US, China, AI and warfare

Some highlights from an FT article entitled "Washington unnerved by China’s ‘military-civil fusion"

... scientists and companies in both China and the west have become interwoven. Large numbers of young Chinese study and work in related disciplines in Europe and America. As many as 25 per cent of graduate students in science, technology, engineering and maths in the US are Chinese citizens, according to an estimate from the Pentagon. Western technology companies are heavily invested in China and Chinese firms have been a growing source of funding for AI start-ups in Silicon Valley.


... “The entanglement in AI creates a dual-use dilemma,” says Elsa Kania, a fellow at the Centre for a New American Security. “Our open and liberal societies facilitate the development of AI, but the Chinese state’s single-minded pursuit of these technologies puts this same openness and freedom at risk.”

... role of private companies means that industry “is moving centre stage in geopolitics”, says Su Tzu-yun, a senior official at the Institute for National Defence and Security Research, a think-tank backed by Taiwan’s defence ministry and National Security Council.

...“So far, their main interests appear to be in harnessing AI for command and control, and to use augmented and virtual reality to make exercises more real — an important feature for a military that has essentially not fought since the Vietnam war,” says Elsa Kania, a fellow at the Washington-based Centre for a New American Security.

NYTimes on musicals converted from other formats

In his review of King Kong (with Ben Brantley), Jesse Green stated:

When I see a musical drawn from a work in another genre — in this case the 1933 movie and its novelization — one thing I look for is the added value. What is gained in bringing “King Kong” to the stage? Certainly not provocative or insightful songwriting. The score is a hodgepodge of soundtrack-style murk by Marius de Vries and a clutch of no-profile songs by Eddie Perfect, whose score for “Beetlejuice” is heading toward Broadway even as we speak

Nitin Noria's comments on veterans and business

Nitin Noria wrote this article in the Washington Post in 2013 about his experience teaching veterans in business school and the importance of cultivating ties between business and the military.

Large corporations and fascism?

In the NYTimes opinion pages this week, Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia, argues that large corporations lay the groundwork for fascism.

I don't think it's a very strong argument, as he fails to tie corporations to the actual rise of leaders. However he highlights that having fewer, larger corporations in an industry obviously consolidates political power in that industry.

He closes by stating: "We have forgotten that antitrust law had more than an economic goal, that it was meant fundamentally as a kind of constitutional safeguard, a check against the political dangers of unaccountable private power."