IF YOU think America's shame will end with Donald Trump gone, think again. The National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI), a government-appointed panel, says the United States has a "moral imperative" to develop AI weapons in a draft report to the Congress, according to media reports.
Ethics never travelled south like this before. As if conventional, chemical and nuclear weapons are not enough to murder and maim men, the US wants robots to finish off what the others have not been able to do.
Is this a race a country which set in motion an international organisation such as the United Nations to end the scourge of wars should start? We tell America, race instead to do good.
There is so much to be done but, for starters, we suggest America lead the race in three areas: global justice, equitable wealth distribution and climate change. Consider global justice first. This is a very unjust world. The mighty few maim the meek many.
And they get away with it. Five nations — the United States, Russia, Britain, France and China — decide between themselves where and when to butcher. All the remaining 195 countries and territories can do is just scream and shout. Injustice shows up everywhere, believe it or not, in items as critical as vaccines.
Even when it means no one will be safe until everyone is safely inoculated. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa had this to say: rich countries are bulk-buying Covid-19 vaccines up to four times what their population needs. Justice doesn't get done this way.
A just world is one where everything is in its right place. America should aim to work towards such a world. Here is where the power of example will work. Eight-day-old President Joe Biden should know that. Time for him to move from "tell" land to "show" land.
Ours isn't just an unjust world; it is an unequal one too. Wealth is skewed to the pockets of the few, leaving a bulk of the population struggling to keep up a healthy life. Close to two billion people or nearly 36 per cent of the world's population live in extreme poverty on under US$2 a day, global figures indicate.
If the Covid-19 pandemic is factored into the poverty equation, as the World Bank has done, an additional 150 million people will go into extreme poverty by the end of this year.
Here is the thing. Poverty will not end as long as we run the world on an economic system that is designed to create just a pocket of the prosperous. Free market capitalism has been on this default mode from its very beginning.
It has become so bad that even the World Economic Forum, a club of billionaires, is calling for reform of capitalism. They are right. There must be a better way of doing economics.
But before any economics is done, we must recognise, as Professor Ha-Joon Chang of Cambridge University acknowledges, that it is not a science but a political argument. If the US wants to see equitable wealth distribution around the world, it must get this political argument right.
Finally, climate change. Here too Biden has his work cut out for him. The Vox website provides the reason: "The US is the all-time biggest, baddest greenhouse gas emitter on the planet." Warming his seat isn't an option for Biden. He has to bring the heat down.