Primary sources:
THE TRAGEDY OF GREAT POWER POLITICS by John Mearsheimer
PRINCIPLES FOR A CHANGING WORLD ORDER by Ray Dalio
A SHORT HISTORY OF CHINESE PHILOSOPHY by Yu-lan Fung
SAPIENS by Yuval Noah Harari
Several other books that have all merged into one amorphous mass of thoughts and principles over the years.
New Era Pathfinders: https://www.skool.com/newerapathfinders - this is my personal growth community for people who want help navigating the changing world and the new era we find ourselves in.
Hey everybody, David Shapiro here. So I've been meaning to try a voice only podcast for a while, and I just updated my NVIDIA broadcast software, which is an AI tool that cleans up the audio signal in real time, which cuts down on post production and other stuff. Basically I've got my whole system optimized. So the first topic that I want to cover is going to be a little bit off the beaten path in terms of, I'm not going to talk about AI directly, but rather I've been thinking more about China and America. Namely as I've been researching the pause movement, so for a quick recap, the pause movement is a small vocal group of people that are advocating for a moratorium on AI research and AI progress. Now with that being said, there is a not insubstantial number of Americans who would favor some kind of regulatory oversight, which might even include slowing down AI progress. But moving on from that, because I don't want to get bogged down on that topic, during the research for this, I've done a lot more digging into kind of the current reality of the situation between America and China. Now let me provide a little bit of background. My wife is a librarian and a prodigious bookworm, and my father-in-law is also a huge bookworm and a military history nerd. So kitchen table conversation for us is everything from South China Sea to Taiping Rebellion, so on and so forth. So we talk about history and military naval conflicts, the world over, going all the way back to the Greek and Roman times. So that's to say, while I don't have a degree in this stuff, I have an informal education on this topic. So one thing in terms of the current situation between America and China, first and foremost, America just has the numbers. We have more arable land, we have more water, we have about the same power generation. China is a little bit further ahead, but a lot of their power generation is coal based, so America has a much more diverse energy portfolio, including more nuclear, but America also has more than twice the data centers, twice the compute that China has. Now if World War III were to happen, this is just purely hypothetical, but if World War III were to happen, and it were to be an AI augmented war, or even an AGI augmented war, the number and quality of data centers is going to be a huge part of the artillery in this conflict. Now that's going to be from a war gaming perspective, a military strategy perspective, a propaganda and misinformation perspective, and then of course cyber warfare perspective. Now here's the thing. There is, well, let me take a step back. Many people, and I don't have sources other than Demisus Abus, but basically the general sense is that China is seven to ten years behind America in terms of artificial intelligence research. Now it's one thing to have a model, the weights and the files, the data set, but it's another thing to have the human capital in terms of engineers and scientists who can deploy and integrate those models into, for instance, military systems, commercial systems, government systems and so on. So think of it this way. Let's imagine, just for the sake of argument, that artificial superintelligence, sorry, was invented tomorrow, and it was open source. Even then, China does not necessarily have the expertise to make the most use of it. Now that's not to say that they wouldn't quickly invest and catch up, but when you look at all of the high end big tech companies, they're all in America. That's Apple, Meta, Google, Microsoft. Yeah, China does have their own tech companies, but they are, I think their top tech company is only number seven, and that's the only one in the top ten globally. The rest are American, with I think one or two exceptions like maybe Nokia or Samsung. Samsung might be up there. Maybe another Japanese company or two. Anyways, my point is, is that America has the manpower, has the expertise, has the compute capacity to basically trounce China in any kind of hot conflict. So that is one of the key things that I think basically means that America would never agree to pause. Like, we would never give up that geopolitical advantage. Now more broadly, I was thinking about the role of oceans as it pertains to conflict and security and so on. So for instance, even with advanced aircraft carriers and the ability to protect power with a blue ocean navy, you're still counting the number of military forces in the tens of thousands rather than hundreds of thousands. And as we've seen with the Ukraine-Russia conflict, even when you have hundreds of thousands bordering on millions of combatants, that's not necessarily enough to move the needle today anymore. And so a mainland attack on China or America is just not going to happen. We do have the ability to lob nukes at each other, which of course serves as a deterrent. And one topic of conversation that is starting to become more interesting is that perhaps artificial general intelligence could be another form of deterrent. If you can start lobbing drones at each other, if you can start harassing each other with cybersecurity threats on the order of general intelligence or super intelligence, you might just decide that it's not worth going there, that that might just be a red line that says, okay, just because we can doesn't mean that we will or that we should. Now, to provide a point of, I guess, contrast, if we think about the nation of Australia, America is one of the few nations that basically occupies a whole continent. We do have Mexico and some Central American nations. We also have Canada, but they're very, well, I don't want to say very close allies. They're allies by virtue of just being our neighbors. And then Australia is the only nation that actually occupies an entire continent. Now, because it's completely surrounded by oceans, Australia has a very powerful natural defense barrier. And to my knowledge, Australia has not really been invaded in any sort of significant force. I do think that the Japanese showed up in Australia in relatively small numbers during World