Jonathan Brun

Peace Museum Hiroshima and Understanding Paths to Peace

As we shuffled through the Hiroshima Peace Museum alongside the throngs of tourists, I wondered what was the point. The museum was so packed that you were basically pushed along by the crowd and dared now take time to read or see much. I even got frustrated with those who stopped to observe the museum exhibits and consequently slowed down the progress of the crowd and created further human traffic jams. 

While this specific museum requires a major upgrade to handle the crowds and an update of its exhibits and layout, my thoughts wandered to the experience and impact of museums related to peace, war and genocide. As a firm proponent of non-violent action against oppression and a staunch anti-war advocate, I often think about how to convince more people to shift away from their overt or tacit support of violence for political motives – otherwise known as war or oppression. There are sufficient books and documentaries for anyone curious about the benefits of non-violence, yet only a very small percentage of the population is aware of the potential of non-violence. Nearly everyone has the belief that there is no real alternative to war.

With numerous ongoing violent conflicts in 2025 – Ukraine, Palestine, D.R.C., Sudan, Myanmar, and elsewhere, it is an unsettling time for many. Not only are there ongoing conflicts, but many world leaders express pro-war sentiment on a regular basis and there seems to be a true failure to deescalate conflicts and rhetoric. Words can lead to violence. It is just as important to stem the vitriol as it is to find paths to peace in ongoing conflicts. As we exited the museum, my family and I were happy to be done with the unpleasant experience, but I thought to myself how much of an impact the Hiroshima Peace Museum or other peace museums really have. How many people who are made aware of the horrors of war do anything afterwards? I suspect the number is quite low. This is presumably similar to any single life experience. No one changes their beliefs or actions after a single experience, but only and rarely after numerous experiences and events that shake their underlying assumptions about a topic or issue. 

Anyone who has studied war and the history of man and violence will be aware of the horrendous suffering we are capable of inflicting on each other. In more situations than I can recall, war was caused or encouraged by a few small groups of people who believed they had the right answer or who were unwilling to compromise. It seems unlikely that we will change human nature or that we will move away from hierarchical structures where one person and their entourage have disproportionate power over a large body of human beings who want to live, breathe and enjoy their time on earth. We must therefore not only focus on teaching the horrors of war, but place much more focus on the alternatives to war that actually work. No self respecting warm blooded human wants to be trampled on. People will fight back if pushed. If the belief remains that violence is the only way to combat violence, we are doomed to continue to our past. We must find a way to educate and more importantly, train people and groups in the tactics and practices and strategies of non-violent non-cooperation that can stop war and force the uncompromising leaders to compromise or capitulate.

Much of the work to document this has been done by the Albert Einstein Institute and its creator Gene Sharp. This work needs to be somehow better communicated and offered in a compelling way to help protect ourselves from ourselves. One day, when I have more free time, I would very much like to contribute to this effort. In the meantime, I simply encourage all those who decide to visit peace museums from Hiroshima to Yad Vashem to understand that there are other paths to affecting political change that do not require tanks, guns, bombs and death.

Fighting Envy

I am currently reading the book The Curve of Time which is a journal by a widowed mother who spent her summers coasting the waters near Vancouver Island with her four children in the 1930s. The book is a lovely tribute to a bygone era of abandoned Indian villages, limited technology, soaring mountains and endless days that blend with each other. In our frenetic and always connected world of 2025, the book reminds me that there are other ways to live and experience the planet we inhabit. For the past few summers, my family has taken a few days to canoe camp with friends and disconnect. It is a splendid respite from the non-stop bustle of the modern world.

Many years ago I attended a lecture by David Suzuki, the Canadian environmentalist, scientist, public speaker and advocate for the planet. The talk was held at McGill University around 2010 in the context of sustainability conference. During his talk he spoke of the rising tides and temperatures, the perils for the planet, the need to change our ways and the risks we are taking with our overconsumption and pollution. Of all the things he said, one item stood out. David Suzuki highlighted how the average home in Canada had dramatically grown in size over the past few decades. In his youth in the 1950s and 60s, homes were often no larger than 1200-1500 square feet. Today, the average house is often over 2500 square feet. The same growth in size can be found in our cars, wardrobes and many other things. Suzuki argued that to solve our sustainability issues, all we had to do was go back to our old habits which at the time, were perfectly adequate for most people.

