Page 17 - The Economist

The Economist December 9th 2017 Leaders 17
2 To begin with, it is an admission offailure. MrTrump is pre- agree on. In practice the United States, like most other coun-
judging the outcome of the “ultimate deal” of Israeli-Palestin- tries, already treats Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Its diplomats
ian peace that he claims to be pursuing. He has given Israel the and politicians—including presidents—routinely meet Israeli
prize ofrecognition without extractinganythingin return, and ministers in Jerusalem. Yet if recognition makes little practical
does not mention Palestinians’ right to statehood. That has difference, why did MrTrump bother?
both weakened his own influence in any peace talks and The answer has nothing to do with American policy in the
America’s claim to be a fair mediator between the Israelis and Middle East and everything to do with domestic politics. At
the Palestinians. Second, MrTrump has furtherdiscredited the home Mr Trump has struggled to enact his promises because
already feeble Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, and all of resistance in Congress and the courts. Abroad, though, he
those who argue thatPalestinian aspirationscan be met byne- has now honoured a radical promise—one his predecessors
gotiationratherthanviolence.Third,hehasembarrassedArab were too feckless to keep. It helps, too, that his electoral base
allies, and made it harder for them to move towards a de facto admires Israel and dislikes Arabs; and that many evangelicals
alliance with Israel to counteract the expansion ofIran’s influ- thinkthe ingatheringofthe Jews will hasten the end ofdays.
ence in the Middle East. Mr Trump would have been best advised not to touch Jeru-
MrTrumpperhapscalculatesthatArabregimesaretoocon- salem at all. It should have been left as the crown in a final
cerned with other crises to bother with Palestine, and that the peace agreement. But if he must shake things up, then he
Palestiniansaretoodividedanddispiritedtodomuchaboutit. should double down on hisradicalism: open notone embassy
Yet even if the prospect of Palestinian unrest is muted, Mr in Jerusalem but two. One would manage ties with Israel and
Trump pointlessly risks stokingviolence. the other in East Jerusalem would deal with the Palestinian
Mr Trump is at pains to say that America will accept any fu- state, which he should also recognise. Two embassies for two
ture deal on Jerusalem that Israel and the Palestinians can states fortwo peoples: that would be truly fresh thinking. 7

The battle in AI
Giant advantage

Artificial intelligence looks tailor-made forincumbenttech giants. Howto judge ifthatis a worry
WO letters can add up to a er: Google) to relax, and search the web using—you can guess.
Global activity in AI Tlotofmoney. No area oftech- Markets with just a handful of firms can be fiercely competi-
Number of M&A deals
nologyishotterthan AI, orartifi- tive. Aworld in which the same fewnamesduke itout in sever-
120
cial intelligence. Venture-capital al industriescould still be a good one forconsumers. Butifpeo-
80
investment in AI in the first nine ple rely on one firm’s services like this, and if AI enables that
40
months of 2017 totalled $7.6bn, firm to predicttheirneedsand customise itsoffering evermore
0
2010 12 14 16 17* according to PitchBook, a data precisely, it will be burdensome to switch to a rival.
*To Dec 4th provider; that compares with That future is still a long way off. AI programs remain nar-
full-yearfiguresof$5.4bn in 2016. In the yearto date there have rowly focused. Moreover, the ability ofthe incumbents to per-
been $21.3bn in AI-related M&A deals, around 26 times more petuate theiradvantagesismade uncertain bythree questions.
than in 2015. In earnings calls public companies now mention The most important is whether AI will always depend on
AI farmore often than “bigdata”. vast amounts of data. Machines today are usually trained on
At the heart ofthe frenzy are some familiarnames: the likes huge datasets, from which they can recognise useful patterns
ofAlphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebookand Microsoft. A simi- such as fraudulent financial transactions. Ifreal-world data re-
lar, though less transparent, battle is under way in China main essential to AI, the tech superstars are in clover. They
amongfirms like Alibaba and Baidu. Several have put AI at the have vast amounts of the stuff, and are gaining more as they
centre of their strategies. All are enthusiastic acquirers of AI push into fresh areas such as health care.
firms, often in order to snap up the people they employ. They Acompetingvision ofAIstressessimulations, in which ma-
see AI as a way to improve their existing services, from cloud chinesteach themselvesusingsyntheticdata orin virtual envi-
computingto logistics, and to push into newareas, from auton- ronments. Early versions of a program developed to play Go,
omouscarsto augmented reality(see page 61). Manyobservers an Asian board game, by DeepMind, a unit of Alphabet, were
fear that, by cementing and extending the power of a handful trained usingdata from actual games; the latestwassimply giv-
of giants, AI will hurt competition. That will depend on three en the rules and started playing Go against itself. Within three
open questions, involvingone magic ingredient. days it had surpassed its predecessor, which had itself beaten
the best player humanity could muster. If this approach is
AlphaGone widely applicable, or if future AI systems can be trained using
The tech giants certainly have big advantages in the battle to sparseramounts ofdata, the tech giants’ edge is blunted.
develop AI. They have tonnes of data, oodles of computing But some applications will always require data. How much
power and boffins aplenty—especially in China, which ex- ofthe world’s stockofit the tech giants will end up controlling
pects to charge ahead. Imagine a future, some warn, in which isthe second question. Theyhave cloutin the consumer realm,
you are transported everywhere in a Waymo autonomous car and they keep pushinginto new areas, from Amazon’s interest
(owner: Alphabet, parent of Google), pay for everything with in medicine to Microsoft’s purchase of LinkedIn, a profession-
an Android phone (developer: Google), watch YouTube (own- al-networking site. But data in the corporate realm are harder 1