The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Is It Time To Talk About Peace Negotiations?

Episode Date: April 18, 2023

After almost 15 months of war in Ukraine, Brian Stewart's regular Tuesday commentary on The Bridge suggests there could be a possibility for peace negotiations just around the corner.  It's far from certain but Brian makes the argument that certain pieces which could lead to talks are starting to fall in place.

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. Is it time to start talking peace negotiations in Ukraine? And hello there, welcome to Tuesday. It's the Tuesday episode of The Bridge. That means Brian Stewart will be by in a few moments' time to talk about some new developments in the story of Ukraine. And specifically today, we're going to talk about is there any chance we could be heading towards peace negotiations? That's the topic coming up in a few minutes' time

when Brian Stewart joins us. But first of all, you know, I was scrolling through the comment section of the bridge. Some of it comes to my email, as you know, and as the basis of the Thursday edition of Your Turn. But some of it as well happens on our YouTube channel ever since we started broadcasting both the Wednesday Smoke, Mirrors, and the Truth and the Friday Good Talk on our YouTube channel. And, you know, there's always a mix of opinion, and that's fine. That's good. That's democracy.

That's what we want to see happen. We want to provoke discussion. But there was one comment that I saw that got me thinking. This guy was writing about the makeup of the Good Talk panel, and he said, you know, Mansbridge is a septuagenarian. And I thought, well, he's right. I am a septuagenarian. And I thought, well, he's right. I am a septuagenarian. You know, I turn in my mid seventies coming up this summer. So it's a big deal. But it sounded like he was kind of slighting

me by saying this. Sounded a little like ageism, you know what I mean? But then I looked at his picture, his profile picture. Now, he didn't say how old he was, but he looked older than me. So maybe he was arguing what Mansbridge needs is to be an octogenarian and speak from that point of view. Well, I don't speak from any point of view in particular. I just speak from experience, right? And what I've seen over the years.

Now, kidding aside, he was clearly thinking, he's passed it. We don't need his take on anything. That's got a lot of younger people. Well, I'm all for younger people, and I focus on some younger people in this program who have experience and knowledge. But this seemed to be, you know, more pointed than that, playing this kind of old guy angle.

And then I thought, well, actually, who does want to hear what my opinion is on anything? Well, it was kind of funny to be thinking that because I had just got off a Zoom call with a student in Canada, 16 years old, who wanted my experience and understanding of what it's like for journalists who go into conflict zones. Now, as I've told you before and made clear in my book, I've been in a few, but never for a very long time. Certainly not like the war correspondents, like our friend Brian Stewart has been in over the years.

But I've had a little experience, and she wanted to know more about not only what happens in those conflict zones, but how does a news organization look after its people who go into conflict zones. So we had a good discussion about that. And I thought, well, that's good. She's 16. She didn't look at me like I was a septuagenarian. She looked at me like I was somebody who had experience.

And that's what so many of us have, right? That's why I love your letters that come every week because they talk about experience, things that you've encountered in your life, in the past or even in the present. And those experiences get me thinking and get others thinking. You don't have to agree with them. But experience is one of those factors in life that we like to look at.

At least I do. Anyway, all this got me thinking as well about about retirement and about the retirement age. Because, you know, we watch what's going on in France right now, right? The French retirement age is 62, and people like that. They like it a lot. The life expectancy in France is 82. So that 20 years between retirement at 62 and life expectancy at 82,

that's nice if you're the 62-year-old. It ain't great if you're the French treasury, and that's what the current dispute is all about. The Macron government wants to raise the retirement age because it's costing a fortune. Other countries, including Canada, have seen this debate as well. And therefore, in some cases, you've seen in different parts of the world, retirement age is raised. Well, in France, that discussion's not going too well. But here's the question for you. And this is kind of a little end bit, the start bit.

And this is based on a New York Times piece in the last couple of weeks. What is the ideal retirement age for your health? Listen, if you've got good health and your mind's active, I say you push it as far as you can get it. As I said, I'm in my mid-70s. I'm doing all kinds of work. At times, I think I'm busier now than I was when I was doing the national.

