Great articles to read on the web

E8: Samo Burja on America’s future, China, AI, and the new global order

Interesting talk; some points I noted –

What determines a country’s success

• Peter Zeihan says that what determines a country’s success is geography their demographics and their energy their ability to produce energy
• Olsen is more likely to attribute a country’s success to its quality of Institutions and
• Balaji is more likely to attribute a country’s success to its IQ into its talent and its technology advancement
• It is certainly possible to squander good geography and if one wants the best proof of that I think geopolitical thinkers have expected Brazil to become a world power any decade now for the last 120 years and it perpetually underperforms because of dysfunctional institutions
• In the 1960s when France was still an optimistic forward-looking economically growing country Charles de Gaulle said IQ is the oil of France

China

• China can almost feed itself China produces over 90 percent of the wheat rice and corn it consumes as well as over 85 percent of the meat it consumes it is a bit less independent on the production of soybeans but soybeans can be substituted for other crops
• China is about 0.08 hectares of arable land per person this is to be fair six times less than the United States which has 0.48 but it’s not that far away from say the European Union which has 0.22 hectares per person really
• China plus Russia are an alternate economic base and that’s why they’re even flirting with interesting ideas like replacing the US dollar
• There’s a reason that in modern China they actually have less of an intellectual justification of disruptive capitalism or technological progress than the United States does yet because the rates of growth were higher in living memory most Chinese who are positively predisposed towards the future – they think the future is going to keep getting better and better technology and progress

Demise of dollar

• I think the dollar has performed very well actually compared to all other Western currencies so my view would be within the Western Alliance and within the Western system the United States will continue to grow in relative importance
• Even if it declines as the premier world currency I think it will be a strong currency for like a very long time
• My key disagreement with some of my say more more libertarian or crypto inclined friends because they think that if you crash the world Empire the currency goes away and I’m like nah you know it’s much more gradual

AI

• Peter Thiel famously said that crypto is libertarian AI is communist
• I think that AI is a communist as in it improves planned economies and planned economies of scale; that doesn’t necessarily mean that it must end in say like a state-controlled economy
• AI will push towards greater economic centralization
• What automation usually is is not that our tools become smarter it’s like we figure out how to do something that previously required intelligence and now can be done by a system that’s not very smart
• You actually have to slightly de-automate to reduce energy usage

Upcoming research interests

• Chinese nuclear industry: understanding about one of the most important questions of the near future is the Chinese nuclear industry. It remains to be seen whether it can fulfill the extremely ambitious plan set by the Chinese government to build 500 nuclear reactors; it is the kind of scale where those reactors are going to become cheaper and more reliable over a decade or two and make China a much less fossil fuel dependent
• Banking crisis: I think is not over I think we’re seeing like a slow motion burn that will require deep reforms of the U.S financial system for now let’s say the government has been successful in slowing it down but not stopping I feel the dominoes still are slowly ticking on each other and another relevant dive will actually be on
• Artificial intelligence: we have done extensive research onto the future
• Battery production: I’m already fairly convinced that solar energy is – in the absence of nuclear – an energy Revolution that decreases daytime energy costs. The only question is will the advances in Battery Technology keep up or will we see a world where you know during the daytime our power is powered by solar and at night we burn natural gas