Richard Nixon’s famous embrace of China is still viewed as a tour d’force of Realpolitik. Designed to deflect Mao’s China from a continuing and closer relationship with Soviet Russia, and to diminish the likelihood of another Vietnam in some other area of Southeast Asia, it also ushered in a westernization of China’s economic system. This enabled a massive expansion of production and exportation of relatively cheap goods to the rest of the world, especially the U.S. in the 1990’s. The economic quality of life improved dramatically for many in China. We benefitted from the deflation of prices for many consumer and industrial goods due to oversupply at cheaper production costs which represented a marked increase in income to the average Chinese worker, and even material resources, that came from the newly industrious and state-compelled Chinese people. That country opened itself economically if not socially to the world. As China surpassed many smaller nations that had bogged down after their former colonial masters had left or been booted out, the Chinese began concerted efforts at ostensibly enriching those third world countries to mutual benefit with their Belt and Road Initiative. While Taiwan remained a sticking point, no further concerns regarding communistic expansionism in Asia seemed to arise. All parties benefitted, right?
With the new industrial revolution of the international internet came new vulnerabilities of intellectual property. As American business appropriately sought lower cost Chinese labor and production costs for goods to be sold in America, they readily agreed to rather open-ended availability of their business knowledge acquired at substantial cost over time. The Chinese, with a huge population and thus a substantially greater number of people capable of understanding and expanding this business knowledge and intellectual property, as well as having no concerns regarding the principles of private ownership of property, began to vacuum up this knowledge to their own advantage without any compensation to the originators of that knowledge. Further “robbery” of intellectual property, less easily valued compared with that of real goods, was readily available via invasion of our domestic companies and universities by Chinese professionals and students who were gifted with intellectual ability by a more strongly competitive educational system and full monetary tuitions readily paid by their government. We agreeably became dependent upon China not only for many real goods but also for more primitive basics in information technology. We chose to immunize this dependency in informational technology by designing computing power but outsourcing it for production to the “safe” version of China in Taiwan. Although we may still lead the world in the intellectual design of computing power, we depend utterly on the physical production of the required “chips” for advanced business, scientific, and military computing power on the Taiwanese who exist in a fantasy freedom a few miles from the China mainland. Would we really commit to war with mainland China to rescue Taiwan? And wouldn’t such a rescue mission be too late, since easy destruction of Taiwanese chip production facilities takes only a few minutes of time given China’s military capacities? Many years are being expended in replicating Taiwanese chip production methodologies and abilities within the U.S. mainland thanks to all the “necessary” restrictions of environmental, societal, and economic regulations.
The new age of “Artificial Intelligence” has arrived on the precipice of this revolutionary intellectual change. We have come to know that this new savior of our intellectual evolution requires advanced new computing hardware just barely available and only from those same Taiwanese chip facilities. More importantly, massive amounts of electricity are required to run the data centers that house such Algorithmic Influencers. Remember, AI is large language trained, which means it is based in a language in a culture that does not necessarily match other languages and other cultures in meaning and nuance. It is based in a human-derived algorithm that is not objective but rather subjective to the designers. Nonetheless, this intrinsically inefficient system thusly requires inordinate amounts of energy and physical computer capacity to exist and run. Multiple recent estimates of the required capacity for energy production and distribution clearly indicate that the U.S.A. may not be capable of these capacities for many years given our concurrent needs to expand our electrical production and distribution for fully electrified transportation, heating, cooling, and everyday appliance use and replacement of our fossil-fuel derived capacity with “clean” but inconsistent green power. Given that our government, without clear mandate or consent of the governed, has decided to impose these new restrictions and capacities upon our country, either our citizen’s day to day lives will have to be energy restricted on a substantial real or cost basis or we will not be able to provide the needed infrastructure for a new Transhumanism Evolution of Artificial Intelligence that will relieve our population of onerous intellectual endeavors much like the advent of steam and fossil fuel engines relieved us of physical labor. Where will such capacity easily and quickly arise?
Such capacity will be sought by international corporations, free from national sovereign oversite, in the most rational sites. Currently that will again be China. With a massive population and thus a massive subpopulation of highly intelligent and well-educated people (often benefitting from education in the U.S.), they also have an unlimited capacity for industrial energy expansion. With massive coal and available oil reserves (some obtained from Russia) and no particular need to abide by international environmental agreements, they can continue to build out coal-based energy infrastructure in a state-controlled fascistic manner, supplying all the energy that data centers for AI might require. When international AI corporations have the opportunity to leapfrog ahead of any potential competitors in the AI market, will they truly elect to ignore their shareholders’ interests and favor higher cost, more delayed, more fragile facilities in the U.S. or Europe, or go to the low-cost producer of energy and labor in China? That process may not even require the acquisition of Taiwanese chip manufacturing, as the Chinese are rapidly gaining the expertise to produce their own version of advanced CPUs and other necessary computing hardware. Typically, the West generates quantum leaps in technology, and the rest of the world appropriately benefits—witness the jump of South America and Africa to cellular technology without having to go through the painful expensive phase of land lines.
We have choices, and I do not know which is the better. Libertarianism and Free Marketers dictate that we encourage and accept the lowest cost producer of goods and services no matter the source. Certainly the U.S. has benefitted first from the Japanese and then from the Chinese in this fashion over the last forty years. Nationalists who desire to maintain independent capacity to survive in all productive capacities will argue that this “off-shoring 2.0” be resisted or prevented. History is replete with the examples of the results of each point of view.
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