning the prevailing design philosophy of AI itself: a philosophy centered on mimicking human capabilities and automating human tasks, with the ultimate goal of artificial general intelligence (AGI) that can do everything a person can.

This philosophy rests on a mistake. It assumes that artificial intelligence and humanintelligence are fundamentally similar, and therefore machines should naturally take over whatever humans currently do. Yet these intelligences are fundamentally different.

Humans are “one-shot” learners. We form hypotheses from a few examples, mentally simulate possibilities, and refine our understanding through a social process of trial and error. This is how children learn language - imitating a few words, generalizing, and adjusting based on how others respond. We are not, however, very good at absorbing massive volumes of information or sifting through unstructured data for relevant patterns.

AI models are almost the opposite. They thrive on enormous training sets and excel at pattern recognition at scale. But they have, as yet, no genuine creativity, no real-world embodiment, and no capacity for trial-and-error learning grounded in interaction with the physical and social world.

When two things are different – you shouldn’t, and typically you couldn’t – use one to mimic the other. If you did, you would end up with suboptimal, disappointing results. It would have been a colossal mistake, and the Chicago Bulls’s legendary coach Phil Jackson would have gone down in the annals of basketball as one of the worst coaches in history, if he decided in the 1990s that because Michael Jordan was the better player, Jordan should mimic everything that Scottie Pippen and Dennis Rodman were doing in the team. The team went from championship to championship because these players worked together and complemented each other.

The same applies to AI and human skills.

The more productive path is complementarity – using AI to do what humans cannot, so that humans can do what they do best. An electrician aided by AI diagnostics, a nurse supported by AI in interpreting symptoms, a teacher using AI to personalize instruction for each student; these are the contours of a different AI future, one that raises rather than displaces human capability.

Optimists and industry insiders will respond that automation-first AI can still benefit everyone, provided redistributive policy keeps pace. But this argument has a poor track record. Forty years of digital automation have already concentrated gains at the top, hollowed out middle-skill work, and produced disappointing aggregate productivity growth. There is little reason to expect that an even more powerful round of automation, deployed by even more concentrated firms, will end differently. We can and must demand a different design.

The global stakes from the future of AI are even larger than those we can see around us in the United States. For the developing world, where billions still depend on the prospect of decent jobs as a path out of poverty, an automation-centric AI agenda is not merely suboptimal. It is simply transferring to foreclose the most important route to broad-based prosperity.

The biggest failing of today's AI industry is its refusal to recognize any of this. It is guided instead by an ideology of control (the industry’s own over humanity) and by a conviction that machines are uniformly better than humans.

As Leo rightly notes, this failure is enabled by the fact that a handful of companies now command the future of AI.

What we need is a combination of moral clarity and a serious, society-wide debate about what AI can do and what we want it to do. That debate must move beyond exhortation toward concrete choices: antitrust action against the dominant platforms, public investment in human-complementary AI, regulation of surveillance and autonomous weapons, and meaningful rights for workers and citizens over the data on which these systems are built.

The Pope's intervention makes such a debate a little more likely today than it was before.

It is now up to the rest of us to carry it further than he was willing to go.

[Roy Badaro @roba2010]

ويبقى #لينان فتيل #الشرق_الاوسط

[Roy Badaro @roba2010]

هذه السنة نعيُد نهار الاثنين في ٢٥ أيار #عيد_استدعاء_اسرائيل إلى الجنوب

#هيهات_من_الذلة
#لماذا؟ #لمن؟ تفوق الايديولوجيا على العقل والمنطق

[Roy Badaro @roba2010]

ويبقى #لينان فتيل #الشرق_الاوسط

[Roy Badaro @roba2010]

هذه السنة نعيُد نهار الاثنين في ٢٥ أيار #عيد_استدعاء_اسرائيل إلى الجنوب

#هيهات_من_الذلة
#لماذا؟ #لمن؟ تفوق الايديولوجيا على العقل والمنطق

[Roy Badaro @roba2010]

Hezbollah’s fighters remind me Hiroo Onoda.

[Roy Badaro @roba2010]

الحقيقة والحس والتضامن. لماذا ولمن؟

[Roy Badaro @roba2010]

Hezbollah’s fighters remind me Hiroo Onoda.

[Roy Badaro @roba2010]

دخلنا في #حرب_استنزاف.

كان ينبغي علينا تجنبها.

العاطفة والأيديولوجيا تتغلبان على العقل.

[Roy Badaro @roba2010]

We entered a #war_of_attrition.
We should have avoided it.
#Emotion_ideology supersedes reason

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

Je veux présenter mes excuses, au nom des Français, pour avoir enfanté la French Theory (qui a enfanté la pire des merdes idéologiques : le wokisme).

Nous avons donné au monde Descartes, Pascal, Tocqueville. Et puis, dans les ruines intellectuelles de l'après-68, nous avons donné Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze. Trois hommes brillants qui ont fabriqué, dans l'élégance de notre langue, l'arme idéologique qui paralyse aujourd'hui l'Occident.

