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Russia's war in Ukraine has shown the defining political fault lines of our age to be fundamentally bogus. While the Kremlin represents the alt-right, and Europe stands for the politically correct liberal establishment, both sides ultimately are fighting over the spoils of a global capitalist system that they control.

LJUBLJANA The Canadian psychologist and alt-right media fixture Jordan Peterson recently stumbled onto an important insight. In a podcast episode titled Russia vs. Ukraine or Civil War in the West?, he recognized a link between the war in Europe and the conflict between the liberal mainstream and the new populist right in North America and Europe.

Although Peterson initially condemns Russian President Vladimir Putins war of aggression, his stance gradually morphs into a kind of metaphysical defense of Russia. Referencing Dostoevskys Diaries, he suggests that Western European hedonist individualism is far inferior to Russian collective spirituality, before duly endorsing the Kremlins designation of contemporary Western liberal civilization as degenerate. He describes postmodernism as a transformation of Marxism that seeks to destroy the foundations of Christian civilization. Viewed in this light, the war in Ukraine is a contest between traditional Christian values and a new form of communist degeneracy.

This language will be familiar to anyone familiar with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbns regime, or with the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol. As CNNs John Blake put it, that day marked the first time many Americans realized the US is facing a burgeoning White Christian nationalist movement, which uses Christian language to cloak sexism and hostility to Black people and non-White immigrants in its quest to create a White Christian America. This worldview has now infiltrated the religious mainstream so thoroughly that virtually any conservative Christian pastor who tries to challenge its ideology risks their career.

The fact that Peterson has assumed a pro-Russian, anti-communist position is indicative of a broader trend. In the United States, many Republican Party lawmakers have refused to support Ukraine. J.D. Vance, a Donald Trump-backed Republican Senate candidate from Ohio, finds it insulting and strategically stupid to devote billions of resources to Ukraine while ignoring the problems in our own country. And Matt Gaetz, a Republican member of the House of Representatives from Florida, is committed to ending US support for Ukraine if his party wins control of the chamber this November.

But does accepting Petersons premise that Russias war and the alt-right in the US are platoons of the same global movement mean that leftists should simply take the opposite side? Here, the situation gets more complicated. Although Peterson claims to oppose communism, he is attacking a major consequence of global capitalism. As Marx and Engels wrote more than 150 years ago in the first chapter of The Communist Manifesto:

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

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This observation is studiously ignored by leftist cultural theorists who still focus their critique on patriarchal ideology and practice. Yet surely the critique of patriarchy has reached its apotheosis at precisely the historical moment when patriarchy has lost its hegemonic role that is, when market individualism has swept it away. After all, what becomes of patriarchal family values when a child can sue her parents for neglect and abuse (implying that parenthood is just another temporary and dissolvable contract between utility-maximizing individuals)?

Of course, such leftists are sheep in wolves clothing, telling themselves that they are radical revolutionaries as they defend the reigning establishment. Today, the melting away of pre-modern social relations and forms has already gone much further than Marx could have imagined. All facets of human identity are now becoming a matter of choice; nature is becoming more and more an object of technological manipulation.

The civil war that Peterson sees in the developed West is thus a chimera, a conflict between two versions of the same global capitalist system: unrestrained liberal individualism versus neo-fascist conservativism, which seeks to unite capitalist dynamism with traditional values and hierarchies.

There is a double paradox here. Western political correctness (wokeness) has displaced class struggle, producing a liberal elite that claims to protect threatened racial and sexual minorities in order to divert attention from its members own economic and political power. At the same time, this lie allows alt-right populists to present themselves as defenders of real people against corporate and deep state elites, even though they, too, occupy positions at the commanding heights of economic and political power.

Ultimately, both sides are fighting over the spoils of a system in which they are wholly complicit. Neither side really stands up for the exploited or has any interest in working-class solidarity. The implication is not that left and right are outdated notions as one often hears but rather that culture wars have displaced class struggle as the engine of politics.

