If the UK is really moved by starvation in North Korea, demand an end to cruel sanctions
This week, the BBC has been carrying reports from the world’s most authoritarian and impenetrable state. The headline: its people are starving. Communist North Korea is destitute, even as capitalist South Korea is one of Asia’s most prosperous nations. It starved in the 1950s, 1970s and 1990s, and was rescued by China. But the government closed the border during Covid and it has barely reopened, hampering the import of Chinese foodstuff. UN experts reckon that North Korea can this year feed barely three-quarters of its 26 million people at survival level. The BBC has spoken to people who have witnessed neighbours dying of starvation in their homes and on the streets. More than half a million perished in the 1990s famine. This could be repeated.
What should Britons do about this, beyond offering distant sympathy? Hazel Smith, Korea expert at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, regularly points out that when a country is so set on xenophobic “self-sufficiency” and spends wildly on defence, it suffers massive economic distortions. Food shortage is “baked into the … system”. China’s exports to North Korea were reportedly down 81% in 2020. Shops are empty of Chinese food and beggars are everywhere.
That the Pyongyang regime should have sought self-sufficiency may have been wrong-headed but was not in itself stupid. As Smith told the BBC this week, what was disastrous was the tightening of UN sanctions in 2017. They extended a ban on nuclear and military materials so that it no longer differentiated between civilian and military needs. In particular, a stop was imposed on oil-based products, including everything needed for agriculture. This includes the inputs for producing fertilisers, pesticides and plastic sheeting. A year’s fuel consumption in the North is now down to the equivalent to one day’s consumption in the South. Food production since 2019 has plummeted, while the collapse in exports has severely limited North Korea’s ability to buy food on world markets.
Perhaps sanctions enthusiasts will say this is proof that “sanctions are working”. If a nation tolerates a viciously authoritarian leader who is a menace to neighbouring countries, they get what they deserve. Every time the North Korean leader, Kim Jongun, tests another missile, he deserves another sanction. That should teach him. A former imperial power such as Britain, self-appointed moral policeman to the world, cannot just do nothing. It can still punch above its weight. It can lead the west in demanding sanctions.
But sanctions hurting is not sanctions working. They were first imposed on North Korea after the 1950s war. They were strengthened in the 1980s, and tightened when North Korea left the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons in 2003. They were further tightened after successive weapons tests by Pyongyang in 2006, 2009, 2013, 2016 and 2017. I can find no shred of evidence that they have resulted in the slightest restraint on the
Pyongyang regime, rather reinforcing its siege mentality and making it ever more reckless. This has served no one’s interest – not the west’s or Korea’s Asian neighbours.
Sanctions against North Korea have done exactly what they have done to countless regimes in recent decades, from Cuba to Myanmar and Venezuela to Afghanistan. They have entrenched existing elites in power, making them ever more paranoid in their behaviour. They weaken a country’s tolerance of dissent and reduce the likelihood of any change. Enthusiasts always say they take time. They have had time. These sanctions have failed for half a century.
Above all, their sheer crudity, enforced year after year, hurts and disempowers the poor and the innocent in the victim country. In the case of energy sanctions against Russia, they also hurt the poor of the imposing countries. They have become just another manifestation of the outbreak of global protectionism. We can assume that British taxpayers will now be asked to send food aid to Korea, to relieve a famine their governments have spent six years contributing towards. They will be right to do so. But our foreign policy has forgotten the maxim that if you cannot do good, at least do no harm. Sanctions do no good, but they are certainly doing harm.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
other companies could and couldn’t do. In the same way that Google reaps billions from Android advertising, app sales and transactions, this could set up Meta for a highly profitable period in the AI space, the exact structure of which is still to emerge.
The company did apparently issue takedown notices to get the leaked code offline, as it was supposed to be only accessible for research use, but following the leak, the company’s chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, said: “The platform that will win will be the open one,” suggesting the company may just run with the open-source model as a competitive strategy.
