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Will Bilderberg still be relevant as the future of war is transformed?

June 12, 2018

Will Bilderberg still be relevant as the future of war is transformed?

This year’s summit is all about war – but what they all want to conquer is artificial intelligence

A protester’s sign saying ‘Stop The New World Order’ near the venue of the 2016 Bilderberg conference in Dresden, Germany.
A protester’s sign saying ‘Stop The New World Order’ near the venue of the 2016 Bilderberg conference in Dresden, Germany. Photograph: Chad Buchanan/Getty Images

This year’s Bilderberg summit is a council of war. On the agenda: Russia and Iran. In the conference room: the secretary general of Nato, the German defence minister, and the director of the French foreign intelligence service, DGSE.

They are joined in Turin, Italy, by a slew of academic strategists and military theorists, but for those countries in geopolitical hotspots there is nothing theoretical about these talks. Not when the prime ministers of Estonia and Serbia are discussing Russia, or Turkey’s deputy PM is talking about Iran.

The clearest indication that some sort of US-led conflict is on the cards is the presence of the Pentagon’s top war-gamer, James H Baker. He is an expert in military trends, and no trend is more trendy in the world of battle strategy than artificial intelligence. Bilderberg is devoting a whole session to AI this year – and has invited military theorist Michael C Horowitz, who has written extensively on its likely impact on the future of war.

Q&A

Does Russia present a credible threat to the UK?

Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, left, shakes hands with China’s president, Xi Jinping
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Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, left, greets China’s president, Xi Jinping. China and Russia are investing heavily in artificial intelligence. Photograph: Sergey Guneyev/AFP/Getty Images

Horowitz sees AI as “the ultimate enabler”. In an article published just a few weeks ago in the Texas National Security Review, he quotes Putin’s remark from 2017: “Artificial intelligence is the future, not only for Russia, but for all humankind. Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world.”

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Bilderberg 2015 – Where Criminals Mingle with Politicians

June 16, 2015

Bilderberg 2015 – Where Criminals Mingle with Politicians

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Out at my car I couldn’t be bothered to get into the whole ‘probable cause’ thing so I flung open the doors and with as much good cheer as I could muster, said: “Help yourself”. They did. While one set of police searched my car with their torches, another lot clustered round me and asked me questions: “Where do you live? What are you doing here?” I’m a journalist and I live in a police state. What about you?

A little while later, bored and a bit cold, I decided to point out to the officers that while they were treating a journalist like a criminal, there were actual criminals about to arrive at the hotel they were guarding. Convicted criminals. Such as disgraced former CIA boss, David Petraeus, who’s just been handed a $100,000 (£64,000) fine and two years’ probation for leaking classified information.

I decided to reward their vigilance with a chat about HSBC. The chairman of the troubled banking giant, Douglas Flint, is a regular attendee at Bilderberg, and he’s heading here again this year, along with a member of the bank’s board of directors, Rona Fairhead. Perhaps most tellingly, Flint is finding room in his Mercedes for the bank’s busiest employee: its chief legal officer, Stuart Levey.

A Guardian editorial this week branded HSBC “a bank beyond shame” after it announced plans to cut 8,000 jobs in the UK, while at the same time threatening to shift its headquarters to Hong Kong. And having just been forced to pay £28m in fines to Swiss regulators investigating money-laundering claims. The big question, of course, is how will the chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne, respond to all this? Easy – he’ll go along to a luxury Austrian hotel and hole up with three senior members of HSBC in private. For three days.

– From Charlie Skelton’s excellent article: Bilderberg 2015: Where Criminals Mingle with Ministers

Charlie Skelton is a Oxford University educated comedy writer, journalist, artist and actor who has covered the Bilderberg meeting for the Guardian since 2009. This year’s meeting took on a particularly eventful twist for Mr. Skelton, something he wrote about in a powerful article published last week.

 

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