War II, but nothing that was going to be permanent. It was more of an expeditionary kind of disruption campaign. Now, with that being said, you might say, okay, well, if Australia has the same advantages of being completely surrounded by ocean, similar to America, we have two gigantic oceans separating us from Europe and Asia. That is a huge buffer. And of course, China does not even have the blue ocean capability that America does. Australia is much closer. So why do I bring all this up? My point is just to talk about how, despite all the technology we have, we're still counting the number of ships that we have in the hundreds, not the thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands. It's just not feasible to have any kind of significant projection of power. And then you look at Taiwan, which is just off the coast of China. It's a little bit further off the coast of China than Britain is off the coast of Europe. And the English Channel was enough to keep Germany at bay during all of World War II. It's entirely possible that Taiwan, which if I remember correctly is about 80 kilometers off the coast of China, might be a little bit more or less. I don't remember exact numbers. But that's far enough that, yes, you could launch air sorties, you can do bombing campaigns, but China's not really going to be able to land an invasion force on Taiwan. Not without at least extensively softening them up first, which would give the rest of the world a chance to react. So I guess long story short is nobody wins a hot conflict between America and China. There might be smaller skirmishes, as we've seen. The Chinese Navy is continuously harassing, for instance, the Filipino Navy. But America, if you watch very closely, is working with allies in the region to slowly, very slowly tighten the noose in that vicinity by shoring up resources in the Philippines and Indonesia and so on and so forth. There's a few narrow corridors in that region, which if you cut that off, then China basically starts starving to death because the vast majority of their oil comes through those corridors in the South Pacific. Now that's one reason that China is so aggressive in the South Pacific is because they realize that threat. Now I've been studying John Mirsheimer's book, which is called The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. And he self describes what's called an offensive realist. And so offensive realism basically says that nations will do whatever it is within their power to expand their power. And they are constrained only by geographic boundaries and competitive powers. And to take a step back, what do we mean by power? There's a few kinds of power. So number one, we'll hear, let me start with the framework that he outlines. There are newer frameworks about what constitutes power. But from John's perspective, there's basically population and economic capacity or industrial base. And that's one of the two primary metrics of power that he looks at. Because if you don't have people, you don't have an army, you don't have a surplus of labor, you don't have a surplus of experts. And so that's one reason that's why I brought up Australia earlier is because their population is very small despite the size of the nation. The carrying capacity of that island nation is relatively low because much of it is very arid. Similarly, Japan has a somewhat limited carrying capacity because it's a very small island nation. Even though they've had an incredibly robust economic growth over the last century, it's kind of stalled out over the last two decades or so. And again, it's because it's a relatively resource poor nation. But at the same time, they are able to field quite a bit of firepower. Some of that is because of the retooling effort that America put into Japan after the war. Basically, the reason that all that happened is because after World War One, Germany was deliberately punished pretty severely. And what did that do? That impoverished Germany and it created a lot of anger and resentment. And so then what happened was 20 years later after World War One, Germany was added again. And so what the world realized is that when you defeat an enemy categorically, you say, well, instead of just punishing them, let's make them a new ally. And so that's why Germany today is very friendly to the West. It's a very peaceful nation, relatively speaking. We've actually been very reluctant to get involved in the war in Ukraine. Likewise, Japan has, you know, there's a tremendous amount of cultural affinity between America and Japan. That was not by accident. That was saying, hey, we recognize that you are a power, but we won this war, so now you're going to democratize, you're going to liberalize and so on and so forth. The reason that I bring all of that up is because that is never going to happen with China. China is too powerful. It is too large, has too big of a population. It will never categorically lose a war the same way that Germany did in World War Two, the same way that Japan did in World War Two. At least I don't necessarily see a pathway to that outcome that would not also be catastrophic for the rest of humanity. So with all that in mind, my thought is that we might be contending with an adversarial China for decades, if not centuries to come. So we're going to be playing a very, very long game. Long after robots take over all jobs, long after we invent artificial general intelligence and artificial superintelligence, with the one potential saving grace, it could be that artificial intelligence is a forcing function that basically, due to the game theory dynamics and competitive dynamics and market forces, could force people to come together because here's just the very first use case of artificial intelligence is it's an artificial translator, or not artificial, universal translator, pardon me. So if we start deploying universal translators around the globe, then everyone functionally can talk to everyone else and all language barriers disappear. When all language barriers disappear, that builds cultural affinity and allows for cultural exchange and cultural exchange is one of the best ways to prevent war and create economic ties and better diplomatic ties. So if I were the United States State Department, if I were the Chinese State Department or whatever their equivalent is, I would be going all in on artificial intelligence to increase affinity between these nations and focusing on cultural exchange. Now to be fair, there is already a cultural exchange program. It's very