Where does that leave Europe? The Guardians Simon Tisdall paints a bleak but accurate picture:

Putins aim is the immiseration of Europe. By weaponising energy, food, refugees and information, Russias leader spreads the economic and political pain, creating wartime conditions for all. A long, cold, calamity-filled European winter of power shortages and turmoil looms. Freezing pensioners, hungry children, empty supermarket shelves, unaffordable cost of living increases, devalued wages, strikes and street protests point to Sri Lanka-style meltdowns. An exaggeration? Not really.

To prevent a total collapse into disorder, the state apparatus, in close coordination with other states and relying on local mobilizations of people, will have to regulate the distribution of energy and food, perhaps resorting to administration by the armed forces. Europe thus has a unique chance to leave behind its charmed life of isolated welfare, a bubble in which gas and electricity prices were the biggest worries. As Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky recently toldVogue, Just try to imagine what Im talking about happening to your home, to your country. Would you still be thinking about gas prices or electricity prices?

Hes right. Europe is under attack, and it needs to mobilize, not just militarily but socially and economically as well. We should use the crisis to change our way of life, adopting values that will spare us from an ecological catastrophe in the coming decades. This may be our only chance.

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What the Woke Left and the Alt-Right Share - Project Syndicate

Only 14 per cent of Capitol riots arrestees to date have been women, and yet women played key leadership roles that are important in understanding alt-right movements. Playing into gendered assumptions, researchers of the alt-right tend to characterize womens participation as passive, with the demographics of Capitol riots arrestees revealing the predominance of white, middle-aged, middle-class men.

However, in our research on digital media and disinformation related to the Capitol riots, we have found that women served key leadership functions in the organization and performance of the riots. They planned events, provided a gentler face for the alt-right, nurtured social cohesion among participants and shaped the direction of the riots.

One commonality between men and women in the Capitol riots was that the vast majority were white. Yet, white women straddle two intersectional identities, one dominant (whiteness) and one oppressed (female).

This allows them to choose when and how to enact each identity. Far-right movements tend to rely on traditional gender roles, contributing in this instance to womens adoption of the labels classic woman or tradwife roles based on sex-realism.

Read more: Tradwives: the women looking for a simpler past but grounded in the neoliberal present

Sex-realism is the notion that women are biologically different from men and thus cannot be equal; while not considered subordinate, traditional roles for women are prescribed. Included in this alt-right form of feminism are race-based pressures to reproduce white children, associated with the racist rhetoric of Make America Great Again.

Women who participated in the Capitol riots performed traditional gender roles intersecting with racist rhetoric and actions. Our study of womens participation at the Capitol riots identified four key groups: mobilizers, QAMoms (female QAnon conspiracy adherents), militias, and martyrs.

Women played key roles in the organization of the Jan. 6 protest, with Women for America First (W4AF) serving as key mobilizers of the march-turned-riot.

In the weeks before the Capitol riots, W4AF held a 20-city bus tour with Bob Cavanaugh, a county commissioner in North Carolina saying, allegedly jokingly: Wed solve every problem in this country if on the 4th of July every conservative went and shot one liberal.

Republican representative Marjorie Taylor Greene also served as an instigator of the riot, posting on the far-right social network Parler and inciting protesters to interfere with the peaceful transition of power. She posted she needed a grassroots army, in a promoted parley that garnered 39 million views, 240,000 upvotes and 12,000 comments.

Mobilizers such as W4AF and Greene are typically well-known, well-funded women who operate behind-the-scenes, exercising a great deal of agency or social power.

Women characterized as QAMoms, may be actual mothers and/or they may act as mothers of the movement. They have been introduced to conspiracy theories like QAnon, which exploit the nostalgia of an idealized past, through hashtags like #SaveTheChildren.

On the surface, this hashtag represents a movement against child sex trafficking, but it has been repurposed by QAnon and QAMoms to promote the far-fetched conspiracy that deep-state Democrats are a cabal of sex-trafficking satanists.

