MM#319--The Battlegrounds of Power: Data is the New Oil

Transcript

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Welcome to the Theory to Action podcast, where we examine the timeless treasures of wisdom from the great books in less time, to help you take action immediately and ultimately to create and lead a flourishing life.

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Now here's your host, david Kaiser flourishing life.

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Now here's your host, david Kaiser.

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Hello, I am David, and welcome back to another Mojo Minute Now.

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Last week we talked about Ray Dalio's fantastic book the Changing World Order, and I'm still working my way through that wonderful book.

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It's a long one, but cranking through it with Audible Books, thank you very much.

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But that excellent book dovetails with this week's breaking news about the Iranian attack on Israel, which we covered earlier this week and which we will continue to talk about in today's Mojo Minute and which we will continue to talk about in today's Mojo Minute when we're going to feature.

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Today's book is called the Four Battlegrounds Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, by Paul Cherie I think I'm pronouncing that right, cherie and the book opens with two absolutely eye-catching quotes.

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So let me share them with you.

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Artificial intelligence is the future, not only for Russia but for all humankind.

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It comes with colossal opportunities, but also threats that are difficult to predict.

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Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world.

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So said Russian President Vladimir Putin.

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Next quote is this Science and technology has become the main battleground of global power rivalry.

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Battleground of global power rivalry.

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That was said by Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping.

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So ponder those two quotes for a while and then ask yourself two questions.

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Are we seeing a monumental shift in the tactics of war happening before our very eyes?

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Are we seeing the shift from the technological revolution that happened with, say, jet propulsion and with precision guided weapons, and now we're coming into a new frontier, a new frontier, say, of the digital age?

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Well, let's find out together, and with that let's grab our first quote from our book, the Four Battlegrounds AI is changing war.

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It is also changing surveillance, disinformation and other aspects of global peace and security.

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Nations around the world, or nations around the globe rather, are racing to capitalize on AI technology to gain an advantage over others.

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The world is just beginning to grapple with the implications of a technology that could herald another industrial revolution.

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Ai is not a distinct or discrete technology like railroads or airplanes.

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It is a general purpose, enabling technology like electricity computers or the internal combustion engine with many applications.

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Those earlier general purpose technologies brought sweeping economic, social and political, or the internal combustion engine with many applications.

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Those earlier general purpose technologies brought sweeping economic, social and political changes.

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Likewise, the scale of potential change from artificial intelligence is staggering.

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By one estimate, nearly half of all tasks currently being done in the United States economy could be outsourced to automation using existing technology.

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And again, that quote comes to us from our book of the day, the Four Battlegrounds Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, by Paul Sheree.

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So a question about the new world we are living in is this have you been through a fast food drive-thru recently?

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You might just get a artificial announcement, perhaps saying are you using your rewards points?

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Or you might actually have a full-fledged order taker that most likely is 50 times more nice, okay, than the pimpled 17-year-old who is breaking up with his girlfriend while trying to take your order.

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Please, it is sad but true.

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Seriously, though, ai is changing everything For me, covering five states, on a regular basis.

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I have been encountering AI fast food order takers for the better part of the last six months and I can say their orders are almost always correct.

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In fact, they are so correct and they are more pleasant to talk to than the argumentative 17-year-old who is still breaking up with his girlfriend while trying to take my order.

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But I digress, let's go back to the book.

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While the process of industrialization transforms society with physical machines, cognitization will transform society with intelligent machines.

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Ai has many constructive applications, ai will save lives and increase efficiency and productivity.

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It is also being used as a weapon of repression and to gain military advantage.

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This book is about the darker side of AI.

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The dangers from AI aren't the dangers science fiction warned us about.

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We needn't fear robots rising up to throw off their human overlords, or at least not anytime soon.

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The dangers from AI excuse me, the dangers from AI today come from people using the technology maliciously or carelessly, causing harm to others.

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Militaries around the globe are investing in AI technology and authoritarian regimes are using it to tighten their grip for internal repression.

