[ExI] chatbots and marketing: was RE: India and the periodic table

[efc at swisscows.email]

On Fri, 9 Jun 2023, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote:

> China would really really like to convert North America and Europe into a food-supplying raw-materials supplying slave labor
> continents, much the way the west uses Africa now.  If China Inc controls the ability to automate nearly everything currently done in
> offices today, that scenario is realistic.

I'm not so sure. When it comes to china, there are a couple of things
which always make me doubt their "power" and think that there will be
dramatic changes there eventually.

1. An acquaintance moved to china many years ago to work as an
architect. His general view after working there for a year was that:

1.1. Chinese are generally fairly incompetent. 
1.2. Do not have the ability to think critically or object. 
1.3. Love to cheat the system, not work at work etc.

It was a nightmare for him to try and get things done. He also travelled
around the country extensively and told me about

1.4. The enormous ghost cities and wasted resources due to incompetent
political decisions suffering from 1.2. and 1.3.

2. Another acquaintance worked extensively with Huawei and his
experience was pretty similar to 1. Why has Huawei become so successful?
His theory is a combination of 1 million monkeys eventually writing a
Shakespeare play _and_ a private company receiving the backing of a
state in the form of money and intelligence, so not successful on its
own.

3. I read somewhere (and keep in mind that I do not know if this is true
or just a rumour) that the chinese parliament has as many billionaires
in USD as the US parliament has millionaires.

Add to that that people in the country side, like the country side of russia,
live a medieval lifestyle. Combine that, the wealth and corruption of
the people in power, and perhaps there will be a revolution or a big
crash, which will in turn, lead to a revolution.

So yes, china might be a threat today, but I think they, like russia,
look way more scary from the outside, than from the inside.

Best regards, 
Daniel


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> spike
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> On Fri, Jun 9, 2023 at 12:16 PM spike jones via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
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>       From: extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat
>       Sent: Friday, 9 June, 2023 9:39 AM
>       To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
>       Cc: William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com>
>       Subject: Re: [ExI] chatbots and marketing: was RE: India and the periodic table
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> Taiwan has the best, eh Spike?  Well, what the Hell happened to industrial espionage?  Enormous dollars are at stake and there
> are still secrets?  Get a spy.  Pay him 50 million dollars - cheap at that price.  Why take over a country?   (also, a
> tetrabyte would be part of a fish)  
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> bill w
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> Industrial espionage steals the intellectual property in the factory, but does not steal the actual factory.  Taiwan has the
> best and most electronic manufacturing on the scale necessary to have the best and fastest GPUs.  America knows *how* to design
> those GPUs and how to build the factories, but the right combination of tax structure and talent base came together in Taiwan,
> which made that country ground zero for the manufacture of the most advanced computer chips in the world.
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> But since you ask, I propose a thought experiment sir.
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> Picture in your mind a working person in the USA, or Europe.  OK, do you have your mental image?  Did you picture a guy in an
> office, perhaps in front of a computer most of the day?  Plenty of us made our living or still make our living that way.
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> That was part 1, now part 2, consider a worker on the continent of Africa, working.  Did you picture a guy grubbing around
> collecting lithium ore in horrific conditions to satisfy the insatiable appetite in foreign lands for the stuff?
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> If you did, then, good for you.  You are aware of where we are in human history: the west is charging ahead with clean and
> green technologies, by compelling people in less fortunate parts of the world to grub around, dig up their land, gather the
> lithium and other minerals we need to purr around in our clean green cars.
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> OK then, part 3 of the experiment if you are still reading down this far.
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> Picture specialized chatbots which are trained on something very specific, such as the complete US tax code.  Printed out and
> bound into books, that tax code on a shelf spans the left elbow to the right wing tip on a typical tall man, so can estimate
> about 1 to 1.5 meters of book, perhaps two billion words.  A chatbot could read all that, and become a soft accountant.  It
> could be a five dollar alternative to hiring an accounting form.  It might be able to train the soft accountant to read all
> your receipts, figure out what is deductible, fill out your tax return.  If so, the tax accounting business is headed out the
> door, and if that can be done with specialized chatbots, so can nearly everything done currently in an office in front of a
> computer in part 1 of your thought experiment.
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> Conclusion: the guy who owns the capacity to manufacture the hardware to make those bots owns the planet.
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> spike
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