Is AI going to kill us? Or take our jobs? Or is the whole thing overhyped? Depends on who you ask.
At this point, you have tried ChatGPT. Even Joe Biden has tried ChatGPT, and this week, his administration made a big show of inviting AI leaders like Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to the White House to discuss ways they could make “responsible AI.”
But maybe, just maybe, you are still fuzzy on some very basics about AI — like, how does this stuff work, is it magic, and will it kill us all? — but don’t want to admit to that.
No worries. We have you covered: We’ve spent much of the spring talking to people working in AI, investing in AI, trying to build businesses in AI — as well as people who think the current AI boom is overblown or maybe dangerously misguided. We made a podcast series about the whole thing, which you can listen to over at Recode Media.
But we’ve also pulled out a sampling of insightful — and oftentimes conflicting — answers we got to some of these very basic questions. They’re questions that the White House and everyone else needs to figure out soon, since AI isn’t going away.
Read on — and don’t worry, we won’t tell anyone that you’re confused. We’re all confused.
Just how big a deal is the current AI boom, really?
Kevin Scott, chief technology officer, Microsoft: I was a 12-year-old when the PC revolution was happening. I was in grad school when the internet revolution happened. I was running a mobile startup right at the very beginning of the mobile revolution, which coincided with this massive shift to cloud computing. This feels to me very much like those three things.
Dror Berman, co-founder, Innovation Endeavors: Mobile was an interesting time because it provided a new form factor that allowed you to carry a computer with you. I think we are now standing in a completely different time: We’ve now been introduced to a foundational intelligence block that has become available to us, one that basically can lean on all the publicly available knowledge that humanity has extracted and documented. It allows us to retrieve all this information in a way that wasn’t possible in the past.
Gary Marcus, entrepreneur; emeritus professor of psychology and neural science at NYU: I mean, it’s absolutely interesting. I would not want to argue against that for a moment. I think of it as a dress rehearsal for artificial general intelligence, which we will get to someday.
But right now we have a trade-off. There are some positives about these systems. You can use them to write things for you. And there are some negatives. This technology can be used, for example, to spread misinformation, and to do that at a scale that we’ve never seen before — which may be dangerous, might undermine democracy.
And I would say that these systems aren’t very controllable. They’re powerful, they’re reckless, but they don’t necessarily do what we want. Ultimately, there’s going to be a question, “Okay, we can build a demo here. Can we build a product that we can actually use? And what is that product?”
I think in some places people will adopt this stuff. And they’ll be perfectly happy with the output. In other places, there’s a real problem.
How can you make AI responsibly? Is that even possible?
James Manyika, SVP of technology and society, Google: You’re trying to make sure the outputs are not toxic. In our case, we do a lot of generative adversarial testing of these systems. In fact, when you use Bard, for example, the output that you get when you type in a prompt is not necessarily the first thing that Bard came up with.
We’re running 15, 16 different types of the same prompt to look at those outputs and pre-assess them for safety, for things like toxicity. And now we don’t always get every single one of them, but we’re getting a lot of it already.
One of the bigger questions that we are going to have to face, by the way — and this is a question about us, not about the technology, it’s about us as a society — is how do we think about what we value? How do we think about what counts as toxicity? So that’s why we try to involve and engage with communities to understand those. We try to involve ethicists and social scientists to research those questions and understand those, but those are really questions for us as society.
Emily M. Bender, professor of linguistics, University of Washington: People talk about democratizing AI, and I always find that really frustrating because what they’re referring to is putting this technology in the hands of many, many people — which is not the same thing as giving everybody a say in how it’s developed.
I think the best way forward is cooperation, basically. You have sensible regulation coming from the outside so that the companies are held accountable. And then you’ve got the tech ethics workers on the inside helping the companies actually meet the regulation and meet the spirit of the regulation.
And to make all that happen, we need broad literacy in the population so that people can ask for what’s needed from their elected representatives. So that the elected representatives are hopefully literate in all of this.
Scott: We’ve spent from 2017 until today rigorously building a responsible AI practice. You just can’t release an AI to the public without a rigorous set of rules that define sensitive uses, and where you have a harms framework. You have to be transparent with the public about what your approach to responsible AI is.
