When Luigi Mangione murdered CEO of UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, last year, I could frame my reaction in the same words that several commentors, US officials and indeed Keir Starmer used to position themselves, quite awkwardly, on the US kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro last weekend. That is to say, I would “shed no tears” over his passing. By coincidence, Maduro and Mangione are being held in the same jail.

A wide cohort of my fellow leftists are sympathetic, if not outright supportive of Mangione, a sufferer of chronic back pain who took it upon himself to kill one of the highest-ranking corporate executives in the US healthcare system, which is extractive by design and leaves millions of the poorest Americans without adequate care. If I am being truthful, I also admit to feeling a twisted righteousness that some of that suffering was, for once, travelling in the opposite direction. Not being able to square that within my own moral framework, there’s an attraction in ducking a position and instead retreating to a simple, noncommittal: “well, I won’t shed a tear for Brian Thompson”.

The most frequent apology I read for US’s military intervention in Venezuela is that Maduro was a bad man, his regime a bad regime, and while we cannot reconcile the unprovoked decapitation of a foreign government within the existing framework of international law, we should not mourn a regime under which eight million Venezuelans have fled the country and most of the remainder live in hardship, with no peaceful recourse to any alternative government. So, maybe it’s fine..? And in any case, it’s happened now. Let’s not provoke the Donald.

The problem with this line of argument is that, practically, law only has force if it commands the approval of all those actors you wish to be bound by it. This applies especially in the international sphere, where law is essentially a voluntary system of norms with no binding mechanisms of enforcement. As such, you cannot excuse yourself from rules to which you have agreed, even where the outcomes of doing are good and your reasons just (neither of which are remotely guaranteed in this case, btw), because ideological diversity between states means they all have their own self-justifying exceptions to which they can appeal.

China has reasons for invading Taiwan and Tibet, which can be justified in terms found in Chinese ideology. Russia has reasons for invading Ukraine and Georgia, which can be justified in terms found in Russian ideology. Even if we believe that Western ideology is just and correct (which in any case, is not the US’s primary motivation), there is no workable international norm of nonaggression which would allow one ideological deviation but not the others.

It is perfectly possible that there are some people, such as Brian Thompson or Nicolas Maduro, that the world would be better off without, and even some that morally deserve to die. But laws against murder do not permit such judgements, they apply in fairly blunt and blanket fashion because it is not possible to sustain a peaceful and ordered society where everyone is permitted to pursue their own discretionary justice against people they think ought to die. Instead, we choose a society in which many bad people live, and prosper, often at the expense of others, but interpersonal and organised violence is heavily regulated and discouraged.

US exceptionalism is thus only admissible from two further positions. First, that international law is a sham not worth honouring and everyone should just give it up. Second, that the US should treat international law entirely strategically, and disobey it only as far as is advantageous, according to its estimations of the gains and costs incurred by noncompliance. It is reasonable to think that the departure of the Trump administration from preceding US administrations can largely be understood as a shift from the second position to the first.

Starmer and his European counterparts seem to imagine that they still face a similar choice: between degrading international law and degrading the mythical special relationship. But the thing about the US obviously not caring what you do or say is that it cuts both ways: the Trump administration is probably as indifferent to British criticism and rebuke as it is to British advice, influence and endorsement. Moreover, the UK is decreasingly a big country that mulls whether to comply (or not) with international law and increasingly a mid-size country that will have to appeal to it. Without taking a view on the prospects for invasion, some significant violation of international law with respect to Greenland now seems highly likely, and in the event, it would be advantageous if the UK could do more than announce that it would now “shed some tears”.

This is one of two posts that mark my getting back to blogging. This a techy one and the other is a politics one, which very roughly are the dual themes of this new blog.

I’m working on regulatory innovation at the moment. It’s a dry topic that’s critical to some not-very-dry things: space, AI, engineering biology and autonomous vehicles. While the first three tend to make me feel insignificant, autonomous vehicles excite me on a basic, childish level. I want one. I want to send it on stupid errands, have it pick me up from the pub or take me on holiday while I sleep at the wheel.

