Catching big fish
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. Buckminster Fuller.
Thousands of Chinese researchers – who author 40% of American research papers – are fleeing the US before Washington bans all AI cooperation with China – despite the fact that Beijing has ten times more smart people1, outspends US R&D fourfold and develops world-changing AI apps like the one in this story.
Industrial strength AI
While ChatGPT was thrilling American consumers, China focused AI researchers on trade financing, mining and shipping. And President Xi emphasized hi-tech at the BRI meeting, he pointed to an app that lets countries trade in their own currencies. But some heads of state were fascinated by a very different possibility.
Chinese know that crooked governments do more harm than wars. That’s why crooked officials – obese, callous and surrounded by giggling bimbos – are the villains in most historical dramas. So when Xi created the National Supervisory Commission, the PRC’s highest supervisory and anti-corruption authority, he charged it with ‘making corruption impossible’.
The Commision promptly bought a supercomputer and trained it on fraud case records going back to Deng’s time, fed it with current officials’ personal financial declarations and began searching for highly effective officials who are also highly effective crooks.
This year, patterns invisible to the naked eye brought down a Defense Minister, a Foreign Minister, mayors and NGO bosses, and the public loved it.
The impossible dream?
Since 2021, thousands of volunteer officials have been paid in traceable e-yuan. Now the Commission wants them all paid that way. With personal financial records on file, they say, corruption will become almost impossible. What’s more, provincial and foreign governments can load the app with their own data and find their own crooks.
BRI heads of state – whose popularity would soar if they could create an honest bureaucracy – are fascinated, and one wants to implement it next year..
The content below was originally paywalled.
The Russian e-ruble has been used in trade for two years and President Putin has followed China’s AI developments closely (he knows some of the perps personally). If he can straighten out his bureaucracy, 180 million Russians will be wealthier and their country’s international stature will rise. And if China and Russia, the Big Boys, can pull it off, the rest of the world will follow.
America’s IQ of 100 means 95% of us have IQ scores between 70 – 130; one in 11,300 has a 160 IQ, the same as the % of people who are 6’10” tall. China’s IQ of 105, multiplied by its population, produces 300,000 geniuses to our 30,000.
