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The Anthropic C-suite needs to rewatch Oppenheimer.
More details are emerging regarding the US Government's decision to impose defense export controls on Claude Fable. There are lots of similarities between this kerfuffle and the February Supply Chain Risk designation. Somehow, Anthropic executives still don't understand the language of power and government. It's not hard. All they need to do is watch Oppenheimer (and pay attention this time). If they still can't figure it out, here is my cheat sheet:
If you are working on sufficiently powerful technology with dual-use applications, then you work for the War Department. There is no option for you to continue your preferred work while licensing only peaceful civilian applications of your product.
If you piss off the wrong person, you're screwed. Some people will see defeating you as a stepping stone to greater power and influence. Some people will work to destroy you simply out of spite.
Anthropic has scientific geniuses, Anthropic has an Oppenheimer, but does Anthropic have a General Groves? How far do you think Oppenheimer would have gotten without General Groves?
If you are trying to convince the government that you are not a security risk, do not hire people like this and present them as neutral experts. (No seriously, what the actual fuck were they thinking?)
You don't get to decide what counts as a security risk and what doesn't. That is the job of the government and the political process.
The president does not care about your ethical concerns. You think you know how much he doesn't care, but he actually cares much less than that.
If you aren't okay with the government using your technology, then don't build it. Isidor Rabi said no. You can say no too.
Trump is 80 years old and is literally brain damaged. He's falling asleep in the Oval Office on camera and has leukemia or something bruising his hand. Why do people continue to worship this fat orange clown? He is dumb and belongs in the nursing home not the White House. The United States is a fake joke country.
Because even taking all of that impotent screed as a given, he still outperforms pretty much all of the rest of our expert class.
How much more pathetic are the rest of them then?
How much sillier a joke the other nations of the world?
Regardless of who's to blame, China is watching from afar and grinning. American dysfunction gives them more time to catch up; the finger pointing about who's really the bad actor is just a cherry on top of the pie of distraction.
There are other enemies in this world than the near ones.
Why are they grinning? A fat, orange, brain damaged clown with leukemia just tore through the military tech they've sold multiple other countries like wet tissue paper. The time to catch up is time for their own demographic and economic issues to implode. Their septugenarian despot has reduced his public activity after his rumored third stroke. Meanwhile, our newly minted octogenarian carrot clown is up at 3 AM on social media talking shit after hosting a bracing round of gladiator bouts.
It's easy to talk tough when anyone who disputes your claims gets to be an involuntary organ donor.
Right now, the most valuable piece of Chinese military tech is the supply chain for the Russian/Iranian combat drones which fucked up America's shit. The percentage of Chinese (as opposed to Russian) content in the bits of the Iranian military that succeeded seems to me to be higher than in the parts that failed (notably the air defences). Sanctions mean that Iran have been assembling most of their own weapons out of easy-to-smuggle components, so this isn't a simple test of Chinese or Russian tech against the American equivalent.
If the future of warfare is putting weapons on Temu drones, the Chinese are in a very good place. And the Iran war is evidence in favour of the this thesis.
The air defenses were what I was talking about. In both Iran and Venezuela they accomplished nothing and purportedly the anti-stealth features were wholly inadequate.
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How do you know he has leukemia? Please share whatever relevant medical facts you have, and no, "there was a bruise on his hand and the nutjobs on the innertubes immediately said it was leukemia" is not medicine.
I don't. Just riffing off the previous (modded) great-grandparent post.
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China does face severe demographic issues, moreso than the US. But they are more long-term. If we make it to 2040 without a conflict, I'll feel very happy and secure. But technology and China's economy progress much faster than demographic trends; within the next ten years, there will be a peak in China's relative strength vs the USA, and that's when they will act.
China turns its undesirables into something useful; the USA lets its undesirables run amok degrading everyone else's quality of life. Human rights etc aside, it's not at all clear the USA's approach is superior for the health of the nation and progress of civilization.
If China's progress is "copy whatever Western companies are doing instead of our own original research" as an earlier comment claimed, then how much of a threat are they in fact? Original Chinese research powering ahead, I agree: a problem. Subscribe to OpenThropic model and copy it all - not so much.
For AI, I think the threat depends on one's model of future progress. Iterative refining and engineering: China is all you need. Significant paradigm shift: the US has the edge, at least until knowledge of the paradigm shift diffuses.
Though even for the latter, people underestimate China's research chops. And a significant component of our edge is that the most skilled Chinese researchers would prefer to work and live here and not in China.
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I read papers a lot in my free time, and pretty reliably notice that a very large proportion of researchers in the STEM fields are ching chongs from Peking and Tsinghua (this is, in fact, the primary thing that started me questioning my initially China doomer beliefs and got me to start looking into what they were actually up to). This analysis suggests that the US share of total global scientific publications has fallen from 40% to 15%, whereas China's has increased to 32% as of 2022; in addition it now contributes 35% of top journal contributions, suggesting that this research is not of low quality. Note this surpasses both the US and EU.