Women drawn to the alt-right through conspiracy theories and disinformation campaigns were seen at the Capitol riots leading prayers, providing first aid, organizing food and assuming stereotypical mothering roles. While playing into traditional gendered roles, these forms of mothering are also displays of leadership and social agency.

Alt-right women also, perhaps surprisingly, organize and participate in militias. Jessica Watkins, who served in the U.S. army in Afghanistan, was arrested and charged with seditious conspiracy for her alleged leadership role in the Capitol riots.

Watkins is transgender, and has been subjected to transphobic inhumane treatment in prison, up to and including being housed naked in a brightly lit cell for several days.

She is alleged to have actively recruited members from the Ohio State Regular Militia that she had founded, and to have planned a military style takeover of the Capitol. Watkins was seen during the riots dressed in military garb and moving with militia members in military stack formation.

Shaped by military training, women who participate in and lead militias performed skilled leadership activities in the riots, such as directing and leading others to attack police lines or scale walls, in their alleged attempt to overthrow the state.

At the Capitol riots, some participants dressed up and performed the roles of famous patriotic women. Others like Watkins were at the forefront of the incursion into the Capitol building.

One of the most dramatic deaths of the day was such a woman. Ashli Babbitt, a business owner and self-styled QAMom, was shot attempting to climb through a window to gain access to lawmakers in the House lobby.

Babbitt was immediately claimed as a martyr by far-right groups, barely moments after her death and against the wishes of her family. The outgoing POTUS Trump himself characterized her as having died at the hands of a corrupt government despite the fact that he himself was President at the time of her death.

It may seem nonsensical for women to work against their own interests in supporting Trump, a man accused of sexual assault and misogyny. An explanation is contained within sex-realism, a particular worldview that many QAMoms hold. Instead of pointing to structures of patriarchy as oppressive, sex-realism is used by alt-right women to scapegoat immigrants and people of colour those below them in societys constructed racial hierarchies.

For tradwives, it may be easier to blame outsiders than to confront the fact that oppressive structures and behaviours may be enacted within their very families.

Yet, with the rise of global populism, we should not risk overlooking the contained agency of women participating in alt-right movements, where they mobilize disinformation, reinforce the traditional gender binary, promote conspiracies and enact racism.

The leadership of alt-right women ultimately paves the way for the escalating racist violence of male counterparts within the groups they lead, nurture and mother.

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Mothers of the movement: Leadership by alt-right women paves the way for violence - The Conversation

When Bored Ape Yacht Club launched at the height of last years NFT frenzy, Ryder Ripps shrugged off the collections off-putting imagery. The series of 10,000 cartoon apes were rife with the meme aesthetics of the internets darkest corners, but if you spend enough time online, its something you tend to just look past. Then a few months later, a friend showed him the collections logo beside the Totenkopf, a skull-and-cross bones insignia widely used in Nazi Germany. It dawned on him: The Apes, now viral and promoted widely by crypto-hawking celebrities, might be an elaborate, malicious troll.

I realized this shit was intentional, Ripps, a 36-year-old conceptual artist and creative director who has worked with major artists like Kanye West and Grimes and brands like Nike, Red Bull, and Gucci, told ARTnews. Theyre ruining the internet.

Since December, Ripps has led a crusade against the irreverent collection, its parent company Yuga Labs currently valued at a whopping $4 billion and founders Greg Solano, Wiley Aronow, Kerem Atalay, and Zeshan Ali.

Ripps contends that BAYC, from its logo to the Apes accessories like sushi chef headbands inscribed with kamikaze in Japanese kanji and spiked Prussian Pickelhaube helmets is threaded with racist imagery and ties to the online alt-right. Ripps and Yuga Labs are currently embroiled in a legal battle after the company sued the artist for creating copycat NFTs that Ripps says are meant to satirize the collection. (Yuga Labs and BAYC have previously denied the allegations of racism.)

Ripps has cast himself as Laocoon the priest who begged the Trojans not to let the Greek horse into the city warning that Yugas founders are trying to slip toxic imagery and ideas into the larger culture by packaging it as just another absurd, but ultimately innocuous NFT collection. But is he the best messenger for his warning?

