Sentinel minutes for week #38/2024

Status: Green-ish. Forecasters predict a 55% probability that Israel invades Lebanon by the end of the year

Geopolitics

Middle East

Thousands of pagers, and then walkie-talkie radios belonging to members of Hezbollah detonated across Lebanon in simultaneous explosions on Tuesday and Wednesday. Unnamed US and Israeli officials reportedly said that detonating the pagers all at once was planned as the opening move of an offensive against Hezbollah, but that Israel became concerned the plan had been discovered, so they set them off early.

The New York Times has linked one of the companies, BAC Consulting, in the supply chain for the devices to Israeli intelligence. The BBC reports that on their linkedin page they claim they worked with the UK Department for International Development, though the Foreign Office reports that initial investigations indicate this is not the case. 

Social media reports and official statements suggest that Israel has been moving troops and tanks to its border with Lebanon.

Our forecasting team made forecasts on the probability that Israel attempts an invasion of Lebanon, meaning moving troops in and holding territory. Our aggregate probability for an attempted invasion by the end of the year is 55% (ranging from 40% to 70%).

Polymarket’s market on whether Israel would invade Lebanon before November has gone from a low point of 9% to its current probability of 39%. 

United States

The US and allies seized control of a massive Chinese tech spying network.

Europe

Armenian prosecutors allege that Russia paid a bunch of mercenaries to carry out a coup. The attempt seems pretty amateurish as only six people were involved, but Armenia could be Russia’s next target if Russia achieves some success in Ukraine and if Armenia continues to move closer to the West (it’s now seeking to join the EU). Armenia’s geographical position is advantageous (Russia would have to go through Georgia, Azerbaijan or Iran by land), but Russia could carry out an amphibious invasion. One member of our forecasting team reported that in the next year, they’d give an invasion of Armenia a 1% chance of happening but a 10% chance in the next three years.

Russia is increasing the size of its army, by 180K troops, to 1.5M.

Meta and Youtube banned Russia Today and other Russian state-affiliated media from its platforms.

Romania has urged NATO to respond robustly to Russian incursions into its airspace.

Asia

Taiwan’s defense minister has warned that China’s growing military activity will make an impending war harder to forecast and spot. China’s strategy, he says, is essentially to gradually ramp up military activity to the point where the difference between a ‘drill’ and an invasion or blockade is very slight.

Our forecasters agree that China is likely to try to take control of Taiwan at some point. As former US Navy Admiral Mike Studeman explains, "Simply put, I take Xi Xinping at his word. He has outlined a grand strategy for China, he is pursuing it aggressively using all means, and a key component of that grand strategy... is to recover Taiwan."

Militants in India's Kashmir are professionalizing, and Pakistan’s terrorist groups are consolidating.

Biological risk

Mpox

The EMA has recommended extending vaccination against mpox to adolescents. Africa’s CDC has warned mpox is not under control. The mpox situation remains serious, and we will continue to monitor this outbreak closely over the coming months.

H5N1

In the US, several contacts of the recent human H5N1 case in Missouri that was discovered through routine hospital influenza surveillance reportedly developed symptoms of respiratory infections around the same time. A household contact developed similar symptoms on the same day as the hospitalized patient and has since recovered. In addition, two healthcare workers developed symptoms.

One developed mild symptoms and tested negative for flu, and the other developed mild respiratory symptoms but was not tested. Further tests will look for antibodies to H5N1 in these patients; blood for such serology tests have been collected from the hospitalized patient and the household contact, and serology testing has been offered to the healthcare worker who was not tested for flu.

Also, the virus isolated from the hospitalized patient was found to have several mutations, one of which would likely drastically reduce the efficacy of an H5N1 vaccine that would be made using the current candidate vaccine strain.

This potential cluster of human H5N1 cases is concerning. It is likely — but not certain — that the hospitalized patient and the household contact were both infected with H5N1 by another, unknown person, because they developed symptoms on the same day. If this did occur, then it raises several questions. How many other people did that unknown person infect? More generally, how big is the human-to-human transmission cluster that has been discovered here? Is any human-to-human transmission chain in this cluster ongoing? It will also be good to know whether it was likely that the hospitalized patient transmitted H5N1 to either healthcare worker who was sick.

It is not likely that H5N1 influenza is spreading widely in humans at this time, because we would see that in wastewater data and, more importantly, in routine influenza testing. What has likely been detected here is almost certainly a small, self-limited cluster of human-to-human transmission. However, it is also possible that there is still an ongoing human-to-human chain of transmission that is affecting a very small number of people and remains undetected. And the longer that chain of transmission is, the higher the probability that the virus will adapt successfully to humans.

AI & Technology

Top AI scientists from Western countries and China agreed to a joint statement, stating that AI safety is a global public good, and that global cooperation is urgently needed. They say that in the long term, states should develop an international governance regime to prevent the development of models that could pose global catastrophic risks.

OpenAI has said its safety committee will oversee security and safety practices for the company's AI model development and deployment as an independent body.

A UN expert panel has said AI development cannot be left only to market forces, and called for the creation of a group of scientific AI experts that would be modeled on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The UK AI Safety Institute will be hosting a conference in November in San Francisco on frontier AI safety commitments.

Four AI experts, including former OpenAI board member Helen Tonner, and whistleblower William Saunders, testified to the US Senate on the topic of AI regulation. Toner reported that many people working at top AI companies believe AI could lead to “literal human extinction”.

Microsoft signed a deal for nuclear power to help meet its growing need for power for data centers required for AI.

Researchers found a big bug in the Google Cloud Platform.

Natural disasters

Shanghai was hit by the strongest typhoon in 75 years.

Fires in Brazil and adjacent countries burnt an area greater than Germany.

The floods in Central Europe have been devastating and will cause fiscal strains in Central Europe for years to come.