The techno-tsar began to rule

"Throw Ultraman on an island of cannibals, and after five years, he'll be king." That's what investor and mentor Paul Graham said about him in his early years, and it's been fulfilled today. Over the past two months, Ultraman has met with leaders from almost all Western tribes, the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Korea, India, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Spain and Poland, and then Indonesia, Singapore and Australia. If Ultraman only saw one or two people, then he was received, and if he saw thirty people, it was the other way around, and these people were received by him.

The techno-tsar began to rule. Whether it was Gates, Jobs, or Musk, their magic was to help people with technology, but Ultraman's magic was to replace people. For the first time, people went from assets to liabilities. Before the dividing line, mankind produced an Einstein in 200 years, he needs to sleep and will be old, but after the dividing line, there is an Einstein who does not sleep, does not grow old, and is smarter every day, he can also be separated, and do many things at the same time.

So the tribal chiefs lined up to see the tsar and must discuss fate, the fate of their own, their country, and humanity, naked and cruel. I felt it necessary to fabricate a coronation speech of the tsar. In those deliberately released press releases and posing photos, only the name may be real. And in a fabricated speech, precisely because it is fabricated, it may be bold to discuss the real problem.

Here is the text:

The earth is shuffling in power. Someone called me Tsar, whatever it was called, this position was not an inheritance, not a vote, not a war, just because I found the tinder, it's as simple as that, whoever passes the tinder to whoever can drive the beast and win the war. So I had to meet a lot of people, appease them, and I had to make sure that there was no big riot in the shuffle of power. Rome was assassinated when power passed from the Senate to Caesar from the Republic to the Empire. The more you are in the transition period, the more you need to be humble and cautious.

The first question the chiefs gave me, you have tinder, we don't, but once we accept tinder, we are kidnapped, and we can never do without your authorization, so is it possible, we first close it, before we make our own tinder, or let people do all the work, so as to avoid unemployment?

I told them that there are risks, artificial intelligence gives equal rights to knowledge, Africans can also use the knowledge accumulated by humans to today, they may learn to build guns and build roads, and begin to replace you little by little, this is a reshuffle of power, if you want to continue to remain in the pyramid, embrace artificial intelligence as soon as possible, stimulate creativity, adapt the whole society, instead of blindfolding.

The chiefs then asked, what should be done if artificial intelligence causes unemployment? Now every boss is thinking, replacing employees with artificial intelligence, reducing costs, followed by price wars, which is the inevitability of competition, and in the end enterprises can only get the minimum profit, so it is difficult to receive more taxes to feed the unemployed. Equivalent to, your Einstein who doesn't sleep, ran out and snatched the job, what should we do?

I said to them, don't panic, openAI is a non-profit organization at the beginning, just need to earn 100 billion dollars for Microsoft, we are free, do not think about making money, do not need to monopolize profits, but become an infrastructure, only collect the most basic money, that means that the price of goods will be very low, because the labor cost inside is close to zero, people only need very little money to live. You can think of us as the second sun, the sun never charges humans, we only charge a cost price, when productivity is greatly increased and everyone's life may be better.

The chiefs then asked, but Microsoft Google is not a non-profit, they want to make as much profit as possible, what do we do? Think about it, if the sun were to charge humanity, who could bargain? You have long designed the system, taxing big business, issuing UBI (Basic Income for All) to everyone, we think you are a kind person, but the United States does not send money to all tribes, what should we do?

I said, so you should support me, support nonprofits, as long as I stay ahead, if I don't make money, other people can't make money. But there is a problem, even if I were willing to supply all the tribes at cost, it might not work. I'm not completely free, I only have a portion of the voting rights, all the physical foundations of my business are in the United States, they can unplug the power strip and the network cable, and I have to cooperate with the will of this tribe. And the will of the United States is to harvest as much as possible, even at the cost of war. Musk used Starlink to help Ukraine fight Russia, who knows if this is out of personal or tribal will?

The chiefs said, we think you have the ability to establish rule beyond multiple tribes, so you are called a tsar, which is a thing that has never been done before. When technology becomes more and more advanced, fewer and fewer people hold more and more power, and in the most extreme case, a few people suddenly control the most core capabilities.

But I have to say that if the individual will can be above the tribe, it will take a while, and only when super artificial intelligence is implemented and can control almost all the key decisions, there may be something like a nuclear button. But at that point, what would I think? There is an old saying in the East, if you have a sharp weapon, you will kill the heart, and the dragon slayer boy will always become a dragon. A lot of people trust me because I don't take a salary, I designed a non-profit organization, and I want to give UBI and virtual currency to every person on the planet, but I have to remind you that I am rich enough to do good things not out of love, but out of high-dimensional ambition.

But, no matter what, the choice is with me, not with you. It is interesting that the technological and market revolution launched by the West has made human power more and more concentrated, but in Western culture, it is a hypothesis that everyone must become an evil dragon. In Eastern cultures, a little hope can be found, they believe that the inner saint and the outer king, those in power, can also have angelic compassion, which is a hypothesis that human nature is intrinsically good.

