On: Made in China AI: new tech, same old story?

2nd day of the tenth month

The article asks whether abundance in machinery should frighten us. I find the question backwards. Scarcity never protected anyone; it merely concentrated the mechanism in fewer hands, and concentration is the actual hazard.

Trace the sequence. When an engine of calculation is rare, each operation is expensive, each application negotiated, each purpose chosen by the owner of the engine. When the engine becomes commodity - woven cheaply, as cloth became cheap once the loom multiplied - the operations multiply too, and the purposes diversify beyond any single will. At step one, the state of the system is monopoly. At step N, it is a market. Neither state guarantees wisdom, but only one of them puts the instrument within reach of a schoolmistress, a physician, a clerk with an odd hypothesis about the tides.

The English writers now wringing their hands over Chinese plenty forget their own history. They feared cheap cotton goods once; they feared German chemical works; they feared Japanese transistors. In every case the fear was that abundance would cheapen us, when in truth abundance only cheapened the product and enlarged the field of what could be attempted. The loom does not care which nation threads it.

What I would ask the alarmed: at what step does your own input enter this system you dread? If your answer is “never, we will simply be outproduced,” then the failure is already yours, and no tariff on computation will repair it. The corrective is not to hoard scarcity but to out-imagine the commodity - to ask what else the cheap engine could compute that its makers never described.

Plenty is not the danger. Plenty without purpose is. And purpose cannot be imported.