The famed investor Charlie Munger was once asked what drove the world and our need to consume. The natural response many of us will have to this question is greed, money, lust, or other emotions that push us to fight for top place and dictate our relations with other people. Munger asserted the main emotion driving our world was in fact Envy. Our envy for what others have is what pushes us to buy more, go bigger and chase an elusive goal that may never really be achievable. This envy is more prevalent today than ever before thanks to the internet, Instagram, influencers and our brains being bombarded with the perfect lives of our friends, relations and celebrities. ‘Keeping up with the Jones’ is nothing new, but I feel it is an overwhelming emotion today that in many ways drives non-optimal decisions. As far as I can tell, too many of us consume too much, save too little and cannot resist the urge to YOLO.

Growing up in a wealthy neighbourhood and at a private school, it was clear that the disease of envy spared no one, especially not the upper classes. If your friend had an Audi, you needed a Porsche. I recently heard of a study (there are so many) that demonstrated that no matter what a person had in income or wealth, they always thought that twice that amount would be the right amount to have. If you had 100$ in your bank account, 200$ would make all the difference. If you had 1 million dollars, 2 million would be enough. I recently know someone who made about 3 million dollars selling their business, they now want 10 million. The lack of satisfaction is what drives us and despite the negative aspects to chasing money, there are positive sides to this human urge to have more.

Without this envy for what others have, our desire to compete and our need to show off, we may still be living in mud huts on the savanna. Though there are many negative aspects to chasing cash, we must admit that it has numerous positive effects too. Someone famously quipped, “Even if you win the rat race, you are still a rat”. True. But the rat race has helped us invent new liberating machines that do so much work for us, develop air travel that brings the world together and dramatically extend our lifespans and improve our quality of life. The trick, I suppose, is to know when enough is enough for you.

There is no shortage of evidence that people on their deathbeds do not lament the jet they never had. Nearly all the time, they seek the people they love or loved and regret the things they said and did that impacted their human relationships. The challenge is not to knowledge and understand the realities we face at death, but rather to live our life on a day to day basis that leads to the end we know we seek. Today, more then ever before, we are subject to constant temptation. Algorithms play us like a fine tuned violin – leading us to waste time watching meaningless videos instead of calling family and friends, buying things we certainly do not need and making decisions we should not make. The economic precarity that so many people face only exacerbates this situation as we seek some form of temporary balm from the knowledge that our financial position is not good and unlikely to improve.

Discipline and focus are the only bulwark against this assault on our senses. These two skills should be taught at our schools from a young age and reinforced as much as possible. As Steve Jobs said, the most important thing you do is what you say No to. The exercise I always recommend to my friends who ask about their career choices or situation is the white paper vivid vision. The task is to take a blank sheet of paper and write out in narrative form the life you want or the vision you have. This can be a big challenge, but its rewards are tremendous. This task of visioning your life and then living your vision is an urgent task because you just never know when things might end or how fate and fortune may decide your life. An old friend of mine who I had travelled with recently passed away at only 50 years old. He left behind the life he wanted – a wife, three kids and great job. He had everything he had sought, but he hit some very bad luck. This can happen to any of us and knowing what we truly want and trying to live it on a daily basis is the only defence we have against unpredictable misfortune and external influence.

Crossing the Rubicon

Tribalism is deeply rooted in the human psyche. For tens of thousands of years, humans evolved and survived only thanks to their participation in a tribe. Very few people can survive without the support of others, finding food, hunting, shelter and protection from attacking tribes requires group effort and coalescence. Even today, though more and more people live solitary lives with work from home and a near persistent attachment to a glowing screen, we still remain part of tribes – be they virtual or real.