It's not the case, really. but it feels like it at times. I mean, I'm doing a lot of things to do this podcast every day, which is fun. It's great fun. Writing books, another one coming out this year with my friend Mark Bulgich. Giving speeches. Giving the odd lecture at universities. I'm sitting on a number of boards. I mean, I do the odd documentary.

The list goes on. I'm having a good time in my septuagenarian years. But so here's the question. When did retirement become a thing when did the retirement age become a thing well you can go back to a number of places but here's the one that many people tend to point to

and feel that the rest of the world patterned itself after. In 1881, the conservative German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, plagued by a rise in socialist ideology, remember he's a conservative, but the country was going through a period of socialist ideology. Otto von Bismarck proposed a national retirement benefit to appease what he thought were the leftist masses. He set the retirement age at 70, 7-0.

Average life expectancy at the time? About 40 years. That's a big gap, right? You're only supposed to live till you're 40, so what's the problem with making the retirement age 70? You're never going to get there. Von Bismarck resigned shortly after the policy passed, but his legacy remained in Germany's retirement benefit,

which was lowered to age 65 in 1916, became the model for many other nations. When President Roosevelt in the United States established the Social Security Act of 1935, 65 was similarly chosen as the national retirement age, despite the fact that less than 60% of American adults lived that long. So there you go.

There's your little history lesson for today. Retirement age. All spurred on by a little comment on a little YouTube channel from some guy looks older than me, kind of thinking that the septuagenarians time has passed. Okay. Whatever. If you have thoughts on this or any other topic we're discussing this week, including the one we're about to do with Brian Stewart, drop me a line at themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com, themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com.

I'll give you a moment to think about that. Before we start with Brian, we'll be back right after this. Don't you love it when I push the wrong button? That's the button for the Smoke Mirrors and the Truth music, as many of you know. But I kind of like it too when I pop it wrong button. That's the button for the smoke mirrors and the truth music, as many of you know. But I kind of like it too when I pop it into the middle of a regular edition of The Bridge. Welcome back. You're listening to The Bridge

on Sirius XM, Channel 167, Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform. All right. Brian Stewart, war correspondent, foreign correspondent, been in so many of the hot spots of the world, and has given for the past year his knowledge and his experience by spending a lot of time researching the situation in Ukraine and the conflict with Russia, the war with Russia.

So let's get to this week's discussion with Brian Stewart. Here we go. Brian, when I sift through the mail each week that comes into the bridge, and especially the mail that has something to do with Tuesday's segment with you. One of the constants I get almost every week, somebody will write in to say, why don't you guys ever talk about the possibility of peace? Why don't you ever talk about negotiations? Well, we have mentioned negotiations before, but it's been a while since we have. Is there a reason to be talking about potential negotiations now? Yes, there is. And I think, in fact, there's a lot more talk going around the world and in top diplomatic circles about what negotiations

will look like. This is the thing. We can talk about negotiations, but the consensus still is there's no negotiations in sight at the moment for a number of reasons I'll get to. But definitely it is time now to start talking about what those negotiations should look like when they begin. What should be the plan A, the plan B, and what should the world be now talking in a bigger strategic sense? The problem is there's no immediate side of negotiations because Russia does not want, Putin does not want to give up any of the territory he's captured and still appears to want to add to it in some proportion, certainly. The Ukraine is still determined, and the public are overwhelmingly behind the military push for this, to win back all they have lost and to teach Russia a lesson it will never forget, and then demand on top of that reparations from Russia when negotiations

come around. So we're a very long way from negotiating. Well, I take that back. I mean, we may not be that far from negotiations, to tell you the truth. They may be coming much faster than anybody realizes. The key element is Ukraine is going to have to have its shot at a major offensive. There's no way that Ukraine will suddenly say, OK, we'll talk to russia now knowing that russia will feel in no obligation to give up anything it's going to have to try and win back if not all of the country at least as much as they possibly can before they force russia into a negotiating position as for the west it's in a position of facing the fact that it's going to

have to go to ukraine after the offensive if the offensive as an increasing number of analysts now fear is not totally successful ukraine is going to have to be basically faced with the fact that there's no option now but to sit down and start negotiations. And so I think what we're all waiting for now is when the offensive begins by Ukraine, how successful it is. You know, there's arguments that the more successful the offensive is, the more russia will be because and the more anxious it will be to bring peace to to hand uh the less successful it is the more difficult negotiations will be but the west really has to start talking to ukraine about the need once you've gone as far as you can go on this offensive, we don't want a long stalemate.