quiet, but MCU movies are released in China and there are scenes that are added or removed to make it more palatable to China and vice versa, although America consumes far less Chinese media. There have been a few movies on Netflix, namely The Wandering Earth was a Chinese movie, and it was very interesting to watch that movie because China very much sees itself the way that America saw itself during the space race. In the movie The Wandering Earth, China sees itself as the savior of the planet earth, basically able to fix the rocket engines that are getting earth away from the sun as the sun's about to blow up. All that being said, I don't necessarily see a direct path to global unification, and of course there would be plenty of people out there that say global unification is a bad idea. The last thing we need is bigger government around the whole world. At the same time, an anarchic world vis-a-vis what John Meersheimer calls our anarchic world were basically there is no police. America presently serves as the world police more or less, although that is kind of fading. In order to stabilize the planet and avoid international war or intercontinental war, we will ultimately need some kind of higher governing body. Now artificial intelligence by melting linguistic barriers, that will help, but it will still take many generations before everyone has a lingua franca. It might be English, it might be Chinese, it might be some pigeon language of the two. But as we see in many works of fiction, Firefly and the Expanse come to mind, it's entirely possible that the deeply entrenched populations and cultural structures and political structures in America could be durable and there could be squabbles on earth for the next 10,000 years that are anchored in these ancient cultural paradigms and linguistic barriers, whereas let's imagine that we find a habitable planet 12 light years away, we're able to get there in about 400 years, everyone who goes to that new planet will become homogenized as a new culture. During the trip it would behoove everyone to learn the same language, you'll probably get some pigeon language, pigeon languages emerging that will eventually become a true creole, and then you'll have this unique culture, a unique language like you see on the dusters and the belters in the Expanse, and then in Firefly you see a lot of Chinese mixed in with English. But anyways, what happens is whenever you have a new, I don't want to say gold rush, but a new world to colonize as what happened with America, you kind of end up with an intrinsically new culture. Now there's, I can't remember exactly what it's called, it's something like the three generation theory, where basically integration into a new culture takes three generations, so the first generation basically never learns the language, they struggle, the second generation is typically bilingual and will translate for their parents, but culturally they're still going to be kind of caught between two worlds, and then the third generation will generally lose their original mother tongue and will be culturally almost identical to the current, to their current location. So we saw this with the Irish and Italians at the beginning of the 20th century, you probably have seen or heard, there's still racial epithets, I'm not going to repeat them, you can look them up if you want, but Irish and Italians were not well respected in America, and now there's lots of people that are proud of their Irish and Italian heritage. But that is because it's been 80 plus years and that three generation cycle generally takes about 80 years for an admixture culture to fully integrate into its new homeland. And the same thing is going to happen to the influx of Eastern Indians into America, as well as the Latinos that are coming into America, where basically 80 years from now, give or take, we're going to see kind of a full integration, and people of Indian heritage are not going to have Indian accents anymore, they might not even speak Hindi or other languages that came from India, they might have even let their religion go to a greater or lesser degree, and they will have become fully quote unquote American. But right now we're kind of seeing the second generation, so some of the people that I went to school with were the children of first generation immigrants from India, and so they were bilingual, some of them had accents, some of them didn't, but they were kind of crossing two cultures and two language barriers, and so the children of my peers are going to be just fully American, they're going to sound American, they won't look American, they will look American by virtue of diversity, what I should have said is they won't be like white people, they'll still be visually distinct in the same way that Hispanics will probably be visually distinct from white Americans, black Americans and so on, but culturally there will be some admixture now with one major exception, and that is that in some cases due to racism and other cultural paradigms you end up with cloisters, and so there are segments of Chinese Americans that basically stay in their own little communities, many African, well I don't want to say African Americans because they're not all from Africa, many black Americans also stay kind of in their own communities, and this is very similar to Jewish communities, and for many, many centuries we're very insular, but those are holdout pockets, many people will choose to integrate. Now why am I bringing all of this up? This is all just to provide a little bit of historical and anthropological context as to what might happen over the next decades to centuries in terms of cultural integration and so on and so forth. Will any of that ever happen with China? Under the current regime I don't think so. The reason is because Americans, very few Americans want to go to China, and likewise very few Chinese want to come to America at least to stay. There's a common phenomenon in American universities where Chinese students come, they don't talk to other people, they study in groups of other Chinese students, and then once they finish they go back to China. Very few of them stay, and so you might say, well that's clearly a geopolitical bad idea because then they're taking American expertise and going back home with it. Now in a short term view, yes I absolutely agree, you don't want to be educating a potential adversary. In the long term though, the cultural affinity that can come from Chinese people that have been to America, that learned to