The Economist reported this week that "America needs to regain its technological edge." Unfortunately, two critical US corporations apparently are unwilling to help our country do so. In the same report, the Economist noted that:
Russia, and particularly China, are both making AI a national priority, and have far fewer qualms than the West in how they go about it. According to Jim Lewis, an expert on the impact of technology on warfare at CSIS, “when it comes to government data, the US doesn’t match what China collects on its citizens at all. They have a big sandbox to play in and a lot of toys and good people.” In China, where big data are bigger than anywhere else, privacy is not an issue, and there is no division between commercial research and military needs. By contrast, Google’s London-based DeepMind subsidiary, whose machine beat a grandmaster at the game of Go, refuses to work with the armed forces.
We all knew, of course, that Google is evil (see, e.g., #Goolag). But who knew they were so lacking in basic patriotism?
Apparently, we can add Intel to the list of companies that are throwing the US military under the bus while aiding and abetting the Chinese:
In initial disclosures about critical security flaws discovered in its processors, Intel Corp. INTC -0.20% notified a small group of customers, including Chinese technology companies, but left out the U.S. government, according to people familiar with the matter and some of the companies involved.
The decision raises concerns, security researchers said, as it potentially could have allowed information about the chip flaws, dubbed Spectre and Meltdown, to fall into the hands of the Chinese government before being publicly divulged. There is no evidence any information was misused, the researchers said.
No evidence that it was missed this time doesn't mean such information won't be misused next time.
All of this seems quite worrying. In the 2016 novel, Ghost Fleet tells a seemingly plausible story about how the Chinese military uses weaknesses in US technology to launch a preemptive strike on Hawaii.
Now let's be quite clear. I do not expect corporations as such to be patriots. After all, the corporation is just a legal fiction. It's personhood is just a convenient fiction not a statement of reality.
Instead, we have to focus on the people who make up the corporation--especially the people who run them. The problem, as I see it, is that the Davos men and women who run companies like Google and Intel increasingly regard patriotism as the moral equivalent of racism and sexism.
As Christopher Lasch observed in The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (which remains the best place to start if you want to understand the intellectual case for Trump and, more broadly, modern American populism):
Those who covet membership in the new aristocracy of brains tend to congregate on the coasts turning their back on the heartland and cultivating ties with the international market of fast-moving money, glamour, fashion, and popular culture. It is a question whether they think of themselves as Americans at all. Patriotism, certainly, does not rank very high in their hierarchy of virtues. “Multiculturalism,” on the other hand, suits them to perfection, conjuring up the agreeable image of a global bazaar in which exotic cuisines, exotic styles of dress, exotic music, exotic tribal customs can be savored indiscriminately, with no questions asked and no commitments required. The new elites are at home only in transit, en route to a high-level conference, to the grand opening of a new franchise, to an international film festival, or to an undiscovered resort.
He warned of a cosmopolitan superclass of 20 million people, with interests diverging ever further from the anthropology of the parish. This rootless supra-culture was cornering the gains of the global economy, and capturing ideological power. “They have little need for national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the elite’s global operations.”
I haven't figured out yet what to do about this problem. We tried Trump as a beta test for the cure, which has not worked out too well for anyone who cares about moral decency and so on.
So my ongoing project remains thinking about how a modern American populism could shake up both the political and, perhaps more important, the business elite.