When asked why hes so sure that Solano, Aronow and their counterparts are trolls, Ripps laughed. Takes one to know one, he said.

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Who is Ryder Ripps, Artist Trying To Take Down Bored Ape Yacht Club ARTnews.com - ARTnews

AI takes on predictive power; humans retain judgement.

There has been no shortage of attention given to the potential of artificial intelligence, along with related concerns about bias, data viability, costs, and employee resistance. But we may be missing the most important point when it comes to AIs ultimate impact, a leading AI proponent argues. That is, were starting to outsource a large share of human decision-making to machines, which may have unforeseen implications beyond simply making cheaper predictions.

Its time to start looking at AI not from a technologists perspective, but from an economists perspective, states Ajay Agrawal, professor at the University of Toronto, and co-author of Power and Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence. Agrawal recently shared his views on the coming AI wave in a talk hosted at the University of British Columbias Green College. AI is moving into its next phase moving up the decision-making food chain. This is where AI is moving from sidelines to a more central role in the economy, he says.

Overall, there has been disappointment with AI, as it does not appear to be delivering the miracles initially promised, he adds, noting that many things seem much less impacted than what we thought. Productivity growth even still continues to decline. At the same time, Agrawal continues, AI is still a work in progress, and were just beginning to see it unfold.

Agrawal maintains that its time to take an economists view of AI. A computer scientist or an engineer will talk about AI in terms of advances in neural networks. But if you ask an economist what's going on with AI, they will characterize it as a drop in the cost of prediction. As AI gets better and better, it effectively makes prediction cheaper and cheaper. This is significant because we use prediction everywhere. Prediction is embedded in all kinds of things where you might not think of prediction for example, autonomous driving.

Decision-making, which is the source of financial and political power in the economy, has two components: prediction and judgment, Agrawal says. These two functions are being decoupled in AI systems humans are retaining judgement, but turning prediction over to AI. We are constantly making some form of a probability assessment and a judgment assessment whether we realize it or not, he says. The rise of AI is shifting one of those ingredients prediction from humans to machines. Were outsourcing the prediction part to the machine.

To date, AI has focused on point solutions transcribing text, detecting errors in production lines, and so forth. We've picked all the low-hanging fruit of all the point solutions where you just get a prediction, the prediction leads to a simple action, Agrawal says. Like a tool linked to a camera that predicts if a tooth on a digger in a mining operation if the tooth is broken. That's a point solution, a prediction that leads to a specific action. It doesn't impact anything else in the operation.

AI begins to realize greater value when you start building a fully autonomous system, where one prediction one decision impacts all many other decisions, Agrawal points out. From an economics perspective, we're into the realm of game theory, where if we change a decision how does that impact all other decisions?

Moving the predictive aspect of decisions to machines can be an eye-opening experience as it rolls out. AI opens the door to a flourishing of new decisions, Agrawal says. Many of these decisions are new because we previously hid them via rules, insurance and over-engineering, he says. We did such a good job hiding them that weve long since forgotten they were ever there. AI is unearthing these long-hidden, latent decisions.

This is more than an exercise in creativity it means power. Decision-making confers power; changes in decision-making can lead to changes in power, he says. Centralizing or decentralizing decision-making will consolidate or distribute power.

This means transformation throughout the economy, Agrawal states. AI is arguably the first tool in human history that learns as you use it. The more you use it, the smarter it gets because every time you use it.

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Economists View Of Artificial Intelligence: Beyond Cheaper Prediction Power - Forbes

U.S. government investment in artificial intelligence has grown significantly in the last few years, as evidenced by the additional funding for AI research in President Bidens 2023 fiscal budget.

With more than $2 billion allocated to the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Department of Energy for AI research and development, it is clear there is a growing enthusiasm for the technology in government.

Driving the push to implement AI is the urgent need to address federal employee burnout. A recent study found that almost two-thirds of government employees are experiencing burnout, a much higher rate than seen in the private sector. Furthermore, almost half of respondents are considering leaving their government jobs within the next year due to increased burnout and stress.