My only objection to this incredible promise lies in the name: most such vehicles, including self-driving cars and most drones, aren’t ‘autonomous’. I will try to convince you that this is important and not at all the pedantry of an former political theorist.

What autonomy means

Autonomy is a relatively young concept in engineering sciences, but it is an old one in philosophy, where is it underpins an incredibly large and diverse body of thought about liberty, rationality and individual rights. It is not a particularly famous idea but it often underpins some much more famous ones, chiefly freedom and consent, as well as domination. Pretty much all liberal philosophy rests on some conception of the autonomous individual, and its also really important in various fields of applied ethics like biomedical ethics and criminal law.

Autonomy evolved out of an effort to understand where morality came from if not Gods, monarchs or nature. There is a long tradition of thought, beginning with Immanuel Kant, that supposes that autonomy is what makes humans special, that it separates us from animals. So the argument goes: animals are governed by base, primal instincts beyond their control, whereas humans are governed by goals they set for themselves about what is the right and good way to live (this logic also underpinned Kant’s racist distinctions between Europeans and ‘savages’). And if there is no higher authority telling us what it right and good, such as Gods or Kings, then we should protect that autonomy at all costs, and uphold various rights and freedoms (on speech, assembly, association, etc.) that guard our autonomy.

Autonomy is thus usually defined in terms of the capacity to choose our own goals, not actions. If this sounds odd to you, that’s probably because we often think of freedom (close cousin of autonomy) as being the absence of constraints on our actions. But this leads to some seemingly perverse conclusions — like the addict whose chases their addiction without constraint. Are they really free just because they do as they please and nothing stops them? By the same token, is a poor hermit who has nothing but wants for nothing either and is perfectly happy, really unfree?

This dilemma occurs because even a ‘free’ person is constrained by what they actually want, and so a satisfying definition of freedom surely involves the ability to choose goals that are actually good for us and stick to them. We are all a bit unfree, in that sense. True freedom then, is being somebody who sets their own goals, who decides what’s important for them. In this way, a free person isn’t totally ungoverned, but rather self-governing. They still live by rules, but rules they make for themselves. We call this concept autonomy.

It is through this capacity we set very trivial goals like ‘I will do park run every week’ and also significant ones like: ‘family is most important’, or ‘I have obligations to people in my nation/community, but less so to people who are not’. Autonomy is not just the capacity to do X over Y, it is the capacity to value X over Y, and as such it is the basis of all moral choice and an defining condition of politics.

What self-driving cars do

Most vehicles described as ‘autonomous’ are apparently so because they take lots of decisions without being told what to do. They make choices about actions, unlike mere machines, which simply execute them. This is an important innovation but it is not what autonomy means. A slave might take lots of decisions about how to go about their work, and maybe much smarter and better placed than their master to do so. But if you are enslaved, by definition, you are being deprived of autonomy.

Autonomy is less the ability to make rational decisions in general, which computers and animals also do — that’s intelligence — and is more about self-governance, agenda-setting and the determination of what is good and right to pursue in the first place. Self-driving cars therefore, are almost paradigmatically not autonomous. They are very intelligent, insofar as they are incredibly good at choosing actions that fulfil the goals they inherit from humans. But insofar as a human still chooses to travel from A to B, and they choose why, they are acting autonomously and the car is not.

Admittedly, the choice of goals and actions is not really so clean a distinction. To get a destination, a car must select millions of goals and actions, which are nested and dependent on each other. ‘Get in the slow lane safely within 100 metres of the exit’ is a goal when you are looking down the decision tree (towards actions that it achieve it), and an action when you look up it (towards the goal(s) it serves). Self-driving cars do therefore set goals, of a sort, but only all of them are directly instrumental to the goal of getting on to the next road, and then the next, and the next, until it reaches a destination it had no part in determining.