You don't want a long stalemate. Ukraine is bleeding, not only in the humanity sense and personnel, but in the economic sense. The world is also bleeding in an economic sense. The West, too, we have many priorities. Certainly Ukraine is at the top, but we have other major ones like rearming ourselves after all the ammunition we spent, guarding in the Pacific and the Middle East for the grim prospect of other difficulties and conflicts breaking out. It is time now to sit down and really get on with talks. And I think what – go ahead. Well, you talk about how the West has to talk,

or some country in the West has to talk to the Ukrainians to say, look, this is the situation, and, you know, it's got to be time to start thinking about discussions and talks with Russia. Who in the West has the ear of Zelensky to have that kind of discussion? Because it seems every time anything like this comes up, Zelensky and the Ukrainians say, we're not interested. Back off. We don't want to talk about that.

So who can talk that game to zelensky these days well i i think i think you know uh based on some past diplomatic experience covering them the talks are already underway but on a very very hidden scale i think the americans and the british are talking off the record in a thousand ways time, plus off the record. Here's what's going to happen if your offensive doesn't get all at once. You're going to culminate, which as we know now is the inability to push any further. A stalemate is something we can't go on supporting forever. We need to start talking about how we get to negotiation. I think those kind of vaguer talks are happening.

But after the offensive, I use that term culminate because it's a military term for when an offensive goes as far as it can go and can't really expect any more gains. That's when it culminates and starts to settle down. When it settles after the next offensive or two offensives in a row, right after the other, reaches that point, the West is going to go, and I think it will be the Americans first. It's got to be the Americans first, the British soon after, Canadians, all of them will have a role in going to the Ukraine and saying, okay, let's bring, here's what role in going to the ukraine and saying okay let's get let's bring here's what we're going to put before you and russia and here are some of the steps i think it'll take there's always the steps to getting peace talks underway first of all we got to call

a ceasefire you stop where you are the russians stop where they are both sides then agree to pull back to create a zone, a demilitarized zone between them. If that holds, and at the same time, we bring in international observers, either from the United Nations or from a group of other countries that could form, that would be trusted on both sides. And it's going to be taking some doing, but it can be put together. then we get a demilitarized zone where there's actually a ceasefire holding that's when you move to the real phase of peace talks begin this could all happen possibly really within months i mean if a ukrainian offensive grinds down by end of early summer say say, and there's an awareness in Kyiv that they're not

going to get much further. And the West really wants to get on with talks now. And it's in their better interest themselves to move on to talks now. We can be talking in July, June or July, about peace talks at that stage. It will take two tracks, probably it always does. One will be the Ukrainians and Russians will talk together with a facilitator or group of facilitators. They will start those talks. Then there will be a second track, which will involve NATO, obviously the United States, Britain, big players there.

And Russia will start talking about a general strategic security understanding. How do we get out of this mess so it doesn't happen again? Let's start talking about all the long-term things we can do. The Europeans will also want to start talking to Russia independently. But at that stage, the negotiations begin. There's probably no fighting on either front, a few boat breaks perhaps, but nothing serious. And the armies are in effect stood down, but on awareness still. They're still in the front, but they're kind of stood down. And there we are. We're at that situation where people will be running around

saying, what if the talks fail and what if we end up with another korea where 70 years later the anniversary is this summer 70 years later uh they go to a divided peninsula on you know still staring at each other uh with hostility well that's better than more was and then south korea has done very well. And Cyprus, remember, it's still divided in a peace way. And that's better than war. But, you know, that's when there will be tremendous debates raging. But the fact is then we'll have talks underway. And then the talks are going to get into terribly difficult subjects.

