The securitization of the EU’s digital tech regulation

Regulation is a prominent tool in what Kruck and Weiss call the Regulatory Security State. Safeguarding security entails shaping tech companies’ behaviour through arms-length rules, rather than wielding state capacity directly–a power shift away from state actors. As I argue, this dynamic also works in reverse: securitization of digital technology imposes security provision–a traditional state rationale–on regulatory domains hitherto dominated by commercial motivations. There is not only more regulation in security; there also is more security in regulation. This dynamic challenges the EU’s global regulatory entanglements. I use budding EU regulation of artificial intelligence (AI) to illustrate this struggle: do AI’s military implications weigh so heavily that its regulation should largely be seen through that lens? And should a transatlantic security alliance trump EU ambitions to craft its own AI governance approach? This fight is undecided yet. But given AI’s general-purpose character, its outcome will reverberate throughout society at large.</p

Regulatory interdependence in AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) creates manifold challenges for public policy, and authorities try to counter them through regulation of AI’s development and application. Such regulation does not evolve in a vacuum, however. Geopolitical and economic power, as well as technological prowess, are distributed highly unevenly across the globe. Governments therefore confront regulatory interdependence: their own scope for effective regulatory intervention is heavily shaped by what powerful jurisdictions such as the USA, China or the EU do. This chapter analyses the different forms of regulatory interdependence countries confront, lays out how economic interests imperatives can undermine regulatory aims, and how most jurisdictions end up being rule takers in AI regulation, never mind their formal legal authority within their own borders.</p

Critical political economy, free movement and Brexit: Beyond the progressive’s dilemma

The progressive’s dilemma suggests that a trade-off exists between, on the one hand, labour and welfare rights underpinned by solidarity and shared identity and, on the other hand, open immigration regimes. With reference to debates on free movement in the UK, it is argued: (1) that a progressive European critical political economy literature of the Left has a tendency to accept this dilemma and resolve it in favour of a the former; (2) that it does so because it erroneously conflates the free movement of people with the (increasingly neoliberal) free movement of goods, capital and services; and (3) that it could and should treat human mobility as qualitatively different and, consequently, need not accept the terms of the progressive’s dilemma. The argument has important implications for a progressive politics in general and for the Left’s (particularly the Labour Party’s) position in the UK on free movement (and, by extension, on Brexit)

Falsification Of The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within The Frame Of Physics

The atmospheric greenhouse effect, an idea that many authors trace back to the traditional works of Fourier (1824), Tyndall (1861), and Arrhenius (1896), and which is still supported in global climatology, essentially describes a fictitious mechanism, in which a planetary atmosphere acts as a heat pump driven by an environment that is radiatively interacting with but radiatively equilibrated to the atmospheric system. According to the second law of thermodynamics such a planetary machine can never exist. Nevertheless, in almost all texts of global climatology and in a widespread secondary literature it is taken for granted that such mechanism is real and stands on a firm scientific foundation. In this paper the popular conjecture is analyzed and the underlying physical principles are clarified. By showing that (a) there are no common physical laws between the warming phenomenon in glass houses and the fictitious atmospheric greenhouse effects, (b) there are no calculations to determine an average surface temperature of a planet, (c) the frequently mentioned difference of 33 degrees Celsius is a meaningless number calculated wrongly, (d) the formulas of cavity radiation are used inappropriately, (e) the assumption of a radiative balance is unphysical, (f) thermal conductivity and friction must not be set to zero, the atmospheric greenhouse conjecture is falsified.Comment: 115 pages, 32 figures, 13 tables (some typos corrected