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Europe Daily Bulletin No. 12574

6 October 2020
Contents Publication in full By article 32 / 32
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No. 022

Les émotions

In a world that has become over-emotional and all the more unpredictable because of it, a European civil servant responsible for forward planning recalls his private, unexpected, uncontrollable and sometimes endless emotions. Encounters with women populate the life of this senior official, punctuating his strategic planning seminars, the eruption of an Icelandic volcano and Brexit, whilst he looks on Europe as a family affair: his father was a European Commissioner and his brother the architect tasked with the renovation of the Berlaymont building. Here, Jean-Philippe Toussaint narrowly avoids any conflict of interests, by ensuring that the positions did not overlap. The characters sometimes come across as dominant, expressive to the point at which they risk a resemblance to living persons, and at other times as evanescent, so much so that they become nothing more than a fleeting shadow. The writing style alternates between these (overly?) detailed descriptions and these silences, without undermining the credibility of a work of fiction which, apart from its slightly too fantastical ending, plunges us into the everyday life of the European bubble. More fastidious readers will no doubt wince at the odd blooper, such as a description early on in the book of the Justus Lipsius building as the “single seat of the Council of Europe” and the author’s decision to refer only to British (Rolls-Royce) and American (General Electric and Pratt & Whitney) automotive manufacturers, even though elsewhere in the book he lectures a European civil servant for serving only non-European wines to their guests. But by opting to overlook the political intrigues and battles for power and influence, Toussaint gives European faces to these impersonal and cold Eurocrats who are so often vilified. Those who enjoy reading romantic intrigues will appreciate the focus on emotions.

Olivier Jehin

 

Jean-Philippe Toussaint. Les émotions. Les Éditions de Minuit. ISBN: 978-2-7073-4643-8. 238 pages. €18,50

 

Taxing robots

The list of tasks of which robots are capable is growing rapidly. The threat this poses is not only to manual or low-skilled work, but also to the more sophisticated work of average or even high-earners. Artificial intelligence (AI) aims to develop robots that are capable of learning, improving and making decisions. Over time, most if not all jobs could be affected, is the worrying observation of Xavier Oberson, warning of a threefold negative effect: (1) considerable reductions in tax revenue and social security contributions from labour; (2) a rise in unemployment and need for additional resources to finance social transfers; (3) a decrease in the consumption of goods and services caused by the rise in unemployment and drop in income. The author therefore calls on political decision-makers to create solutions to prevent or offset these effects. These solutions could, amongst other things, include taxing robots and bringing in a form of universal income.

A lawyer and professor of law at the University of Geneva, Xavier Oberson stresses that the debate on the possibility of giving robots a form of legal personality deserves further investigation: “the development of large-scale AI that is capable of reasoning and presenting cognitive characteristics similar to those of the human brain will bring about the creation of new types of robot. Sooner or later, we will have to adopt specific rules for the conduct and control of relations between robots and humans or between robots themselves. These new rafts of rules can be implemented to protect and control intelligent robots. Humans are only just discovering what interaction with robots means” (our translation throughout). The author holds that there is an argument for defining a new form of “electronic” person, alongside natural and legal persons, with rights and obligations corresponding to the specific nature of robots. Oberson, who reviews all potential forms of robot taxation, stresses that granting a legal personality to robots with genuine autonomy could also, under certain conditions, make them taxable entities.

Maybe in the future, the taxation system will be based on robots as taxpayers and consumers, which will pay all the various forms of taxation, will collect them and will fund all the infrastructure that humans need. When that day comes, let us hope that we have set in place the control mechanisms necessary to avoid a situation in which robots could either refuse to pay their taxes, or force us to pay them! In that scenario, we could have become robots ourselves, without even realising it. At that point, it will no doubt be too late, because we will then be completely subjected to the robot tax…”, the author concludes with a wry smile that does not detract from the need to start thinking about how we offset the negative effects of automation and retain control over robots. (OJ)

 

Xavier Oberson. Taxing Robots: Helping the Economy to Adapt to the Use of Artificial Intelligence. Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1788976510. 228 pages. £75,00

 

La Russie de Poutine

A stroll through space and time like a traveller more or less pushed for time, hoping to understand origins of endlessly fascinating country” is how Thomas Gomart, Director of the French Institute of International Relations (Ifri), describes this book in a preface in which he stresses that this stroll owes a great deal to the singular career of Tatiana Kastouéva-Jean, from the Ural to Provence (our translation throughout). And it is an entirely accurate description of a work that tells the history of a people and rigorously takes stock of Russia, with its challenges and opportunities.

In power for more than 20 years and now with the “theoretical possibility of retaining the presidential post until 2036”, Vladimir Putin remains a mystery who “is unlikely to have finished his evolution and capacity to surprise”. According to Kastouéva-Jean, Putin is now on the horns of a dilemma: “keep the political and economic system as it has developed over 20 years in place at all costs or try to reform it, because the problems have built up and up”. She clarifies: “shortcomings in industry, the lack of infrastructure, insufficient investment in research and development, the stagnation or decline in public health and education spending against a backdrop of demographic issues (6.7 million fewer people of working age between 2002 and 2018, according to the Federal Statistics Office) do not bode well for Russia to secure its place between the West and China. Regional inequalities and the evolution of certain ethnic regions, such as Chechnya and Dagestan, are bound to attract attention. The main focus of the fourth presidential term of office, which began in March 2018, will be on finding useful tactics – if no viable alternative strategy is possible – to preserve both the regime’s foundations and Russia’s new place on the global scene”.