survive here, that learned to like being here and have friends here, that is generally going to be better because people that have visited other places are less likely to feel hostile towards them. So for instance, I don't remember the name of the military commander, but when America decided to drop the nuclear bombs on Japan, one of the proposed targets was Kyoto. However, the commanding officer had visited Kyoto, saw its beauty, knew how important it was to the Japanese and said no, that would be a bridge too far. So even in wartime there was a level of respect for the Japanese people and their heritage. Now of course you say that's a very thin consolation when we killed what, 80 to 120,000 people with a single weapon. At the same time, I just want to point out that cultural familiarity, that cultural affinity does tend to reduce hostility and that is one of my greatest hopes is that we can use artificial intelligence to start reducing hostility and building cultural affinity across not just America and China, but literally every nation. Communication is the antidote to violence and artificial intelligence as a powerful mediator could also help with diplomatic ties. When you get on the internet and you see Israelis talking to Palestinians, it's all vicious. When you see Palestinians talking about Israelis, it's vicious. When you see Israelis talking about Palestinians, it's vicious. And that's not to say that they're wrong or unjustified. There is plenty of righteous anger on both sides. And I'm not going to comment on who's right or wrong. It's a pretty awful situation all around. As Elon Musk said shortly after the October 7th attack happened, there's not really any easy or obvious solution. One thing that I hope though is that artificial intelligence will allow us to start treating the profound amount of intergenerational trauma in that region. One of the patterns that I see, particularly in the Israel-Palestine conflict, is the amount of intergenerational trauma basically makes both sides feel completely justified in othering and alienating and dehumanizing the other, which is not good. Now obviously using artificial intelligence to treat PTSD, that's a long shot. There's not really any guarantee that that would work. There's not really any evidence that that's a viable path forward. But it could be another tool in the toolbox. Likewise, I'm hoping that language barriers, mental health issues can be addressed or augmented by artificial intelligence globally. And kind of the way that I think about it is the internet was the invention of the nervous system of a global superorganism. But the global superorganism is about as intelligent as an amoeba. It just wants more resources. It wants more data. It wants more energy. It wants more attention. And it's a simple optimizing machine to get more attention, to get more data. Now as we add artificial intelligence to the mix, this is going to be basically growing a cerebral tissue for the global superorganism. We're giving the internet a brain. And I'm hoping that the net result of that is that we will come together more as a single species. That's not to say that we should homogenize and become a single culture. That could very well take hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of years just due to inertia. And also if people start living a much longer time, if the average generation goes from 20 years to 100 years to 200 years, that greatly extends the timelines because, you know, as they say, science advances one funeral at a time. Likewise, cultural integration advances one generation at a time. So if we're measuring generations and centuries instead of decades, then that, you know, 10x is the length of time that it takes to homogenize a culture. If you even want to do that, we would not actually want to lose that cultural diversity. But at the same time, one of the costs of having diversity is bridging those communication gaps. Anyways, my point with all of this is just that I'm pretty optimistic that artificial intelligence will be able to help with some of these things. And I'm hoping that we start to see more both free market, you know, corporate or commercial deployments of universal translators, but also more deliberate use at the government level and military level to actually bridge some of these barriers. Because as many United States military commanders will say, the purpose of the military is not war, it's deterrent. At least that's the posture right now. And what better way to deter conflict than saying than investing in, you know, cultural building cultural affinity, building bilateral cultural exchange and facilitating more communication. Because I don't think anyone truly wants a hot war. And if we can chart a path to greater peace, I think that that's a path that could be exploited pretty readily, honestly. Because artificial intelligence models are already good at translating text, they're also already good at speaking. We basically can have Star Trek level universal translators on our phone. Someone just needs to build the app if they haven't already. Or maybe it could even just be integrated as a default feature of Android and iPhone and every other smartphone manufacturer out there. So I think I'll wrap it up here. Let me know what you think. If you like this audio only version, I know that people have been asking for an audio version of me talking for a long time. And I've tried doing it other formats, other kinds of, you know, interview based podcasts. But the production time of those is a little bit heavy for me, given the workload of everything that I'm already doing. So yeah, let me know what you think about this. And finally, I want to do a plug for my community. It is called the New Era Pathfinders. It's on school. That's S-K-O-O-L.com. Yeah, so this is my private coaching community or growth community that is focused on navigating this new era. So we focus on learning artificial intelligence skills, sharing news. I also have a course called the Pathfinders Journey, which is based on my personal journey as to where I started from a non-AI job to now I do AI full time. Everything that I've learned along the way, including ancillary skills such as communication skills, presentation skills, and also how to make sense of life and how to make sense of meaning with the possibility that I might not even have a job in five to ten years. Who knows? So anyways, check it out. Link should be in the description and I will talk to you next time. Cheers.
China vs America in the Age of AI