Tag: policy

US-China Cold War

The new dynamic affects people as well as products. China is asking state firms to avoid travel to the US and its allies. And if you were an American or Canadian tech company executive, would you travel to China right now, given that Canada has detained a leading Huawei executive (and daughter of the company’s CEO) for extradition to the US? Meanwhile, many American universities are kicking their local Confucius Institute off campus, most notably the University of Michigan, amid complaints that those institutes are spying on Chinese nationals who attend those schools. Whether or not that is true, this is another sign of the collapse of trust. This is the deeper issue with the US-China relationship: the continuing erosion, in an era of rapid deglobalization, of previous ties built at least partly on a common sense of purpose. Looking back at 2018, it now seems obvious that this was the most important story of the year.

2019-03-15: AI competition

Suppose, however, that the AI competition between the US and China is submerged in a far larger global competition between man and machine. Suppose the strongest, healthiest, happiest country is the country in which human beings are most in control of their lives. Humans controlled by their machines, by contrast, will feel a pervasive, purposeless malaise, locked into what Webb describes as a “digital caste system” with all their decisions made for them in predetermined and directed lives.

2019-06-24: Liu Cixin

A leading scifi writer takes stock of China’s global rise

2020-01-01: Dan Wang

I’ve found it curious that Congress has become so keen to publicly beat up on Facebook and Google while the US considers itself in technological competition with China. In my view, antitrust arguments apply better to companies like Intel and Boeing, which are the tech giants that wield much greater market power. The US responded to the rise of the USSR and Japan by focusing on innovation; it’s early days, but so far the US is responding to the technological rise of China mostly by kneecapping its leading firms. So instead of realizing its own Sputnik moment, the US is triggering one in China.

2020-01-06: and the New Yorker

To a degree still difficult for outsiders to absorb, China is preparing to shape the 21st century, much as the US shaped the 20th

2021-01-27: A proposed strategy

America’s technological leadership is fundamental to its security, prosperity, and democratic way of life. But this vital advantage is now at risk, with China surging to overtake the United States in critical areas. Urgent policy solutions are needed to renew American competitiveness and sustain critical US technological advantages.

In order to lead, the United States will need to maximize its competitive advantage in key strategic technologies in ways that overcome China’s advantages, which include greater scale, hyper-integrated platforms, and faster product integration loop.

Intelligence. We need to upgrade our intelligence capabilities to dominate the forecasting space. If we cannot forecast where technology is going, we cannot stay competitive.

Brain Drain. The United States will need to develop, attract, and retain human capital and foster environments for inquiry and experimentation.

Supply Chains. Building more resilient supply chains is critical to diminishing our vulnerability to Chinese control, but will require significant investment in domestic infrastructure, ally-centric production, and advances in automation.

Multilateralism. We must work with allies to strengthen cooperation among like-minded countries; promote collective norms and values around the use of emerging technologies; and protect and preserve key areas of competitive technological advantage.

Government Redesign. Our internal government structures are not optimized to address the new challenges posed by emerging technologies.

2022-02-22: US losing in war games

Over the past decade, in US war games against China, the United States has a nearly perfect record: We have lost almost every single time. Our spy and communications satellites would immediately be disabled; our forward bases in Guam and Japan would be “inundated” by precise missiles; our aircraft carriers would have to sail away from China to escape attack; our F-35 fighter jets couldn’t reach their targets because the refueling tankers they need would be shot down. How did this happen? It wasn’t an intelligence failure, or a malign Pentagon and Congress, or lack of money, or insufficient technological prowess. No, it was simply bureaucratic inertia compounded by entrenched interests.

2023-02-23: China Internet content may be too low quality to build good LLM.

As of 2021, although the numbers of Simplified Chinese Internet users and English Internet users are comparable, English content accounts for 60.4% of the top 10 million websites in global rankings, while Chinese content accounts for only 1.4%.
The poor quality of Chinese Internet content is the result of Chinese Internet companies, represented by Baidu and ByteDance, who rush to make quick profits. Instead of patiently transporting more books and literature into the Internet, these platforms judge the quality of content based on whether it kills time and drives revenue. After several years of precipitation, it is now difficult to search for high-quality information on the internet in Simplified Chinese, and it should not surprise us that these chatbots confuse themselves as soon as they are asked meaningful questions.

Anti Solar Campaigns

In Arizona, however, where a recent poll found that 75% of the electorate wanted more solar energy, A.P.S. has spent $22m campaigning against Prop 127. “You’d think we were proposing something truly harmful and dangerous”. He hasn’t been shy in returning the blows, spending $18m supporting Prop 127 through Clean Energy for a Healthy Arizona. Their biggest expense was a paid force of petitioners who spread out across the state to collect 480k signatures to get the initiative on the ballot, 2x the amount required by law. “We’re on the side of the angels. This is a black-hat, white-hat fight.”

