Carnegie Council Audio Podcast

As the fifth month of Russia's invasion of Ukraine begins, Atlantic Council's Melinda Haring returns to speak with Doorstep co-hosts Nick Gvosdev and Tatiana Serafin about on-the-ground realities in Ukraine and how the West needs to manage Putin's long war game. What more is needed from leaders attending G7 and NATO meetings this week? And how can "compassion fatigue" be countered to help Ukraine meet the challenges of the second phase of a more brutal war? For more, please go to carnegiecouncil.org. 

For decades, American nonprofits and philanthropies worked with Chinese citizens and the Chinese Communist Party. But over the last several years especially, the space for foreign NGOs to operate in China has increasingly shrunk due to COVID restrictions, paranoia about Western influence, and an American public suspicious of Beijing. Should nonprofits and philanthropies continue to engage with a China ruled by an increasingly hostile Party? Freedom House's Michael Abramowitz and Strategy Risks' Isaac Stone Fish discuss this question and much more in this podcast.  For more, please go to carengiecouncil.org. 

In this Artificial Intelligence & Equality podcast, Carnegie-Uehiro Fellow Wendell Wallach is joined by Angela Kane, a chair of the United Nations University Governing Council, to discuss how AI is likely to upend geopolitics. Kane, a former UN under-secretary-general, also shares some of her concerns about the role of the UN and the many ways AI could undermine international peace and security. Without proper guardrails, the development and deployment of AI systems could accelerate the pace of armed conflict and risk loosening control over the means of war. For more, please go to carnegiecouncil.org. 

Inflation and a bear market are dominating headlines. Efforts to curb costs and boost markets, like the Ocean Shipping Reform Act—which President Biden is set to sign—should help. Logistics analyst Peter Sand returns to speak with Doorstep co-hosts Nick Gvosdev and Tatiana Serafin about what else can be done in the the face of unexpected obstacles to global trade like China's slide back into lockdowns and a fourth month of war in Ukraine. What trade-offs will U.S. consumers have to make in the short and long-term? For more, please go to carnegiecouncil.org. 

Countries in the Arab region are seeking substitutes to oil so they can diversify their economies and mitigate the impact of fossil fuels production. “They realize that the emissions that are coming up from the production of oil are not acceptable and they have a moral obligation and responsibility at the global level to reduce their emissions,” says UNESCWA's Rola Dashti during a  C2GTalk. The war in Ukraine has increased energy prices impacting livelihoods globally. In the Arab region this has resulted in billions of dollars of gross domestic product losses. Now we see why energy security is so important at the global level and why climate finance is crucial to support developing countries in their green transition. Rola Dashti, executive secretary of the Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (UNESCWA), is a leading Kuwaiti economist and long-time champion of women’s rights, gender equality, and democratic reform, before moving to ESCWA in 2019. For more, please go to C2G's website.

More research and better governance is needed to help developing countries make decisions about solar radiation modification (SRM), says Thelma Krug, vice-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), during a C2GTalk. SRM has come into focus due to a likely overshoot of the 1.5C warming goal, which would bring increasing risks to people and natural ecosystems, and—depending on the length and extent of overshoot—potentially irreversible impacts. Thelma Krug is a former researcher at the Earth Observation Coordination at the National Institute for Space Research in Brazil, under the Ministry of Science, Technology, Innovation and Communication (MCTIC). She was elected vice-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for the Sixth Cycle of Panel (October 2015 – October 2022), after having been co-chair of the IPCC Task Force on National Greenhouse Gas Inventories from 2002 until 2015. For more, go to carnegiecouncil.org. 

Ahead of NATO's Madrid summit in June, The Washington Institute's Dr. Soner Cagaptay joins Doorstep co-hosts, Nick Gvosdev and Tatiana Serafin to discuss Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's strategy to reset relations with the West and get what he needs out of potential NATO enlargement. With Turkey's inflation skyrocketing and Gen Z voters threatening to unseat him in next year's nationwide elections, President Erdogan is betting that demanding concessions from Sweden and Finland and staying friendly with Russia may not only strengthen Turkey's national security but also score him points at home. Will this also win him friends in Washington, DC? For more, please go to carnegiecouncil.org.

In a fascinating Artificial Intelligence & Equality podcast, Senior Fellow Anja Kaspersen speaks with Kobi Leins about her new book New War Technologies and International Law: The Legal Limits to Weaponising Nanomaterials. How can scientists and policymakers work together to make responsible choices about the use of “nanoscale” materials? What are the implications of this emerging technology for the environment, international security, and current arms control regimes? For more, please go to carnegiecouncil.org. 

As Russia's war in Ukraine deepens and China’s influence continues to grow, many observers say that the United States is entering an era of “great-power competition” with these two rivals. But, as Eurasia Group's Ali Wyne discusses with Doorstep co-hosts Nikolas Gvosdev and Tatiana Serafin, this kind of framework could leave the U.S. defensive and reactive, and hinder efforts to renew itself, both at home and abroad. Can America seize its "great-power opportunity"? For more, please go to carnegieouncil.org. 

