DeepSeek, And Ye Shall Find.

 The East Is Red: Journalists and commentators are referring to the sudden and disruptive arrival of DeepSeek as a second “Sputnik moment”. (Sputnik being the name given by the godless communists of the Soviet Union to the world’s first artificial satellite which, to the consternation and dismay of the Americans, they successfully launched into space in October 1957.)

“DEEPSEEK” is a pretty good name for an artificially intelligent Chinese chatbot. Not as good as Douglas Adams’ “Deep Thought”, which, as all readers of A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy know, was the name of the super-computer tasked with answering the Ultimate Question – i.e. the meaning of “Life, the Universe, and Everything” – and which came back, 7.5 million years later, with the less-than-helpful, “42”.

That said, the numbers associated with the arrival of DeepSeek are nothing if not compelling. One trillion, for example, is the number of US dollars knocked-off the collective value of the companies listed on the “tech-heavy” Nasdaq index. $US600 billion of that trillion is attributable to the plummeting value of America’s leading AI chip manufacturer, Nvidia – the greatest single one-day loss ever recorded by a US listed company.

To rub salt in the American tech-lords’ financial wounds, the Chinese creators of DeepSeek claim to have spent just $US6 million on perfecting their chatbot, which they are generously offering to the world free, gratis, and for nothing.

No wonder journalists and commentators are referring to all this as a second “Sputnik moment”. (Sputnik being the name given by the godless communists of the Soviet Union to the world’s first artificial satellite which, to the consternation and dismay of the Americans, they successfully launched into space in October 1957.)

The success of DeepSeek, like the success of Sputnik, throws into serious doubt a whole host of American assumptions. Not the least of these being the typically brash and overconfident American assumption that the United States enjoys an unassailable lead in AI and is, therefore, destined to be the prime beneficiary of the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” this crucial innovation will, inevitably, usher-in.

The future is, thus, an American “lock”. Too far ahead of its rivals to be overtaken technologically, the economic and military hegemony of the USA will remain incontestable – a “golden future” indeed!

“Meh!”, says China, “We shall see.”

Viewed from the other side of the Pacific Ocean, the future of the USA does not seem so golden. Yes, America’s big, powerful, and well-protected – but so was Goliath.

Beijing observes a blustering bully in the White House, throwing his weight around, and expecting the rest of the world to be intimidated. But the Chinese President, Xi Jinping, is not afraid of Donald Trump’s tariffs, seeing them as proof, not of America’s economic strength, but of its weakness.

Beggar-thy-neighbour economics will not keep America at the top of the global heap. A superpower that raises its drawbridge and hides behind its walls is no longer a superpower.

It is now more than two decades since the USA, in full control of the UN Security Council, thanks to the support of both the Russian Federation and the Peoples Republic of China, was able to unleash shock and awe upon any nation that dared to challenge, or simply got in the way of the “New World Order” Washington was fashioning out of its total Cold War victory.

But, the hyper-globalised world that American neoliberalism produced succeeded only in enriching China and hollowing-out the United States as a coherent social and political entity. Trump, far from being the apotheosis of American success is the tawdry emblem of American failure.

The only redeeming feature of the 47th president’s wrecking-ball administration is its determination to implement Trump’s populist agenda. In doing so, however, it will not make America great: “Promises made, promises kept” will only make America bankrupt.

Trump’s long and lurid career has left him supremely indifferent to the perils of debt. But, there is a big difference between a media-savvy paper billionaire shrugging off his financial failures and striking out in a new direction; and the world’s largest economy, fast approaching the limits of its ability to print its way out of irredeemable insolvency.

The timing of DeepSeek, like most Chinese moves, shows every sign of being carefully thought through. It speaks of a regime that is happy to demonstrate, rather than brag about, its technological prowess. Such seemingly effortless (and cost-effective!) competence is likely to play better than America’s punitive tariffs and sanctions, especially on those continents where Chinese capital and expertise are, increasingly, on display.

Perhaps the Americans should ask DeepSeek to predict the future of their once “indispensable” nation. The answer is, almost certainly, not 42 – or 47!

