A Deal With The Devil?

So I’ve been thinking about Trump calling for China to help him dig up dirt on his opponents. I predicted that we would discover additional countries that he attempted with, and China certainly was near the top of my list of guesses, though I’m still waiting to hear that he asked MBS to “jokingly” take care of one of his political opponents. Might be waiting for once the Democratic primary is over.

In any case, I think that China giving into Trump’s request to manufacture dirt is the wrong move for China. Trump will of course float the idea that it would be a bargaining chip in a trade deal, though it will be through his mobster language that is incredibly transparent, yet allows for Republicans to pretend it’s opaque. China shouldn’t fall for this though, as first, these things tend to get out, and may damage international standing, which China is still working hard on accruing, and second, Trump will not follow through on his promise, even if the Chinese managed to get it in writing, or him saying it directly.

There is a terrible stereotype that ALL the Chinese do is plagiarize from others, which has some truth to it, but isn’t all there is to their technology. This however, is an opportunity for China to put that stereotype to use. China has been practicing image maintenance through the use of state-owned Twitter accounts on issues like the Hong Kong protests and the Uighur detention camps, but if they were to copy the Russian methodology, as conveniently laid out in the Mueller Report, but with ten, or a hundred times the funding (still a paltry $10 million for such a large economy), they could employ a propaganda hurricane that could sweep through the Western media, and possibly damage Republican enthusiasm enough to allow for at least presidential victory for the Democrats.

So, while Trump’s inability to follow through on contractual agreements is an excellent reason not to support him in this way, why would they specifically want a Democrat to win in 2020 over Trump? First of all, whoever it is will make efforts to repair the global economic damage that Trump has done by doing things like stabilizing trade. Secondly, it will give China continued access to our market for their technology, and may still be with enough time to be competitive in the U.S. Third, the continued economic integration with the west will allow for China to continue exerting its influence on American corporations, with the most important of those being producers of American culture, which is now conveniently and explicitly more pro-Chinese, and is exported across the globe. With a fractured global economy (you have to remember that China may force the states that it exerts soft power on to retaliate against America as well), China may lose its ability to hijack the influence of American media, and easily export their values through secondary level propaganda. Lastly, if the tensions escalate, scientific and educational materials that are produced in the U.S. may become inaccessible to China. Cooperative labs may lose their funding, or find that their contracts mysteriously aren’t given renewal for their funding. Exchange programs between the two countries may end, limiting access to new technologies, and stifling scientific progress across the board.

China, I know you’re listening, you’re always listening, so listen, I may have a whole different set of reasons to support a Democrat, and I may be incredibly concerned about the advancement of the authoritarian state in China, but that doesn’t mean that four more years of Trump is something that China actually wants, despite how much of a kiss-ass Trump is to authoritarians.

Paperbacks are here!

Paperback editions of my first two books are available now on Amazon, The Stolen Tome, and its sequel, The Silverbows. If you purchase the paperback version, you can also purchase the digital version for only a dollar more! I have spent the last several months highly discouraged, and in a creatively oppressive atmosphere (see this post), but I am now once again writing, and in a frenzy! I’m skeptical that I will make my goal of publishing book 3 by the end of the year, but I will certainly be making more progress! My creative juices continue to rise as the stresses of the past year have finally began to sort themselves out. I’ve still got challenges ahead, to be sure, but honestly, it’s all better than living with my father. I spent so much time just trying to relieve enough anxiety to function, but now, Dobby is free! Rolls in a pile of socks.

A Couple of Thoughts About China and Bitcoin

On October 25th, the president of China Xi Jinping  announced that China should seize the opportunity to adopt blockchain technology. Now this announcement came as a surprise to many, considering how tightly the Chinese government has previously cracked down on cryptocurrency transfers. Now though, it looks as though the Chinese have had a sudden change of heart regarding blockchain, but why?

 

Personally, this change came as no surprise to me. China is developing what I like to refer to as Laplace’s economic demon, a twist on the classic French though experiment developed by Pierre Laplace in the 1800’s. His version of the demon knew the momentum, position and spin for every atom in a room, or in the universe, which would allow for the demon to be able to calculate the state of the universe at any other point. My version of the demon is a little bit different. My demon knows every transaction made in an economy, which allows allows for the demon to predict where resources should be allocated in an economy.

 

Now the math for such calculating something so complex and multidimensional as the economy seems far beyond the predictive power of our current mathematical models of it. Additionally such a demon would require being able to track the amounts and contents of nearly every transaction in the system. A human may not be able to accomplish this (though economists certainly love to try), but I certainly believe that it is possible for artificial intelligence to be able to manage it.

 

Now what could an advanced, centrally-planned economy do? Such an AI could serve poor families household necessities, it could react to job losses to provide financial or food assistance to those families. An example of this would be a government version of Walmart’s grocery delivery service, but combined with the predictive power of Amazon’s product re-ordering recommendations. The government sees that you are low on groceries, and need assistance, so they send someone to your home with staples, while the AI searches through the economy to find replacement work for your particular skill sets.

 

To some, such possibilities may seem like a dream, but to others, it is a dystopian nightmare. The ability for the government to have a full view of every consumer’s discretionary spending  becomes problematic when the government decides that people aren’t spending money the way that they think the people should, and decides to interfere. Now, some people would say that such a thing would be impossible, or that even if it was possible, that it never could happen, because people would not stand idly by and allow for such a system to be put in place. It would require too much data, it would require a way to track nearly every transaction, and would require an intense surveillance state, the likes of which have been unseen by society.