Liberal Radicalism

We were able to compute the optimum level of the public good because we knew each individual’s utility function. In the real world each individual’s utility function is private information. Thus, to reach the social optimum we must solve 2 problems. The information problem and the free rider problem. The information problem is that no one knows the optimal quantity of the public good. The free rider problem is that no one is willing to pay for the public good. The government used the contribution levels under the top-up mechanism as a signal to decide how much of the public good to produce and almost magically the top-up function is such that citizens will voluntarily contribute exactly the amount that correctly signals how much society as a whole values the public good. Amazing!

Crack pipe vending crackdown

3 vending machines dispensing crack pipes for $2 each were discovered roadside in Long Island. The machines were marked “PENS” and did indeed contain pens, well, ballpoint pens that had been turned into crack pipes. Town of Brookhaven Supervisor Ed Romaine tested the machine by inserting the required 8 quarters and later remarked, “We’re going to crack down on this.”

1918 Flu

The Spanish flu strain killed its victims with a swiftness never seen before. In the United States stories abounded of people waking up sick and dying on their way to work. The symptoms were gruesome: Sufferers would develop a fever and become short of breath. Lack of oxygen meant their faces appeared tinged with blue. Hemorrhages filled the lungs with blood and caused catastrophic vomiting and nosebleeds, with victims drowning in their own fluids. Unlike so many strains of influenza before it, Spanish flu attacked not only the very young and the very old, but also healthy adults between the ages of 20 and 40.

2020-03-01:

In most disasters, people come together, help each other, as we saw recently with Hurricanes Harvey and Irma. But in 1918, without leadership, without the truth, trust evaporated. And people looked after only themselves.

Vacant Property Theory

Broken-windows theory always worked better as an idea than as a description of the real world. The problems with the theory, which include the fact that perceptions of disorder generally have more to do with the racial composition of a neighborhood than with the number of broken windows or amount of graffiti in the area, are numerous and well documented. But more interesting than the theory’s flaws is the way that it was framed and interpreted. Consider the authors’ famous evocation of how disorder begins: A piece of property is abandoned, weeds grow up, a window is smashed. Adults stop scolding rowdy children; the children, emboldened, become more rowdy. Families move out, unattached adults move in. Teenagers gather in front of the corner store. The merchant asks them to move; they refuse. Fights occur. Litter accumulates. People start drinking in front of the grocery; in time, an inebriate slumps to the sidewalk and is allowed to sleep it off. Pedestrians are approached by panhandlers. Things get worse from there. But what’s curious is how the first 2 steps of this cycle—“A piece of property is abandoned, weeds grow up”—have disappeared in the public imagination. The 3rd step—“a window is smashed”—inspired the article’s catchy title and took center stage. Debates about the theory ignored the 2 problems at the root of its story, jumping straight to the criminal behavior. We got “broken windows,” not “abandoned property,” and a very different policy response ensued. But what if the authors—and the policymakers who heeded them—had taken another tack? What if vacant property had received the attention that, for 30 years, was instead showered on petty criminals?

For Epistocracy

Illing: Let’s return to the “competence principle.” Why does the right to competent government trump other fundamental rights, like the right to participate in the democratic process? Brennan: I think the real question is why should we assume there’s a right to participate in democratic process? It’s actually quite weird and different from a lot of other rights we seem to have. We have the right to choose our partner, to choose our religion, to choose what we’re going to eat, where we live, what job we’ll do, etc. While some of these things do impose costs on others, they’re primarily about carving out a sphere of autonomy for the individual, and about preventing other people from having control over you. A right to participate in politics seems fundamentally different because it involves imposing your will upon other people. So I’m not sure that any of us should have that kind of right, at least not without any responsibilities. So how do we create an epistocracy? Brennan: Here’s what I propose we do: Everyone can vote, even children. No one gets excluded. But when you vote, you do 3 things. First, you tell us what you want. You cast your vote for a politician, or for a party, or you take a position on a referendum, whatever it might be. Second, you tell us who you are. We get your demographic information, which is anonymously coded, because that stuff affects how you vote and what you support. And the third thing you do is take a quiz of very basic political knowledge. When we have those 3 bits of information, we can then statistically estimate what the public would have wanted if it was fully informed. Under this system, it’s not really the case that you have more power than I do. We can’t really point to any individual and say you were excluded, or your vote counted for more. The idea is to gauge what the public would actually want if it had all the information it needed.

AI Sector Blurring

As the applications of machine learning grow, the interactions between companies and nation states will grow in complexity. Consider for example road transportation, where we are gradually moving towards on demand, autonomous cars. This will increasingly blur the line between publicly funded mass transportation and private transport. If this leads to a new natural monopoly in road transportation should it be managed by the state or by a British company, or by a multinational company like Uber?

Bryan Caplan

We talked about whether any single paper is good enough, the autodidact’s curse, the philosopher who most influenced Bryan, the case against education, the Straussian reading of Bryan, effective altruism, Socrates, Larry David, where to live in 527, the charm of Richard Wagner, and much more