AI Superpowers: China’s Sputnik Moment

Editor’s Note: This will be another long day on this website. I’ve been reading Kai-Fu Lee’s AI Super-Powers: China, Silicon Valley and the New World Order which our man Andrew Yang has brought to my attention and want to start breaking it down chapter by chapter.

I’ve always been an admirer of Asians.

The leftwing journos and “extremism watchdogs” who monitor this website are unable to grasp this. In their minds, I am various labels in their mental universe which THEY have tagged me with … an “extremist,” a “hate group,” a “fascist,” a “white supremacist,” etc.

In reality, I am a disaffected White populist and nationalist blogger. I’m a highly intelligent, very well-educated and kind human being who is nostalgic about the past. I see through all the bullshit, lies and hypocrisy of the American mainstream media. I clearly see the problems that are plaguing the West and especially my country, which I care a great deal about … Dixie.

We are living in the 21st century. I live in this world and interact with all sorts of people in my area, Central Alabama, on a daily basis. I graduated from Auburn University in 2005 and truth is that I am frequently in the Auburn-Opelika area. I’ve watched the Auburn-Opelika area change a great deal over the past 15 years or so. Specifically, it seems like there are many more Asian students at Auburn now than when I was in college, although there were more Asian than black students even then.

While I won’t reveal too much about my personal life on this blog, I will just say that we interact quite frequently with the Asian community in this area. We have been given the chance to observe these people. Most of them are foreign students from all over China who are attending Auburn in order to study mathematics and engineering. These students strike us as quiet, intelligent, hardworking folks and we often joke privately in our household about how they are going to change the world.

If I may speak candidly about race in Alabama, the White students at Auburn spend their days and nights socializing, getting plastered at the bars and rolling Toomer’s Corner. The recent loss of the Auburn basketball team to the University of Virginia was particularly devastating. It was quite a scene to watch all these White girls crying who don’t know shit about basketball. The only thing that they know or care about is that their team lost its chance to win the NCAA championship.

As for the blacks, there aren’t that many of them in Auburn which is seemingly growing wealthier by the day. I’ve been amazed at all the new construction going on. The economy seems to be really taking off there. It is in stark contrast to the Alabama Black Belt which is where I grew up and still live. All I can say is that the biggest lesson in race realism that I can show you is to drive from Auburn in Lee County, AL less than an hour down the road to Tuskegee, AL in Macon County.

Have you ever thought about why Tuskegee, AL or Union Springs, AL is the way it is in the 21st century? Why is Auburn, AL such a wealthy place, but Tuskegee, AL such a poor place? If you start asking questions like that in good faith, the SPLC and the mainstream media will brand you a “racist.” I’m not really a “racist” though. I don’t “hate” anyone. I just think about these issues.

This is where I actually am on the “extremism” spectrum in American politics:

I’m not the “extremist.”

I’m a highly intelligent, well-educated person in the middle of the electorate. I’m motivated by a sense of altruism and duty to my own people … White Southerners. In contrast, I have crazy people shouting names at me and labeling me an “extremist” when in fact they are the ones who are so polarized and so far to the Right or Left that they are the ones who are actually on the fringe.

Let me tell you about our pal Wenbo.

Wenbo is a Chinese kid who is attending Auburn to get his degree in mathematics. I don’t “hate” Wenbo. I like Wenbo and cheer him on while he is taking his tests here. I look forward to the day when Wenbo returns to the People’s Republic of China and gets a job in a technology firm somewhere in Beijing or Shanghai. Virtually the last thing I want is to fight people like Wenbo.

pic.twitter.com/PfGNXON0n2

— #YangGang GIFs (@yangganggifs) March 17, 2019

Meanwhile in Shanghai pic.twitter.com/NQbRHfgA7M

— Jack Posobiec ?? (@JackPosobiec) March 27, 2019

China is our biggest enemy

They have stolen our IP, hacked our citizens, copied our technology for far too long

Now their state sponsored company, Huawei, is on the verge of controlling 5G all throughout America

We CANNOT allow our greatest enemy to control our country

RT!

— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) April 2, 2019

It is MIGAites like Steve Bannon and Charlie Kirk who see our friend Wenbo as their enemy. I look at Wenbo and then I look at the KIA plant in West Point, GA or the Hyundai plant in Montgomery, AL and I understand that it is Asian folks like Yang and Wenbo who are the ones who are actually creating the good jobs and investment in my area, not the Blompfs of the world.

I love this video and will continue sharing it:

This is somewhat personal for me.

I come from a military family. My grandfather was in the Marines and was deployed all over the world in the 1960s and 1970s. My mother was born in Germany. My aunt was born in Vietnam. During the Vietnam War, my grandfather lost his leg fighting in one of these stupid wars for Richard Nixon and became an alcoholic. He died at early age shortly after I was born in the 1980s which is one of the reasons why I despise neocon warmongers. I will also be damned if I sit idly by while Blompf and the MIGAites try to foment another one of these wars and get more of our boys killed in some place like Syria or Iran because a wealthy Jewish Republican donor is stuffing their mouths with shekels.

