News — At The Edge — 6/8
Pandora’s box was actually a large jar given to Pandora containing all the evils of the world — China trade war and digital programming — that flew out when opened.
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For the U.S. and China, it’s not a trade war anymore — it’s something worse —
“[A] new tone has begun to emerge…[portraying] the U.S.-China relationship in nationalistic and emotion-charged terms…[and] a ‘clash of civilizations’ and boasting that China’s government-controlled system was far superior to the ‘Mediterranean culture’ of the West, with its internal divisions and aggressive foreign policy….
[Meanwhile] senior State Department official…[used] something close to racial terms….’In China we have an economic…[and] ideological competitor…[for] the first time that…is not Caucasian’….
Attitudes have hardened…after the Trump…[blacklisted] Huawei, essentially blocking one of China’s most successful global companies….
[China] will probably ‘hunker down and try to get by until either the second term of the Trump administration or the incoming new administration’….
[T]he party’s propaganda organ has dusted off old patriotic films of the Korean War…[when] Chinese army pushed back American forces…and Xi’s recent…message of girding up for a new ‘Long March’ to resist a foreign bully….
Already 1 in 5 U.S. firms…in China say they face increased inspections and slower customs clearances… suspended purchases of billions of dollars of U.S. soybeans, and…could restrict supplies of so-called rare-earth elements…[for] electric cars and other high-tech products….American universities already are fretting about a potential drop-off in full-tuition-paying Chinese students.” https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/for-the-us-and-china-its-not-a-trade-war-anymore-its-something-worse/ar-AACgRKC?ocid=spartanntp
Childhood’s End —
“All revolutions come to an end….The digital revolution began when stored-program computers broke the distinction between numbers that mean things and numbers that do things…[and] now rule the world.
But who rules over the machines?
Once it was simple: programmers….Two things then happened….Codes became self-replicating, and machines began supplying instructions to other machines…[so] the next revolution, an analog revolution, has begun….
Childhood’s End was Arthur C. Clarke’s masterpiece…[about] arrival of benevolent Overlords who bring many of the same conveniences…[of] the Internet to Earth. It does not end well….
Nature uses digital coding for the storage, replication, recombination, and error correction of sequences of nucleotides, but relies on analog coding and analog computing for intelligence and control. No programming, no code….
In analog computing, complexity resides in topology, not code. Information is processed as continuous functions of values…[and] not only tolerates errors and ambiguities, but…needing a certain level of noise to work…[yet] can be implemented in solid state….
[The] success of digital computers in modeling real-world phenomena…[hides] different ways that…networks of digital computers, can be used…[so] new hybrid organizations, although built upon digital computers, are operating as analog computers on a vast, global scale, processing information as continuous functions….
The new gatekeepers, by controlling the flow of information, rule a growing sector of the world…[but] what deserves our full attention is…what is happening as these powers escape into the wild…[and] the ascent of analog systems over which the dominion of digital programming comes to an end.
Nature’s answer to those who sought to control nature through programmable machines is to allow us to build machines whose nature is beyond programmable control.” https://www.edge.org/conversation/george_dyson-childhoods-end
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Doc Huston