Although “Russia has made spectacular progress in the World Bank’s international ‘Doing Business’ classification”, rising from 120th place in 2012 to 28th place in 2019, “doing business in Russia is still a risky undertaking”, Kostouéva-Jean presses, reiterating that “every single year, numerous reports by various employer associations sound the alarm over heavy taxation, unstable legislation, multiple inspections engendering corruption, difficult access to credit, the lack of an independent judiciary, pressure from the structures of power up to and including expropriation of viable businesses (reïderstvo), etc.”. Russia is also struggling to renew its scientific and technological capacity: “its international visibility, such as the number of publications in referenced journals (…), are constantly declining. In 2018, the Russians submitted 1.4% of international patent applications, while the corresponding figure for China is now more than 40% (…). Domestic expenditure on research and development in Russia equated to less than 1% of GDP in 2018, while the average for OECD countries is 2.4% (…). Russia is the only one of the industrialised countries with a number of researchers on a downward trajectory (-17.5% since 2000)”.

The Far Eastern Republic (36% of the Russian territory) is emblematic of the enormous demographic, economic and infrastructure problems facing the country. The region is home to barely 5% of the population, or 6.2 million people in 2018 (compared to 8 million in 1990), Kostouéva-Jean reports. Despite a huge wave of increasingly ambitious projects (“energy ring” connecting Russia’s electrical systems to those of South Korea, China and Japan, the “Free Port of Vladivostok” or the offer of a hectare of free land to any Russian citizen to develop projects in agriculture, industry, tourism or B2C services), “the stimulation of the region is struggling to pay off”. The author adds that “rates of departing populations have slowed down a bit, but the downward trend is by no means at an end”.

Over the course of the book, the author also discusses the influence of the Russian Orthodox church as a component of Russian identity, clashes between the clans in the Russian President’s closest circles, the spectre of ‘colour revolutions’, corruption, public liberties and control over the media as well as Russia’s foreign policy. (OJ)

 

Tatiana Kastouéva-Jean. La Russie de Poutine en 100 questions. Tallandier. Collection Texto. ISBN: 979-10-210-4559-0. 318 pages. €10,00

 

Albert Einstein from Pacifism to the Idea of World Government

The contributions brought together in this work, published with the support of the Centro Einstein di Studi Internazionali and the Centro Studi sul Federalismo of Turin, provide an insight into the evolution of Albert Einstein’s thinking during the first half of the 20th century, marked by its two world wars. They describe Einstein’s relationships, many of them scriptural, with other intellectuals, starting with those he appears to admire the most, Mahatma Gandhi and Albert Schweitzer. But in what at the time was tantamount to the birth of an intellectual scene of intellectuals, the physicist had dialogues on war and peace with many other famous figures, such as Max Planck, Sigmund Freud, Thomas Mann, Romain Rolland and George Bernard Shaw.

In 1914, Einstein and Friedrich Georg Nikolai, Professor of Physiology at the University of Berlin, co-signed a ‘Manifesto to the Europeans’ stressing that the war could lead only to disaster, both for civilisation and the national survival of individual States. They argued that it was the “duty of the educated and well-meaning at least to make the attempt to prevent Europe (…) from suffering the same tragic fate as ancient Greece”, adding: “Should Europe too gradually exhaust itself and thus perish from fratricidal war?”. “We are firmly convinced that the time has come where Europe must act as one in order to protect her soil, her inhabitants, and her culture”, states this manifesto which, along with other texts (such as the Russell-Einstein manifesto July 1955 against the H bomb) are appended to this book.

Einstein denounces nationalism equally fervently and observes, in a letter dated August 1915, that “it would appear that men always need an idiotic fiction on behalf of which they can hate each other. It used to be religion. Now it is the State”. Not abandoning his war on war, Einstein would gradually develop the idea of a better world organisation, with a supranational authority with the capacity to regulate conflicts between States. However, as he had previously stressed in his Manifesto to the Europeans, “it is necessary that the Europeans first come together and if – as we hope, enough Europeans in Europe can be found, that is to say, people to whom Europe is not merely a geographical concept, but rather, a dear affair of the heart, then we shall try to pull together such a union of Europeans”.

Aside from their historical interest, the documents analysed in this work retain a degree of topicality. As Giampiero Bordino stresses in his preface: “in a world that is ever more characterised by opportunistic political leadership that is culturally and humanly inappropriate, Einstein’s thoughts on war and peace, particularly nuclear war, should be published more broadly (…), not just for intellectuals to read, but also politicians (…) and citizens in Europe and throughout the world” (our translation). (OJ)

 

Lucio Levi (editor). Albert Einstein from Pacifism to the Idea of World Government. Peter Lang. ISBN: 978-2-8076-1295-2. 202 pages. €40,00

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