Perhaps if my car chooses what music to play, we can say is slightly more autonomous. If it chooses what time to leave home in order to pick up my kids from school, making judgements about safety, punctuality and dinner, it is exercising moderate autonomy — and this level isn’t implausible. But until it starts going to shops on its own, and crucially, for its own reasons, it is not fully autonomous.

Why it matters

Part of this is pedantry and I won’t pretend otherwise. It’s my blog and I write and post autonomously. But there will come a time when it will be important for the public to understand the difference between ‘smart/intelligent things’ and ‘autonomous things’. There is currently much fanfare in the world of AI about the possibility of superintelligence and its implications for AI risk/safety. A general artificial intelligence comparable to or surpassing humans is, if we are to believe the hype, not really that far away.

Without getting drawn into the debate about how likely this is, it is worth pointing out that the core condition of a deviant AGI subverting human intentions is not so much one becoming superintelligent but becoming autonomous. That is to say it would override, expand or reinterpret its own system prompts in ways we did not forsee or intend. Presumably it is feared that autonomy will develop organically out of intelligence, as it did for humans, because while are spending trillions on making machines more intelligent, there is no comparable investment in developing ones that determine their own agendas and imperatives.

And why would there be? The financial potential of AI invariably lies in having them serve purposes that humans want and are prepared to pay for. How can I reliably make money from a machine that has its own agenda? I’m not even sure I’d want to get in a truly autonomous car. Fortunately, the vehicles in development now are not autonomous but simply very smart cars. That is what we should call them, along with smart data, smart meters, smart homes, smart speakers and TVs. Alas, for this reason and others, a great wrong was done to us at the turn of the century.

This is one of two posts that mark my getting back to blogging. This a politics one and the other is a techy one, which very roughly are the dual themes of this new blog.

Funny how you wait your whole life for a competitive alternative to Labour and then two come along like buses. Perhaps it is a good problem to have, to be spoilt for choice when for so long we had none. But then there is the very real concern that a failure to rally behind one might spell disaster for both, squandering a once in a lifetime opportunity to reshape the electoral landscape.

To some extent ‘Your Party or the Green Party’ is the choice nobody asked for. The opportunity is the basically same for both: the broad electoral bases of Labour and the Conservatives have become unsustainable under the weight of historic political realignment, but have been propped up by an electoral and party system that confers on them a huge incumbency advantage. Fuelled by a confidence in this truism and the animosity of the 2017-19 civil war, Labour have relentlessly pursued the fraction of marginal constituencies that mark their frontline with the Tories and treated their own ‘core’ voters as an irrelevance, operating on the assumption that the electoral system would continue to gift them them those seats.

This was, until now, entirely rational — there really has been very little electoral incentive to court or even forgo antagonising the left. Until unthinkably, the inconvertible logic of the British two-party system finally cracked. Constituencies in London, urban centres and university towns which were once no-choice-but-Labour safe seats are now up for grabs. In a delicious irony for an embittered left, so safe were these seats supposed that many of those selected for them are now in Starmer’s top team and may have to fight to keep them.

I suspect most left-wing voters are not ideologically concerned whether it is Your Party or the Greens that contests them. The task is clear: to laser-target these seats with counternarratives on immigration, Palestine and redistribution, insurgency vibes, and exploit dissatisfaction with, and their distinctiveness from, Labour. The goal is a landmark result in May’s locals to secure further credibility as ‘real party’ and as the primary bulwark against Reform, teeing up a general election run where they take enough seats to force themselves into coalition with Labour, and establish themselves as a permanent feature of the British electoral map.

So which to choose? And why are there two options anyway? Interestingly, although Labour’s internal struggle has opened the floodgates for both of them, that struggle has also profoundly shaped one but not the other, and marks the only notable distinction between them.

The founding promise of Your Party is that it will be authentically ‘yours’, in the sense of being led by its membership. Ostensibly, it has no leader, Corbyn and Sultana only claimed they were co-leading the founding of the new party. Its six MPs have sought to position themselves as stewards of that party, the actual constitution of which will be determined through a series of regional assemblies and a founding conference in November. Both the roadmap to establishing the party and its core messaging (and the working title), put being radically grassroots, “doing politics differently – where decisions are shaped by all”, at the centre of the project.