Let me just back you up for a second. Because you put all the conditions in these, quite rightly, as you talk about what could happen here. optimistic that this is actually a possibility than you were not that long ago. Whenever this kind of stuff would come up in our discussions, you'd say it's not going anywhere. There's nothing happening on the negotiation front. Now, today you're sounding like, well, there's nothing happening exactly right now, but they're talking about how they would do it if the right things fall into place. And you know why so many more people are now talking about it this week than they were even

two weeks ago? The leaks, the Pentagon leaks came out and confirmed what a lot of military analysts have been warning about, frankly, for the last five, six, seven weeks. And that is the Ukrainian military is not capable of winning this war outright. It is not going to happen. The Ukrainians still, with all their eight attack brigades, the tanks that are coming in with precision weapons, are now facing a much more dug-in Russia. They haven't really proven themselves, apart from one example back in September, be that adept at maneuver warfare. Now they're going to have to come up with an ability to break through Russian lines, maneuver successfully in ways they haven't really even been

trained to do up until a couple months ago. And that is simply going to run into the kind of attrition on the Ukrainian side, losing more than the defending side loses, that this country won't be able to stand. You know, tens upon tens upon tens of more thousand casualties and more aerial attacks pouring in from Russian side. So there's a feeling that Ukraine won't win outright, and Russia is not going to lose outright. But you know, that's in some ways a solution to a problem we've had from the beginning, which somebody summed it up this week fairly well. The West is caught in a trap between fear of catastrophic failure and fear of catastrophic success. I'll explain that.

Fear of the catastrophic failure at the beginning of Ukraine failing and falling under Russian occupation. That failure has gone away. the fear of catastrophic success which we've often talked about was the possibility of winning ukraine winning the war so overwhelmingly that putin's only recourse in his own mind such as it is is either to escalate uh the war against the west and maybe attack another NATO country or threaten more nuclear weapons on an hourly basis, or at least to the collapse of the current Russian government into the hands of potentially a far worse group that runs the Kremlin right now. And as we know from past talks about the extreme nationalist right and their increasingly vocal stand in this war, it's quite possible a far more nationalist right-wing aggressive group could actually take over if Putin was to fall. So there was a catastrophic failure. It's sort of going away. Catastrophic success.

A lot of the West are still trying to avoid that. Yeah, we want to win against Russia, but we don't want to drive Putin to those extremes. We're all, quite frankly, still worried about a lot. Or see Moscow and the Russian vast country fall into years of perhaps chaos and anarchy, or the hands of a more authoritarian group still yet. So that's why a lot more people are saying, that would be the time if the Ukrainian offensive doesn't win all the way, and they get back as much as they realistically know is the best they can do it's their best shot they're not going to get a second best shot so the best shot is going to come in the next month or two if at that point they realize they're not going to get you know really

much further they will then say okay what can we get out of negotiations that could still do us in our national interest? That's what they've got to start thinking of. What's in our national interest? It's easy to see. Well, start with some peace. Start with the economic rebuild, which will come very quickly once the firing stops. And then start with your own ability to start rebuilding your battered, bruised Ukrainian military to make an even stronger point.

Okay, let me swing us back to the papers, the so-called second version of the Pentagon papers. And because I found it fascinating, your suggestion that part of this move towards let's talk about negotiations is as a result of the papers and the leaks that have come out in the last 10 days or so. Well, we've witnessed quite something in the last week, the arrest of this, basically this kid, you know, this like 20 or 21-year-old junior Air Force guy. A few years out of high school. I know. You know, he was born after 9-11. You know, that's how much of a kid he is.

But he was leaking this stuff, apparently, to try and impress people. But how he ever got his hands on it in the first place has left many thinking about, like, how secure is the American Intelligence Service that this could get out like this? Imagine if this had happened in Canada or in Britain. It would be, there'd be hell to pay for sure. Let me focus, though, on the other aspects of the paper, because there's a lot of stuff in there.

