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Utterly naive to call AI a "human right". It's a new battleground. And the Chinese surveillance-state model is going to kick the West's ass unless we get serious about introspecting all the ways we are currently unprepared to even TALK about this problem in the policy sphere.
They have better data, on more citizens, and more coordinated action across their entire tech sector b/c it's all government pwned.
Meanwhile in the West, Europe is literally breaking up and the US is *shut down* by an insane man-child.
Meanwhile in the West, Europe is literally breaking up and the US is *shut down* by an insane man-child.
The best the West can hope for is that the Chinese suffer an internal political crisis (counter-reaction to Xi Jinping over-reach) and/or their economic bubble pops hard. B/c if those two things don't happen, the US is pretty well screwed.
We, at best, will continue spiraling up and down into a two-caste system, and we'll need to maintain that inequity in order to keep the lights on for innovation investment. That creates deep latent opportunity for foreign actors to instigate populist revolt & turmoil.
The AI wars of the 2020s will shape the geopolitical landscape for decades to come. Whether Western values of individualism can actually prevail depends on us getting our shit together *right now* to create better infrastructure for human communication, thinking, freedom.
We must sacrifice the current "attention economy" model that powers Google, FB, Twit. We have to prick the bubble - or lance the boil - of runaway higher education costs and get back to basics of education as a means, not an ends.
Most painful for the Davos crowd: we have to kill the mathematical fiction that the "miracle of compound interest" is delivered by God, and not by regulatory capture and tax rate arbitrage. The Wall St. resource-allocator class must reset their expectations of "scale uber alles".
Scale has social cost. Scale destroys ecologies, bleaches the reefs, encourages fast-growth monoculture. Scale is the diabetes of hypercapitalism.
Hyper-focusing investment on scale destroys local economic viability, sustainability, and infrastructure for human meaning.
Hyper-focusing investment on scale destroys local economic viability, sustainability, and infrastructure for human meaning.
We need new *investment models* that prioritize resiliency at multiple geographic scales & allow broader participation in upside. Instead of the "gig economy" that timeslices humans into commodity labor, we need holistic models of "economic society", solving for sufficiency.
We have all the tools to fix this.
We have all the pieces.
We just need to organize them better, and to do that we have to have the stories of *how* they can be organized better. We need the courage to dream.
If we don't, the West's endgame looks very much like China.
We have all the pieces.
We just need to organize them better, and to do that we have to have the stories of *how* they can be organized better. We need the courage to dream.
If we don't, the West's endgame looks very much like China.