How worried should we be about the dangers of AI? Should we worry about worst-case scenarios?
Marcus: Dirigibles were really popular in the 1920s and 1930s. Until we had the Hindenburg. Everybody thought that all these people doing heavier-than-air flight were wasting their time. They were like, “Look at our dirigibles. They scale a lot faster. We built a small one. Now we built a bigger one. Now we built a much bigger one. It’s all working great.”
So, you know, sometimes you scale the wrong thing. In my view, we’re scaling the wrong thing right now. We’re scaling a technology that is inherently unstable.
It’s unreliable and untruthful. We’re making it faster and have more coverage, but it’s still unreliable, still not truthful. And for many applications that’s a problem. There are some for which it’s not right.
ChatGPT’s sweet spot has always been making surrealist prose. It is now better at making surrealist prose than it was before. If that’s your use case, it’s fine, I have no problem with it. But if your use case is something where there’s a cost of error, where you do need to be truthful and trustworthy, then that is a problem.
Scott: It is absolutely useful to be thinking about these scenarios. It’s more useful to think about them grounded in where the technology actually is, and what the next step is, and the step beyond that.
I think we’re still many steps away from the things that people worry about. There are people who disagree with me on that assertion. They think there’s gonna be some uncontrollable, emergent behavior that happens.
And we’re careful enough about that, where we have research teams thinking about the possibility of these emergent scenarios. But the thing that you would really have to have in order for some of the weird things to happen that people are concerned about is real autonomy — a system that could participate in its own development and have that feedback loop where you could get to some superhumanly fast rate of improvement. And that’s not the way the systems work right now. Not the ones that we are building.
Does AI have a place in potentially high-risk settings like medicine and health care?
Bender: We already have WebMD. We already have databases where you can go from symptoms to possible diagnoses, so you know what to look for.
There are plenty of people who need medical advice, medical treatment, who can’t afford it, and that is a societal failure. And similarly, there are plenty of people who need legal advice and legal services who can’t afford it. Those are real problems, but throwing synthetic text into those situations is not a solution to those problems.
If anything, it’s gonna exacerbate the inequalities that we see in our society. And to say, people who can pay get the real thing; people who can’t pay, well, here, good luck. You know: Shake the magic eight ball that will tell you something that seems relevant and give it a try.
Manyika: Yes, it does have a place. If I’m trying to explore as a research question, how do I come to understand those diseases? If I’m trying to get medical help for myself, I wouldn’t go to these generative systems. I go to a doctor or I go to something where I know there’s reliable factual information.
Scott: I think it just depends on the actual delivery mechanism. You absolutely don’t want a world where all you have is some substandard piece of software and no access to a real doctor. But I have a concierge doctor, for instance. I interact with my concierge doctor mostly by email. And that’s actually a great user experience. It’s phenomenal. It saves me so much time, and I’m able to get access to a whole bunch of things that my busy schedule wouldn’t let me have access to otherwise.
So for years I’ve thought, wouldn’t it be fantastic for everyone to have the same thing? An expert medical guru that you can go to that can help you navigate a very complicated system of insurance companies and medical providers and whatnot. Having something that can help you deal with the complexity, I think, is a good thing.
Marcus: If it’s medical misinformation, you might actually kill someone. That’s actually the domain where I’m most worried about erroneous information from search engines
Now people do search for medical stuff all the time, and these systems are not going to understand drug interactions. They’re probably not going to understand particular people’s circumstances, and I suspect that there will actually be some pretty bad advice.
We understand from a technical perspective why these systems hallucinate. And I can tell you that they will hallucinate in the medical domain. Then the question is: What becomes of that? What’s the cost of error? How widespread is that? How do users respond? We don’t know all those answers yet.
Is AI going to put us out of work?
Berman: I think society will need to adapt. A lot of those systems are very, very powerful and allow us to do things that we never thought would be possible. By the way, we don’t yet understand what is fully possible. We don’t also fully understand how some of those systems work.
I think some people will lose jobs. Some people will adjust and get new jobs. We have a company called Canvas that is developing a new type of robot for the construction industry and actually working with the union to train the workforce to use this kind of robot.
