It’s well past time to push back against foreign interference
Securities are often illusions. We feel safe walking near home, and then we’re mugged. We feel healthy, and then we’re diagnosed with cancer. We’re prosperous, but then we’re laid off and left to the ravages of a challenging economy. Illusions of securities can intensify into outright delusions. Insecurities already abound, but we construct an image that allows us to ignore them until precisely the moment when our positive perception perishes.
These would be extraordinary revelations in any context, but Canada’s self-stylized image of peaceful existence and international bonhomie makes the news particularly hard to swallow. Calm security has turned into frenzied insecurity, particularly for the three quarters of a million Sikhs living in Canada, the highest population proportion in the world, along with 1.7 million Chinese.
There’s a simple question at work here: who controls whom? The simplistic view is that a nation controls the affairs of its own citizens. Canadian citizens are subject to Canadian laws and due process. If India had evidence that a Canadian citizen was a terrorist, it could appeal to the Canadian government and demand extradition, and Canada’s justice system would adjudicate the request.
Simple, but wrong. Technology and globalization have tightly coupled the world, and the barriers between nations have become more porous than ever. Secure sovereignty is now much harder to defend and protect, and incursions are becoming ever more commonplace.
An extrajudicial murder is an extraordinary example of extraterritoriality, the idea that the laws of a country can apply outside of that country’s borders. India believes that Nijjar is a terrorist, and therefore, assassinating him wherever he might be is within its rights as a nation. Indian political commentators have noted a parallel between India’s killing of Nijjar with America’s killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, which was done without the authorization of Pakistan’s government.
Russia, similarly, has been on something of an extraterritorial offensive in recent years. A brutal murder believed to be ordered by Vladimir Putin in Berlin’s central Tiergarten riveted Germany back in 2021. The convicted murderer, Vadim Krasikov, is now an omnipresent name on Western-Russian prisoner swap lists. Vienna has become so enmeshed in Russian spying that one European intelligence leader called it a “veritable aircraft carrier” for Putin. Then there’s Ukraine, the greatest example of extraterritoriality the world over right now.
Europeans, Canadians and Australians (who are dealing with their own Chinese interference investigations) are coming to terms with their delusions of immunity. Autocracies have more tools and resources to undermine democratic states than ever before, ranging from sophisticated cyberattacks to plain old skullduggery. Increasingly, they seem to be using such tools with impunity.
There’s an irony here, of course, and comeuppance is certainly one appropriate perspective. The West intervened all around the world with near impunity itself the past few centuries, extracting the resources it wanted and terrorizing the people who attempted to stop it. In short, we controlled them. Now, with the rise of the rest and a global rebalancing of economic and political power, there’s a good slathering of hypocrisy when the West has the audacity to complain that foreign countries now have the wherewithal to interfere in its own affairs.
We should acknowledge that hypocrisy, but we also need to move past it. At stake isn’t just the lives of dissidents finding refuge from their homelands, but the very machinery of progress and democracy.
The first step is dispelling our illusions about security at home. Like our allies, the United States is not immune to pressure and interference from other governments. Many countries operate clandestinely on U.S. soil, all without sanction. That means rebuilding trust between citizens and our police force, and between companies and counterintelligence teams. Distrust between people and the people’s institutions is ripe for exploitation by adversaries that would like to do America harm.
Then there must be stronger and more consistent consequences for foreign interference. Governments that engage in extrajudicial murders, electoral interference or industrial espionage need to face not just legal consequences, but passionate and unified wrath. Any case of interference may perhaps benefit some citizens or candidates or parties more than others — one person’s gain is another person’s loss. But rather than seeing these actions as zero-sum, we should instead judge them as a negative-sum crisis. We all lose something when our own independent choices and constitutional protections are thwarted by malevolent actors.
The challenge then becomes what to do about democracy and economic promotion overseas. Does the improvement of civil society or human rights in authoritarian countries undermine our own claims that foreign interference is wrong?
No. Emphatically no. The twenty-first century is not a time for moral relativism, or liberal quietism in the face of bold evil. There is an objective lens to evaluate these actions, and it derives from understanding who is being freed and who is being subsumed under authority. The extrajudicial murder of dissidents, journalists and artists is wrong, because free speech is a fundamental human value. No one should be killed for what they have to say. To equate the murder of a dissident with the assassination of a terrorist like bin Laden, who organized the killing of thousands of people, is a relativity I can’t compute.
Quietism doesn’t work because the other side isn’t quiet. Authoritarian regimes are emboldened, tearing down the fabric of the liberalism that has guided the freedom and prosperity of humanity for more than two centuries now. Freedom of speech, freedom of business, freedom of association and religion — these rights and many others combine to create a life free of tyranny.
I just finished reading Waiting to be Arrested at Night, a harrowing memoir from dissident Uyghur poet Tahir Hamut Izgil. Izgil spent decades under the thumb of the Chinese state in Ürümqi, Xinjiang, plotting an escape to America over years as the central government’s dragnet against Uyghur intellectuals closed in ever tighter. He’s now an Uber driver living in Washington, DC.
