Tag: United States of America

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.

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I guess this is what Europeans really think of us…

At least when Buzzfeed asked AI to come up with what Europeans imagined what people from each State in America to look like. The images were created in Midjourney the best text to image AI out there so far. The result wasn’t pretty.

Following the alphabet number 1 is Alabama

Number 2 is Alaska

To get the rest click on this link to BuzFeed

https://buzzfeed.com/daves4/european-ai-american-list

What makes the U.S.A. unique among nations

George Friedman has been an advisor to many American Administrations. His 4th of July message from 2016 looks at out origins…

Artist John Trumbull
Year commissioned 1817;
purchased 1819;
date of creation 1818;
placed in the Rotunda 1826

Two hundred and forty years ago today, the American people were declared to be a unique and independent nation, distinct from all others. This was the conception of the people, but the sovereign government of the United States was born in battle. The revolution lasted eight years and about 25,000 died – a higher percentage of the population than died in World War II. This led over time to the Constitution, which founded the regime that governed the American people.

It was a unique regime because it did not trust politicians. The founders feared the politicians’ desire for power. To solve this problem, they founded a regime so unwieldy, so inefficient, that very little could get done. Their vision of America was a country of businesses and farms, churches and societies. They envisioned a nation whose heart was not in Washington – an artifice invented to hold politicians – but in private life. The life of farmers, businessmen, clergymen and eccentrics. Few other governments were founded with such fear of governance.

I recently told a foreign friend that his country has excellent relations with Washington, but it needs a better relationship with America. Many of our non-American friends live in countries where the political capital is the heart of the country. That isn’t the case in the United States. The American revolution was fought to make certain the government was weak and society strong and free. Our founders feared strong presidents and contrived to cripple them before they took office by confronting them with two Congressional houses run on different rules and a Supreme Court. Very little can get done, yet America flourishes. When you marvel at our candidates for president, bear in mind that the U.S. president is among the weakest heads of government in the world. The sacrifice of 25,000 was to make sure tyranny would not rule this country. If the price was political paralysis, it was a small price to pay.

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