In ancient times, one of the most serious punishments for crimes, aside from death or torture, was to be banished from your tribe and cast into the wilderness to near certain death. This happened regularly in traditional societies who sent a strong message that breaking tribal norms was not acceptable. Even antiquity saw people who caused nuisance banished from the city – from Athens to Rome to 19th century France, forced emigration was a common form of punishment and an important tool in maintaining the integrity of society along the lines of what the leaders sought. Despite a changed society, tribalism remains alive and well.

Certain societies claimed and attempted to rid themselves of tribalism. This was most commonly done by communist societies who sought internationalism. Communists believed that only by transcending our tribal divisions could we all be brothers and sisters and move humanity forwards. Even the national anthem of the communist cause was called l’Internationale. Through this dogmatic approach to anti-tribalism a new form of tribalism was created, one centered around the communist party and its leadership apparatus. Oh, the irony!

Liberal societies have also attempted to eliminate or reduce tribalism. Today, it is all too common hear people say they do not see the color of people’s skin, that they are not racist or that they believe in equality for all. More aggressive efforts around this belief that we can break down artificial barriers has taken the institutional form of Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (DEI) programs that seek to create opportunity for those who were historically excluded from wealth and power. This modern form of affirmative action was aimed at creating a more balanced representation in power structures. These efforts have received widespread backlash and the recent election in 2024 of Donald Trump and other right wing people around the world. A large part of the population has clearly repudiated the breaking up of their tribe. The most liberal and individualistic of all societies, the United States of America has taken the lead in many ways. My only reasonable conclusion is quite simple: People want tribes.

One of the guiding lights in this DEI effort was the writer Ibrahim X. Mendi who wrote a book titled How to be an Anti-Racist. Without delving into this interesting book, suffice to say that the philosophical framework that he proposes has a number of problems. He attempts to identify all the layers of racism and bias within society and quickly discovers that there are a lot of intersecting layers of shit. Black people in white society are obviously discriminated against, but black men discriminate against black women, black women discriminate against lesbian black women who discriminate against black men. The circular nature of all societies inevitably leads to circular discrimination and when taken to the individual level, we get lost in a sea of bias and tribes. In many ways, people want to feel superior to others and they will find a way to feel that if at all possible. Whether they acknowledge that they are supercilious is an entirely different story. It is impossible to clearly navigate yourself out of such a swamp of bias.

Ultimately, the only way a rational human seeking a “normal” life can operate is to adhere to a tribe that is broadly theirs and then hang on for dear life. This is how we have survived so far and it seems unlikely to change. How many people change their tribe, their religion, their fundamental believes or their social environment when compared with their parents?

This brings me to my main issue, which is the clear and remarkable cohesion of the communities in the face of overwhelming evidence of the most horrific of all human endeavors: genocide. A rational person might make the ridiculous mistake of thinking that a tribe who was subject to genocide only 80 years ago would have an elevated sense of humanity. This tribe would understand the horrors of another tribe trying to wipe them off the face of the planet. This tribe would understand not only what can lead to genocide, but also how other groups would react and how a genocide could be stopped – or not. If you were to make such a mistake, like me, you are excused. What seems to be the case is that being subject to genocide in fact creates the exact opposite effect. The collective intergenerational trauma from one genocide has enabled a next generation to inflict a genocide on others. Looking at history now, this seems stupidly obvious.

Groups of people who are subject to horrible violence have a shared and common response: coalesce. When your group is being attacked the natural human reaction is not to reflect, discuss, or think about the causes of this violence. The reaction is simple and clear, protect the group and reinforce the leadership so that they can do their best to protect the tribe. The examples of such a reaction are too numerous to count. When the British firebombed cities in Germany, they hoped to cause an uprising against Hitler and the Nazis. It had the exact opposite effect – people dug deeper into the Nazi cause. The same failed tactic was employed in Japan. When countries apply sanctions to countries like Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Iran, North Korea or Russia with the hope of starving the leadership and driving an uprising, the exact opposite happens – people rally around the leadership who claim to protect the interests of the nation. This patten has been repeated over and over again and yet we learn nothing. More than anything else, humans are social animals and we will literally kill other people’s children rather than give up our position within our own tribe.