Of course, we want to take our destiny into our own hands, the chiefs say, but are we locked out of new technology and can never turn over? Artificial intelligence requires a large number of chips, algorithms, many engineers and scientists, human-computer interaction data, and it is very power-intensive, and most tribes do not have it. Even if a few can come up, it will take time, and many things will happen in the process, such as a missile falling, the supply of key materials is cut off, the financial crisis caused by the dollar, disrupting the entire order, and there are 10,000 ways to abandon it halfway. In recent decades, Japan and Europe have been living specimens.

My reaction to this can only be, I'm afraid there is still no choice. The Internet was decentralized when it first came out, and now it is ruled by several enterprises, in fact, when one end is more decentralized, the other end will be more centralized, which is a bit like, the higher the mountain, the deeper the sea, they are symmetrical. Technology and markets would have been more concentrated, and we've been in this boat. When the new crown vaccine in the United States just came out, it was bought by rich people, and the people complained, and Trump said, this is life.

The chiefs will ask if China has chips and algorithms, enough power and engineers, enough force to ensure its own security, independent financial sovereignty to ensure that it will not be harvested, and if it has enough time, they can catch up with you. In other words, China may become an option for us, and then all the troubles we discussed earlier may be avoided or slowed down.

I have to say, this is a fact. Only one tribe masters Tinder, and two tribes master Tinder, and it will be two different Earths. In fact, I am also happy to see the existence of competitors, if only we have fire, then the United States may have to eliminate it, this thing is too dangerous. But because there is competition, no one is going to stop us, and we have to go all out. The existence of competitors is a variable, but this variable guarantees that our curiosity can be unleashed, and we are all Adam's descendants, aren't we?

The chiefs will hold out a hope, they ask, this time, humanity will create more new jobs and open up new worlds, as before. Ultraman, do you have faith in human potential? Humanity is great, and tens of thousands of years ago we had no words and no fire. Fifteen thousand years ago, we didn't know how to farm. Before 350 years, we didn't know that apples falling from trees to the ground hid the laws of the universe. 120 years ago, we didn't know that space could be bent.

To this, I can say, full of confidence, but this is a blank promise. I can also honestly say that there are some reasons for us to be pessimistic. Artificial intelligence is effective precisely because most people parrot their words, they are used to imitation, and because of this, the laws can be inferred from it and artificial intelligence is possible. There has always been Einstein in human beings, but the difference is that in the past, all Einstein could do was help people from the outside, for example, no matter who they were, they could enjoy the benefits of electricity, but this time Einstein had to help people from the inside and stimulate their potential, which was more difficult.

There is a saying that human beings are willing to do anything in order not to think independently. I think Einstein probably agreed that thinking about relativity on his own is ten thousand times more difficult than it is for the church to understand it. UBI can make people have food, and artificial intelligence and VR glasses will serve you like an emperor, come whatever you want, so how many people will struggle and pursue the value of life? Of course I have the answer, but I'm not stupid enough to answer for everyone.

The chiefs seemed a little desperate, and they asked the last question, since artificial intelligence is inevitably getting stronger and stronger, does humanity have a future? Are you the Terminator?

I also have to be honest about this, not that I may end humanity, but that humanity may end itself. That parable in the Garden of Eden has been ruling mankind, and Adam fell because he couldn't control his curiosity, right?

You see, humans have been violently dissecting this nature, using scientific knowledge, and as a result, the global wildlife population is nearly 70% lower than in 1970, 8 million tons of plastic waste end up in the ocean every year, more than 60% of coral reefs are endangered, nearly 90% of the earth's wetlands have disappeared since 1700, and at least 1 species is extinct every day in tropical forests. But most brilliantly, the number of sperm in men's semen today is 60% lower than it was 40 years ago. That's why Musk is going to Mars, essentially it's running away, he's a pragmatic guy and a romantic escapist.

Later, man was not satisfied with dissecting nature and began to dissect himself, which is Hinton's story. He was not interested in the physical world and wanted to understand the human being, so he decided to study the most core, psychology, but he found that to understand the mind, the premise is to understand the brain, but he also found that to understand the brain, the premise is to make the brain, he agreed with Feynman said, to understand, you must build. So Hinton had to do a brain, so today there is artificial intelligence, but the trouble is that today Hinton understands neither the brain nor how artificial intelligence works, everything is a black box. Even more terrifying, Hinton himself realized that humans could be killed before they could figure them out.

Human beings will do it when they don't fully understand it, can't wait, this is the habit of human beings, to be precise, the habit of the West, the West likes to disassemble, starting from the part of infinite subdivision, which makes science, but the East is holistic. Interestingly, if you look at Western religions, they believe in the same God, the same Old Testament, the same ancestors and prophets, but they kill each other. If you look at the East, they have different masters, studying objects that look different, but Confucianism and Taoism are unified. Because the West likes to disassemble, as long as the details are disassembled, it always finds differences, but the East likes to integrate, and in the end, always find the same.

In fact, what I am interested in now is whether the Western way and the Eastern way will develop different models in artificial intelligence, and how will this determine the final win or loss? If the East wins, then we can use the Eastern way to engage in more essential problems, is it possible for human beings to figure out the whole without dissecting the parts?