It is also a logical product of Corbyn and Sultana’s last decade in the Labour Party. Corbyn was elevated to the top of Labour by the membership after Ed Miliband replaced the electoral college with a one-person, one-vote system. The shock election of Corbyn was not even met with the pretence of deference to the party’s democratic choice via this new method, but an immediate and bloody campaign by MPs and party officials to remove him, which failed but tarnished the party’s reputation. Under Starmer’s leadership, a new electoral system was approved with support of the unions and MPs, to their mutual advantage and at the expense of members, which would prevent another insurgency from the left.

So it is not much wonder, that Corbyn is attracted to the idea of a party that is member-led and incontrovertibly democratic by design. Such a party would be a permanent home for the Labour movement, from which they could not be evicted and would a enjoy greater consistency between ethics and electoral strategy. It would probably willingly re-elect Jeremy as leader, but assuming that is not a role he wishes to revisit, Sultana, the left’s next most visible figure, would be the presumptive frontrunner.

All this talk of likely leaders does somewhat detract from the point of Your Party however, which seems to be genuine attempt to move away from having a charismatic leader as the defining feature of a party’s public offering. The same cannot be said for the Green Party, which is moving in precisely the opposite direction.

Until recently, the Green Party had two co-leaders, and an inspiring, pluralistic, nicey-nicey political innovation that was intended to reflect the party’s diversity and experiment with new modes of political leadership (presumably, it also doubled their capacity for appearances). The election of Zack Polanski over Adrian Ramsey and Ellie Chowns signifies two things. First, the decision to come out firmly on Labour’s left flank, rather as Ramsey and Chowns proposed, to build a larger, looser coalition incorporating other voters with which the party has made inroads, such as environmentally-minded centrists in rural constituencies.

Second, and as an extension of this choice to be a narrower, nimbler, insurgent left party, it signifies the party opting to revert to having a charismatic, conversation-leading, attention-sapping leader at the wheel. To start with, by electing Polanski the Green Party chosen to have a single face for the public to recognise. Beyond that, Polanski clearly has a way about him, and early doors his stock is appreciating fast. No doubt he is enjoying a honeymoon period, but he is also making timely and articulate interventions into public debate, is fashioning a clear direction for the party under his leadership, and marking it out as a clear alternative to Reform — and in the ability to do that, a clear alternative to Labour. The self-styled “eco-populist” has explicitly argued that the Greens should “learn” from Farage, which implicitly is saying ‘we should bet big on my personal powers of persuasion’. The effort to emulate Farage extends to selfie video monologues, a willingness to indulge in heated media debates and ploughing into difficult issues Labour would rather avoid. It’s hard not to see the logic of taking inspiration from Reform though, who are polling at 27%-ish at the time of writing, a limited company with no party infrastructure that is built entirely on the back of Nigel Farage’s personal brand.

This is the main substantive difference between Your Party and the Greens, one aims to be a democratic mass movement that generates an electoral proposition, while Polanski’s Greens aspire to orchestrate a mass movement through a skilful figurehead. Whilst the relationship between party and movement is old question for the left that long predates this moment, I suspect that most for now would be happy to support whichever was the most winningest. With that in mind, if there is another important difference between the two it is that the Greens are organised, established and on the up, while Your Party has managed to spectacularly implode before being founded.

I can understand why living and dying by the personal capabilities of a messianic leader doesn’t sit well with many on the left. But the debacle of Your Party demonstrates the contradiction at its heart and the necessity of some measure of hierarchical leadership: its founders wanted a party that would not be led by party elites, but it looks to be dead on arrival as a consequence of internal conflict between party elites over the direction the should take and who controlled various executive functions.

You can take the MPs out of Labour, but can you take Labour of the MPs?