When I think about East Asian countries, I think about many of the parallels between their experience with American imperialism and my own country … Dixie.

Japan

Vietnam

South Korea

My other grandfather … he was in South Korea.

China

Dixie

The experience of losing wars and being occupied and exploited for generations isn’t an experience that any White Americans other than White Southerners have ever known. They are unable to relate to what is like to, say, be torn apart by war and have to rebuild.

This isn’t a new subject for me.

I’ve written here many times in the past with admiration and sympathy about how South Korea, which was one of the poorest countries in the world in the 1950s, clawed its way out of the devastation and poverty of war to become one of the wealthiest countries in the world. Some of us in Alabama have noticed and thought about the Samsung flat screen televisions and smartphones and the Hyundai and KIA automobiles which are manufactured by lots of White people in this state:

Here’s an excerpt from the introduction to Ha-Joon Chang’s Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism:

“Mozambique may or may not succeed in living up to my fantasy. But what would your reaction have been, had you been told in 1961, a century before the Mozambican dream, that South Korea would, in 40 years’ time, be one of the world’s leading exporters of mobile phones, a strictly science-fiction product at that time? Hydrogen fuel cells do at least exist today.

In 1961, eight years after the end of its fratricidal war with North Korea, South Korea’s yearly income stood at $82 per person. The average Korean earned less than half the average Ghanaian citizen ($179). The Korean War – which, incidentally, started on June 25, Mozambique’s independence day – was one of the bloodiest in human history, claiming four million lives in just over three years (1950-3). Half of South Korea’s manufacturing base and more than 75% of its railways were destroyed in the conflict. The country had shown some organizational ability by managing to raise its literacy ratio to 71% by 1961 from the paltry 22% level it had inherited in 1945 from its Japanese colonial masters, who had ruled Korea since 1910. But it was widely considered a basket case of developmental failure. A 1950s internal report from USAID – the main US governmental aid agency then, as now – called Korea a ‘bottomless pit’. At the time, the country’s main exports were tungsten, fish and other primary commodities.

As for Samsung, now one of the world’s leading exporters of mobile phones, semiconductors and computers, the company started out as an exporter of fish, vegetable and fruit in 1938, seven years before Korea’s independence from Japanese colonial rule. Until the 1970s, its main lines of business were sugar refining and textiles that it had set up in the mid-1950s. When it moved into the semiconductor industry by acquiring a 50% stake in Korea Semiconductor in 1974, no one took it seriously. After all, Samsung did not even manufacture colour TV sets until 1977. When it declared its intention , in 1983, to take on the big boys of the seminconductor industry from the US and Japan by desigining its own chips, few were convinced.

Korea, one of the poorest places in the world, was the sorry country I was born into on October 7 1963. Today I am a citizen of one of the wealthier, if not wealthiest, countries in the world. During my lifetime, per capita income in Korea has grown something like 14 times, in purchasing power terms. It took the UK over two centuries (between the late 18th century and today) and the US around one and half centuries (the 1860s to the present day) to achieve the same result. The material progress I have seen in my 40-odd years is as though I had started life as a British pensioner born when George III was on the throne or as an American grandfather born while Abraham Lincoln was president …”

Ha-Joon Chang continues:

“In terms of these life-chance indicators, Korea’s progress is as if Haiti had turned into Switzerland. How has this ‘miracle’ been possible?”

This excerpt also comes from one of Ha-Joon Chang’s books and is particularly interesting in light of the fate of the steel industry in Birmingham, AL:

“Korea also provides another dramatic example of a successful public enterprise in the form of the (now privatized) steel maker, POSCO (Pohang Iron and Steel Company). The Korean government made an application to the World Bank in the late 1960s for a loan to build its first modern steel mill. The bank rejected it on the grounds that the project was not viable. Not an unreasonable decision. The country’s biggest export items at the time were fish, cheap apparel, wigs and plywood. Korea didn’t possess deposits of either of the two key raw materials – iron ore and coking coal. Furthermore, the Cold War meant it could not import them from nearby communist China. They had to be brought all the way from Australia. And to cap it all, the Korean government proposed to run the venture as a SOE. What more perfect recipe for disaster? Yet within ten years of starting production in 1973, (the project was financed by Japanese banks), the company became one of the most efficient steel-producers on the planet and is now the world’s third largest.”

More on POSCO here.

I’ve long been an admirer of South Korea. I wish that Dixie was more South Korea in lots of ways. I have cracked jokes for years about the relative superiority of its broadband internet COMPARED TO MY AREA. We’ve been extremely supportive on this website of the peace talks between North Korea and South Korea. In fact, we have even given Blompf credit where it is due in this area.

Why do we support Korean reunification? Is it because of “racism” or “extremism” or “white supremacy”? No, it is because we support humanity and international peace.

Identity Dixie is likely content for Alabama to maintain its international superiority in peanuts and poultry processing – Traditionalism Today, Traditionalism Tomorrow, Traditionalism Forever. Here at Occidental Dissent, we know better than our 21st century Agrarians.