 

Back to China, who is currently in the process of building this system. Now, do the upper elites in China already have this laid out as their plan? It seems fairly unlikely that this is the specific plan that they have, but it does seem that they are putting together all the individual pieces of such a system separately. Let’s step through the major steps that China is taking towards this goal, and how these steps could come together, shall we?

 

The first thing that would be required would be for the government to have the ability to observe its citizens as they live their lives, on a granular level, that would allow for any given citizen to be tracked wherever they go, as they move throughout the economy. Now, China doesn’t have a system like this set up across the whole of their country, but that doesn’t mean that they are not working on it. The Chinese government is currently testing the technology, and setting up the initial systems on populations that they want to suppress, most recently their large population of Uighur Muslims. They have begun by setting up an enormous amount of cameras on street corners, and placing mini police stands all over the place, creating a system of checkpoints that make it impossible to leave one’s house without being tracked.

 

Now, how do they track you specifically, instead of just having a general idea for your location? Between location tracking on phones, the camera locations, and the boots on the ground state agents, they can create a fine-grain map of movements, from your home, to the store, to your work, and of course where all of the people you care about live. China’s state facial recognition software may be on par with Facebook’s, or even better by now, due to the enormous amount of facial data that is being fed through the tens of thousands of cameras they use.

 

However, even with over a billion faces, and untold numbers of cameras, without sufficient knowledge of how to create the algorithms that process them, you would have an ocean of data, with only a paddle-boat to navigate it. Unfortunately though, the Chinese are working on the tools necessary to process this enormous amount of data with AI. For years, I’ve heard from people that the Chinese aren’t a threat because of the large amount of plagiarism in their academic work. Now this may have been true a decade ago, but the tides have changed, and the field of AI research has advanced enough that AI’s created in other countries have been able to create entirely new products. Who needs to be creative, when you can create an AI to do even that for you? China has opened thousands of universities in the past few decades, and is continuing to ramp up its production of AI research papers at a faster rate than any other country. It’s only a matter of time before the Chinese government takes this technique steps further.

 

Artificial Intelligence is unique as a field of intellectual study, and advancement, as AI acts as an intellectual capital multiplier, as opposed to many other technologies, which were labor capital multipliers. Assembly lines allowed for a single worker to perform the same specialized task hundreds or thousands of times faster than without the use of manufacturing equipment, but an algorithm that specializes in intellectual labor can invent hundreds or thousands of times faster than a human, and can create designs that a human mind would be far too limited to even comprehend.

 

This brings us back to cryptocurrency, and China’s adoption of block-chain technology. Of course it’s possible that it could allow for a more transparent economic system, but the possible metadata that could be collected by the state could allow for a whole new level of control, with absolute control over every citizen’s assets. No more cash in your mattresses. I think that those who like the liberal, or libertarian values associated with bitcoin, liberty, fairness, anonymity, freedom from governmental control, they should take this adoption of a new technology with a grain of salt, and be wary of where this may be headed, because if China manages to be successful, they will export their success to other countries.

 

Lastly, it is important not to simply dismiss China’s growing economic and technological threat. Simply because they are not as big of a threat in these regards yet, doesn’t mean they won’t be soon. These endeavors take time, and only now are the fruits of their long plan beginning to come to fruition. We cannot assume that democracy and freedom and capitalism will win the day simply by their own virtues. The twisting of Hong Kong’s capitalist origins, leveraged for the benefit of China has not produced revolutions like was guessed when trading was opened with them, nor did the introduction of the internet spread truth and knowledge as had been hoped. Instead, each became a tool for their agenda, and AI is simply the next step, and they know that if they can get far enough ahead on this, no one else will be able to catch up.

A Short Thing

I looked in the mirror, and I did not recognize who I saw. I did not recognize the world on the other side, or rather this side. It was so hard to tell these days what was real, if it was all really happening. All of it? For how much longer could I continue to believe my eyes and ears? It seems that each day the lies become more obvious, the believers more oblivious. A movement in the mirror. Was it real, or was my mind beginning to manifest what I had cynically expected to see? Would my mind begin to believe what were once so outrageous lies?

Not today. There was still truth, still some rationality, still some time to fix things. I stepped through the mirror, into that backwards, crazy world, to try not to drown in that sea of cognitive dissonance.

Emerging From A Depressed Hiatus

Lately I’ve been dealing with a lot, but mostly my dad. I’ve been living with him since last November, after my roommate was mugged with our rent money, getting us evicted from our apartment. It was a nice thing for him to do, but since I have been living with him, things have gotten tense. He would deride me, and interrogate me on why I haven’t “made it” yet at 26, with a lot of college credits, but no degree, and a lot of knowledge and skills, but no proof. After publishing my second book earlier this year, he told me to give up, and to sell my soul to a corporation and work myself to death.

As a result, I became pretty depressed, which along with farcical levels of bad luck, including an insane attempt to buy a set of tires back in August/September, and is still not resolved, has caused me to take a hit to rate at which I was saving. I’ll finally be moving out soon (the beginning of November), and I can feel the stress of interacting with him fading. I know that without us being under the same roof, it would be a lot easier for us to get along, and in fact, I might even at one point have been willing to play some of the games I got for us to play together. Not much chance of that now though.

I tried to explain my difficulties to him, and I tried to conform to what he wanted, but doing a 9-5 in a corporate office for a tech company just isn’t me. He can’t accept that though, and thinks that as a result, I am wasting away my life doing nothing. He could be correct about that. It could be that in my future years, I’ll continue to write, and live in poverty and obscurity. I think though that it’s far more likely that some day some aspect of my writing will attract someone’s attention. I’m less worried about it now, and after such a long hiatus of not writing, it really does feel good to get really anything down on a page. I’ve got ideas, and need to get them down!