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September 18 - October 31, 2023
STATES OF FAILURE
CHAPTER 10 FRAGILITY AMPLIFIERS
Technology is ultimately political because technology is a form of power.
Today, no matter how wealthy you are, you simply cannot buy a more powerful smartphone than is available to billions of people.
THE MISINFORMATION MACHINE
According to Facebook, Russian agents created no fewer than eighty thousand pieces of organic content that reached 126 million Americans on their platforms during the 2016 election.
A Carnegie Mellon study analyzed more than 200 million tweets discussing COVID-19 at the height of the first lockdown. Eighty-two percent of influential users advocating for “reopening America” were bots.
Labor market disruptions are, like social media, fragility amplifiers. They damage and undermine the nation-state.
CHAPTER 11 THE FUTURE OF NATIONS
CONCENTRATIONS: THE COMPOUNDING RETURNS ON INTELLIGENCE
Companies already control the largest clusters of AI processors, the best models, the most advanced quantum computers, and the overwhelming majority of robotics capacity and IP.
the frontier of this wave is found in corporations, not in government organizations
I think we’ll see a group of private corporations grow beyond the size and reach of many nation-states.
All the big tech platforms either are mainly service businesses or have very large service businesses. Apple has the App Store,
Everywhere you look, technology accelerates this dematerialization, reducing complexity for the end consumer by providing continuous consumption services rather than traditional buy-once products.
Meeting demand for cheap and seamless services usually requires scale (massive up-front investment in chips, people, security, innovation), which rewards and accelerates centralization.
SURVEILLANCE: ROCKET FUEL FOR AUTHORITARIANISM
CHAPTER 12 THE DILEMMA
CHAPTER 13 CONTAINMENT MUST BE POSSIBLE
China is slamming on the brakes in some areas while also—as we’ve seen—charging ahead in others. Its regulation is matched by an unparalleled deployment of technology as a tool of authoritarian government power.
In effect, Chinese AI policy has two tracks: a regulated civilian path and a freewheeling military-industrial one.
A useful comparison here is climate change. It too deals with risks that are often diffuse, uncertain, temporally distant, happening elsewhere, lacking the salience, adrenaline, and immediacy of an ambush on the savanna—the kind of risk we are well primed to respond
Pessimism aversion is much harder when the effects are so nakedly quantifiable. Like climate change, technological risk can only be addressed at planetary scale, but there is no equivalent clarity.
CHAPTER 14
U.S. citizens working on semiconductors with Chinese companies are faced with a choice: keep their jobs and lose American citizenship, or immediately quit.
In AI, the lion’s share of the most advanced GPUs essential to the latest models are designed by one company, the American firm NVIDIA.
Most of its chips are manufactured by one company, TSMC, in Taiwan, the most advanced in just a single building, the world’s most sophisticated and expensive factory.
TSMC’s machinery to make these chips comes from a single supplier, the Dutch firm ASML, by far Europe’s most valu...
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LIFE AFTER THE ANTHROPOCENE