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The Pentagon is applying the same AI techniques used to achieve superhuman intelligence in poker to much higher stakes strategy game theory, such as analyzing what weapons to invest in to deter nuclear war.

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China is building a techno dystopian surveillance state to monitor and repress its citizens through facial recognition and or well and and Orwellian social credit system, excuse me, deep fake video and audio continue to improve and long-term trends are likely to lead to fakes that are indistinguishable from reality and undermine truth.

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And an AI technology could radically alter the nature of war, ushering in a battlefield singularity in which war moves too fast for human control.

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Now think about that last statement.

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Ai technology could radically alter the nature of war, ushering in a battlefield singularity in which war moves too fast for human control.

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Ponder that for a while.

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That is breathtakingly different than anything we've ever seen in our lives.

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And so those that are bringing out the dark side of the AA revolution we are just now realizing as a human society, no matter the technology, human nature will always remain human nature.

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There will be best use cases.

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So we might still remember the invention, some of us might still remember the invention of the television.

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News at the time, in the early 1950s, could then be offered along with video pictures in the television, painting a very vivid picture in the minds of its watchers.

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Now the downside of the invention of the television would ultimately culminate in a pornography industry that is etched into its watchers hundreds of thousands of video images causing all kinds of mayhem and evil in terms of sexuality, that are still persisting to today.

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So that's just one invention, the television.

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But back to our artificial intelligence example and our recent quote about the dark side of things, and here is where things get very interesting.

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Let's go back to the book.

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The US-China AI competition is complicated by the fact that their AI ecosystems are deeply intertwined that their AI ecosystems are deeply intertwined.

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Us military leaders have raised alarm at China's model of quote military-civil fusion and the fear that the US firms working in China could even indirectly benefit the Chinese military.

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Some US tech firms have unandoubtedly contributed to the growth of the AI ecosystem in China, including, in at least a few instances, working with researchers from Chinese military institutions.

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Partnerships between the Chinese military and US academia are equally problematic.

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Us academia are equally problematic.

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Since 2007, an estimated 500 Chinese military scientists have studied in the United States.

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From 2006 to 2017, chinese military scientists co-authored over 1,100 research papers with US scientists.

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Major universities, including MIT and Princeton, have worked with Chinese companies that have later been sanctioned for human rights abuses.

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These ties have led US policymakers to increasingly push to quote decouple the United States from China, to stem the tide of intellectual capital flowing from US businesses and academia into the harms of a strategic competitor.

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So you can see, indeed, things are getting interesting because, unlike many other wars and potential wars that the lead up to we, we've never had as much intertwined In terms of our technology as AI technology with the rise of China as a superpower.

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Let's go back to the book, because later on, we're going to read some more nefarious things.

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On the eve of Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, russia and China announced a quote no limits partnership that encompassed, among other issues, artificial intelligence.

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If the United States and other democracies do not work together to lead in AI and shape the rules for how it is used, they are risking a creeping tide of techno-authoritarianism that undermines democracy and freedom around the globe.

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So we have Russia and China now coupling together its own digital revolution with AI, and I'm sure China is going to school about how the drones are being used in the conflict in Ukraine.

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I'm sure they're learning a lot.

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And as that war grinds into a stalemate, the real sensitive spot on the globe shows up, and that real sensitive spot is Taiwan, and that is not just for us in the United States as a sensitive spot, but for the whole world.

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Why?

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Well, we will actually answer that question more unequivocally with our next release for our Academy review, but for now, let me grab a quote to begin to have you think about why Taiwan is so important in this new digital revolution we're just walking into.

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Let's go back to the book to find out about that.

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Technology is an enabler of both hard economic and military, and soft culture and values.

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Power Technology can be used to build weapons, to coerce or defend material goods, to trade, bribe or bolster other states, and media platforms to spread messages around the world.

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Technological revolutions have, in the past, not only transformed the global balance of power, but even the key metrics of power, and AI promises to do the same.

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One of the starkest illustrations of a technology's transformative effect on global power is nuclear technology, whose advent in the mid-20th century quickly divided the world into nuclear haves and have-nots.