We know there is nothing traditional at all about, say, our economic specialization in hardwood timber or peanuts and soybeans (agricultural research is responsible) or broilers and poultry processing or now the fact that Alabama is one of our leading manufacturing states of automobiles thanks to the Japanese, South Koreans and Germans. We’ve noticed that we don’t even grow much cotton in the Black Belt!

Anyway, this has been a longwinded post and we haven’t even gotten to the subject of the day yet, which is Kai-Fu Lee’s book AI Super-Powers: China, Silicon Valley and the New World Order. I just wanted the gallery to see and understand the historicist perspective with which we are approaching this first and not have their minds clouded by the nonsense spewed by the American mainstream media.

My apologies.

Here’s the connection between our pal Wenbo, Andrew Yang and Kai-Fu Lee: Wenbo is one of the Asian kids studying in the United States described in this book.

“My dialogue with the kindergartners was also revealing because of where it took place. Not long ago, China lagged years, if not decades, behind the United States in artificial intelligence. But over the past three years China has caught AI fever, experiencing a surge of excitement about the field that dwarfs even what we see in the rest of the world. Enthusiasm about AI has spilled over from the technology and business communities into government policymaking, and it has trickled all the way down to kindergarten classrooms in Beijing.

This broad based support for the field has both reflected and fed into China’s growing strength in the field. Chinese AI companies and researchers have already made up enormous ground on their American counterparts, experimenting with innovate algorithms and business models that promise to revolutionize China’s economy. Together, these businesses and scholars have turned China into a bona fide AI superpower, the only true national counterweight to the United States in this emerging technology. How these two countries choose to compete and cooperate in AI will have dramatic implications for global economics and governance.”

Kai-Fu Lee starts his book by describing a highly emotional event for the Chinese people that virtually no Americans even noticed because our media is dominated by leftwing journos who are morons:

“But on this May afternoon in 2017, he was locked in an all-out struggle against one of the world’s most intelligent machines. AlphaGo, a powerhouse of artificial intelligence backed by arguably the world’s top technology company: Google. The battlefield was a nineteen-by-nineteen lined board populated by little black and white stones – the raw materials of the deceptively complex game of Go. During game play, two players alternate placing stones on the board, attempting to encircle the opponents stones. No human on earth could do this better than Ke Jie, but today he was pitted against a Go player on a level that non one had ever seen before. …

But on this day AlphaGo wasn’t just beating Ke Jie – it was systematically dismantling him. Over the course of three matches of more than three hours each, Ke had thrown everything he had at the computer program. He tested it with different approaches: conservative, aggressive, defensive, and unpredicatable. Nothing seemed to work. AlphaGo gave Ke no openings. Instead, it slowly tightened its vise around him …”

280 million people in China watched AlphaGo beat Ke Jie at China’s national game: Go. Kai-Fu Lee compares the reaction in China to the Americans watching the Soviet Union launch Sputnik in 1957. It lit a fire under the ass of China’s government, entrepreneurs and tech sector to beat the Americans in AI.

He continues:

“But looking out my office window during the Ke Jie match, I saw something far different. The headquarters of my venture-capital fund is located in Beijing’s Zhongguancun (pronounced “jong-gwan-soon”) neighborhood, an area often referred to as “the Silicon Valley of China.” Today, Zhongguancun is the beating heart of China’s AI movement. To people here, AlphaGo’s were both a challenge and an inspiration. They turned into China’s Sputnik moment for artificial intelligence.

When the Soviet Union launched the first human-made satellite into orbit in October 1957, it had an instant and profound effect on the American psyche and government policy. The event sparked widespread U.S. public anxiety about perceived Soviet technological superiority, with Americans following the satellite across the night sky and tuning in to Sputnik’s radio transmissions. It triggered the creation of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), fueled by major government subsidies for math and science education, and effectively launched the space race. That nationwide American mobilization bore fruit twelve years later when Neil Armstrong became the first person ever to set foot on the moon.

AlphaGo scored its first high-profile victory in March 2016 during a five-game series against the legendary Korean player Lee Sedol, winning four to one. While barely noticed by most Americans, the five games drew more than 280 million Chinese viewers. Overnight, China plunged into an artificial intelligence fever. The buzz didn’t quite rival America’s reaction to Sputnik, but it lit a fire under the Chinese technology community that has been burning ever since.

When Chinese investors, entrepreneurs and government officials all focus in one one industry, they can truly shake the world. Indeed, China is ramping up AI investment, research, and entrepreneurship on a historic scale. Money for AI startups is pouring in from venture capitalists, tech juggernauts, and the Chinese government. Chinese students have caught AI fever as well, enrolling in advance degree programs and streaming lectures from international researchers on their smartphones. Startup founders are furiously pivoting, reengineering or simply rebranding their companies to catch the AI wave.”

I might happen to know someone like this.

I won’t continue with any further long excerpts, but this is a fascinating discussion. I would highly recommend purchasing this book and reading through it like I am doing. We’re furiously pivoting into a new paradigm here as well in light of recent developments.

Note: This will be continued at a later date.