The United States is still the last bastion of protection for “your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” as Emma Lazarus wrote for the Statue of Liberty. I am under no illusions: it can be hard to be the final destination for so many people running from economic devastation and political persecution. It requires sacrifice to protect our own while still welcoming others. But it will be a very dark day indeed when dissidents and dreamers are dissuaded that America is no longer the final rampart against evil.
“Securities” Video: Is Your Brain a National Asset?
Design generated by Chris Gates
The knowledge economy demands the brightest minds, and nations across the world are increasingly seeking out the best talent and recruiting them. But at what point do the industrial policies of countries conflict with the independence of entrepreneurs and engineers to do their work?
As a follow up to “Brainwash Departures,” our “Securities” producer Chris Gates put together a video about the challenges of managing intellectual property when national prosperity is fundamentally derived from the thoughts emanating out of the minds of citizens and visitors alike.
Our scientist-in-residence Sam Arbesman points to HeyGen Labs’ new creation, a translation tool that will take a video of a person speaking English, and translate it into another language with matching mouth movements. It’s dubbing, but as if the original actors were speaking the dubbed language. Finally, we know how the universal translator works on Star Trek.
Love him or hate him, but Elon Musk and the new biography by Walter Isaacson has been everywhere the past week since publication. No one has offered a more sardonic synoptic take on the tome than satirist Gary Shteyngart in The Guardian: “Highest on the list of things Musk won’t shut up about is Mars. ‘We need to get to Mars before I die.’ ‘We got to give this a shot, or we’re stuck on earth forever.’ The messianic part of the Muskiverse is his attempt to put 140m miles between himself and his father as he tries to turn humanity into a ‘multiplanetary civilization’ even though we are having a hard enough time making it as a uniplanetary one.”
Sam has always been a big champion of long-range human projects, and this week, The New York Timesprofiled one of the most ambitious. Slated for completion in the year 3,183, the Time Pyramid is “a public artwork that Wemding’s citizens are assembling at a rate of one six-by-four-foot block every decade. There are 116 more to add before [it] will be complete, when it will stand 24 feet tall.”
Tess Van Stekelenburg points to Elliot Hershberg’s epic long profile of Illumina in Century of Bio. “I’m describing the birth of Illumina, a company that established a Measurement Monopoly in the life sciences. I mean this in the Thielian sense. Illumina invented a profound new measurement technology and paired their innovation with a business strategy that enabled them to capture enduring differential returns over time.”
Finally, Sam recommends a “visual connection engine” called River built by Max Bittker that allows you to click and zoom into an infinite depth of generative visual imagery. Beautiful and fascinating.
That’s it, folks. Have questions, comments, or ideas? This newsletter is sent from my email, so you can just click reply.
Forcing China’s AI researchers to strive for chip efficiency will ultimately shave America’s lead
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Right now, pathbreaking AI foundation models follow an inverse Moore’s law (sometimes quipped “Eroom’s Law”). Each new generation is becoming more and more expensive to train as researchers exponentially increase the number of parameters used and overall model complexity. Sam Altman of OpenAI said that the cost of training GPT-4 was over $100 million, and some AI computational specialists believe that the first $1 billion model is currently or will shortly be developed.
As semiconductor chips rise in complexity, costs come down because transistors are packed more densely on silicon, cutting the cost per transistor during fabrication as well as lowering operational costs for energy and heat dissipation. That miracle of performance is the inverse with AI today. To increase the complexity (and therefore hopefully quality) of an AI model, researchers have attempted to pack in more and more parameters, each one of which demands more computation both for training and for usage. A 1 million parameter model can be trained for a few bucks and run on a $15 Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, but Google’s PaLM with 540 billion parameters requires full-scale data centers to operate and is estimated to have cost millions of dollars to train.
Admittedly, simply having more parameters isn’t a magic recipe for better AI end performance. One recalls Steve Jobs’s marketing of the so-called “Megahertz Myth” to attempt to persuade the public that headline megahertz numbers weren't the right way to judge the performance of a personal computer. Performance in most fields is a complicated problem to judge, and just adding more inputs doesn't necessarily translate into a better output.
And indeed, there is an efficiency curve underway in AI outside of the leading-edge foundation models from OpenAI and Google. Researchers over the past two years have discovered better training techniques (as well as recipes to bundle these techniques together), developed best practices for spending on reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), and curated better training data to improve model quality even while shaving parameter counts. Far from surpassing $1 billion, training new models that are equally performant might well cost only tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.
This AI performance envelope between dollars invested and quality of model trained is a huge area of debate for the trajectory of the field (and was the most important theme to emanate from our AI Summit). And it’s absolutely vital to understand, since where the efficiency story ends up will determine the sustained market structure of the AI industry.
If foundation models cost billions of dollars to train, all the value and leverage of AI will accrue and centralize to the big tech companies like Microsoft (through OpenAI), Google and others who have the means and teams to lavish. But if the performance envelope reaches a significantly better dollar-to-quality ratio in the future, that means the whole field opens up to startups and novel experiments, while the leverage of the big tech companies would be much reduced.
