Taking inspiration from the China threat

Creating an industrial policy for AI in the context of a capitalist economy

I read a good short article on American patriotism the other day which made several interesting points. Patriotism — mostly separate from nationalism —in some ways represents a unique American experience. It distinguishes itself using ideological, rather than narrowly geopolitical enemies. Before picking the article apart, I want to emphasize that it’s worth reading in full. (I also wouldn’t be doing this if it weren’t a fairly widespread phenomena.)

Having said that, do you see anything missing here?

N ow rival camps differ as to whether the existential threat is sharia or Russia. The split among Americans as to whether imams or Russian bots present a greater threat to the country is indicative of political polarisation. At a deeper level, it also indicates a certain turmoil within US patriotism, a result of its increasing incoherence…

The Russia story is worth following up on, if nothing else to bury the notion that Trump is doing anything to the swamp but flooding it. But, as Haselby notes, it’s not really the kind of threat that’s going to bring the country together. Putin (and I’ll throw in Kim Jong-un here as well) are simply too cartoonish as villains to fill that role, and Al-Qaeda also isn’t very coherent as a target.

Liberals often seem to forget that we are in fact in the middle of a great power rivalry. (I include Haselby in that category, even though I’m not sure about his specific beliefs, at least as someone who seeks a version of politics that goes beyond zero-sum games.) This rivalry is evident in the latest rounds of the space race, and in frequent comparisons of China’s tech sector with Silicon Valley. It’s China, not Russia, who seeks status as a serious contender to global American power.

The primacy of China is also evident in Trump’s strategic thinking. (Yes, I’m equating Trump with patriotism here: sorry if this leaves a bad aftertaste, but some people do see things that way.) If there’s going to be anything that could resemble a “Trump doctrine” at this point, it’s fairly clear that it’s going to involve China. Trump will likely eventually make some some minor accomplishments on trade with China. Even though they’ll likely renege on whatever they end up promising as soon as Trump leaves office, we shouldn’t let the fact that pretty much everyone of his domestic policies is a train wreck distract from the fact that these will be real, unprecedented achievements. Moreover, they will be concrete, in a way that reinforces preexisting prejudices — in contrast to, say, job retraining programs to address the problem of automation.

Here, in terms of both the reality of the situation and the way domestic politics is shaping up, we’ve finally found the external enemy the US. has been lacking for the last three decades. But then if China is the question, what’s the alternative answer? How can the U.S. draw lessons from this situation to improve itself? I’ll focus on the question of AI here, since space programs don’t involve so much in the way of social reorganization. The U.S. must focus on not ceding the title of the AI superpower to a growing country with very different values.

An AI Industrial Policy

If we talk about patriotism in the context of the Cold War, the answer would involve faith in the free market to incrementally surpass the capabilities of a planned economy. The U.S. certainly has a system closer to free market capitalism than China. So then, do nothing and wait? That seems risky. I think people in the industry will point to availability of data as a more important growth factor than lack of government interference. Here, China has certain structural advantages in a lack of privacy laws, centralized governance structure, and size, which the U.S. simply won’t match.

Does this then mean we give up on capitalism and imitate China’s full-on industrial planning approach, simply plopping capital into DARPA programs and higher education? Actually those aren’t terrible ideas. Still, if that’s all we’ve got, it seems like just another form of “thoughts and prayers.” It’s never going to match China’s funding levels, nor should it: in part, this approach simply represents the failure of an open banking and financing system.

What’s needed instead is the level of focus of a full-on AI industrial policy, but adapted for private industry. This includes reform of intellectual property, labor, visas, and other laws to support the organic growth of the industry. It might help to rethink anti-monopoly policies — although in a way that emphasizes rule of law, not just breaking up Google because it’s “too big.” Getting rid of some of the dinosaurs would also help.

A New Type of AI

So we’re getting warmer, but none of this eliminates the advantages of dictatorship noted above. It seems like the current generation of tech, focused on things like facial recognition, seems most useful for things like social control, functions most interesting to a closed regime. (Sure, there are also some applications of facial recognition for payments, but this hardly seems significant on a geopolitical level.) What use does AI have for a capitalist democracy anyway?

My answer to that question is cyber security. It would be extremely helpful to have a machine scan an exponentially growing set of threat surfaces — and it also seems like an area where automated solutions would have unique capabilities. I’m not an expert in the area, but I guess this would mean a shift away from the deductive functions of neural nets, and more towards inductive capabilities: having machines study philosophy, ethics, and law before trying to tackle any practical problems. This sounds fairly sci-fi in terms of current technologies, but it wouldn’t be a worthwhile goal if it could be accomplished in only 3-5 years.

Basic neural nets are essentially stereotype machines, concerned exclusively with correlation, labeling problems, rather than actually fixing them. Put another way, if the inspiration of this architecture is the human brain, it helps to remember that the average human is actually a hunter-gatherer. We might want to have them simulate educated humans instead. Cyber security is a field with real social benefits — reinforcing the primacy of private property — and obvious military applications as well. Furthermore, China’s security culture will simply never match America’s. The reasons for this could fill up a book, but it comes down to a culture where covering up problems is seen as an acceptable compromise.

With this direction in mind, more policy options become apparent. Much more severe penalties are required for companies that endanger personal data. Equifax should not be in existence anymore. This is not an anti-business policy: it would be able to sell of its assets anyway to continue operation under a new name. Moreover, done right, these new requirements should create new business models, job descriptions, and even whole industries. This is how you do industrial policy under a capitalist system.

China-Inspired Patriotism

If there’s one thing America is famous for, it’s letting problems fester until the absolute last minute, when crisis arrives. The crisis is here. Trump has proven to have a keen eye for pointing out problems, even if he has less talent for finding the solutions. Meanwhile, China seems ready to score some early points in the competition over computing power and applications. The apparent advantages of authoritarianism for AI should give pause to believers in the American model. It’s not too late to reshape the system to adapt to new technologies, but some things will have to change. I’ve given some thoughts here, but the bigger point is that this will be a society-wide project with the potential to reshape overall social relations.

As for why China has been ignored so long in ideological terms, I won’t speculate too deeply, but one possible factor is that it doesn’t fit neatly into our left-right political spectrum — perhaps indicating too much focus on both of the two parties, and a point-counterpoint-compromise dialectic in the media. One important point to take away here is that protection of private property rights is not an act of government passivity, but an active process requiring strategic thinking in its own right.