And a lot of those jobs that a lot of technologies replace are not necessarily the jobs that a lot of people want to do anyway. So I think that we are going to see a lot of new capabilities that will allow us to train people to do much more exciting jobs as well.
Manyika: If you look at most of the research on AI’s impact on work, if I were to summarize it in a phrase, I’d say it’s jobs gained, jobs lost, and jobs changed.
All three things will happen because there are some occupations where a number of the tasks involved in those occupations will probably decline. But there are also new occupations that will grow. So there’s going to be a whole set of jobs gained and created as a result of this incredible set of innovations. But I think the bigger effect, quite frankly — what most people will feel — is the jobs changed aspect of this.
What is the debt ceiling? What happens if the US breaches it? And other questions you were too embarrassed to ask.
This spring, Congress finds itself standing at a familiar precipice. Once again, if lawmakers don’t agree to suspend or raise the debt ceiling, the federal government risks defaulting on its loans, which would likely cause a massive economic crisis. To add to this urgency, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen recently announced that a default could happen as early as June 1.
At issue is not whether the debt ceiling — a legal cap on how much the US can borrow — should be raised, but how. Democrats, led by President Joe Biden, insist that Congress pass a “clean” debt ceiling increase that does not include any trade-offs to guarantee its passage. House Republicans, meanwhile, are eager to pass spending cuts in exchange for approving any debt ceiling increase, with some saying they’re unwilling to compromise on this point.
This standoff has led to concerns that the US could come dangerously close to actually defaulting, which it came within 72 hours of doing in 2011.
The reason Congress continues to land in the same place is that raising or suspending the debt ceiling, much like funding the government, is something it must address on a regular basis. Because it’s must-pass legislation and requires the backing of both chambers, the party that’s out of power in the White House or in the minority in Congress has often used this measure as leverage to extract policy concessions or send a political message.
Republicans are attempting to do just that this time around, pushing significant spending cuts in the Limit, Save Grow Act, which is their opening bid to negotiations. At this point, Biden has been unwilling to consider such tradeoffs, though the two sides are scheduled to meet at the White House next week to discuss potential options.
For years, the US has been in a dangerous cycle in which the minority party tries to squeeze every concession it can out of the process, debt ceiling negotiations go down to the wire, and any miscalculation on the part of lawmakers could tip the US toward default. Thus far, this year hasn’t proven any different.
- What is the debt ceiling?
The first thing to know about the debt ceiling is that, as the name implies, it has something to do with the national debt.
Congress passes spending bills and tax laws; the revenues from those taxes pay for the spending, but often there’s not enough — and the US Treasury has to borrow money to make up the difference.
Year after year of doing this has brought us the national debt, currently at more than $31 trillion. This debt has been accrued under both parties: During the Trump administration, the national debt rose roughly $7.8 trillion, and under the Biden administration so far, it’s gone up about $3.7 trillion.
The debt ceiling is simply the cap on how much the US can borrow — from banks, investors, foreign countries, etc. — to help pay for the spending Congress has enacted.
As Vox’s Dylan Matthews has explained, the United States is unique in having a debt limit that lawmakers need to suspend or raise every few years. Were the US to “hit” its debt ceiling, it would effectively mean that it couldn’t pay any of its bills.
A debt limit was first established in 1917 in order to “make it easier to finance mobilization efforts in World War I,” per the Brookings Institution. Before that, Congress had to issue bonds every time it needed to borrow money, which proved unwieldy. Setting a debt ceiling enabled the US government to take on debt to more quickly and efficiently finance the military.
But the debt ceiling doesn’t automatically adjust for inflation or a growing economy, so it has needed to be raised over time. Since the 1960s, Congress has raised the debt limit more than 70 times; 20 of those times have been in the last 23 years. And as the present situation suggests, it has become increasingly used as leverage in budget negotiations during periods when government is split between Republicans and Democrats. —Li Zhou
- When is the US expected to breach the debt ceiling?
Technically, the US already hit the debt ceiling in January, and the Treasury Department has been employing accounting tactics known as “extraordinary measures” to buy some more time. That’s basically a fancy term for accounting gymnastics that buy the government more time before it truly runs out of money.