So, you know, you've isolated a couple of things that haven't received a lot of attention, but perhaps should, because they're quite startling, really. They really are. You would have thought would have blown their top to find the Americans have been spying on them. And we're really and a lot of this embarrassing stuff about their military not being as strong as people thought it was and needing a lot more training than it's had and needing these far more weapons before it can really count on any victory and probably not being able to achieve victory with throwing the world into a long ceasefire, sorry, stalemate, stalemate, not ceasefire. Well, the Ukrainians have turned that around and said, okay, what does this tell you?

It tells you that you haven't been giving us the weapons we've been asking for rapidly enough. You're describing what we've been complaining about, that you have not given us all we need to take on the Russian giant. And, you know, what is the bottom line message here? Give us the tools and we will finish the job. The old Churchill statement to the United States before it came into the war. So the Ukrainians are hoping to turn this somewhat to their advantage,

but they certainly must know by now it's opened a lot of talk, as we were just talking about, the possibility of their not winning a breakthrough convincingly enough to declare a real victory and having them to negotiate. That was one area of developments that are interesting. There's another thing that you pointed out to me in a note, which comes as classic news to me. I'd never even heard of this.

The DF-27 hypersonic glide vehicle. It sounds like a movie. It sounds like a futuristic movie. What is that, and what do these papers tell us about it? And, you know, Peter, you're talking to somebody who you said on air is not a slave to his technological brilliance, which is me. Describe me as somebody who took a month to figure out the one button on the sound system. That's pretty accurate, I must say. Anyways, this is amazing to people who haven't been really keeping up with this particular

hypersonic development world. But the Chinese have now an amazing weapon on their hands, the DF-27 hypersonic glide vehicle. What that is is a missile that doesn't rely on normal air sucking and fuel to proceed, but it has a hypersonic ability to go 5, 10, 20 times the speed of sound. And this is a missile that the Chinese are confident will be able to break through U.S. air defenses. Another wake-up call to Canada that it better start looking more seriously to its air defenses too down the road. But how fast is this vehicle?

It's almost incomprehensible. Itensible it can travel 1200 kilometers in 12 minutes 12 minutes that's you know a speed five five times or whatever the speed of sound i was trying to figure out in canada distance of two cities you know point what was it 2100 kilometers apart but it was taking me too long to get the classic Halifax to this, the Ottawa to that. Maybe you can do it. But this is amazing speed. So we're learning now through leaks the seriousness of how the second Cold War, which we're now in, is seeing the rapid development of truly awesome weapons. And of course, the United States will be pouring and its allies will be pouring a lot of effort into trying to figure out ways to stop the hypersonic missile.

Because when I said the glide missile gives a clue, it's not like a ballistic missile fired in point A goes up into the sky and up into space and comes down on point B, its target. The glide missile can zigzag all over the place, up, down, around, zigzag. So you're trying desperately. Your radar can't keep track of it. It's going so fast and so bizarrely. There are no patterns that the computers can work out. Well, if it's over here, one minute from now it's going to be over there, so fire over there. Wayne Gretzky, you know, fire where it's going to be in time technique.

No, now you've got to figure out things like lasers that can possibly stop something like this. That's come out in the leaks too. A real wake-up call for a lot of countries to really realize some of the challenges ahead. I just want to nail down because I got lost in some of those numbers. It can travel 2,100 kilometers in 12 minutes? In 12 minutes. So I'm saying, okay, you take off from where? Ottawa or, you know, Halifax?

It's roughly half the distance across Canada in distance of the across Canada in 12 minutes. I mean, they're built, they're, they're not giant missiles, but they're powerful missiles. They're built specifically to take out really important targets like aircraft carriers, because they can maneuver. Now they can go after an aircraft carrier. It's very hard for, you know, the supporting fleet around it to bring it down, fire it down. Because, again, it's hard to rely upon your own missiles to knock down another missile when it's zigzagging all over the sky like that. that uh or it could come into land and take out a major power plant a major pipeline uh you know

pretty well really have devastating impact and they you know and also use on the battlefield for closer in but mainly this is a strategic light as a result of either the papers or the reaction to the papers that tells us anything about what's happening inside Moscow? Yeah, the Russian, the papers clearly point to infighting between the military and the Russian intelligence service over the declaration of casualty figures. I mean, Russia lies and brings out false casualty figures, as let's face it, does Ukraine. But Russia does it a little more egregiously. And both have been arguing over which kind of lie to come up with, which is more realistic, believed by some at least. So that's going on again.

