AI Kills China

The return of merit

For thousands of years, Chinese children have been memorizing long, complicated lines of poetry and multiplication tables up to 4761 in order to achieve mundane jobs as imperial bureaucrats. That may be an exaggeration, but the purpose of hyperbole is to emphasize a real difference in a truthful direction.

The Chinese pride themselves on their long history, but they were not the oldest civilization. Instead, they have the longest memory of any civilization, and are the most sedentary, and least mobile, of any civilization. The Silk road traders were Greeks, Jews, Arabs, Berbers, Muslims, and Turks. Caucasians of various flavors and mixtures all traveled east to bring their wares, trade with the Chinese, and bring their silk and gunpowder back east. As much as the Chinese were a mercantile civilization, they were not a nomadic people.

Chinese culture has been pejoratively described as “soulless,” but this is not a technical term. A more accurate term would be “lacking individuality, intuition, creativity, and improvisation.” While Asians have a higher average IQ than whites, they are underrepresented among the country’s millionaires and billionaires. All cultures have dogmas, rituals, and conformism, but Chinese culture is the most extreme in its bias against the prophet. Korean K-Pop is not Chinese, but it does display a remarkable collective conformity.

Compare the doll-like uniformity of a K-Pop star to the striking uniqueness of David Bowie. Western icons are revered because they are different, sometimes offensively so, provocative, always pushing boundaries and rebelling against norms. This is not some “leftist” innovation of the 1960s, but originates in the myth of Odysseus, the lone pirate against the world.

Whatever the origins of Chinese conformism, it has always had its own parallel in the west. The memorization of poetry, of rituals, and obeisance to meaningless cargo cults of custom, politeness, and manners, all can be found in western culture. The more a man ignores these things, the more he is a savage, a pirate, an outlaw, an adventurer. It was these men who conquered America, and most of the world. The men who were busy memorizing the phonebook were staying home.

AI has the capacity to kill homework. Homework is essentially teaching cheating as a skill. You read the book, copy down the answers, and turn in your homework. You read the book, write a summary, and the more accurate your summary, the better your book report. Homework is essentially passive consumption of information, followed by repetitive memorization, regurgitation, summarization, and internalization.

AI threatens this, because it is increasingly difficult to detect which essays are written by AI, and which are written by humans. Instead of reading War and Peace, you can ask AI to write your book report for you. This makes the entire Chinese cultural model irrelevant.

Plato said of the Greeks that they had no memory when compared to the Egyptians. It’s true that Greek history is extremely foggy and essentially pre-literate before Homer, yet the Egyptians have records stretching back to 3400BC, nearly 2000 years before the earliest Greek script. Yet it was among the Greeks that philosophy and geometry made rapid advances, with the schools of Pythagoras, the pre-Socratics, and Plato. Cultures which emphasize remembering and regurgitating ancient genealogies over looking at the world with fresh eyes, with the spirit, tend to stagnate. Cultures which leave the memorizing to the old women, and have a Faustian attitude toward the frontiers of new knowledge, tend to expand rapidly.

For the last 30 years, China has consumed, adopted, and implemented western technology on a mass scale. None of the technological innovations in China have come from China. China repeats and replicates, but does not innovate. China’s patents are riddled with fraud. They excel within fixed systems, but get lost when there is no map to guide them. They can memorize everything you need to know to pass your medical exam, but they struggle when it comes to thinking outside the box.

AI is making this Chinese strategy useless. With AI, anyone can instantly have access to the superficial “facts” of a disease: here are the symptoms, here are the tests, here are the possible treatments.

The Chinese, for many years, perfected the art of cheating to get around having to memorize long, useless strings of information. AI is leveling the cheating playing field. When cheating is easy, convenient, and universal, it changes the nature of the test.

What if, instead of memorizing long bits of information, students were forced to think critically? To be creative? To use their mind in ways that AI finds difficult? As AI is adopted by younger and younger audiences, homework will become irrelevant or trivial. At that point, the only way to differentiate one student from another will be to engage their most human faculties. Under such conditions, one billion human robots will be replaced by a smart phone with a wifi connection.

The first victims of technology were the farm workers. As technology advanced, societies where 90% of people were peasants became societies where 90% of people were factory workers. This transition was sudden, rapid, and violent, leading to the birth of Marxism and fascism. Now, technology is replacing the factory workers. Manual labor — the most repetitive, monotonous, and mundane kind — can be done for cheap by robots. Now the same thing is happening in the mental realm. The most monotonous forms of memorization and regurgitation are being replaced by AI.

Under such conditions, the following will remained prized:

1. People skills, warmth, which robots fundamentally lack even if they simulate them well;

2. Innovation, creativity, the ability to break the rules rather than conform.

The kids who go to Kumon and study 14 hours a day will be crushed, like the peasants and the factory workers before them. The future has no need for human robots. AI is crushing the bugman. It is the chariot of our age, and the future lies in wait like the Ganges river.