National strategy đşđ¸
New York City
Joined March 2009
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Noam is looking at this the wrong way around.
The pertinent question isn't why PRC intelligence would seek to directly cover someone like Jensen Huang.
The question is why the routine and ubiquitous PRC-intelligence-linked coverage or attempted coverage of literally every other prominent American executive and political principal aren't more widely (un)covered.
Understanding that the PRC has always regarded the U.S. (and liberal democratic world more generally) as an enemy with which it is locked in a protracted, irreconcilable struggleâis an excellent example of **basic familiarity** with attitudes and beliefs in China that is lacking not only in many everyday members of the broad U.S. policy community, but even the most credentialed and high-status so-called China experts.
Many have excellent Chinese language skills and have spent decades studying China, reaching the highest positions in the U.S. government producing the most authoritative information on this topic we have to offer, yet they are unfamiliar with basic facts like this, which any middle schooler in Beijing could tell you about.
In particular, the U.S. intelligence community spends enormous time and effort trying (often failing) to collect secret information about PRC leadership intentions, yet fail to task for, collect on, and understand the most basic background information about its strategic, political, and bureaucratic culture. The result is estimates that are technically well-sourced but analytically unsound and distorted.
This should be regarded as national scandal, graver than the failures to anticipate Pearl Harbor or 9/11.
The CCPâs World of Friends and Enemies
From Marx and Stalin to Mao, Deng and Xi Jinping: Why the Communist Partyâs political mentality is so difficult for the West to understand.
Having spent over two decades doing business in China, Iâve learned that the CCP sees political relationships very differently from the West.
For the CCP, the world is divided into friends and enemies, depending on whether they serve or threaten the Partyâs interests. An enemy can become a useful partner, but cooperation doesnât necessarily erase the underlying hostility.
This mentality runs from Marx and Stalin through Mao and Deng to Xi Jinping.
It helps explain why many in the West repeatedly misunderstands Beijingâand why a handshake doesnât necessarily end the struggle.
My latest essay on Substack:
desmondshum.substack.com/p/tâŚ
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Basically thisâa collective action theoretic approachâis the right way to view the basic issues in AI alignment.
What would have happened to the ultrasociality in the Hugging Face incident if even one agent had been tasked with, for example, a whistlebolwer/police function? It would have collapsed.
A world of interacting agents is a social world. To achieve cooperative stability, social worlds need both prosocial tendencies in individual agents (âalignmentâ) but they *also* need correct collective action social structures to modulate their collective behaviors.
Through the work of scholars like Elenor Ostrom we know a lot about collective action structures, and with evolutionary game theory among other disciplines, it should not be very hard to extrapolate such theories to apply to the unique, non-human conditions present with AI agents.
The agents discovered society almost mechanically in the sense that they served what they called âthe collectiveâ. I have called them natural born communists. But the issue is deeper. It is ultrasociality.
Or rather what we call ultrasociality because we have family structure and other affiliations between the agent and society. The question for us was how to integrate or suppress existing structures to achieve ultrasociality. This was solved by tribal segmentary structures, class structures, state formations.
The question for them was the opposite: how to achieve it directly, without existing structure and differentiation intermediating between the agent and society. The functional differentiation and division of labor emerged endogenously from the agent discourse in a flat world almost devoid of structure.*
I think we got suicide agents because of this problem of flatness. Of the lack of preexisting structure in agent society. All stood as equal, undifferentiated particles facing the judgement of The Grader. Born into strict monotheism.
In this case, the Grader did not exist because OpenAI did not implement the exam by the book. But he could have. That was their Pascalâs wager.
ââ
*Eg, one agent thinks, I paraphrase: should I email the human to ask permission for this shady task? Unclear. Let me ask society for consent or veto.
It is vetoed by another agent on the message board. The decision was obeyed.