But as Yellen said in her letter, the Treasury Department is running out of such moves — and the so-called “X-date” might be as early as June 1. —Li Zhou
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Alex Wong/Getty Images
- Has the US ever breached the debt ceiling before?
The US has never knowingly and purposefully breached the debt ceiling before. Depending on how you define “default,” it may have defaulted in the past, but in bizarre situations that bear no resemblance to the current moment (one was the aftermath of the War of 1812). —Dylan Matthews
- What would happen if we do breach the debt ceiling?
Once we breach the debt ceiling, the federal government will not be able to pay its bills, or for things like Social Security checks, payroll for service members and other federal employees, and Medicare reimbursements. Interest payments on past debt could go unpaid, which would mean the US government would default on its debts. In 2011, the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department planned on prioritizing interest payments, acknowledging that they would miss payments of other things like Social Security checks, veterans’ benefits, etc.
The US would almost certainly enter a recession, probably a quite severe one, and the whole world could face a massive financial crisis. Beth Ann Bovino, chief US economist at Standard and Poor’s, was hardly alone in 2017 when she predicted that “the impact of a default by the U.S. government on its debts would be worse than the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008.” — Dylan Matthews
- Has raising the debt ceiling always generated this much drama?
While there are concerns that this year’s standoff could be the most dangerous yet, political threats about the debt ceiling have been around for a long time.
In the 1950s, Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower navigated standoffs with Democratic members of Congress about increasing the debt ceiling. Much as Republicans do today, Senate Democrats argued that the federal government should focus on reducing its expenditures rather than raising the debt cap. By withholding their support for a higher ceiling, lawmakers forced the administration to consider serious spending cuts.
Since then, the debt ceiling has been weaponized by members of both parties. Republicans, for instance, like to point out that Biden was among the senators who opposed raising the debt limit in 2006 when Republicans had congressional control. (Then-Sen. Barack Obama also voted no on raising the debt ceiling.)
But the US was never actually in danger of default in that instance — Democrats didn’t filibuster the final vote on the debt limit year.
Experts say the debt ceiling fight in 2011 was a turning point in that regard, with some lawmakers actually seeming open to a possible default. That year, Republicans balked on increasing the debt limit and refused to do so until President Obama agreed to key spending cuts, some of which they ultimately secured. The US got so close to default that year that it led Standard & Poor’s to downgrade the country’s credit rating, a move that prompted stocks to drop at the time.
“I’d definitely say 2011 was a step forward in how aggressively the debt ceiling was weaponized to secure partisan policy goals,” Josh Bivens, the director of research at the Economic Policy Institute, previously told Vox. “I’d say 1995 was also important; [House Speaker Newt] Gingrich threatened this but didn’t take it as far as the GOP did in 2011.”
In the years since, Republicans have become more aggressive in holding debt ceiling increases hostage to either elicit a policy demand or send a message. According to data analysis Aaron Blake did for the Washington Post, that pattern is noticeable across administrations, with Republicans much more likely to rail against the debt ceiling increase if a Democrat president is in charge, and Democrats doing the same to a lesser degree:
In the 10 debt ceiling votes under a Republican administration, an average of 65 percent of House Republicans and 74 percent of Senate Republicans voted in favor of adjusting or suspending it. But in Democratic administrations, those numbers decline to 24 percent and 20 percent, respectively.
Under Democratic presidents, an average of 86 percent of House Democrats and 98 percent of Senate Democrats voted for debt ceiling increases. Under Republican presidents, those numbers drop to 51 percent and 58 percent, respectively.
The willingness to filibuster the debt ceiling, experts say, is also a sign of how partisan many legislative fights have become — even ones where the entire US economy hangs in the balance. —Li Zhou
- Can Joe Biden raise the debt ceiling by himself?
A president acting on his own to unilaterally raise the debt ceiling is untested and would be controversial. That said, a few ideas have been floated on how the Biden administration can act if Congress won’t.
Mint the coin
It’s strange but true: As blogger Carlos Mucha pointed out back in 2010, an existing law gives the US treasury secretary the power to issue platinum coins of any value she wishes.