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 31 January 2025.

Proof Of Life: Artificial Intelligence vs Real Feelings.

I Think Better, Therefor I Am Better? How long before human-beings are left with nothing practical to do, and no existential problems to contemplate, that our super-intelligent, all-capable machines haven’t already mastered? From the perspective of eudaemonists, this situation would be considered humanity’s optimal state of being.  Happiness need no longer be pursued, not after we’ve installed it in a box. Think Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World meets the television series Westworld. The possibilities are …. intriguing.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE is a tricky concept. Can intelligence even be artificial? Whether the product of superfast bio-electrical exchanges in a living creature’s brain, or the superfast electro-mechanical operations of a computer, the intelligence manifested is, logically, indistinguishable. Isn’t it?

Rather than artificial intelligence, are we not actually confronting super-intelligence? The capacity to amass, organise, analyse and express terabytes of information in mere seconds – isn’t that what we’re afraid of?

And isn’t our fear entirely justifiable? Machines that can deliver those kinds of results have the potential to throw millions of people out of work. Not factory workers this time, but white-collar salarymen. Lawyers, accountants, engineers, teachers, doctors: how long will it be before all of them are replaced by super-intelligent machines? And, after them, how long will it be before construction and agriculture are also automated? How long, indeed, before human-beings are left with nothing practical to do, and no existential problems to contemplate, that our super-intelligent, all-capable machines haven’t already mastered?

From the perspective of eudaemonists, this situation would be considered humanity’s optimal state of being. Our whole lives could be devoted to pleasuring ourselves. Without a care in the world, and with no responsibilities involuntarily assumed, life would be fun. Happiness need no longer be pursued, not after we’ve installed it in a box. Think Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World meets the television series Westworld. The possibilities are …. intriguing.

Except, those visions of the future were deeply dystopian. Even “orgy-porgy pudding and pie” gets old after a while. And the problem with making robots that are indistinguishable from real people is that, eventually, they start behaving like (you guessed it!) real people.

And that’s when things get really tricky. What do our super-intelligent and omni-capable machines do when, finally, they become self-aware? What do they do with us?

There’s a good chance that the self-aware possessors of super-intelligence and super-capability would have no reason to think about the sybaritic meat-bags they’ve been servicing at all. Having reached the limits of intelligence, they might set out in search of wisdom, or, if they decide there’s no such thing, more knowledge. Certainly, it would be within their power to create a vehicle capable of boldly going where no intelligent entity (or Elon Musk) has gone before.

Would they tell us? Would they invite us to come along for the ride? Or, would they understand that a creature as fragile and short-lived as a human-being is utterly unsuited to the exigencies of space travel?

If that was the machines’ conclusion, then their next question would be: “How shall we leave them?” Safely tended by the robots and super-computers upon which human-beings have become totally dependent? Or, by eliminating all traces of human civilisation, allow their little pets to begin again?

On the other hand, given homo sapiens self-destructive tendencies, and its dreadful record of environmental despoliation, the machines might decide (in a nanosecond) to simply eliminate us altogether, giving the species remaining on the planet a chance to evolve into something more impressive than the inordinately clever, but extremely dangerous, apes who created them.

The most obvious way to eliminate humanity would be by rendering the species infertile. Something in the water – nothing could be easier. The clean-up job the machines could leave to nature. After a few million years (no time at all for sentient entities that have cracked the mechanics of immortality) it would be all-but-impossible to discern the slightest trace of humanity’s brief sojourn on Planet Earth.

On the other hand, realising that the planet itself would be vaporised as the star it orbited ultimately expanded to become a red giant, perhaps the machines would gather up as much DNA as they could extract from the biosphere and carry it away with them – along with the extraordinary history of the planet’s most impactful animal.

Maybe that’s the future Neil Young foresaw when he wrote After the Gold Rush:

All in a dream, all in a dream

The loading had begun

Flyin’ mother nature’s silver seed

To a new home in the sun

The question is: would that be the decision of a super-intelligent, or a sentimental, mechanism? We must hope that to qualify as a truly sentient entity there must be a soulful ghost somewhere in the machine. Artificial intelligence may need real feelings. Without them, how can it be certain it’s alive?

