Tag: Peace

Why You Should Care Who Wins the AI Race.

Will the Server Farms of today turn into Server Cities to supply the Fifth Industrial Age’s insatiable drive for more computing power?

Or will it be like the Main Frame Computer being overtaken by the PC?

ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Glen Beck (background) and Betty Snyder (foreground) program the ENIAC in building 328 at the Ballistic Research Laboratory (BRL).

But nowadays the PC in your hand, i.e. your cellphone, offloads it’s computing load to more powerful computers at a server farm. A server farm is actually a large number of PCs hooked up parallelly. All that data has been harnessed in Large Language Models (LLM) to train Artificial Intelligence (AI).

By winning the Fourth Industrial Revolution, Britain was able to produce the ships and tanks that powered their Empire. Whoever wins the AI race (the Fifth Industrial Revolution) will dominate this century and maybe beyond. This thoughtful interview will brief you on the implications of our ongoing competition with China and why we should win, except for one caveat –

this idea of “temporal claustrophobia,” where the Kaiser, Imperial Japan, and Nazi Germany all convinced themselves they were at a high watermark.

Jeffrey Ding

ChinaTalk

GPTs and the Rise and Fall of Great Powers

“Economic power is the most fungible and transferable currency.”

JORDAN SCHNEIDER

 AND 

RYAN HAUSER

JUL 10, 2023

Jeffrey Ding is a professor at George Washington University and the creator of the ChinAI Substack. He argues in a recent paper that great powers must harness general-purpose technologies if they want to achieve global dominance.

In this show, we discuss the historical underpinnings of that argument and apply it to AI today — drawing out policymaking lessons spanning centuries of technologically driven great power transitions. We also get into:

  • Why long-term productivity growth is driven by the diffusion of general-purpose technology, and what makes this so crucial for great power competition;
  • Historical lessons from the UK, Soviet Union, US, and Germany illustrating the cultural and policy roadblocks to tech diffusion;
  • The importance of decentralized systems, and how this helped America win the Cold War
  • Why China’s diffusion capacity lags behind its innovation capacity, and how America should avoid getting locked into any one technological trajectory.

Co-hosting is Teddy Collins, formerly of DeepMind and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

https://embed.podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/jeff-ding-on-us-vs-china-ai-and-lessons-from-past/id1289062927?i=1000612569365

Midjourney: “Technological Diffusion in the Style of Traditional Chinese Art, City, Society, Schools, Different forms of Technology, Artificial Intelligence, Scrolls, the Printing Press, Computers, Smart Phones”

Click on the 2 page to read the whole interview. It is worth your time to learn about what will undeniably will be the defining driver of our age.

Pages: Page 1, Page 2

How Xi is Preparing China for War

Kyle Bass has been a long-time China hawk. in this lecture he reveals some very disturbing trends in China’s plans to recover Taiwan. It is going to be hard to deter this determined emperor. He has became a one-man-show, with no dissenting voices to council him. This is a very dangerous situation and one that I’m not sure diplomacy can resolve.

Just as our oil blockade forced Japan to desperately attach Pearl Harbor, we declared war on China with our October 17th microchip ban. I doubt the current American public’s willingness to run a Chinese blockade of Taiwan, like we did during the Russian blockade of Berlin during the Cold War.

Such an humiliating defeat would further embolden the Coalition of autocrats and become the beginning of the end of the dollar as the world’s Reserve currency and the substantial benefits that confers on us.

Zhou between Kissinger and Mao

When Premier Zhou Enlai was asked by Henry Kissinger what he thought of the French Revolution, he calmly replied “We’ll have to see”. Except for brief periods in history, autocracies (kings, emperors, dictators) have ruled our world. The Chinese take the Long View that this current aberration of History, with concern for freedom and human rights, will eventually revert to the mean again. And they will be here to push us back to those prevalent dark times.

Kyle’s presentation includes 3 sections:

1. Military force readiness & preparation

2. Changes to the legal system & infrastructure

3. Financial market movements & wartime planning

Here is his opening statement…

Take the time to watch the rest of this sobering assessment with the link below.

https://www.hudson.org/events/china-prepares-war-timeline-miles-yu-kyle-bass

See Crowd-Sourced Map of Global Conflict

Click on the map and you are seeing an overview of major global activity each day, as captured by the world’s news media and monitored by the GDELT Project. All protest and conflict events are grouped together by city/location. For the animated map layer, if a location has both protest and conflict events, it is colored by whichever there are more of. All dots on the animated map are the same size, regardless of the number of events at that location, due to current limitations of the animation system. For the daily map layers, dots are displayed separately at each location for protests and conflict and are sized based on the total volume of coverage devoted to that type of event at that location. Thus, locations with more “important” events will be displayed using a larger dot to indicate major evolving situations. Since some events may not have recognizable geographic markers or may occur at the country level, such events are displayed at the centroid of the country, except for the United States, where only events recorded at the state or finer resolution are shown. When your pointer turns into a hand, click and you’ll see the news sources harvested by web bots of the US Institute for Peace.

via Mapping A World in Motion: A Daily Dashboard of Global Conflict | GDELT Official Blog.

In the long run, wars make us safer and richer – The Washington Post

“The 10 most dangerous words in the English language,” Reagan said on another occasion, “are ‘Hi, I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’ ” As Hobbes could have told him, in reality the 10 scariest words are, “There is no government and I’m here to kill you.”

So yes, war is hell — but have you considered the alternatives? When looking upon the long run of history, it becomes clear that through 10,000 years of conflict, humanity has created larger, more organized societies that have greatly reduced the risk that their members will die violently. These better organized societies also have created the conditions for their members will die violently. These better organized societies also have created the conditions for higher living standards and economic growth. War has not only made us safer, but richer, too.

WarWhatIsItGoodForWhile we a gone from World Wars to Cold Wars this book review, which is continued from the “more” link overlooks the ongoing danger of  even a “small” thermonuclear war, between emerging powers, annihilating our 10,00 years of “progress”. The miscalculations of rising powers has contributed to most wars of the Industrial age.

We are now moving into a world of what I call Soft Wars, waged by guerrilla tactics of cyber and economic warfare. And now with so many empowered transnational bad actors on the world stage, it will be hard to determine who really hit you and how do you counter.

 

via In the long run, wars make us safer and richer – The Washington Post.

Why is There Peace?

Violence has been in decline over long stretches of history, and today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species’ time on earth.

When the archeologist Lawrence Keeley examined casualty rates among contemporary hunter-gatherers—which is the best picture we have of how people might have lived 10,000 years ago—he discovered that the likelihood that a man would die at the hands of another man ranged from a high of 60 percent in one tribe to 15 percent at the most peaceable end. In contrast, the chance that a European or American man would be killed by another man was less than one percent during the 20th century, a period of time that includes both world wars. If the death rate of tribal warfare had prevailed in the 20th century, there would have been two billion deaths rather than 100 million, horrible as that is. Read on with the link below.

via Greater Good Magazine | Why is There Peace?. Continue reading “Why is There Peace?”

Future Predictions From Geography

People and ideas influence events, but geography largely determines them, now more than ever. To understand the coming struggles, it’s time to dust off the Victorian thinkers who knew the physical world best. A journalist who has covered the ends of the Earth offers a guide to the relief map—and a primer on the next phase of conflict.

via Foreign Policy: The Revenge of Geography.

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