Keeper of the gate
Developments
- South Korea is giving every citizen a free artificial-intelligence app, built on its own models rather than American ones. But whose AI is a state-controlled AI
- Nicaragua’s dictator finally dictates a formal end to elections. … After five months of war in the Persian Gulf, the U.S. can’t stop it from widening. … & Molten rock carrying chemistry older than any of the continents surfaces from the floor of the Indian Ocean.
Feature
- Has politics really killed the humanities in America? Chad Wellmon on a red herring in public debate about the universities—and what you see when you start following the money.
From the files
- Why hasn’t Ukraine collapsed into autocracy? Serhii Plokhy on what’s keeping a young democracy together under the strain of war.
Books
- What is conservatism anymore? Emily Jones, The Disraeli Myth: The Making of a Conservative Tradition.
Music
- What is sacred steel?
- & New tracks from Evil Graham Lee, Django Django, Swapmeet, Echo & the Bunnymen, & Matt Berninger.
+ Weather report
- El Niño keeps the Atlantic quiet and the Pacific busy, with Fausto closing on Hawaii and more storms gathering off the Philippines …
Developments
A mind of one’s own
South Korea spent this week doing something that drew almost no notice abroad. Its government confirmed that in December it will switch on “AI for All”—a chatbot free to every one of the country’s 50 million citizens, with no usage limits, paid for from the public purse, and built to run at least half on Korean-made models rather than the American models most Koreans use now. It’s the companion piece to a law already on the books: the AI Basic Act, which took effect this year, as the world’s first comprehensive statute for artificial intelligence, and brought the whole field—foreign providers included—under a Korean regulator’s eye.
President Lee Jae-myung has been uncommonly direct about the reasoning. “We have the U.S. and China bipolar AI systems, and to avoid dependency, we are creating our own sovereign AI,” he said this month. “If our dependency is high, our risk is high. We never know what might happen—if they suddenly shut the door, an absurd situation could arise.” To an extent, the timing bears Lee out: He isn’t speaking in the abstract. This summer, a war has shut a shipping lane and driven oil past US$100 a barrel. You can see his point about dependency.
But who’s independent now?
- Answerable in Korea. The Basic Act comes with enforcement, run through the Ministry of Science and ICT—the government’s technology ministry. It gives a regulator the thing regulators most often lack: someone local to summon. The big foreign providers that operate at scale in South Korea now sit inside its reach, obliged to keep a point of accountability in the country rather than a distant head office, though a grace period softens the early penalties. The direction is what matters. The firms that supply the models are no longer offshore and out of reach; they have addresses in Seoul.
- A market made to order. “AI for All” looks like a public service and works, at the same time, like industrial policy. At least half of it must run on Korean-built models—from Naver, the country’s home-grown Google, and from LG and SK Telecom—and the state is supplying the hardware, hundreds of Nvidia’s top chips, to manufacture the demand a young domestic industry can’t yet generate itself. Free access is the visible half. The other half is a government using its own citizens’ daily habits as the launch customer for a national AI sector—buying an industry into being.
- An agent that reads your file. The service isn’t only a chatbot. Its public-agent features reach into a citizen’s own records—reading academic history and income to surface a scholarship, and, further out, booking travel and settling payments on that person’s behalf. Done well, that’s a state making its bureaucracy quick and legible, the opposite of a maze. Done another way, it’s a single government-run system that reads your file, knows your situation, and acts in your name. Which one it turns into depends on rules—on data, access, and audit—that aren’t public yet.
On its own terms, the plan holds together: a law that puts artificial intelligence—foreign providers included—under a domestic regulator; a stack of Korean models with the state as guaranteed buyer; and a free service that, if it works, puts a capable assistant in tens of millions of hands. Lee’s stated aim is sovereignty in AI, and you can’t really dismiss “if they suddenly shut the door” as paranoia. So read at least one way, Korea is doing what any prudent democracy might: refusing to leave a basic capacity wholly in two foreign powers’ hands.
But you can read the same facts another way, turning on a distinction that may be easy to miss: between the state guaranteeing its people access to AI, and the state being the one that supplies it. A subsidy that let citizens pick among competing tools would meet the dependency worry without concentrating anything. What Seoul is doing instead is running tens of millions of people through a single public system, on approved domestic models, that can read their records and act in their name. The government hasn’t yet publicly defined whatever limits it intends to put on this system—the service doesn’t go online until December.
Meanwhile
- Nothing left to count. Daniel Ortega, who’s won every Nicaraguan election for twenty years, recently announced at a rally that there’d be no more of them. This week, his loyal National Assembly began writing that into law, locking in his wife and co-president, Rosario Murillo, as a successor no vote can challenge. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio called on the region to “join forces”—without yet elaborating on what that might mean. … See “Sealing the exits.”
- Bridge by bridge. The U.S.–Iran war was supposed to be ending, at least according to the “memorandum of understanding” the two countries signed in June; instead it’s widening. This week, Donald Trump warned that for every Iranian attack on shipping in the Strait of Hormuz—a critical channel for much of the world’s oil—American forces would level an Iranian bridge or power plant. Publicly, Tehran is having none of it, vowing to fight on—though it’s reportedly asking four different governments for help brokering a new truce. … See “Peace and war.”
- The first minutes. Fani Maoré is a volcano that rose out of the sea between Mozambique and Madagascar in 2019. If that weren’t interesting enough: Its lava, it turns out—according to a team of geochemists reporting this month in Nature—contains elements of the Earth from 4.5 billion years ago, when the whole planet was molten rock. By rights, eons in a churning, self-mixing mantle should have done away with them. But here they are, the oldest chemistry samples on Earth—via one of its youngest volcanoes.
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Feature
Humboldt’s gift
Has politics really killed the humanities in America? Chad Wellmon on a red herring in public debate about the universities—and what you see when you start following the money.