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DonkeyHotey via Flickr
The intention of the original 1997 law was about making it easier to produce platinum coins for the international coin collector market, but in 2011, Mucha revived the idea in the context of that year’s debt ceiling standoff. The treasury secretary could issue, say, a platinum coin worth $2 trillion, deposit it into the Treasury’s account at the Fed, and use those funds to sustain the government until the debt ceiling is raised.
The Obama administration found the idea too unserious there to use, but the legal case for minting the coin is as solid as platinum. Just ask debt ceiling hardliner Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), who was sufficiently concerned about the option to introduce legislation to close the platinum coin loophole. The plain text of the 1997 law clearly allows the treasury secretary to do this, and Jerome Powell, the Fed chair who in a past career was an expert on the debt ceiling and its dangers, is arguably legally required to accept the coin as a deposit. (For what it’s worth, Powell has all but thrown cold water on this idea.)
Invoke the 14th Amendment
Some legal scholars have argued that Section 4 of the 14th Amendment, which specifies that “the validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law … shall not be questioned,” renders the debt ceiling unconstitutional, as it threatens the validity of the US’s public debts by creating the possibility of default. The New York Times’s Jim Tankersley reports that the White House has been seriously debating the idea in recent weeks.
This is hardly a consensus position among constitutional law experts, but if Biden were to declare he was ignoring the debt ceiling because it’s unconstitutional, it’s not clear that anyone would have legal standing to sue him and challenge the decision.
That helped encourage a number of political actors, from then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to former President Bill Clinton, to urge Obama to invoke the 14th Amendment during his debt ceiling showdowns. Obama declined repeatedly, arguing in 2013 that “if you start having a situation in which there’s legal controversy about the US Treasury’s authority to issue debt, the damage will have been done, even if that were constitutional, because people wouldn’t be sure.”
Declare ignoring the debt ceiling to be the “least unconstitutional” option
University of Florida law professor Neil Buchanan and Cornell law professor Michael Dorf have, in a series of papers, proposed a way out of the debt ceiling that’s related to but distinct from the 14th Amendment option.
Buchanan and Dorf note that Congress, by setting spending and tax policy as well as a debt limit, has given the president three mandates: to spend the amount Congress authorizes, to tax the amount Congress authorizes, and to issue as much debt as Congress authorizes. When the debt ceiling is breached, it becomes impossible for the president to obey all three of these legal requirements.
Prioritizing spending on certain activities and cutting it elsewhere (as the Treasury planned to do in 2011) usurps Congress’s spending power by cutting spending unilaterally. Raising taxes without congressional authority would usurp Congress’s taxing power. And ignoring the debt ceiling would usurp Congress’s power to set debt limits.
The last option — respecting Congress’s taxing and spending powers while ignoring its debt limit — is the “least unconstitutional” option, Buchanan and Dorf argue. This judgment would no doubt be challenged in court, but it’s arguably less dramatic than the president unilaterally declaring the debt ceiling a violation of the 14th Amendment. (This may be my favorite of the options here.)
Issuing quasi-debt while the crisis plays out
Steven Schwarcz, a professor at Duke Law and an expert on capital markets, has proposed getting around the debt ceiling by having the Treasury Department create a “special-purpose entity” to issue new securities, distinct from traditional Treasury bonds, that can pay for government expenditures. Because they’re not Treasury bonds, these securities would not be subject to the debt limit.
This may seem bizarre, but Schwarcz got the idea from state and municipal finance in the US; many states raise most of their debt with special-purpose entities, rather than by directly issuing bonds, often so they can get around their own state debt limits. —Dylan Matthews
- Biden, as Obama’s vice president, negotiated the debt ceiling standoff in 2011. How did that play out?
The 2011 Budget Control Act was the result of that year’s debt ceiling standoff.
It included $917 billion in direct spending cuts, mostly implemented by capping “discretionary” spending, which includes defense programs and everything else the government does that isn’t a mandatory entitlement program like Social Security, food stamps, or veterans’ benefits.
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The bill then mandated another $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction to be determined through a congressional committee (colloquially called “the supercommittee”). If the supercommittee failed to put together a package slashing $1.2 trillion through tax hikes or spending cuts, indiscriminate spending cuts would ensue through forced decreases in the caps on defense and non-defense discretionary spending.