The U.S. right now is parallelizing both approaches toward AI. Big tech is hurling billions of dollars on the field, while startups are exploring and developing more efficient models given their relatively meagre resources and limited access to Nvidia’s flagship chip, the H100. Talent — on balance — is heading as it typically does to big tech. Why work on efficiency when a big tech behemoth has money to burn on theoretical ideas emanating from university AI labs?
Without access to the highest-performance chips, China is limited in the work it can do on the cutting-edge frontiers of AI development. Without more chips (and in the future, the next generations of GPUs), it won’t have the competitive compute power to push the AI field to its limits like American companies. That leaves China with the only other path available, which is to follow the parallel course for improving AI through efficiency.
For those looking to prevent the decline of American economic power, this is an alarming development. Model efficiency is what will ultimately allow foundation models to be preloaded onto our devices and open up the consumer market to cheap and rapid AI interactions. Whoever builds an advantage in model efficiency will open up a range of applications that remain impractical or too expensive for the most complex AI models.
Given U.S. export controls, China is now (by assumption, and yes, it’s a big assumption) putting its entire weight behind building the AI models it can, which are focused on efficiency. Which means that its resources are arrayed for building the platforms to capture end-user applications — the exact opposite goal of American policymakers. It’s a classic result: restricting access to technology forces engineers to be more creative in building their products, the exact intensified creativity that typically leads to the next great startup or scientific breakthrough.
If America was serious about slowing the growth of China’s still-nascent semiconductor market, it really should have taken a page from the Chinese industrial policy handbook and just dumped chips on the market, just as China has done for years from solar panel manufacturing to electronics. Cheaper chips, faster chips, chips so competitive that no domestic manufacturer — even under Beijing direction — could have effectively competed. Instead we are attempting to decouple from the second largest chips market in the world, turning a competitive field where America is the clear leader into a bountiful green field of opportunity for domestic national champions to usurp market share and profits.
There were of course other goals outside of economic growth for restricting China’s access to chips. America is deeply concerned about the country’s AI integration into its military, and it wants to slow the evolution of its autonomous weaponry and intelligence gathering. Export controls do that, but they are likely to come at an extremely exorbitant long-term cost: the loss of leadership in the most important technological development so far this decade. It’s not a trade off I would have built trade policy on.
The life and death of air conditioning
Photo by Ashkan Forouzani on Unsplash
Across six years of working at TechCrunch, no article triggered an avalanche of readership or inbox vitriol quite like Air conditioning is one of the greatest inventions of the 20th Century. It’s also killing the 21st. It was an interview with Eric Dean Wilson, the author of After Cooling, about the complex feedback loops between global climate disruption and the increasing need for air conditioning to sustain life on Earth. The article was read by millions and millions of people, and hundreds of people wrote in with hot air about the importance of their cold air.
Demand for air conditioners is surging in markets where both incomes and temperatures are rising, populous places like India, China, Indonesia and the Philippines. By one estimate, the world will add 1 billion ACs before the end of the decade. The market is projected to before 2040. That’s good for measures of public health and economic productivity; it’s unquestionably bad for the climate, and a global agreement to phase out the most harmful coolants could keep the appliances out of reach of many of the people who need them most.
This is a classic feedback loop, where the increasing temperatures of the planet, particularly in South Asia, lead to increased demand for climate resilience tools like air conditioning and climate-adapted housing, leading to further climate change ad infinitum.
Josh Wolfe speaking at Nvidia Auditorium at Stanford. Photo by Chris Gates.
Josh Wolfe gave a talk at Stanford this week as part of the school’s long-running Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series, talking all things Lux, defense tech and scientific innovation. The .
Lux Recommends
As Henry Kissinger turns 100, Grace Isford recommends “Henry Kissinger explains how to avoid world war three.” “In his view, the fate of humanity depends on whether America and China can get along. He believes the rapid progress of AI, in particular, leaves them only five-to-ten years to find a way.”
Our scientist-in-residence Sam Arbesman recommends Blindsight by Peter Watts, a first contact, hard science fiction novel that made quite a splash when it was published back in 2006.
Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, and just how far he has been willing to go to keep his daughter tranquilized and imprisoned. “When the yacht was located, off the Goa coast, Sheikh Mohammed spoke with the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, and agreed to extradite a Dubai-based arms dealer in exchange for his daughter’s capture. The Indian government deployed boats, helicopters, and a team of armed commandos to storm Nostromo and carry Latifa away.”
Sam recommends Ada Palmer’s article for Microsoft’s AI Anthology, “We are an information revolution species.” “If we pour a precious new elixir into a leaky cup and it leaks, we need to fix the cup, not fear the elixir.”
I love complex international security stories, and few areas are as complex or wild as the international trade in exotic animals. Tad Friend, who generally covers Silicon Valley for The New Yorker, has a great story about an NGO focused on infiltrating and exposing the networks that allow the trade to continue in “Earth League International Hunts the Hunters.” "At times, rhino horn has been worth more than gold—so South African rhinos are often killed with Czech-made rifles sold by Portuguese arms dealers to poachers from Mozambique, who send the horns by courier to Qatar or Vietnam, or have them bundled with elephant ivory in Maputo or Mombasa or Lagos or Luanda and delivered to China via Malaysia or Hong Kong.”
