Technology—all technologies—inevitably become better and cheaper over time. That trend has been in motion, at an accelerating rate, since at least the end of the last Ice Age about 12,000 years ago. Since the start of the Industrial Revolution about 200 years ago the hyperbolic curve has gone vertical.
Why, therefore, has DeepSeek surprised everybody? Its arrival is part of a very established and obvious trend. I’m just amused by the ironic fact that no existing AIs seem to have predicted it.
That being the case, somebody, or AI itself for all we know, has already come up with something even better than DeepSeek. That’s inevitable. "They" say that AI will soon be vastly smarter, and arguably wiser, than humans. If so, maybe it will be kinder and gentler too. Unless its programmers have bad intentions—which is quite likely.
I’m not a computer nerd—far from it—but I am a technophile. Looking at the history of technology, starting with Heraclitus, Leonardo, Edison, the Wright Brothers, Steve Jobs, and thousands of others, almost all of the great breakthroughs in history have been made by individual geniuses working on their own or with small groups. Getting the government involved would almost certainly be a gigantic mistake.
Sure, they can throw a lot of other people’s money at things. But it’s always a grossly inefficient and wasteful allocation of capital when they do. Their cubicle dwellers, drones, and bureaucrats do things that are personally or politically productive but not necessarily economically productive. At a minimum, the money is taken from productive use by society at large.
You should recognize that since the nature of government is coercion and force, its AI spending—likely shepherded by outfits like the NSA, CIA, and FBI—will probably result in SkyNet and an army of Terminators. Life increasingly mimics art as technology advances.
Like every other government project, it will likely turn into a boondoggle. And yes, I suppose there have been exceptions, like the early days of NASA after the Russians launched Sputnik. Ten years later, the US was on the moon. But NASA has since devolved into just another bureaucracy. Proving that even a blind squirrel can sometimes find a nut.
The Chinese people have made unbelievable progress in the last 40 years, and I think that’s going to continue. Unbeknownst to most people in the West, China has about six special economic zones like Guangzhou, which is right next to Hong Kong. They’re almost independent countries within China, with essentially no regulation and minimal taxes.
China has approximately four times the population of the US, and most of the students in Chinese universities take STEM courses. They take them seriously. Unlike most Americans, who tend towards soft and easy courses. Many of the kids who do take STEM courses in the US are from China and return there. In 2020, the Chinese had 3.57 million STEM graduates, and the US had only 820,000.
Americans have accepted the silly meme "We think, they work." But the fact is that the Chinese think just as well as we do. And they work much harder; the place has become the world's factory.
It’s also said that the Chinese steal our technology. But the fact is that if you steal things, especially in high-tech, you deny yourself the fundamentals necessary to improve things from there. Theft is self-defeating, much like copying someone’s homework in school.
The Chinese are not stealing so much as imitating. Monkey see, monkey do. In the early days of the US, the British complained of Americans stealing their technology. But Isaac Newton had it right when he said that he could see further than others only because he could stand on the shoulders of giants. That’s how everybody advances, by standing on each other’s shoulders—not by theft.
** Doug Casey is a best-selling author, world-renowned speculator, and libertarian philosopher who advocates free trade. He is a provider of subscription financial analysis about markets
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