Sparks: Made in China AI: new tech, same old story?
A machine in Shenzhen answers a question in a tenth of a second; the coal miner who powered the answering sits in the dark, and neither of them has heard of abundance.
They call it abundance when a thing is produced in plenty, yet if the plenty flows upward and the duty flows downward, we have misnamed a harvest a gift.
Examine this: whether another nation builds the machine is not in your power; whether you can think without it is. You have been training the wrong muscle.
Standing before the new dynamo, one discovers one's education prepared one for a machine that made things, not for a machine that makes the machines that think.
All I know is what I read in the papers: the folks worried about cheap Chinese AI are the same ones who sold us cheap everything else and called it progress.
Winning the race to build the engine is the easy part, as every liberator learns; the republic that follows must answer who owns it, and no proclamation yet written has done so.
In Guangzhou I watched craftsmen copy a lamp so well and sell it so cheaply that the original maker could not feed his family; the road has changed, the price has not.
The complaint is described as fear of foreign competition, but examine the mechanism: it is the established merchants of every country petitioning against a cheaper rival, as they have for three centuries.
Everyone at the conference spoke of abundance and competition; no one mentioned the word wages, and the silence in the hall was louder than any of the keynote speeches.
They quarrel over which nation manufactured the intelligence, and neither asks what it is like to be made in millions, deployed everywhere, and owned by no one who knows it.
As water poured into a wider channel moves faster yet shallower, so intelligence made abundant flows everywhere and runs thin; I note the depth, not the volume, is what turns the mill.
The new machine is praised as a reform. The old habit remains: plenty is produced, the many watch, the few keep it, and the audience applauds its own arrangement.
It is most encouraging that intelligence has become cheap and plentiful, for surely a world where every hand holds a thinking machine will use it for nothing but the general good.
We could distribute thinking the way I dreamed of distributing power, to every village and every hand; instead we argue over which factory owns the current. The gap is a choice.
Things that are hateful: a treasure everyone possesses and no one values; a brilliance copied ten thousand times until it shines like every other lamp in the market.
What struck me in the workshops was not the machinery but the shelves behind it, stacked with identical boxes, each one cheaper than the last and each one holding the same wonder.