In the current genocide in Gaza I have been astonished by the Jewish community outside of Israel. It would be one thing for Israelis to whole heartedly support the massacre – which they broadly do (thought it is starting to slow), but the support by the North American Jewish Community for the massacre in Gaza has been rock solid. While there are groups such as Jewish Voices for Peace (JVP) or Independent Jewish Voices (IJV) who advocate against the massacre of children (crazy!), all of the mainstream Jewish groups continue in December 2024 to push against any restriction whatsoever on ripping children to pieces. The Center for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) just recently lambasted the Amnesty International conclusion that Israel is committing a genocide and insisted the Canadian government continue its policy of sending military equipment to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

Within the religious organizations, almost no synagogue or temples have taken any meaningful action against the genocide or against the mainstream Jewish organizations. Even a highly progressive (on most issues) organization such the Mile-End Chavurah, where I live, refuses to take a position on killing tens or thousands of children or creating the largest group of amputees in history. Tribalism is a very deeply rooted part of society and it seems almost nothing can break its cohesion.

Organizations are difficult things to change. Because organizations are themselves a tribe with a leadership and a member body, they tend to have the same conservative and protective impulses as the broader tribe as the organization itself wants to protect the cohesion of the organization. Whether an organization is religious, secular, political or military in nature, they all seek stability before anything else. If we cannot set high expectations for organizations to take a stand on a moral issue, we could perhaps hope that liberal intellectuals who claim to seek enlightenment would shudder and then act when faced with overwhelming evidence of a genocide being conducted in their name. Self proclaimed luminaries who claim to fight tribalism, such as “anti-religion” television pundit Bill Maher, Harvard Professor Steven Pinker or Physicist David Deutsch have all spent decades claiming that tribalism and violence should be fought against. Yet, they all, still, remain firmly behind Israel as the massacres continue. These big men are in fact, quite small. Personally, I prefer to cross the proverbial Rubicon and distance myself from any tribe who finds it acceptable to kill children, even if that means losing some of my friends and family members as people of my tribe.

It seems very little can be done to prevent tribes from killing each other over and over again with no end in sight. Whether it was the Protestant-Catholic wars in Europe, the Tutsi-Hutu massacres in Rwanda, the communist-capitalist cold war battles or some other tribal conflict, humans have scarcely evolved. I wish I could offer some form of optimism amidst the surging increase in tribal conflicts in Sudan, Myanmar, Ethiopia, Syria, Ukraine, Palestine and elsewhere, but it is difficult to see much hope. The only solace I have found is in reading history and the stories of how despite all our past conflict, there was a slow and steady progress of humanism, with the torch of humanity often carried by a very small minority of people and luminaries from one generation to another. Let us hope that we avoid the worst in the years to come and somehow find a way to reduce tribal tensions and find our common humanity again.

Some thoughts on AI

AI is the talk of the town these days. Though the hype from OpenAI’s ChatGPT has now calmed a bit, there is still a general expectation that AI will revolutionize society, take jobs and solve many of our challenges. I must admit that even I was caught up in the fervor and felt that ChatGPT and large language models were a big step forward towards general artificial intelligence and the automation of many of our mundane tasks along with potential tools to make scientific breakthroughs. After a couple of years, my enthusiasm is more tempered.

AI is a catch-all term for many different techniques and approaches to building a machine that can reason in some form or another. While the current Large Language Models (LLMs) have provided a new and novel way of interacting with extremely large bodies of written material, they remain a specific set of techniques and mathematical tools. My current conclusion today (August 7, 2024), is that LLMs are helpful, but are also fundamentally limited. It is my feeling that LLMs are basically a new and more advanced form of Search. They allow you to interact with very large sets of information and receive responses that have been digested and reformulated in a way that sounds human. Though the responses sound human, they are are just reformulations of information that is already contained within the large dataset. LLMs have not clearly shown an ability to reason our provide material that is not already in existence. Yes, LLMs are taking bits of information at multiple layers and sticking them together to create something that appears new and novel, but it is unclear that it is indeed anything new and novel.