Il faut comprendre ce qu'ils ont fait. Foucault a enseigné que la vérité n'existe pas, qu'il n'y a que des rapports de pouvoir déguisés en savoir. Que la science, la raison, la justice, l'institution médicale, l'école, la prison, la sexualité, tout n'est qu'une mise en scène de la domination. Derrida a enseigné que les textes n'ont pas de sens stable, que tout signifiant glisse, que toute lecture est une trahison, que l'auteur est mort et que le lecteur règne. Deleuze a enseigné qu'il fallait préférer le rhizome à l'arbre, le nomade au sédentaire, le désir à la loi, le devenir à l'être, la différence à l'identité.

Pris isolément, ce sont des thèses discutables. Combinées, exportées, vulgarisées, elles forment un système. Et ce système est un poison.

Car voici ce qui s'est passé. Ces textes, illisibles en France, ont traversé l'Atlantique. Les départements de Yale, de Berkeley, de Columbia les ont absorbés dans les années 80. Ils y ont trouvé un terreau qui n'existait pas chez nous : le puritanisme américain, sa culpabilité raciale, son obsession identitaire. La French Theory s'est mariée à ce substrat, et l'enfant de ce mariage s'appelle le wokisme.

Judith Butler lit Foucault et invente le genre performatif. Edward Said lit Foucault et invente le post-colonialisme académique. Kimberlé Crenshaw hérite du cadre et invente l'intersectionnalité. À chaque étape, la matrice est française : il n'y a pas de vérité, il n'y a que du pouvoir, donc toute hiérarchie est suspecte, toute institution est oppressive, toute norme est violence, toute identité est construite donc négociable, toute majorité est coupable.

Voilà comment trois philosophes parisiens, qui n'ont probablement jamais imaginé leurs conséquences pratiques, ont fourni le logiciel d'exploitation à une génération entière d'activistes, de bureaucrates universitaires, de DRH, de journalistes, de législateurs. Voilà comment on a obtenu une civilisation qui ne sait plus dire si une femme est une femme, si sa propre histoire mérite d'être défendue, si le mérite existe, si la vérité se distingue de l'opinion.

C'est de la merde pour une raison simple, et il faut la dire calmement. Une civilisation se tient debout sur trois piliers : la croyance qu'il existe une vérité accessible à la raison, la croyance qu'il existe un bien distinct du mal, la croyance qu'il existe un héritage à transmettre. La French Theory a entrepris de dynamiter les trois. Pas par méchanceté. Par jeu intellectuel, par fascination du soupçon, par haine de la bourgeoisie qui les avait nourris. Mais le résultat est là. Une génération entière a appris à déconstruire et n'a jamais appris à construire. Une génération entière sait soupçonner et ne sait plus admirer. Une génération entière voit le pouvoir partout et la beauté nulle part.

Je m'excuse parce que nous, Français, avons une responsabilité particulière. C'est notre langue, nos universités, nos éditeurs, notre prestige qui ont donné à ce nihilisme son emballage chic. Sans la légitimité de la Sorbonne et de Vincennes, ces idées n'auraient jamais traversé l'océan. Nous avons exporté le doute comme d'autres exportent des armes.

Ce qui se construit maintenant, en silicon valley, dans les labos d'IA, dans les startups, dans les ateliers, dans tous les lieux où des gens fabriquent encore des choses au lieu de les déconstruire, c'est la réponse. Une civilisation se reconstruit par les bâtisseurs, pas par les commentateurs. Par ceux qui croient que la vérité existe et qu'elle vaut qu'on s'y consacre. Par ceux qui assument une hiérarchie du beau, du vrai, du bon, et qui n'ont pas honte de la transmettre.

Alors pardon. Et au travail.

[Roy Badaro @roba2010]

هل #لبنان دولة وظيفتها الاسناد، ام وظيفتها هي #التوافق_الداخلي، فوق كل اعتبار، وايجاد سلام وبحبوحة لشعبها.
ما معنى وهدف خدمة #ايران على حساب كل لبنان؟
#الرجوع_عن_الخطأ_فضيلة.

#استيقظوا يا من يؤيد ايران مباشرة او غير مباشرة، ويبدي الغريب عن القريب

[Roy Badaro @roba2010]

#الجنوب ينزف
#الطائفة_الشيعية تستنزف
اشعر معها
واسألها:لماذا تؤيدون من استجلب اسرائيل لداخلنا،لعقر دارنا؟
جميع اللبنانيين أسيرين طوائفهم وزعمائهم
لا اخاف من السلام لأننا اقوياء بذكائنا وإبداعنا
اسرائيل اقوى منا بالحرب والبرهان شعبنا مشرد
فالنقارعها بالسلام حيث نحن الأقوى