In this Artificial Intelligence & Equality podcast, Carnegie-Uehiro Fellow Wendell Wallach sits down with Emory University's Professor Paul Root Wolpe for a thought-provoking conversation about the truth of ethical decision-making, the challenge of regulating new technologies whose impact is uncertain, the intrinsically fragmenting nature of social media and AI, and the dilemmas of neuroscience and neuromarketing.   For more, please go to carnegiecouncil.org. 

Much has been said about the inability of tech and AI developers to grapple with ethical theory and inherent tension. Similarly, philosophers are often criticized by AI engineers for not understanding the technology. Anja Kaspersen and Wendell Wallach, senior fellows and co-chairs of the Artificial Intelligence & Equality Initiative, sit down with University of Pittsburgh’sProfessor Colin Allen for a fascinating conversation. Wallach and Allen wrote Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right From Wrong together more than a decade ago, and this conversation also features an assessment of how we have progressed in building AI systems capable of making moral decisions.    For more, please go to carnegiecouncil.org. 

After Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the global financial backlash was swift and unprecedented: Dozens of financial institutions cut off their exposure to the Russian market for reasons that were at least partially ethical. These moves against Russia have led many to wonder if China—which is far more integrated into the global economy—could and should be the next target. In this podcast, Isaac Stone Fish and finance expert Perth Tolle discuss these issues and more. For more, please go to carnegiecouncil.org. 

Ahead of a May 6 international conference in Lithuania on steps to create a tribunal to hold Russia accountable for alleged war crimes and genocide in Ukraine, NYU Law’s Professor Ryan Goodman, co-editor-in-chief of Just Security, joins Doorstep co-hosts Nick Gvosdev and Tatiana Serafin to discuss the issues and challenges of prosecuting Putin and his top brass. With American public sentiment at an all-time high to see justice done, will this be a defining moment for the Biden/Harris administration on the global stage? For more, please go to carnegiecouncil.org. 

The debate around solar radiation modification has broadened in recent years, but there has not yet been significant progress on international mechanisms to govern it, says Economist senior editor Oliver Morton in this C2GTalk. He adds: "I don't want a world with solar geoengineering come what may, but I also don't want future generations to look back and say, 'I wish they’d thought about this just a bit more thoroughly.'" Oliver Morton previously worked at Nature  and  Wired  and contributed to a range of other publications, including The New York Times and Science.  He is the author of Mapping Mars: Science, Imagination and the Birth of a World; Eating the Sun: How Plants Power the Planet; The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World; and The Moon: A History for the Future. Asteroid 10716 Olivermorton is named in his honor. This interview was recorded on February 10, 2022 and will be available with interpretation into  中文,  Español,  and Français. For more, including an edited transcript, pl

The global pandemic and investments in mRNA COVID vaccines have accelerated worldwide interest in the field of synthetic biology—a field that unifies chemistry, biology, computer science, and engineering for the purpose of writing better biological code. In this podcast, Genesis Machine co-author Amy Webb and Senior Fellows Nick Gvosdev and Tatiana Serafin explore how these developments are leading to a new industrial revolution. For more, please go to carnegiecouncil.org. 

In this Artificial Intelligence & Equality podcast, Senior Fellow Anja Kaspersen talks with Dr. Ricardo Chavarriaga about the promise and peril of brain-machine interfaces and cognitive neural prosthetics. What are the ethical considerations and governance challenges in using computational tools to create models or enhance our brains? For more, please go to carnegiecouncil.org.

Since the Russian invasion began in late February, millions of Ukrainians have been forced to flee their homes. In this Global Ethics Review podcast, Senior Fellow Michael Doyle discusses what this means on the ground in Eastern Europe, what governments are and should be doing to help, and how this refugee stream is different from ones that came before. For more, please go to carnegiecouncil.org. 

Global war, inflation, and a COVID-19 resurgence--the Biden/Harris team has been put on defense for first two quarters of 2022. Policies are reactive, promises made a year ago tabled. This week, "Doorstep" co-hosts Nick Gvosdev and Tatiana Serafin reflect on what has happened to the vaunted Biden/Harris "foreign policy for the middle class" and how midterm elections will up-end the narratives the administration expected to put in place. Where do we go from here? For more, please go to carnegiecouncil.org. 

The advent of the age of data is a formidable accelerator of history. As society faces a crisis of politics compounded by the emergence of powerful virtual communities competing with territorial communities, are we on the cusp of an earthquake in the history of humanity? In this Artificial Intelligence & Equality podcast, Senior Fellow Anja Kapsersen is joined by Professor Jean-Marie Guehénno for a thought-provoking conversation about his new book The First XXI Century: From Globalization to Fragmentation. For more, please go to carnegiecouncil.org. 

Every time a new technology that collects, stores, and analyzes our data is released to the world or permitted a new role, we are promised that it will work as intended and won't cause undue harm. But writer, professor, and speaker Dr. Chris Gilliard has found that this is rarely how these stories actually end. In this discussion with Senior Fellow Arthur Holland Michel, Dr. Gilliard explains why the arc of surveillance technology and novel "artificial intelligence" bends toward failures that disproportionately hurt society’s most vulnerable groups, what this means for our notions of "responsible tech" and "AI ethics," and what we can do about it moving forward. For more, please go to carnegiecouncil.org.