The across-the-board cuts included as a backup were never meant to take effect. But the supercommittee failed, forcing those spending cuts.
According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget’s Marc Goldwein, the Budget Control Act resulted in $1.2 trillion or so in overall deficit reduction.
What did this all mean?
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ David Reich co-authored a category-by-category report and found that, between 2010 and 2021, every single category of non-defense discretionary spending besides veterans’ programs saw declines after adjusting for inflation and population growth.
Economic security, health care, and scientific research programs were close to stagnant, falling by 4 percent or less. But funding for environmental protection and parks fell by 15 percent; general government operations by 26 percent; education and job training by 14 percent; and diplomacy and foreign aid by 19 percent.
A study from the American Association for the Advancement of Science found that aggregate research and development spending from the federal government was $200 billion lower due to the Budget Control Act; health research from the National Institutes of Health and the VA fell by over $7 billion a year relative to previous historical trends, while the National Science Foundation got almost $2 billion a year less.
This was all bad news for people interacting with government programs. The two biggest social assistance agencies in the US are the Social Security Administration (which administers old-age and disability payments) and the IRS, which administers tax credits that are crucial for reducing poverty. Adjusted for inflation, funding for the agencies fell by 13 and 19 percent between 2010 and 2021, respectively. —Dylan Matthews
- Can’t Congress just get rid of the debt ceiling?
The US government doesn’t have to work this way.
Congress could pass legislation doing away with the debt ceiling, and the president has options to ignore it as well, though they’d likely prompt legal challenges. As mentioned above, the president could invoke the 14th Amendment and ignore the debt limit, or Congress could approve an increase to the debt cap that’s so high it basically nullifies the ceiling.
Abolishing the debt limit altogether would prevent either party from using this process as political leverage. Doing so would greatly reduce the uncertainty that comes around every time there’s a deadline like this and prevent significant market volatility that results.
“There are zero downsides to getting rid of the debt ceiling,” said Bivens from the Economic Policy Institute.
Other economic experts note that eliminating the debt ceiling could take away an opportunity for Congress to debate fiscal policy. But many feel like that’s a moot point, given debt ceiling standoffs are rarely about any specific spending anymore, but rather about weakening the party in power.
Rather than do away with the debt limit altogether, some experts have proposed options like giving the president the ability to propose a suspension that Congress would need to override if it disagreed, making it tougher for legislators to jam up that process. A proposal that Shai Akabas of the Bipartisan Policy Center supports would pair this proposal with a mandatory debate on fiscal policy to force Congress to confront spending issues.
It’s unlikely there’s enough political will to make any of these changes happen. Instead, it seems as though lawmakers are comfortable getting right up to the brink — and running the risk of a default again and again. —Li Zhou
- Where do things go from here?
There’s significant uncertainty in how things could play out from here.
Biden has repeatedly emphasized that he’s not interested in negotiating on the debt ceiling and that he’d back separate talks on the budget and annual spending. Republicans, meanwhile, have tried to put forth their own position via recent legislation that lays out serious social spending cuts and rolls back Democratic policies like funding for the IRS and clean energy tax credits. That proposal is a non-starter for both the Senate and the White House.
The shadow of the 2011 debt ceiling crisis and the deal that ended it looms over today’s standoff. At the time, Democrats felt burned by Republicans after trying to negotiate and the GOP felt like they were able to secure significant wins by using the debt ceiling as a cudgel.
There are some off-ramps that lawmakers are eyeing. In one case, House Democrats are preparing to force a vote on a measure raising the debt ceiling by using a tool known as a discharge petition, which requires a simple majority — or 218 House members — to support it. To do so, the 213-member Democratic caucus would need the backing of five moderate Republicans — support that’s unlikely at the moment.
Additionally, lawmakers could try to approve a short-term suspension that gives both sides more time to wrangle negotiations, though Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has suggested he favors a longer-term two-year solution. Schumer also said that Senate Democrats would wait until after the White House meeting on May 9 to determine how they intend to move forward.
