China and AI - it's about control

According to Signal, the newsletter of the Eurasia Group: "control is a central motivation of the [Chinese] government’s bid to become a 21st century AI superpower"

They go on:

The idea is to create a nation in which every person, company, road, bridge, river, air particle, hospital, school, and police station is monitored by sensors, cameras, or data hoovers. And then to feed that data into AI systems, developed by China's increasingly capable homegrown tech industry, that can help the government do to three things:

• Improve people’s quality of life by using massive data sets and artificial intelligence to make roads, rails, hospitals, schools, and other public services run better and more responsively – without ever having to open up to the mess of democratic accountability or oversight. This might look good to those people around the world who believe democratic governments can barely tie their own shoes.
• Keep order by controlling the movement of “threatening” people and ideas. This is much easier to do via technology and data analysis than by sending spooks out to spy on people. This idea will appeal to governments looking to create the kind of stability that doesn’t demand power-sharing.
• Create incentives for people to follow the rules by using technology to limit the access of lawbreaking citizens to important services. That might appeal to both law-abiding citizens and political officials.

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."

Nassim Taleb talk

Nassim Taleb gave a talk today at Google. He opened by stating that he gave a talk six years ago at Google in Mountain View, and that it seemed that the average age in the room today was about six years older. I don't know if he meant it this way, but it made the point for me that people really never leave Google (and that says something about our culture).

He said later in his talk that all corporations decline, and that some of that is because we get farther away from the customer. He recommended that we all start our own companies.

He also discussed the Lindy Effect. Wikipedia defines it as: The Lindy effect is a concept that the future life expectancy of some non-perishable things like a technology or an idea is proportional to their current age, so that every additional period of survival implies a longer remaining life expectancy.[1] Where the Lindy effect applies, mortality rate decreases with time. In contrast, living creatures and mechanical things follow a bathtub curve where, after "childhood", the mortality rate increases with time. Because life expectancy is probabilistically derived, a thing may become extinct before its "expected" survival. In other words, one needs to gauge both the age and "health" of the thing to determine continued survival.

Refreshing article on conservative leadership at Pintrest

Pintrest is led by a conservative leadership team, that seems to emphasize profitable growth with a core set of customers. The NYTimes wrote an article profiling the CEO, Ben Silbermann, and the company more broadly.