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Nuclear weapons have awesome destructive power, but translating that power into political outcomes is hardly straightforward.

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Threats to use nuclear weapons are rarely seen as credible, except in the most extreme cases.

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Ai is in many ways, the opposite of nuclear technology.

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Ai technology is widely available and proliferates rapidly, and has a multitude of uses.

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Let's actually keep going here, because this is a good train of thought.

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The current wave of digital innovation is highly globalized, with centers of gravity in the United States, china and Europe.

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Each power center is vying to realize their own vision for how digital technologies should be used in society.

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The struggle for geotechnical dominance points to the importance of assessing national digital power.

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Countries will benefit the most and what digital elements will become key determinants of national power, like coal, steel and oil did during the Industrial Revolution, is important Now, did you catch that?

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Let me repeat that nugget of wisdom again as the AI revolution unfolds which countries will benefit the most and what digital elements will become key determinants of national power, like coal, steel and oil did during the Industrial Revolution?

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So right now we are learning from an upcoming book that we're going to release as an Academy review, that 90% of the computing power in the world is housed in the Far East.

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They make the semiconductors and we will further learn that Taiwan represents over 70% of that computing power.

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Now, as many analysts both in and out of the military are saying this phrase and I'm curious in Ray Dalio's book that I'm reading right now if he covers this but many military analysts are saying data is the new oil of the 21st century.

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Again, data is the new oil of the 21st century and with data being the new oil of the 21st century, no-transcript Machine learning systems depend on few key inputs like data, computing hardware and algorithms and, finally, human capital.

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Machine learning is often data and computer intensive, using large amounts of computing power to train an algorithm or enormous data sets.

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The process isn't magic and it can often be difficult work to get machine learning systems to function properly, so having talented ai scientists and engineers is crucial to building effective machine learning systems.

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When considering ai power, some of these inputs matter more than others.

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It's hard to limit the spread of algorithms, so the relative availability or scarcity of data, talent and computing are not major factors, although not the only ones, that affect national AI capacity.

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That affect national AI capacity Additionally, social institutions from the availability of funding for AI startups to public perceptions of AI technology also influence AI adoption.

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Nations that lead in these four battlegrounds of data, computing, talent and institutions will have a major advantage in the AI power.

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So we have four new battlegrounds Data, the new oil of the 21st century, computing, talent and institutions.

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So we have to remember the most important phrase for this nugget of wisdom in today's Mojo Minute is data is the new oil.

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In fact, the economist in 2017 actually proclaimed just that quote the world's most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data.

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Data is the new oil.

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So just one last example to drive home this point.

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Let's go back to the book.

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The autonomous car company Waymo started in 2020, stated I'm sorry stated.

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In 2020, they had driven over 20 million miles on public roads, building up a large data set of real-world driving interactions.

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To augment this real-world data, waymo has been simulating 10 million driving miles every single day in computer simulations, racking up a total of 10 billion simulated miles as of 2020.

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These simulations are another form of synthetic data which can then be used to improve autonomous car algorithms.

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Simulations allow Waymo to create thousands of variations.

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Simulations allow Waymo to create thousands of variations, ensuring its algorithms are robust to a range of driving conditions.

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Wrap your mind around that 10 billion with a B Simulated miles.

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We are indeed in a new frontier.

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I'm thinking of Captain Kirk on the Starship Enterprise looking out at another galaxy to conquer.

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So, in today's Mojo Minute, let us not fear the new industrial revolution that's coming because it's here.

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Let us not fear because our ancestors didn't what is around the next corner, but let us challenge ourselves to wrap our minds around this and to tackle the next series of hard decisions as our country and our world face a new frontier of the AI revolution.

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Hopefully, our leadership will understand that data is the new oil and, as always, let's keep fighting the good fight.

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Thank you for joining us.

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We hope you enjoyed this Theory to Action podcast.

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Be sure to check out our show page at teammojoacademycom, where we have everything we discussed in this podcast, as well as other great resources.

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Until next time, keep getting your mojo on, thank you.

MM#319--The Battlegrounds of Power: Data is the New Oil

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