Think Tanks Helping Government Use AI for Peace Deals

Here is more from The Economist:

In a messy age of grinding wars and multiplying tariffs, negotiators are as busy as the stakes are high. Alliances are shifting and political leaders are adjusting—if not reversing—positions. The resulting tumult is giving even seasoned negotiators trouble keeping up with their superiors back home. Artificial-intelligence (AI) models may be able to lend a hand.

Some such models are already under development. One of the most advanced projects, dubbed Strategic Headwinds, aims to help Western diplomats in talks on Ukraine. Work began during the Biden administration in America, with officials on the White House’s National Security Council (NSC) offering guidance to the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a think-tank in Washington that runs the project. With peace talks under way, CSIS has speeded up its effort. Other outfits are doing similar work.

The CSIS programme is led by a unit called the Futures Lab. This team developed an AI language model using software from Scale AI, a firm based in San Francisco, and unique training data. The lab designed a tabletop strategy game called “Hetman’s Shadow” in which Russia, Ukraine and their allies hammer out deals. Data from 45 experts who played the game were fed into the model. So were media analyses of issues at stake in the Russia-Ukraine war, as well as answers provided by specialists to a questionnaire about the relative values of potential negotiation trade-offs. A database of 374 peace agreements and ceasefires was also poured in.

 

Here is a link to CSIS's Futures Lab, which is run by Dr. Benjamin Jensen.

Jill Biden Joins Milken Institute

Here is more from the Milken Institute:

While women make up half the U.S. population and nearly half the workforce, women’s health has faced decades of underinvestment, which is critical for wider economic productivity. Today, the Milken Institute announced the launch of the Women’s Health Network to serve as a global collaborative to collate, elevate, and advance existing and new efforts across the women’s health ecosystem. The Milken Institute has also announced that Dr. Jill Biden, the former First Lady of the United States, has joined its new Women’s Health Network as Chair.

 

The Milken Institute is a California-based think tank and the Milken Center for Advancing the American Dream (MCAAD) is expected to open this summer in Washington, DC.

Think Tank Quickies (#515)

• Former Project 2025 chief Paul Dans has first major interview of Trump's presidency. 
• EPA moves forward with Project 2025.
• Trump, who said Biden's 11th-hour pardons were void because Biden signed them with an autopen, were made following similar arguments from the Heritage Foundation.
• Demonstrators protest Project 2025 outside Heritage Foundation.
• Well-connected think tank Third Way will launch an 18-month Signal Project, including polling, to identify Trump Administration actions "that are most relevant to key voters and how best to frame those issues."
  
• Heritage Foundation prepared report calling for ending US aid to Israel.
• Biden's former national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, is taking up two new university roles.  He will be Harvard Kennedy School's inaugural Kissinger professor of the practice of statecraft and world order.  He'll also be a faculty affiliate of Harvard's Belfer Center.  He's also taking up a role at the University of New Hampshire as a senior fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy and the Franklin Pierce School of Law.
• FAS: Chinese Nuclear Weapons - 2025.
  
• Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity: "A think tank that promotes free markets." 
• After Jan. 6, 2021, Elbridge Colby published fewer of the deeply researched think tank papers that had defined his career in favor of harder-edged social media posts.