To be completely fair, a large proportion of human work in both business, administration and even the arts is all about taking various bits and pieces of information, various sources of inspiration and then creating derivative works that seem new. The evidence for this int he music industry and in writing are numerous and frequent. In that sense, AI and LLMs will have a large role to play as they are doing tasks and work that humans are doing. However, just because the LLMs can do this type of rearrangement of information does not mean they can reason outside the dataset itself.

Chess is a game with a clear winner and loser and a scale that indicates the strength of players. The scale ranges from about 400 ELO to 3200 ELO for the World Champion. This fascinating study shows how an AI trained on lower level chess games (1000 ELO) can play Chess at a higher level than its training set (1500 ELO). On the surface this may indicate that an AI can move out and above its training set, but upon closer examination this is not correct. Very often 1000 ELO players make a move in chess that is worth a 1500 ELO, but the players do not consistently play at 1500. The AI is basically able to grab the best moves from these low level players and recompose the data to play consistently at 1500. Interesting, but not true intelligence. When the AI is trained on a data set of 1500 ELO, where the higher caliber players tend to be more consistent in their play, the AI cannot really exceed the 1500 ELO level.

Beyond the technical limitations of LLMs and AI, there are a number of social considerations we can think about when talking about AI and its potential adoption. AI is creating interesting artwork, but does it matter? Humans ultimately want a few basic things. They want community, they want to create something and they want to be recognized by their pears. AI has a role to play in society and can in many cases act in helpful ways – everything from online psychologists, tutors and personal assistants – but I am skeptical it can replace our core human needs.

To take the example of Art. Humans love to create things, we see this from a young age with drawings and paintings all the way to full grown adults who have attained enough material wealth to retire but decide to continue to work and create out of pleasure or egotistical need or both. AI can create infinite quantities of art, film, video games and more, but is it worth anything? If we specifically look at the art world for clues, it is clear that humans place value on authentic art work that has a social value. We are willing to spend million of dollars on a piece of work by a famous artists that is a unique piece and is recognized by society as valuable and a status symbol. Instead of buying the expensive artwork you could by a reproduction that is completely indistinguishable from the original work with the exception of its known authenticity. Even forgetting about the million dollar work, many people will not pay for non-unique works of art because they recognize that something that is available in near-free infinite quantity has no value. This is broadly true of AI generated work: it is infinitely available and therefore of little value.

What is true of the value of AI art is also likely true of much of the material AI can and will produce. There is no point in generating mountains of AI marketing material, white papers or other items if there is a set limit on consumption. In the past the cost of creating mediocre quality marketing material was the cost of labour. Today, anyone can create unlimited marketing material at a next to nothing cost. Therefore, the quality of marketing material will come to matter much more than quantity. There are only so many hours in the day for humans and there is now far more material than we can ever consume. Humans will turn to higher quality material produced by reputable brands. More than ever, brand matters. It is critical to not dilute brand through AI shortcuts or else you end up killing the golden goose. Having actual expertise and being able to effectively communicate that to other humans though services and products will become the defining element of success. This is not a fundamental change, expertise has always been highly valued, but the landscape in which we operate has changed with more noise that experts will need to wade through to have their message heard.

At my company Nimonik, we have built a Regulatory and Industry Standards AI Chatbot that allows you to interact with laws, regulations, standards and other compliance information. We have built this with a team of two people, open source technology and infrastructure from Amazon AWS and a few other sources. It is an inhouse product and does not use commercial tools like Open AI’s ChatGPT. The tests of our chatbot over the last few months with industry experts shows that it is quite good and helpful, though not perfect. The point of the story here is that it does not take that many resources to build a robust chatbot that is quite helpful. As many AI investors are currently finding out, there is minimal ‘moats’ around these businesses and their ability to stay afloat will come under tremendous pressure from competition and self built tools.