One immediate solution to help this potential crisis is the responsible implementation of artificial intelligence. AI can mitigate the impact of burnout by removing repetitive and time-consuming tasks and streamlining processes, reducing the overall burden and repetitive nature of government work. However, effective AI investments demand more than just funding and technology.

Agencies must balance efforts to scale investment in AI while responding to the unique needs and challenges of the many diverse teams that make up the federal workforce.

Currently, there is a lack of cohesive guidance leading government efforts around AI. While organizations such as NIST have released basic AI framework for RMF, organizations without any AI experience may struggle to build the necessary foundation for a mature, agile AI posture. To lay the groundwork for a long-term AI strategy while generating short-term gains to support the federal workforce quickly, agencies must consider three guideline components of AI.

Dedicated funding for AI is only one component of an effective AI strategy. Before implementing new technologies, agencies must start with their existing processes beginning with their level of data maturity.

If an agency does not have enough historical data to analyze, or the data they do have is not organized, implementing AI can create extra work on the front end for federal workers who could find themselves sorting through inaccurate or incomplete data processed by AI. For example, in response to this challenge, the Department of Defense stood up the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) to lead the deployment of AI across DoD, including the Departments strategy and policy on data.

Once agencies realize a baseline of data maturity, they can pilot basic AI applications such as automating basic tasks, empowering agencies to gather high-quality data and provide analysis and insight around that data, providing the information needed to create a scalable AI roadmap that can integrate with other IT modernization technologies.

But having a roadmap alone is not enough to ensure that AI-driven technologies are useful for the federal workforce.

To implement AI that truly supports federal workers, agencies need to understand the main pain points and challenges facing federal employees. For most private enterprises looking to implement new technology, user experience surveys would be a core part of the pilot program to ensure an analytics-driven understanding of the technologys successes and gaps.

However, although employee input is a crucial part of the AI planning process, government surveys are often expensive and can take months or years to consolidate into actionable data.

One way to combat this difficulty is utilizing existing AI to inform AI investments. For example, instead of sending out a survey where the results may take months to receive, an AI dashboard may provide a real-time view of overall work showing what areas need more support or automate a simple response survey where employees can provide input.

Using relatively basic AI to evaluate implementation allows agencies to gain insight into the needs of the workforce more sustainably and effectively than surveys, showing IT leaders where to implement AI for the most impact.

Once agencies have an AI baseline and understand worker needs, the last step to implementing employee-focused AI is creating a robust AI-empowered employee experience program.

There are many ways that AI can help agencies with experience management, from automating timesheets to streamlining business decisions. When AI is designed with these improvements in mind, AIs tangible benefits support both broader organizational goals and the humans working to achieve them.

Scaling AI beyond pilot programs remains a challenge. One of the primary responsibilities of the CDAO is to develop processes for AI-enabled capabilities to be developed and fielded at scale across the defense space.

CDAO addressed this issue by selectively scaling only proven AI solutions for enterprise and joint use cases. Prioritizing proven solutions ensures that the AI they are implementing runs smoothly, is easy to use and most importantly is familiar to the workforce. As AI solutions become more sophisticated, agencies can continue to expand until they have a fully scalable AI network designed by and for humans.

Contrary to much of the conversation around AI, people are the most essential component of successful artificial intelligence programs. For implementation to be successful, agencies need a human-centered AI mindset. Following these three guidelines to create human-centered AI creates space for the federal workforce to be exponentially more creative, productive and ultimately more effective in furthering agency missions, equipping leaders to elevate the full potential of their teams.

Dr. Allen Badeau is the chief technology officer for Empower AI, as well as the director of the Empower AI Center for Rapid Engagement and Agile Technology Exchange (CREATE) Lab.

This article is an Op-Ed and the opinions expressed are those of the author. If you would like to respond, or have an editorial of your own you would like to submit, please email Federal Times Senior Managing Editor Cary OReilly.

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Artificial intelligence in government is about people, not programming - Federal Times