Sentinel minutes for week #46/2024

Status: greenish; forecasters don't anticipate events spiraling into global catastrophes this week. H5N1 spreads further in North America, tensions between the US and Iran will likely rise next year.

Nov 18, 2024

Europe

Ukrainian officials are indicating that they are resigned to making territorial concessions in peace talks with Russia, as long as they receive adequate security guarantees. Security guarantees were a key sticking point during the March-April 2022 peace talks, with Russia opposing the idea of Western countries being bound to defend Ukraine from further aggression in the future.

Meanwhile, President Zelensky has said that he wants the war with Russia concluded through diplomacy by the end of 2025, and Russia’s ambassador to the UN in Geneva said that Russia is open to any Ukraine peace talks, if Trump starts them. Forecasters believe that there is a 59% chance (range: 50%-63%) that there is a ceasefire (even if it doesn’t comprehensively bring about peace) between Ukraine and Russia by the end of 2025—they generally think that the US applying a carrot and stick approach to both parties is likely to succeed, and that Ukraine’s position becomes worse with only European support.

Forecasters also lowered their probability of Russia detonating a nuclear weapon on Ukranian soil: their current forecast is a 0.46% chance of this occurring (range: 0.05%-0.8%) by the end of 2025, a bit down from their aggregate of 0.68% in week 39 of this year.

In the event that Ukraine doesn’t receive adequate security guarantees, some have suggested that it could use spent plutonium to build an implosion-type atomic bomb, similar to the one detonated over Nagasaki, within months.

President Biden is now allowing Ukraine to fire long-range missiles into Russia. Russia says that it “raises tensions” and is a “serious escalation”.

Nikolai Patrushev, a Navy advisor to Vladimir Putin, claimed that the US and UK are planning to sabotage underwater internet cables. Some interpreted this as a signal that Russia itself is planning to do so, and US officials expressed concern about this back in September. Meanwhile, a Russian spy ship was escorted away from an area in the Irish Sea containing critical undersea cables and pipelines.

Protesters are occupying the parliament of the Russia-backed Georgian breakaway territory Abkhazia, which Georgia lost control of after the 2008 war. The dispute concerns property reforms that could allow Russians to buy up property in the region. The President says he will resign if the protesters leave.

Canadian forces are training for deployment in Latvia.

Middle East

President-elect Trump’s Cabinet picks include a number of Iran hawks, which forecasters believe raises the risk of a US-Iran war by the end of 2025. This week, Marco Rubio has been announced as the Secretary of State, Mike Waltz as National Security Advisor, and Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense. In aggregate, forecasters believe there is an 11% chance (range: 2%-22%) that the US will cause more than 20 Iranian military fatalities on Iranian soil by the end of 2025. They still think this is unlikely in part because the incoming Administration may want to apply “maximum pressure” to Iran via sanctions before considering any major military action.

Israel destroyed a facility that was doing research and hosting equipment that could be used to design the plastic explosives that surround uranium in a nuclear device. The facility was not part of Iran’s declared nuclear program, so the Iranians aren’t able to acknowledge the significance of the attack without admitting they violated the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.

An Iranian MP says Iran should move forward with a nuclear test.

Iran has likely developed fentanyl-based chemical weapons.

The US has delivered a draft ceasefire proposal to Lebanon.

East Asia

There have been a lot more Chinese PLA incursions into Taiwan's Air Defence ID Zone (ADIZ) this year compared to last year. This may be part of China’s “anaconda strategy” to squeeze Taiwan.

North Korea has ratified a mutual defense treaty with Russia, which commits both countries to providing immediate military assistance to each other using “all means” necessary if either faces “aggression”.

The US, South Korea and Japan conducted a joint military exercise.

President Biden and President Xi are set for a final meeting to discuss cyber-crime, trade, Taiwan, and Russia.

Biorisk

H5N1

H5N1 continues to spread in North America. In British Columbia (Canada), a teenager is in hospital in critical condition after being infected with an avian (not bovine) H5N1 strain. The patient was exposed to dogs, cats and reptiles, but the source of the infection is still unknown, and some researchers expressed concern that the mutations in the case could enhance human-to-human transmission of the virus as well as its severity. However, contact tracing yielded no positive results, and one forecaster says that such mutations occasionally turn up but usually aren’t indicative of anything more serious.

Based on a serological survey of dairy farms in the US, forecasters estimate that there may have been thousands (tentatively, 7K to 12K) of undetected cases in the country. Given that there haven’t been any US deaths in the past couple of years, this suggests that the infection fatality rate (IFR) of the bovine strain of H5N1 could be quite low (<0.1%), but most of those exposed to it have been healthy farm workers, and the IFR could be higher among the elderly, children and those with pre-existing conditions. And as the Canadian case potentially illustrates, adaptation to human receptors could lead to greater virulence as well as transmissibility.

Six more human cases of H5N1 have also been found in the United States, five in California, one in Oregon.

In Tulare County, California, where dairy farms have been hard hit by H5N1, the CDC is making free testing for H5N1 available to people. KVPR reports that "the clinic was part of a brand new initiative by the CDC, known as the Farmworker Enhanced Surveillance Program, to test for bird flu in states with some of the highest virus caseloads.” A CDC webpage states: “CDC is working with pharmacy networks eTrueNorth and Walgreens on a pilot program to provide free testing of symptomatic persons in California and one other state initially that have confirmed H5N1 bird flu infections in people, poultry, or livestock.”

Mpox

Clade 1b mpox continues to spread in Africa. It has been found in recent cases in Zambia and Zimbabwe, and cases continue to climb in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Africa is still seeing about 2,800 mpox cases each week, of all clades. Vaccination campaigns are ongoing in the DRC and Rwanda, and vaccinations are set to begin in Nigeria on November 18.

The first case of Clade 1b mpox has also been detected in the United States, in a patient who had recently returned from East Africa.

Tech

Another AI safety researcher, Richard Ngo, has quit OpenAI. Ngo worked on policy at the company. In a statement he made online he wrote: “...while the “making AGI” part of the mission seems well on track, it feels like I (and others) have gradually realized how much harder it is to contribute in a robustly positive way to the “go well” part of the mission, especially when it comes to preventing existential risks to humanity.”

OpenAI outlined a policy proposal on Wednesday, calling on the US government to support the AI industry with funding and resources. The proposal calls for special economic zones for AI development, a fleet of small nuclear reactors, and a “North American Compact” on AI to compete with China. Trump previously said that he would repeal President Biden’s AI executive order, which does put some reporting requirements on the developers of the most powerful AI models.

President-elect Donald Trump repeated his view that the US must “win the A.I. arms race with China (and others)”.

The Financial Stability Board has warned that AI could pose risks to financial stability.

OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman has returned to OpenAI.

Ilya Sutskever suggested that AI scaling has plateaued, which is congruent with OpenAI’s rumored difficulties, though forecasters also noted that Sutskever has an incentive to advocate for novel approaches to AI now that he runs a new company.

Amazon is considering another multi-billion dollar investment in Anthropic.

Elon Musk has expanded his lawsuit against OpenAI to include Microsoft. As part of the lawsuit a series of new emails have been released between OpenAI’s cofounders. They indicate that as early as 2017 Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever had concerns about Sam Altman’s judgment and power-seeking behavior, and that they raised similar concerns about Elon Musk. Elon Musk, for his part, expressed concern that Google Deepmind CEO Demis Hassabis could create an AGI dictatorship, and said that the OpenAI & Microsoft partnership made him feel nauseous.

ASML’s CEO says the company expects the chip market to grow 9% annually through 2025, passing the $1trillion mark around 2030.