| | | | On GPS at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET on CNN:
First, Fareed gives his Take on China's future following the Communist Party Congress this past week – and why the "shift in reputation that we are witnessing around the world is not so much about the rise of China, but rather the decline of America."
"China has aggressively sought to improve its image in the world, spending billions on foreign aid, promising trade and investment, and opening Confucius Institutes to promote Chinese culture," Fareed says.
"Meanwhile, consider how the United States must look now to the rest of the world. It is politically paralyzed, unable to make major decisions. Politics has become a branch of reality TV, with daily insults, comebacks and color commentary. America's historical leadership role in the world has been replaced by a narrow and cramped ideology."
Then, Fareed is joined by Bill Browder, once the largest foreign investor in Russia and the driving force behind the Magnitsky Act. He found himself barred from the United States this month after Russia put out an Interpol arrest warrant on him. Interpol has now blocked that warrant. They discuss the latest developments.
Also on the show: The Trump administration has claimed that its proposed corporate tax cut could give U.S. households a big boost in their income, too. Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers says the White House numbers just don't add up. He joins Fareed to explain why he believes the Council of Economic Advisers' analysis "is really of remarkably low quality."
Watch Summers on analysis of White House corporate tax proposal
Plus: Kevin Hassett, chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, pushes back against the claim by Summers that the analysis is "dishonest." Hassett explains to Fareed why he believes that critics of the plan have it wrong.
Watch Hassett explain what critics get wrong about the plan
Next: On Friday, Catalonia's parliament voted for independence from Spain. The vote follows a recent referendum by Iraqi Kurds on independence. What should we make of these and other movements? Fareed is joined by Michael Ignatieff, president and rector of the Central European University, who follows them closely.
Finally, Walter Isaacson, president of the Aspen Institute, has written biographies on Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein and Steve Jobs. How to top those three? Fareed is joined by Isaacson, who has now written a book about the original Renaissance man -- Leonardo da Vinci. It was Fareed's Book of the Week last week.
| | "The divide is not between the left and right anymore but between patriots and globalists!" So, officially, begins Marine Le Pen's campaign for the French presidency. Speaking at a rally in Lyon, Le Pen also called for a return to using the French Franc, promised a referendum on membership of the European Union, and called for France to withdraw from NATO.
-- The new divide: James Shields, author of "The extreme right in France: from Pétain to Le Pen," told me, "We are already seeing a realignment towards a new divide -- between insular nativism and economic protectionism on one hand, and a liberalizing embrace of open borders and globalization on the other. Le Pen is the archetypal proponent of the former, and the independent centrist Emmanuel Macron of the latter."
-- Global skeptics: France is the most skeptical country of globalization, according to a recent YouGov survey, with more than a third of French respondents seeing it as a force for bad, the same number who said it was a force for good. (The United States was the second most skeptical, with 27% of respondents saying globalization is a bad thing).
-- Fareed on the "sin" of globalization: "The best approach to the world we are living in is not denial but empowerment," Fareed writes. "Countries should recognize that the global economy and the technological revolution require large, sustained national efforts to equip workers with the skills, capital and infrastructure they need to succeed. Nations should embrace an open world, but only as long as they are properly armed to compete in it. And that requires smart, effective -- and very expensive -- national policies, not some grand reversal of globalization."
-- Globaloney: The world is far less globalized than people tend to believe, argue Pankaj Ghemawat and Steven A. Altman in the Washington Post. "Based on how much goods, services, capital, people and information flow across the nation's borders compared with how much stays inside the country, the United States ranks 100th out of 140 countries," in their Global Connectedness Index.
-- "Non" to fake news: Google and Facebook have launched a project to tackle potential fake news stories in the run-up to the French presidential election, CNet reports. The CrossCheck initiative, launched Monday, "will serve to help verify news stories being shared among the French electorate." | | | Enabled attacks – "violence conceived and guided by operatives in areas controlled by the Islamic State whose only connection to the would-be attacker is the internet" – are making up a growing share ISIS's operations, the New York Times reports in an in-depth look at the terror group.
The Times says that in several cases, a pattern has emerged: "The attacker initially tries to reach Syria, but is either blocked by the authorities in the home country or else turned back from the border. Under the instructions of a handler in Syria or Iraq, the person then begins planning an attack at home." | | China has become the world's largest producer of solar energy by capacity, Reuters reports, after more than doubling its installed photovoltaic capacity last year, according to the country's National Energy Administration.
-- Soft power play: But the push to become a renewables leader may not just be about cleaning up the country's air, the South China Morning Post suggests. It could also be about boosting its influence in Southeast Asia. "More leadership from China will help it build international credibility, cultivate trust in the region and ease tension in other areas," the paper quotes one researcher as saying.
| | The real threat to humanity isn't super intelligent machines, but super dumb ones, writes Edinburgh University's Alan Bundy for the Association for Computing Machinery (hat tip Vice).
"[M]any humans tend to ascribe too much intelligence to narrowly focused AI systems. Any machine that can beat all humans at Go must surely be very intelligent, so by analogy with other world-class Go players, it must be pretty smart in other ways too, mustn't it? No! Such misconceptions lead to false expectations that such AI systems will work correctly in areas outside their narrow expertise…"
"…[C]ould such dumb machines be sufficiently dangerous to pose a threat to humanity? Yes, if, for instance, we were stupid enough to allow a dumb machine the autonomy to unleash weapons of mass destruction. We came close to such stupidity with Ronald Reagan and Edward Teller's 1983 proposal of a Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, aka 'Star Wars')." | | | | | | |