The tension rising between the various power blocks of the Kremlin, the military, the intelligence, the security service, and the nationalist support for the war that the military bloggers who are broadcasting all the time are coming out with. They're talking about infighting all the time. But something almost incredible happened on Friday. Once again, Russia's leader, founder of the Wagner Group, that private mercenary group of mercenary thugs of the worst order, gave an interview on Friday. And he's been, you know, the big Russian offensive on the Eastern Front in Ukraine. And he came out predicting the russians the

ukrainians would probably launch a 200 000 uh person man uh offensive and there's a chance they would win there's a chance they would actually break through this is the russian commander talking they would actually actually break through the russian lines and really win. He said, that's a real possibility. And then he said, he's not hoping for this, but he said, and Russia might lose the war. Imagine a Canadian-American or British commander in the field saying, and we might really lose this war because the enemy might win this offensive against us. And then he said something, he said, you know, maybe it's not a bad thing if Russia did lose, or maybe it wouldn't be a bad thing if Russia lost. Because throughout our history, whenever we've lost a war, since 1905 against Japan, 1917, First World War, Afghanistan in 1989, major changes have come in.

And it always causes the population of Russia to wake up, change happens, and then we're onto a new kind of script scenario altogether. And maybe that's exactly what Russia needs. We need to cleanse ourselves and come in with a force and then conduct the war onwards, go back and conduct that war in the way it should be a force and then conduct the war onwards, go back and conduct that war in the way it should be fought, and then confront the West in a way it should be confronted. That's his message, which is kind of hair-raising, because he's got a lot of support among those extreme nationalist, hard right, some people use the term fascist because it's very similar in many ways to

fascistic worldviews, which is, you know, take and hold and kill and whatnot. It's very close to that. He could mobilize a lot of support in Russia among former army officers and former intelligence officers, former security officers, and people who feel that, you know, Putin's becoming a doddering old man who hasn't done anything really impressive for years and really should be sent packing on his retirement or forcefully sent packing. Putin has made a career of crushing people who in any way spoke out against his leadership. And this guy is doing more than just speaking out. I mean, he's acting it out big time.

How can Putin not control him at all? Well, he's a friend of Putin's. That's the other thing that's mind-boggling. Some friend. He's one of Putin's very few circle of male friends who made hundreds of millions and billions of dollars during the Putin years. And he was supposed to be a close ally. But, you know, you're right. This is a regime that just in the last couple of days sentenced a man for criticizing the war to 27 years in prison. That's what we send murderers to in democracies, you know, 25 years in prison.

Now he's afraid to take down a guy who says maybe it'd be a good thing if we lose the war, because then we could topple the government and start all over afresh, the Russian people. He's letting them stay in power and not challenging him. It's because of fear. This is a, you know, you do what you can get away with in Russia. And I think the military who detest the Wagner group and Rogozin would love to see him overthrown, but they don't, they fear taking him on directly. The Kremlin obviously fears taking him on directly. And the West, going back to that fear of catastrophic success, have to worry about, my God, what would happen if, in fact, Russia is absolutely decisively defeated in this war.

And you've got wild men out there, like the Wagner Group leader and all those military will go in total alliance with China against the West and everything the West stands for. That's the scary stuff you've got to worry about. That's why everybody would rather like to sit down at a negotiating table these years and have coffees and talk about splitting things up more peacefully. But again, that's not going to happen until the Ukrainians get their big shot. Okay. Boy, you've given us a lot there. You've given us a lot in the last half hour or two.