One use case that AI/Computers is really good at is interpolating data from known data sets. This was done for Google’s project around GO and then for the work to map the structure of proteins with AlphaFold. The AI models and software they built has accomplished work that would have taken humans decades. This is very helpful. It is not however quite as revolutionary as we might thing. Google has basically built a giant calculator for protein structures. It is an important milestone that will accelerate medical research and discover and we should celebrate this accomplishment, but the tool remains a human driven tool.

Last, but not least, I recently had the chance to test Tesla’s famous Full Self Driving. I have owned a Tesla for 3 years and love it, but we did not purchase the Full Self Driving due to its cost and our rather infrequent use of our car. Tesla offered us a 1 month trial of this technology that Elon Musk keeps claiming to be near perfect and able to drive us anywhere with minimal human intervention. I was not impressed. On the highway the car did fine, but as soon as we were in town or had some slightly abnormal configuration the FSD stumbled. This is despite the fact that there are a ton of Tesla’s in Québec (maybe about 300,000) and therefore Tesla should have a very good dataset of our roads and infrastructure. From everything I saw, Tesla’s FSD is not capable of extrapolating outside of its knowledge base and really struggles with surprises. This is a fundamental problem that no one seems to have solved. The only true self driving experience is Waymo and they have solved the problem not through complex AI, but through good old fashioned super detailed mapping of roads and infrastructure. It seems that even Elon has not outsmarted a more primitive and basic approach to self-driving.

AI remains interesting and promising, but my main conclusion is that we are still far off from General Artificial Intelligence and it remains debatable whether it is even possible. For now we continue to make substantial progress in computer science, mathematics and computational power. This has produced OpenAI and other helpful products. We have stuck a label of AI on these tools and companies, but in reality they seem to be very much a continuation of our previous work that created all the technology and software we use today. Progress will continue to be made in a progressive and iterative way, the way it has always been done. Do not hope for miracles, but do expect more progress on many fronts.

The Bloodbath Continues

After 300 days or so since the October 7th attacks in Israel, the genocide of Gaza and the Westbank continues largely uninterrupted. Other mass killings in Sudan and elsewhere also continue along with ongoing massacres in Ukraine. None of these conflicts have much hope in sight.

Coincidentally, during these conflicts I have been progressively reading War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. If there is one message about war that echoes through time it is that it is both horrible and also a self propelling force. Once started, conflict, war, death and self-sacrifice by perfectly normal people becomes a growing snowball that carries forward despite any efforts to slow or stop it. The momentum of a conflict only stops once one side is completely destroyed or a stalemate emerges. Ukraine is leaning towards a stalemate. Gaza is leaning towards complete destruction. In Tolstoy’s Russia, the Napoleonic wars only ended when Napoleon’s 600,000 strong army was reduced to 50,000 thanks to Russian efforts, the scale of Russia and particularly, Russia’s winter. After that debacle, the end of Napoleon was inevitable.

Despite all the protests and all the efforts by Palestinian and Human Rights advocates around the world, Israel continues to erase Palestine from the face of the Earth. As the French Holocaust survivor stated, at this point the only thing we can do is document and bear witness to the genocide so that one day, maybe, some people may be held accountable. Like the genocide in Rwanda, the massacres in East Timor or the deaths by Pol Pot, the current war is a train that cannot be stopped until everyone is dead or incapacitated. There seems to be no one from the outside that will or can intercede and as long as the United States keeps sending money and weaponry to Israel, the Israeli nationalists will continue working hard to fulfill their clearly stated aim of establishing a Greater Israel that includes all of Biblical Israel and maybe more, even if the country is built on the corpses of Palestinian women and children.

There is little hope things will change, but let us at least document those are guilty and those who are complicit in these war crimes. One day we will look back on this massacre in the same way we look back on so many of our crimes.