Ask A Genius 1543: Ceasefire Uncertainty, ICC Politics, and the AI Arms Race
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/10/13
How do ceasefire fragility, ICC politics, women’s representation in China, and an accelerating AI arms race intersect to shape global risk and human rights today?
Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner range from roof repairs to world repairs. They discuss the fragility of Israel–Hamas ceasefires, contested ICC warrant actions involving Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, and the staggering toll on journalists in Gaza. Jacobsen notes patterns of ceasefire violations and hopes hostages return while Palestinians gain relief. They examine Xi Jinping’s remarks on women in governance, the legacy of the 1995 Beijing Declaration, and gaps between rhetoric and implementation. Finally, they compare today’s AI arms race to nuclear escalation, warning that incentives to accelerate outstrip safety, and leadership competence remains the decisive, missing ingredient today.
Carole’s Little Library
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Any complaints or comments for the day?
Rick Rosner: I shingled the roof of Carole’s little library. Any kind of home improvement chore just takes three times as long as you estimate.
You have to seal the underlayment, put down the tar paper, measure and cut the shingles, and nail them in the right place. Even though I was only doing four square feet of roof, it took two and a half hours, which is ridiculous.
Maybe if I were an experienced roofer with proper tools, it would be different. Shopping for the nails and getting the right ones took twelve to fifteen minutes because there are so many different kinds. It’s the rule of three: take the time you think it will take and then triple it.
Jacobsen: What’s happening? Looking at the American news for today, or world news. They’re supposed to release—Hamas is supposed to release—some of the hostages. Everyone’s waiting to see if the peace holds.
Rosner: What do you think? You’ve been over there. You’ve talked to people.
Jacobsen: People seem sincere about wanting peace, but peace in the sense of at least a ceasefire. It’s like winning and not losing not being the same thing. Ceasefire and peace are partly the same, partly not. The history of ceasefires between Israel and armed groups in the Palestinian territories is terrible. If you go by history, you should expect a violation of the ceasefire—either from an armed group out of Gaza or elsewhere in Palestinian territory, or from the IDF. If it happens, it’s more likely to be the IDF; that tends to be the pattern, not always, but generally.
Rosner: The tendency is to behave as if they have impunity.
Jacobsen: There’s a lot of context around the ICC warrant from Pre-Trial Chamber I of the International Criminal Court, which issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, but not for Mahmoud Abbas. Domestically, Netanyahu has faced multiple corruption charges, including breach of trust and fraud. There would be reason to continue conflicts to avoid some of that, at least from a leadership perspective. But in terms of getting hostages back, giving Palestinians some relief from killings, and from a journalistic perspective—seeing fewer journalists die in Gaza is a good thing. As of September 2025, at least about 189 journalists and media workers had been killed since October 2023, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. That’s not talked about much, but it will likely shake up journalistic opinion.
Press Murders
Rosner: They wear press vests, hats, and clearly labeled gear. They make it very obvious who they are, and that doesn’t stop Israel from killing them.
Jacobsen: Theoretically, you can also manipulate numbers on killings. You can shoot someone in the knee—maim or dismember but not kill. Then they return to society unable to work. There are probably many such cases in different conflicts. I’m hopeful, like everyone else, but the history is not encouraging. At a minimum, the hostages will come back and return to Israeli society and their loved ones, which is really good. There will be some relief for Palestinians from ongoing suffering.
Jacobsen: On the international news front, there’s a lot of focus on how President Xi Jinping of the People’s Republic of China has said there should be more women in governance. That’s a good statement. What are your thoughts on it?
Rosner: Have they made statements like this before, or is this new for the Chinese government?
Jacobsen: It’s interesting. I don’t know the gender makeup of their leadership—I don’t expect it’s very good—but the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action was adopted in 1995, and its 30-year review (Beijing+30) was marked in 2025 at CSW69 with a new political declaration. These are periodic reviews rather than renewals every five years.
The Beijing Declaration has probably produced more impact than any other rights document ever. Every five years, they hold a review session. This year was one of those review years at the Commission on the Status of Women. So it has been about thirty years since its adoption and twenty-five years of renewals. They’ve certainly been involved in some of the key points of gender equality.
Whether those statements have translated into real-world implementation is probably another question.
Incompetent Regime
Rosner: I have two thoughts. One is that, as an American living under an incompetent regime, I want other countries’ governance—especially China’s—to be terrible too, so we don’t fall too far behind until we can get decent leadership back in America, if that’s even possible.
On the other hand, from a human rights point of view, shutting down half the population by excluding women from participation is disastrous. I don’t know what the actual conditions are for Chinese women, or if it’s even desirable to be part of the Chinese government. But it would be great if we could compete squarely with China. Right now, we have idiots in charge, which disadvantages everyone in America.
I’ve heard—and I think you’d probably agree from people who know China—that China had pretty dysfunctional leadership for a while, and now it seems to be improving.
Jacobsen: Yes, they did a massive crackdown on corruption, as far as I know, but with an absolute slant towards maintenance of Jinping’s power structure and governance.
Rosner: And with technology spinning out of control, I’m not even sure what competent leadership would look like. It may turn out that competent leadership would actually shut down AI development as much as possible until we can get a better handle on it. But I don’t think either country is putting meaningful limits on AI.
AI Incentives
Jacobsen: There’s a huge disincentive to impose limits. In fact, there’s an even bigger incentive to accelerate.
Rosner: It’s an arms race with something that’s going to be smarter than us and doesn’t even need to be conscious to behave in dangerous ways, because it’s trained on human data.
You could liken it to the arms race in the 1950s and 1960s—the nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union—where we kept building more and more warheads, more and more powerful nukes. That could only go on for so long. It was mostly over by the late 1950s, because there’s very limited use for a 50-megaton nuclear warhead.
You drop five megatons on a city and everyone’s dead. You drop fifty, and everyone’s still dead—just with a bigger hole in the ground. Whether it’s 500 feet deep or 700 feet deep, it’s still a crater.
That part of the arms race ended, but then they developed MIRVs—Multiple Independently Targetable Reentry Vehicles—which allowed a single missile to carry eight warheads that could strike different targets. That continued until the early to mid-1960s, when both the U.S. and the Soviet Union had about 7,000 nuclear warheads each.
Since then, we’ve calmed down somewhat, but we still each have roughly 1,700 deployed warheads—enough to destroy the planet several times over. So we’re still in danger with nuclear weapons, and now we’re going to endanger ourselves again with AI.
And I don’t know—is there any country in the world that could actually make a difference? The big countries have the big companies. If Estonia were to put limits on AI, it wouldn’t mean anything.
It’s bad luck—and maybe not entirely luck—that we have the dumbest president in history at a time when we’re engineering the next entities that will be the smartest on the planet.
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