Although Google’s Bard and OpenAI’s ChatGPT are free to use, they are not open source. Bard and ChatGPT rely on teams of engineers, content moderators and threat analysts working to prevent their platforms being used for harm – in their current iterations, they (hopefully) won’t help you build a bomb, plan a terrorist attack, or make fake content designed to disrupt an election. These people and the systems they build and maintain keep ChatGPT and Bard aligned with specific human values.
Meta’s semi-open source LLaMA and its descendent large language models (LLMs), however, can be run by anyone with sufficient computer hardware to support them – the latest offspring can be used on commercially available laptops. This gives anyone – from unscrupulous political consultancies to Vladimir Putin’s well-resourced GRU intelligence agency – freedom to run the AI without any safety systems in place.
From 2018 to 2020 I worked on the Facebook civic integrity team. I dedicated years of my life to fighting online interference in democracy from many sources. My colleagues and I played lengthy games of whack-a-mole with dictators around the world who used “coordinated inauthentic behaviour”, hiring teams of people to manually create fake accounts to promote their regimes, surveil and harass their enemies, foment unrest and even promote genocide.
I would guess that Putin’s team is already in the market for some great AI tools to disrupt the US 2024 presidential election (and probably those in other countries, too). I can think of few better additions to his arsenal than emerging freely available LLMs such as LLaMA, and the software stack being built up around them. It could be used to make fake content more convincing (much of the Russian content deployed in 2016 had grammatical or stylistic deficits) or to produce much more of it, or it could even be repurposed as a “classifier” that scans social media platforms for particularly incendiary content from real Americans to amplify with fake comments and reactions. It could also write convincing scripts for deepfakes that synthesise video of political candidates saying things they never said.
The irony of this all is that Meta’s platforms (Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp) will be among the biggest battlegrounds on which to deploy these “influence operations”. Sadly, the civic integrity team that I worked on was shut down in 2020, and after multiple rounds of redundancies, I fear that the company’s ability to fight these operations has been hobbled.
Even more worrisome, however, is that we have now entered the “chaos era” of social media, and the proliferation of new and growing platforms, each with separate and much smaller “integrity” or “trust and safety” teams, may be even less well positioned than Meta to detect and stop influence operations, especially in the time-sensitive final days and hours of elections, when speed is most critical.
But my concerns don’t stop with the erosion of democracy. After working on the civic integrity team at Facebook, I went on to manage research teams working on responsible AI, chronicling the potential harms of AI and seeking ways to make it more safe and fair for society. I saw how my employer’s own AI systems could facilitate housing discrimination, make racist associations, and exclude women from seeing job listings visible to men. Outside the company’s walls, AI systems have unfairly recommended longer prison sentences for black people, failed to accurately recognise the faces of darkskinned women, and caused countless additional incidents of harm, thousands of which are catalogued in the AI Incident Database.
The scary part, though, is that the incidents I describe above were, for the most part, the unintended consequences of implementing AI systems at scale. When AI is in the hands of people who are deliberately and maliciously abusing it, the risks of misalignment increase exponentially, compounded even further as the capabilities of AI increase.
It would be fair to ask: are LLMs not inevitably going to become open source anyway? Since LLaMA’s leak, numerous other companies and labs have joined the race, some publishing LLMs that rival LLaMA in power with more permissive open-source licences. One LLM built upon LLaMA proudly touts its “uncensored” nature, citing its lack of safety checks as a feature, not a bug. Meta appears to stand alone today, however, for its capacity to continue to release more and more powerful models combined with its willingness to put them in the hands of anyone who wants them. It’s important to remember that if malicious actors can get their hands on the code, they’re unlikely to care what the licence agreement says.
We are living through a moment of such rapid acceleration of AI technologies that even stalling their release – especially their open-source release – for a few months could give governments time to put critical regulations in place. This is what CEOs such as Sam Altman, Sundar Pichai and Elon Musk are calling for. Tech companies must also put much stronger controls on who qualifies as a “researcher” for special access to these potentially dangerous tools.