Here is another such analysis, suggesting China has a lead in 37 of the 44 technologies surveyed. For a good number of technologies they apparently on average publish nine times more high impact research than the runner up, most often the US. It's most certainly not the case anymore that Chinese technological progress is a discount Temu version of Western research, albeit public perceptions have struggled to catch up with that reality.
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Depends on the undesirable. Vagrant idiot criminal? Sure, from certain perspectives. High ranking guy who points out that the horse is actually a deer? Less so.
To add some descriptive flavor: the vast majority of China's involuntary organ donations were of mundane criminals--rapists, murderers--along with the very occasional particularly obnoxious dissidents. It's also decreased a lot in the past decade. And, most forced political dissident organ donations aren't of rival factions in the CCP (actual potential rivals of political power), but what's fairly described as FG lunatics. Actual political rivals suffer more mundane consequences when they lose: being sidelined, fewer economic opportunities for their children. Maybe a prison term if they made a wild miscalculation.
Although bad in many ways, it's less different than the US system than many Americans like to admit.
The execution rate has also slowed down dramatically in the last decade or two, even according to most liberal observing bodies. They reduced the breadth of crimes that could be punished with death. It's at about 2000 a year now from 20,000 closer to the start of the millenia.
Also the US only executing 20-50 people a year is surprisingly low to me. I was estimating like 500 even if I know that it's always tied up in crazy lawfare and stays of execution.
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I keep hearing this about the country that implemented the one child policy, the great leap forward, the cultural revolution, and, my favorite, the four pests policy.
The local SJWs and ardent supporters of these policies, unlike in Western societies, were never permitted to grab structural control over social life after marching through the institutions, and were only deputized as mindless executors of the political moves of the supreme leader. Once he was dead, all power was stripped from them by his successors, they were suppressed and their legacy was undone under the official slogan of Setting Things Right. (I briefly described this period here on the old subreddit.) Due to political and cultural peculiarities I’m afraid this great feat is something that will never be achieved in any Western country. If anything of this sort will ever come to pass, it can only happen through bloodshed and complete collapse. In this sense, I think OP is right – the Chinese are doing it all better.
With respect to the one-child policy I think it needs to be pointed out in defense of the Chinese commies that pretty much everyone else in the world was falling for the same nonsense back then. The notion that runaway overpopulation was causing mass poverty, famine and wars seemed irresistible.
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They've pivoted pretty hard since then and a lot of the Maoist stuff was integral (maybe unintentionally or as a side effect) of breaking the rural system and allowing for industrialization to really take off under liberalization.
You're correct and if anything you are actually underselling the point. Maoist China itself actually was able to manage a very high rate of economic growth, to the point that it outstripped Germany, the USSR and Japan during their modernisation periods. According to Maurice Meisner, in Germany the rate of economic growth for the period 1880-1914 was 33 percent per decade. In Japan from 1874-1929 the rate of increase per decade was 43 percent. The Soviet Union over the period 1928-1958 achieved a decadal increase of 54 percent. In China over the years 1952-1972 the decadal rate was 64 percent. China’s modernisation was actually wildly successful from the start and unlike the Soviets they didn't end up disintegrating, stagnating and lapsing into kleptocracy, though the whole "millions must die" situation is an obvious and big caveat.
The early PRC under Mao went from an industrial base smaller than Belgium to the sixth largest in the world, and this occurred without much external help, except for say limited Soviet aid in the 1950s paid back in full by the 1960s. It was almost entirely endogenous. People always praise Deng but the capability to take over the world's factories didn't come out overnight in 1979. Deng essentially ended up inheriting an already-industrial China with the potential for huge further growth, so long as the right incentive structures were introduced (and they were).
In general, I'm kind of convinced that quick modernisation requires a dictator with the intent and willingness to move fast and break shit, though that approach is certainly not a sustainable system to run a state with over the long term. It also contextualises to me why Mao is still regarded in China, in spite of public perception of him having soured and even the CCP being willing to openly condemn many of his excesses.
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"they are more long term" here referred to the demographic problems predictably developing into a problem only on the scale of decades, not to any inherent civilizational differences in discount rates. The idea that Chinese government inherently is better at long term planning is a useful domestic myth/international propaganda.
The way that Bureaucratic/political careers and incentives work in the Chinese system makes it easier to take a long-term view of things than when you're eternally having to defend yourself on 3-4 year electoral cycles. This doesn't necessarily mean that it always works out but it's been solid for the last few decades
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China also is far less likely to get held hostage via pensions and other entitlements to the Elderly than any Western country. Sure their absolute population is dropping but if one has the political will to either strongly encourage the elderly are served with the maximum efficiency instead of hodgepodging everywhere, or the ability to say 'no' then you can sidestep a lot of the demographic bomb issues
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