Inauguration, AI, and China: Reasonable Discussion Guards against Folly
addendum, 2025/01/22: What I heard in Pres. Trump's second inaugural address and subsequent events seem to me to support the analysis below, which was written two weeks before the inauguration.
With the presidential inauguration rushing at us, I’m hoping that no matter what happens, people will seek reasonable discussion with their political adversaries. We need to help each other connect current events to historical lessons, because a disturbing pattern is emerging.
The year-end stock market story at CNN pointed out the extraordinarily high back-to-back annual gains in the S&P 500 in 2023 and 2024. The three top winners were stocks related to artificial intelligence, whether through its application (#1 Palantir), through power generation to run it (#2 Vistra), or hardware to build it (#3 Nvidia).
Frequent news stories tell of Chinese spying, and This Week with George Stephanopoulos recently showed a picture of Xi Jinping while the host spoke of our nation’s enemies. Technically, China is our enemy, because the Korean War never ended. Hostilities were merely suspended via 1953’s armistice.
People are talking about what Russia will give North Korea in return for the North Korean lives now being sacrificed in the Ukraine War. In December, 60 Minutes Australia broadcast a senior Australian defense analyst discussing this issue. He went on to say that World War III may have begun and that we need to be ready to win it.
In October, at the University at Albany, New York State's Gov. Hochul announced the installation of a computer for AI research. She mentioned China right after promising that “whoever dominates the AI industry will dominate the next chapter of human history.”
In December, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, promoting a book on AI he wrote with another tech businessman and with Henry Kissinger, mentioned the “China vs. U.S. national security issues of AI” and declared there was “no scenario” under which AI could be developed in collaboration with China.
Meanwhile, Kai-Fu Lee, a Beijing-based leader in AI, believes the United States is “better at innovation, breakthrough. China [is] better at execution.” Lee expects that U.S. and Chinese AI won’t compete, except “in the small number of countries that are friendly” with both nations. This sounds like spheres of influence, not domination. I find it hopeful that Lee is from Taiwan and is the son of a Kuomintang official who fled the mainland in 1949.
I opened with the stock market because it helps us follow the money. Many people are getting rich off AI, a new technology that requires vast resource consumption, that might never work quite right, and that poses extreme risks. Promoting hostility to China creates urgency to keep the money-making going full-tilt.
Let’s make China our friend, just a friend on whom we spy at least as much as they spy on us. If I were Chinese, I’d see the United States as deserving more long-term trust than Russia or North Korea, let alone the two combined.
How can we promote discussion of relevant history?
For months at the Vietnam War gallery in the Abrams Building at the Empire State Plaza, the exhibits have focused on military medicine and surviving battlefield injury. When I walk by, I almost hear Pete Seeger in my head, singing the words of Tom Paxton:
What did you learn in school today, dear little boy of mine?...
I learned that soldiers seldom die…
I learned our government must be strong.
It’s always right and never wrong…
Standing sentinel in the alley east of the exhibits that reassure future soldiers with tales of military medicine's prowess, metal tablets bear the names of New York’s Vietnam War dead. The names guard against fantasies about waging wars of choice in Asia.
Where would there be enough room for tablets if we go to war against China? Would there still be a city in which to erect tablets? Would the billionaires welcome us inside their doomsday vaults?
Human intelligence can save us from repeating follies, but we need frequent reminders of history.
It’s time to move New York’s Vietnam War Memorial from its obscure alley to a place where many people walk routinely. Let the honored dead promote reasonable discussion.
completed 2025/01/06, posted 2025/01/14, last sentence in paragraph on Kai-fu Lee added 2025/01/22
Here's an interview, posted on 2025/01/13, with Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs, a longtime advisor to governments, expressing his fear that the United States is fomenting World War III: https://youtu.be/cm0zalh-BLg?si=9ycjHFzQ7WBp70ne