I sometimes wish I didn't have enough to give because the world all settled down again. But we're just not in that world anymore. Every week there's a lot, and they're almost every area of new stuff. Yeah, awesome. That's fascinating. Listen, Brian, thank you so much. We'll talk to you again in a week. Who knows what will be happening by then.

Take care. Okay, thanks a lot. Brian Stewart with us. And I know before, well, it's probably too late for some of you who are already writing. You're at your laptops. You're typing in. Mansbridge, the distance across the country is greater than you suggested. It is, just a little bit.

Now, remember, I said that that missile that can go 2,100 kilometers in 12 minutes could almost get halfway across the country, Canada. Almost. Which implies that's not halfway across the country. Well, it isn't. Because if you get in a plane in St. John's and fly to Victoria, you're going to do over 5,000 kilometers, 5,100, 5,200, somewhere in there. So half would be like, you know, 2,600.

So 2,100 isn't that. So there you go. You don't need to write any further. I have self-corrected. Time for one final end bit. Do you like, you know, futurists? I love them. I love listening to futurists telling me what the world's going to be like

in 10 years, 20 years down the road. Sometimes they're right. Jules Verne. And sometimes they're, like, really wrong. You know, in the 1990s, according to a piece I read in the Mail Online here in Britain, futurists of the 1990s predicted that we'd be living underwater or riding flying cars by this point.

Well, we're not living underwater in any permanent way, and we're not riding flying cars in any permanent way. But that isn't stopping the predictions. Here's some fast ones for the future. Everybody talks about artificial intelligence, right? No doubt it's making its mark now. We've discussed it on this program. Great conversation a month ago. And many more, I'm sure, to come. The experts say that we tend to overestimate the effects of new technology like AI in the short term, but underestimate it in the long term. So what's it going to do for us in the future? Here's what the experts say.

The machines really will do most of the work, and a basic wage will become common, freeing us to enjoy more leisure time and realize ourselves as human beings. This will require a drastic change in society and in our approach to education. All right. Here's another future guess.

People will implant chips inside their bodies. They're already starting to do that. But the idea here will be the chips will monitor conditions within the body, enabling people to basically keep an eye on their health, warn them of things that are coming up. Here's another one. This one's scary. Okay.

People could live on after death thanks to AI. In the future, relatives who die might not be really dead, says Dr. Ajaz Ali, head of business and computing at Ravensbourne University in the United States. Dr. Ali said, by linking AI with digital technologies and motion capture tools, our conscious knowledge and experiences will be transferred to our digital twins. Loved ones could carry on interacting and their relatives who have already died, but exist in a digital twin form.

Scary. There's a bunch of stuff in this thing. Actually, I'm not sure if Ravensbourne University is in the U.S. or in Britain. I'll have to check that out. There's a bunch of these, but here's the last one. We will find intelligent aliens in the next 15 years. By 2036. And we're talking intelligent life, not microbes or similar little things.

If the Earth is the only place with life, it's like a winner in a lottery where the odds are a billion to one. That's the argument for the fact we're going to find it in other areas. That may be the strongest argument for life in space, says one of the scientists studying this, because if there isn't any, there's something really exceptional about what's happened here on Earth. While that's not to rule any of that out, it does seem a little self-centered. And finally, large areas of Earth might become uninhabitable. You know what this has got to do with?

Climate change. Soaring humidity and heat will lead to heat waves where it's almost impossible for humans to survive outdoors in areas including South Asia, the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea. By 2070, this will also be true in areas of Brazil and China. Wet bulb temperatures refer to conditions where temperature and humidity are high, making it hard to survive outdoors. Humans can survive temperatures of up to 50 degrees Celsius when humidity is low, but in high humidity, humans cannot survive because there's no way to cool down by sweating. Even extremely strong and fit people die within hours.

Well, take your pick of those futurist predictions. Some of you will get to know whether any of them come true, but us septuagenarians, who knows? We might not be around to find out. But you'll be able to communicate with us. Thanks for listening today.

That's it. Tomorrow, smoke, mirrors, and the truth. Bruce Anderson drops by. Thanks for listening today. I'm Peter Mansbridge. We'll talk to you again in 24 hours.