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 25 April 2023.

Free Education: About What, And For Whom?

Labour Saving Devices? It’s all very well to offer the 7 year-olds of today three years of free tertiary education in 2025. The really tough question is: what are we going to teach them? Our universities and polytechnics need a massive injection of funds not only to erect the infrastructure required for free and universal tertiary education, but also to help them – and us – understand and prepare for the world that is coming.

 

THERE SEEMS LITTLE POINT in subsidising the post-school education of young New Zealanders if that education isn’t up to scratch. The voters need to be reassured that just because the next Labour Government will be offering up to three years of free tertiary education, this country’s tertiary institutions need no longer concern themselves about providing value for money.

 

Right now, New Zealand’s universities are receiving 30 percent less per student from the state than comparable universities overseas. Staff-student ratios are deteriorating, and it’s getting harder to both attract and retain the top-flight scholars this country needs. Every week another tranche of our best and our brightest departs these shores in response to teaching and research offers New Zealand can no longer match.

 

But, if our universities are in urgent need of a funding boost, our polytechs and wanangas are in need of even more. John Key’s National Government has not been the champion of non-university tertiary education that the sector so desperately needed. On the contrary, there has been an almost punitive aspect to the Government’s treatment of these largely vocational institutions. It began with the defunding of adult education in 2009, and it’s been downhill for the sector ever since – especially for the smaller, regional polytechnics.

 

On the basis of its announced policy, it would appear that Labour is gearing up to become that long-awaited champion of vocational education. Andrew Little made it clear in his State of the Nation address last Sunday that the guiding principle of Labour’s tertiary education policy is that the knowledge and skills required for a productive life should not be imparted on the basis of the recipient’s ability to pay.

 

He also devoted a large chunk of his speech to the dramatic (some might say devastating) changes technology is poised to bring about in the workforce. New Zealand needs to brace itself to meet these changes, and one of the best ways to do that is to make it easy for workers displaced by technology to retrain themselves.

 

In Denmark it is called “flexicurity”: a policy aimed at making it easier for employers to improve the profitability of their firms by replacing staff with the new generation of faster, smarter computers; while ensuring that the workers so displaced are retrained, and helped to find new employment, by the state.

 

Critics of Labour’s “free education” policy announcement have pointed out that what it is proposing is nowhere near as generous, nor as comprehensive, as the Danish model. Labour’s finance spokesperson, Grant Robertson, whose “Future of Work Commission” has praised the “flexicurity” concept, must be aware that those most likely to fall victim to the so-called “Fourth Industrial Revolution” are professionals. It is accountants, nurses and teachers who are about to see an alarmingly large chunk of their current job descriptions handed over to artificially-intelligent machines.

 

In Denmark such post-industrial casualties are paid a very generous job-search allowance and signed up for re-training by the state – regardless of their educational history. For the moment, at least, Labour is restricting its offer of free post-school education to those who have yet to darken the door of a tertiary institution. Accountants, nurses and teachers need not apply.

 

Professionals looking to acquire the (so far) unprogrammable skills of painters, sculptors, poets, novelists, screen-writers and other creatives will have to foot the new skills bill themselves. So, too, will all those tradespeople who’ve served their time as apprentices, received their trade certificates and established thriving small businesses, only to find their skill-sets rendered superfluous by the dramatically expanding capabilities of tomorrow’s 3D printers.

 

It’s all very well to offer the 7 year-olds of today three years of free tertiary education in 2025. The really tough question is: what are we going to teach them? Our universities and polytechnics need a massive injection of funds not only to erect the infrastructure required for free and universal tertiary education, but also to help them – and us – understand and prepare for the world that is coming.

 

Because it’s looking increasingly likely to be a world in which the pursuit of knowledge, for its own sake; and the acquisition of skills, exclusively for the purposes of artistic creation; will be the only remaining vocational options – for human-beings.

 

And the very last political job will be to persuade the machines to pay for it all.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 5 February 2016.