The smaller platforms (and the hollowed-out teams at the bigger ones) also need time for their trust and safety/integrity teams to catch up with the implications of LLMs so they can build defences against abuses. The generative AI companies and communications platforms need to work together to deploy watermarking to identify AI-generated content, and digital signatures to verify that human-produced content is authentic.
The race to the bottom on AI safety that we’re seeing right now must stop. In last month’s hearings before the US Congress, both Gary Marcus, an AI expert, and Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, made calls for new international governance bodies to be created specifically for AI – akin to bodies that govern nuclear security. The EU is far ahead of the US on this, but sadly its pioneering EU Artificial Intelligence Act may not fully come into force until 2025 or later. That’s far too late to make a difference in this race.
Until new laws and new governing bodies are in place, we will, unfortunately, have to rely on the forbearance of tech CEOs to stop the most powerful and dangerous tools falling into the wrong hands. So please, CEOs: let’s slow down a bit before you break democracy. And lawmakers: make haste.
David Evan Harris is chancellor’s public scholar at UC Berkeley, senior research fellow at the International Computer Science Institute, senior adviser for AI ethics at the Psychology of Technology Institute, an affiliated scholar at the CITRIS Policy Lab and a contributing author to the Centre for International Governance Innovation
had her after-school football session cancelled, because “there were only enough coaches to take the boys”.
Game On argues that sport can facilitate discussions that otherwise struggle to be voiced. From the narrow definition of femininity and the objectification of female bodies, to the social dictates that govern the kinds of beauty and activity that are “appropriate” for women – sport is an arena where we can confront, and ultimately defeat, our hangover of cultural chauvinism. The structural injustice and sheer absurdity of requiring women to wear dresses, or bikini bottoms, or white kit to compete is, after all, still a live issue – this is the first year that Wimbledon will allow female tennis players to wear black undershorts.
But there’s another discussion we need to have. Because while change is happening, other changes loom unseen. The long-overdue removal of grassroots barriers, and the hyper-accelerated professionalisation of women’s elite sport, require ever more resource. The sector’s rapid rise is already being fuelled – and will be increasingly steered – by the commercial interests of sponsors and administrators hungry to “optimise” a whole new market.
The talking heads in Anstiss’s film – from Grey-Thompson and Denise Lewis to Stacey Copeland and Clare Balding – all agree that women’s sport is special.
Its painful climb from the lower plains of niche-sporting-subculture means its greatest role models are still “just people”, accessible to and invested in those who come out to support them. The family-friendly nature of matches, seats full of women and children who exhibit none of the learned behaviour of the football stadium, offers a refreshing contrast to the aggressively tribal atmosphere of so much men’s sport.
The metrics that measure the success of women’s sport have also been different to those that prevail elsewhere. Participation and inclusion are the priorities, not shareholder profits. In March, the hosts of the 2023 football Women’s World Cup, Australia and New Zealand, won a significant victory when they forced Fifa to backtrack on its planned Saudi Arabian sponsorship deal for the tournament, arguing that it made a mockery of their gender equality mission.
Women’s sport is entering uncharted waters, whose depths will be richly stocked with dazzling prizes and murky compromises. The question that needs to be asked now – as loudly and often as possible – is what it can do to resist the pressures that threaten its values and virtues, and fashion a sustainable future. Will (and should) its executives ignore the well-worn path to the door of the betting industry? Can England’s Lionesses remain the approachable face of elite football, or will they – like today’s highest-paid women’s tennis players – disappear behind a wall of sponsored appearances and curated Insta feeds?
The guest list at the Game On premiere boasted Olympians, netballers, rugby and hockey players, and female administrators, all of whom have spent their careers fighting for a fairer, better sports industry. If the future of women’s sport needs extraordinary and principled leadership, the good news is that there are plenty of women with the qualifications and experience to offer it.
• Game On: The Unstoppable Rise of Women’s Sport is released on Netflix on 26 June