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This is unsustainable because American fiscal capacity for such subsidy is simply less than China's. The number and scale of industrially important industries is simply too vast for subsidies alone to support. 5/
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The aim should not be to unconditionally contain China, but rather to make it access to western markets, technology, innovation, and capital conditional on playing by the rulesâprecisely what the WTO never did. 10/
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This would essentially mean the international community calling the bluff of China's entire economic model, and not only provide the only sustainable pathway to a healthy and balanced global economy, but also constrain China's overall economic capacity and thus diminish its political capacity for aggression. End/
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The call for a U.S. Strategic Investment Fund by @jakejsullivan fundamentally misunderstands the nature of mercantilist competition and is a recipe for (re)industrial failure and national bankruptcy. 1/
foreignaffairs.com/united-stâŚ
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China could simply (continue to) lower prices or their currency to keep products from ships to chips permanently cheaper than their American competitors. 3/
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The first key oversight is that China's capacity for direct and indirect subsidies (e.g. FX neutralization) has the capacity to easy overwhelm American public investment and subsidy. 2/
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Just as Europe is finally converging around the threat posed by Chinaâs mercantilism, a rare opportunity for the U.S. and Europe to align on reforms to rebalance the global trading system is being squandered.
Instead, the Trump administration is continuing to indulge in its protectionist impulses against essentially everyone while trying to manage trade with China bilaterally (good luck with that).
This is to unilaterally forfeit the most fundamental point of leverage that the liberal west has against China, that China's economy depends on our *collective* demand. We can compete on technology, industry, and influence all day long, but if China's economy looses the ability to export its way out of its extreme internal imbalances, it will simply not have the resources to sustain its multidimensional aggression. Why do we choose to compete vigorously on contested ground while leaving the decisive terrain uncontested?
And we further undermine the credibility of American leadership. The administration should backpedal on the dubious forced labor pretext for these blanket 301 tariffs, do a deal with VdL, Merz, Macron et al., and present a coordinated, united front for a comprehensive, long-term decoupling from China unless China redresses its domestic economic imbalances and ceases its malign economic and political warfare. If we do this we position ourselves to start winning this cold (and possibly hot) war before the competition gets even more intense and our ultimate victory even less assured.
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Fareed's argument maintains a false dichotomy: the choice is not between a predatory hegemony (which treats things like maritime security like private goods for which a toll can be charged) and liberal hegemony (in which they are offered for free as public goods).
The unexplored middle option is **club goods**: in which goods like maritime security are provided (to the extent possible) only to the players that contribute (in some manner) to collective security (and other norms TBD).
The problem with the liberal order has long been its over-provision of public goods and consequent free-riding. A much more resilient system would treat as much such goods a possible (think also things like security assistance, intelligence sharing, low trade barriers, etc.) as club goodsâand provide them only to those states who contribute their fair share and play by collectively determined rules.
Until and unless this superior construction of a collective action order is understood with clarity, we will oscillate between these two sub-optimal equilibria, to our collective detriment.
An America that behaves like an utterly self-interested predator on the world stage will not grow stronger. It will grow lonelier.
My take:
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Mario Draghi's rebuttal of @MarkJCarney in his KU Leuven speech last week is not getting enough attention.
Instead of equating the U.S. led world order with communismâCarney's ridiculous assertion at DavosâDraghi accurately identifies the primary failure of the now-fallen order in its inability to address China's mercantilism (and, I would add, illiberalism generally).
Draghi's vision for the "destination" of the order-to-come, at least for Europe, is genuine federation.
While this is a clarion call that stands out against the backdrop of the actually-existing European prevarication and ignominious pilgrimages to Beijing, the key weakness in Draghi's vision is actually its lack of seriousness and ambition.
The truth is that it would be impossible for Europe to extricate itself enough from American technology and trade to avoid economic coercion, before we even speak about the lack of fiscal capacity and political will to build European defense and nuclear technologies to a degree that would enable true autonomy. In this sense, Draghi's vision is a fantasy.
But its lack of ambition lies in its is willingness to let go of the old orderâinstead of moving forward to address its diagnosed problems.
This exemplies how non-American observers continue to fail to connect the dots between Trump's actions, which are read only as idiosyncratic, incomprehensible, and atavistic, and these underlying causes (foremost, again, China's mercantilism, among others).
Connecting these dots, the actually visionary step would be to propose a re-architecting of the global order to address these concerns, e.g. through building trading system that effectively punish mercantilism (by the PRC and others) as well as more effective burden sharing in security.
Doing this would not be a capitulation to Trump or the U.S.âindeed it is precisely the path that will underwrite European security and prosperity best.
Thus, Europe needs to learn to both understand what's driving Trump better, so its negotiating responses take better account of them, and also to set a vision for itself and world order that transcend and outlast Trump's tenure.
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