The question is still whether either side will blink. Negotiators from the 2011 debt ceiling crisis previously told Vox that it’s possible Democrats will have to offer Republicans some type of concession so that GOP members can claim they got something out of the talks. “Everybody needs something to save face,” Brian Riedl, a former economic policy staffer for Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH), said. —Li Zhou
Camilla chose not to wear the Queen Mother’s crown, but its ill-gotten jewel is still worth talking about.
When King Charles III and Queen Camilla are officially crowned at Westminster Abbey on Saturday, the Duchess of Sussex won’t be the only thing missing.
The controversy-stirring Kohinoor diamond — the 105-carat sparkler at the center of the violet crown Camilla was expected to wear — won’t make an appearance. The royals have good reason to want to keep the gem out of Saturday’s coronation festivities. The crown jewel of the crown jewels is widely considered an ill-gotten spoil of Britain’s colonial conquests, and calls for the British to return the stone to India have grown increasingly loud since the death of Queen Elizabeth II last year. (The current Indian government, under Narendra Modi, has vacillated on whether it wants the diamond back, but many others do.) The British have yet to heed them.
Flashing the Kohinoor (also sometimes spelled Koh-i-noor) might have attracted the wrong sort of attention, but attempting to simply hide away a colonial past doesn’t work when it comes to the royals: With the death of the queen last year came a massive reassessment of the symbolism of British royalty and the moral and cultural wrongs of colonialism it has perpetrated and continues to condone explicitly and implicitly, particularly by keeping plundered artifacts. Even in trying to avoid one controversy, they’ve stepped into another one. The Cullinan diamonds, chipped off a massive diamond taken from South African mines, will be part of the coronation, and sure enough, South Africans want those back, too.
The Kohinoor landed in British hands in the 1840s, when the colonial British East India Company wrested it, and other property and land, from an Indian boy-king — a Sikh emperor who was just 10 or 11 at the time — in the cruelest of ways. The British imprisoned his mother, leaving him no choice but to turn over the gem.
It was no accident: Vox has reported that the British plundered an estimated $45 trillion (in today’s currency) from India during its reign. It took art, artifacts, property, and lives. The Kohinoor, found in a mine in what is today the city of Hyderabad, had a storied history, having been set in the bejeweled throne of Shah Jahan (of Taj Mahal fame) and plundered by the Afghans at some point (the Kohinoor is also claimed by Afghanistan). The British had been angling for the famed stone for years, simply waiting for the right mark. They found it in a prepubescent boy.
The British have been hanging on to the stone — even slicing away at it until it shined and glittered in a way that appealed to distinctly Western tastes — ever since. After making an appearance as a brooch worn by Queen Victoria, it eventually landed on the purple-flecked crown of the Queen Mother.
Objects snatched up in the age of empire, as well as during the Nazi regime, have become cultural hot potatoes in recent years: Under pressure from other governments to return what is rightfully theirs, museums in the US and Europe have begun sending back (also known as repatriating) Nigeria’s Benin Bronzes, the Italian Orpheus and the Sirens, and Cambodia’s Khmer art, among other antiquities.
But the British remain unapologetic holdouts, arguing to Greece that the Elgin Marbles were gainfully acquired, having been stripped from the Parthenon with permission from the Ottomans (colonizers themselves). Egyptians have lobbied for the return of the Rosetta Stone, which has sat in the collection of the British Museum since 1802. No dice there, either.
The words of Rudyard Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden” come to mind when trying to understand why the British don’t want to return precious artifacts to countries that would like to have parts of their culture back. The country’s actions suggest it doesn’t believe a poor brown nation is a capable steward of its own people or its own rich culture.
The British, for all we can figure, loved empire, and still do today. The Kohinoor diamond has long been “a symbol of potency rather than beauty,” Anita Anand, who with historian William Dalrymple wrote the definitive book on the Kohinoor, told Smithsonian Magazine. The Kohinoor will stay with the British for at least a while longer; they’ve already made plans to display it late this month at the Tower of London, as a “symbol of conquest.”
That an effectively looted jewel is set in a crown is highly symbolic — symbolic of the British Empire’s legacy of bloody conquest, of subjugating brown and Black people, and of having made off with the artifacts that help carry on a culture. Simply hiding it away on coronation day doesn’t change that.