Background
Today is the thirty-second anniversary of the Tienanmen Square Massacre and also the day on which a panel chaired by Sir Geoffrey Nice QC starts to hear evidence, in London, of alleged genocide by the Chinese Communist Party against the Uighurs in Xinjiang, not that essentially the same thing hasn't also happened in Tibet and Inner Mongolia. A vote in the UK Parliament has already defined what's going on as genocide, but assorted nit-pickers and hair-splitters claim that "only a court can make such a determination" whilst simultaneously doing everything in their power to stop the matter coming before such a court.
Looking Beyond the Obvious for a Change
It really should have been obvious well before June the fourth, nineteen eighty-nine that "mainland" China was a totalitarian state whose rulers would use any force (or falsehood) necessary to maintain and increase their power. And since that date no honest person has been able to deny it. Yet for those thirty-two years Western, especially American, high-technology, businesses have fought and won political battles with their own governments, shareholders and sceptical opposition politicians to continually pour money and intellectual property into Communist mainland China. As soon as one asks "why", loud but unthinking voices respond by saying "it's a huge market, dummy!" which is the equivalent of the people who air their great wisdom by saying that conflict in the Middle East, or the Falklands, is "all about oil". It isn't: strategic battles over the Middle East predate the industrial exploitation of oil reserves by many centuries. The Middle East is strategically important because it's in the middle.
China is a "huge market" that constantly attracts investment of money, intellectual property (not even counting that which it steals), effort and attention from the West, without allowing any non-Chinese, non-communist entity to benefit in any significant way. Most of the "consumers" in the Chinese market have no disposable income at all by any standard that applies in Taiwan or Malaysia for example: what they eat each evening is what they earned that day. That still leaves a few hundred million middle-class consumers with a disposable income of a sort, but they are subject to tight social control by the Chinese Communist Party and if the CCP tells them to boycott a given company or country's products, they do so within hours. Every factory or laboratory in China built with Western money and know-how cedes control of both to the CCP at the outset and forever. The Chinese market is one where inwards investment has been proven over decades to never really pay dividends to the investor -and still the inwards investment keeps coming! There must be more to it than a fool's gold-rush driven by the greed of key individuals for the same thing to keep happening for so long. Einstein defined madness as repeating the same action over and over again and expecting something different to happen. If it's madness, it must be multi-generational. Or there must be some factor other than the shareholder's best interests at work here. If the West's business leaders are true capitalists, then furthering interests other than those of the shareholder is idolatry. So, if they are not mad, what's their idol?
Artificial Intelligence
In engineering terms "Artificial Intelligence" is very different from "Automation" but the latter comes close to being an economic model for the former. The remaining difference is that while automation replaces labour, most profitably skilled or semi-skilled labour, whilst creating a potentially-powerful class of persons capable of managing the technology (what C.S. Lewis called "the conditioners"), AI replaces the conditioners themselves and puts power either into the hands of a much smaller cadre of human rulers, or into its own hands. Now, C.S. Lewis was trying to make a point about the importance of objective reality standing apart from the political issue of tyranny, hence his use of a very neutral word, "conditioners," for the governing class in a largely-automated world. But in any situation where ethnic minorities are being subject to genocide at the same time that the ethnic majority are subject to such tight social control that most members of the ethnic majority have no choice about anything and own nothing, not even their own vital organs, then words like "tyranny" have to enter the conversation because it's not possible to describe the situation without them.
This article was sparked by a chance remark, this week, from one of the author's engineering colleagues. He had been engaged in a discussion with an American friend, about the fact that up to about nineteen-seventy, improvements in wages in America had tracked improvements in productivity, but since that date wages have fallen further and further behind. The friend held that this was because "different types of capital were being invested" (this may be a way of saying "it's the damned liberals/neo-cons") but my colleague was adamant that, having worked in factory automation ever since nineteen seventy and in several parts of the world, it was automation replacing mere mechanisation that had broken the link between improved productivity and improved wages. (Automation only replaces skilled labour if you have skilled labour in the first place. This places skilled Western economies at a disadvantage because they have to maintain living standards for the skilled, especially if they have a vote.)
The American friend wasn't going to accept a non-American observation, of course, so they agreed to differ. But my colleague kept on thinking and he started to read around the issue, and especially reading about whether Artificial Intelligence was doing the same sort of thing, economically, as automation. And what he found was, that in America it wasn't. The improvement in American productivity due to AI is quite modest, just a few percent, and it's nothing like enough to justify all the hype. Especially when compared to alternative (and cheaper) ways of improving productivity, such as genuinely-improving education for as much of the population as possible, with an emphasis on nurturing free and creative thought.
The impact of automation and more especially AI on the Communist Chinese economy was much more profound: AI has improved productivity in China by more than fifty percent. It is the main driver of productivity. Because it is "replacing" something that has never really existed there in the first place, there are fewer economic or social costs involved in using AI to the full. And a tyranny will tend to perceive the "social costs" of AI as benefits, because those social costs weaken the power of the entire population save for a tiny elite cadre much too small to be called a social class.
There are other considerations, too: a heavily AI-based economic model is the only kind that can tolerate anything like a Chinese Communist-style education system which trains workers to think little and remember less whilst conditioning the middle classes to instinctively keep even their innermost thoughts within "patriotic" bounds which get narrower every year. All the economic alternatives to AI require free and creative thought to be liberally scattered at random throughout the masses in order to work sustainably. AI wasn't available in time to save the USSR, so it choked and died. But because a tyranny like the CCP cannot tolerate anything happening at random and it cannot tolerate free and creative thought at all, an AI-based economic model is the only kind which offers a tyranny indefinite sustainability
The American and other big-tech companies and oligarchs haven't just invested time, money and intellectual property in AI: they have made a massive emotional investment in AI too. For most of the key players, AI being seen as a boon to mankind is the only thing which allows them any self-esteem. Placed on top of the more tangible investments they have made, that emotional investment draws them towards the only system willing to revolve around AI and make their work significant. And that system to which they are being drawn, is tyranny. The people behind AI need it to be needed and it's tyranny that needs it most. Because tyranny has no purpose other than to sustain itself and therefore it has to try and exist forever. AI is tyranny's only chance.
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