Tag: China

Is the world safer with an AI-powered American military?

Does technology advanced by the American military make the world a better place? Or a worse one?

The last century has made those complicated questions. It’s difficult to interpret American involvement in the 20th century’s first two world wars as resulting in anything but a freer, safer, happier world. The track record has been murkier since.

The ascendant uses of artificial intelligence has awakened the debate. Whether the “neo-prime” military contractors like Palantir give the world’s most powerful democracy an edge to maintain that freer world, or fuels a morally vacant oligarchy, is a hot debate in American culture. At the heart is the US-China rivalry. It’s important then to understand the origins of the American military embracing AI.

That’s the focus of British journalist Katrina Manson’s 2026 book Project Maven: A Marine Colonel, His Team, and the Dawn of AI Warfare.

She tells of the tale of Drew Cukor, who more than almost anyone dragged a hardware-focused Pentagon toward the data-science and autonomy that was sprouting out of Silicon Valley. When he began his leadership before 9/11, intelligence was viewed to military leaders as secondary, “like a flower in the room.” That has changed.

Below I share my notes for future use.

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China is an engineering society, and the United States is a lawyerly one

The world would be better of if the United States would give engineers more influence, and if China would defer more to lawyers.

The Americans have built a lawyerly society, and the Chinese have an engineering one. The two nations have more in common than they might realize, and so they’d both do well to learn more from one another.

That’s from the 2025 book “Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future” by technology analyst Dany Wang.

It’s one of my favorite books of the year: Fun, fast-moving and authoritative. At the heart of the world’s two-state superpower battle, the author argues: “This contest will be won by the country that works best for the people living in it.”

In the greedy late 20th century, American policymakers and executives failed to grasp the importance of “process knowledge.” Boeing and GE traded engineering knowledge for shorter-term Wall Street gain. By 1992, Michael Boskin, an influential economic adviser to the first President Bush, famously said: “Potato chips, computer chips—what’s the difference?” They got it.

Below I share my notes for future reference.

Continue reading China is an engineering society, and the United States is a lawyerly one

Jimmy Lai, Hong Kong’s troublemaker

What’s the greater priority: universal human rights or sovereign rights? What rights, if any, are truly universal? How far should other nations go to challenge a sovereign power who is taking such rights away from residents within their boundaries?

After the horrors of the world wars, the United Nations marked in 1948 its “Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” This gave moral currency to dozens of international actions over the next 80 years. The drafting committee included philosophers from China and Lebanon, yet these are criticized by some as Eurocentric. Overreach under the UDHR banner complicated its message, and gave authoritarians greater cover.

Where does that leave us? I’ve thought about that since completing “The Troublemaker: How Jimmy Lai Became a Billionaire, Hong Kong’s Greatest Dissident, and China’s Most Feared Critic,” a 2024 biography written by Mark Clifford.

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Autocracy Inc.

Naïveté abounded among rich-world leaders in the 1990s.

Free market capitalism and representative democracy seemed ascendant. Free-flowing information online seemed to inspire people to overthrow repressive governments.

In March 2000, then President Bill Clinton famously dismissed a new effort from the Chinese Communist Party to censor the internet: “That’s sort of like trying to nail Jello to the wall.” Likewise, German and other European leaders argued that doing business with Russian and Chinese companies would make them freer. Looking back, this all looks plainly wrong.

That’s a theme from the 2024 book from Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anne Applebaum’s book Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World.

More free-flowing information does not necessarily mean more truth. Technologies have helped democratic movements no more than they’ve helped authoritarian ones, and turns out those Russian oil providers and Chinese electronic vehicle firms were at least in part government actors, so their motivations weren’t only aligned with a Western capitalistic view.

Today, at least half of all humans now live within states considered autocratic. The world has gotten less democratic in recent years, a backward trend that in the early 1990s seemed impossible. Applebaum’s book is a breezy and thoughtful overview of this emerging bloc she calls “Autocracy Inc.

Below I share my notes for future reference.

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Why 10 percent unemployment and worse is our future, unless we rethink our economy

People waiting in line for unemployment relief in Chicago in October 1960. Photo by Myron Davis for LIFE Magazine

Updated with more perspective on the job-crashing Internet here and more from Vox Media here. Also, though some think there is a mighty economic transition happening, many readers and friends have pointed that I didn’t properly address the ‘lump labor fallacy‘ here, in which I incorrectly assume there is a static number of jobs that are going away. I still think there is perspective worth sharing below. More comments welcome.

In the next 20 years, the United States and the broader global economy will either dramatically rethink its employment structure or a history-altering societal change will take place.

Of course, unemployment numbers are gamed by those who give up on looking for jobs, but the idea here is that it’s hard to understand why anyone seems to think that the overall unemployment numbers for our country will trend anywhere but upward.

Let me be clear, this is armchair commentary from someone with absolutely no background in economics or geopolitical, socioeconomic trends, so I am writing this hoping for outside insight because I can’t figure this out.

Below, I (a) outline the problem as I see it, (b) look at big economic drivers that seem to be chances for more problems, (c) list all the opportunities I understand that could reverse somewhat this trend and then (d) highlight some of the transformational changes that could lie in wait for the next generation, before offering some more reading and then waiting to get yelled at in the comments.

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Backpacking in Eastern China December 2006

Monday, November 27 to December 7, 2006

Before returning back to the United States after living and studying in Tokyo, Japan, I took a couple weeks to visit the two largest and best known metropolises of eastern China: capital city Beijing and cultural hub Shanghai.

I hope to include more details of my experiences in the future, but for now, please enjoy some photos.

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