“Don’t use your left hand for contact with others,” advises the U.S. Marine Corps in a new edition of the Iraq Culture Smart Card (very large pdf) which is distributed to military personnel in Iraq. “It is considered unclean.”
It seems late in the day for such niceties. Amid the daily brutality of the Iraq war, there is probably little to be gained by courtesy or to be lost by mere rudeness.
But the Marine Corps Intelligence Activity evidently thinks otherwise.
The MCIA has produced an updated Iraq Culture Smart Card, dated May 2006, which features rudimentary information on Iraqi customs, religion and language. A copy was obtained by Secrecy News and is available here (in a very large 22 MB PDF file).
“One thing became increasingly clear: AI doesn’t simply introduce a new category of risk. It changes the speed, scale, complexity, and interaction of risks that already exist.”
In an ideal world, we would not have state or federal climate intervention research bans. We would have researchers and institutions that would not shy away from revealing the good, the bad, and the ugly of these technologies and doing so responsibly.
“What excites me is that it’s very tempting to be very discouraged, and say, ‘Oh, we’ve got these archaic institutions that are calcified and you could never change them.’ But I think we’re in the middle of a technological revolution that will upend lots of things, and does provide a window.”
Ask people what worries them most right now, and they’ll say the cost of living and their livelihoods, not climate change. But those concerns are not separate.