“AI is accelerating efforts toward human longevity and potential immortality through ‘digital twins,’ advanced medical diagnostics, and, as predicted by some, nanotechnology-driven biological repairs. Technologies like Mind Bank AI and others seek to create AI-powered digital replicas for continued existence in cyberspace. Experts predict that by 2030, advances in AI could make significant life extension possible.”
In case you are wondering who we are quoting, it wasn’t Peter Thiel, or Sam Altman, or any other tech fanatic who has aimed American AI at developing into AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), which will be the supposed launching pad for creating human immortality. Rather, it was the answer generated by AI itself (probably the latest version of Google’s Gemini) when asked to respond to the prompt “AI and living forever.”
And it’s yet another sign of how AI’s potential is being elevated to unimaginable heights, heights that make praying to a higher power nearly obsolete, overtaken by a new deity we call Artificial Intelligence. This worship of AI epitomizes how a once-great America, whose foundation had strong spiritual elements, has devolved into wholesale materialism. The money we print to grease the wheels of what has become a filthy machine is worth no more than the paper on which it is printed. It has marked us all for a whirlpool in which we will drown unless we find our way back to some semblance of what we once were: a country defined by a dream that virtually any citizen could aspire to heights limited only by the natural laws of human being-ness. We must switch course and redirect AI development into a role in which it serves as humanity’s helper rather than its successor. If we do not, then, to paraphrase Walt Kelly, the ultimate threat—an existential threat to all Americans and possibly the entire world—will be our nonsensical pursuit of materiality on a mission it will never be able to fulfill.
This blog springs in part from reading a recent issue of Wired, a magazine that focuses on the interplay between culture and technology in America. The issue’s cover story was the ascendency of China in the world of technology. Wired was founded in 1993 when the U.S. was at the top of the tech world, with technological advancements that were unmatched. For more than 30 years, the magazine has written with a voice that continued to view America as a world leader in technology. But in a recent issue, that changed, and changed dramatically. Admittedly, there are still some—indeed, too many—who extol American exceptionalism and extol the goal of developing AGI at all costs as a means of assuring that exceptionalism. More than whistling past the graveyard, this amounts to jumping into a freshly dug grave. In that recent edition of Wired, the closing lines of the opening editorial summed up the state of the world: “… while the president of the country is promising to make America great again as he strips it of its parts, Chinese leaders are quietly seizing the moment. …These days there is almost no limit to what is created in China ….”
We cite Wired because of its focus on American culture. At its heart, ours has become a culture defined almost solely by material aspiration—bigger means better, more means magnificent. But what about creativity, freedom of thought, and cooperation? These concepts, which form the heart of a spiritually based culture, tragically have virtually disappeared from our database.
Sheer fantasy
America’s bet on AGI is based on the assumption—which is sheer fantasy—that emergent sentient genius is the guaranteed result of the trillions of dollars being spent to build ever more massive data centers. But the only upshot of this misguided bet-the-house dream will be bigger computers that are nothing more than stimulus-response machines. The stimuli may be more varied and complex, and the responses more detailed, but at their core the responses will be an entirely predictable consequence of an extraordinarily long sequence of zeros and ones—the absence of human creativity writ monstrously large. What we need instead are ways to enhance human creativity, which has been and will remain the key to real breakthroughs. Thinking AI can replace human creativity is the height of arrogance and represents a wholly misplaced belief in materiality.
Let’s get back to China and to Wired’s assertion that “there is almost no limit to what is created in China.” At a recent AI summit in London, sponsored by The Financial Times, NVIDIA’s CEO Jensen Huang left no doubt about what he sees lying ahead when he said: “China is going to win the AI race, not might win, will win.” Huang gets a lot of credence not only because of NVIDIA’s material success, evidenced by its largest-in-the-world market capitalization of nearly $4.5 trillion, but also because he had the creative insight to recognize that chips used almost solely for gaming could be foundational in building gigantic computational factories, which have become the heart of American AI. GPUs had been a niche market used primarily in gaming, which requires exceptional speed. Huang saw the potential in this and capitalized on it. But while America has remained stuck using these GPUs, part and parcel of its “bigger is better” mentality, China is looking beyond.
Perhaps one reason Huang sees China as winning the race is that, China, whatever its flaws, has a culture that is spiritually based. As we write this, the Chinese are celebrating their lunar New Year, customarily featuring red and gold, where red symbolizes the material and gold the heavens. Or perhaps Huang sees China as still taking lessons from the profoundly creative and still relevant treatise ‘The Art of War.’ But most likely is that Huang has a first-hand view of how China is creating a version of AI whose goal is to enhance, not replace, creativity.
China’s multipronged AI hardware efforts
Perhaps you’re thinking that whatever Wired or Huang has said about China, and even though it’s clear that China has surpassed the U.S. in most STEM areas, the U.S. still is ahead in chip design.
It’s true that the U.S. has access to much smaller chips than do the Chinese. The main reason is that Dutch company ASML has a monopoly in the world’s most critical semiconductor equipment, extreme ultraviolet photolithography (EUV) machines. EUV machines create the patterns on silicon wafers. The finer the patterns, the smaller the chips, and the smaller the chips, the greater the number of chips that can fit on a wafer, leading to more efficient and faster performance.
ASML’s machine was decades in the making and requires hundreds of suppliers. The U.S. has banned China from access to EUV lithography. Until 2023, experts widely believed that EUV was necessary to produce chips smaller than 14nm. But in 2023, Huawei, China’s largest multifaceted tech company, introduced a smartphone that used a 7nm chip. Huawei had used older technology, DUV, in an innovative way to get from 14nm to 7nm. The process, which involved double etching, had a lower yield—percentage of good chips—than EUV, so the chips were more costly. Still, the phone rivaled the best smartphones both in performance and price.
Experts in the U.S. were so surprised by this feat that they accused Taiwan Semiconductor, the world’s largest manufacturer of chips (and largest ASML customer) of having sold the 7nm chips to China. That turned out to be false. Thanks to cooperation among many Chinese companies and a creative spirit, China had done what most had thought impossible. It wasn’t the first time and already, we know, not the last. It is still a long distance from 7nm to 3nm, 2nm, or possibly even 1nm. Chips smaller than 7nm appear to be critical to further leaps in technology. But we wouldn’t bet against the Chinese getting there, as their achievement of getting from 14nm to 7nm shows they have a habit of making the impossible possible.
Notably, China is following multiple paths towards gaining supremacy in the hardware underlying AI. One of those paths is through the creation of so-called superclusters, which are defined in terms of connectivity among individual chips. Thanks to NVIDIA, the U.S. has led when it comes to single-chip making. NVIDIA’s major edge is that it has access to much smaller transistor sizes than Huawei. In one-to-one comparisons, NVIDIA chips are more powerful than Chinese individual chips. But through their use of quantum properties, Chinese chips can form clusters exponentially larger than the clusters of NVIDIA chips. Superclusters do the heavy lifting when it comes to computation. Game to China.
True, China’s superclusters require much more energy and space than Nvidia’s clusters, but China is not short on either, possessing abundant cheap energy sources like wind and solar. In an article on the website Tom’s Hardware, a well-known internet site that provides analysis of all things tech-related, Anton Shilov writes: “Performance of the Atlas 950 Supercluster is truly impressive on paper; it is said to be massively higher compared to NVIDIA’s Vera Rubin NVL144… a product that the company compares it to.” He adds: “However, that performance comes at a price…” That price is something China is more than willing to pay in order to have the fastest form of training AI.
An aggressive workaround: analogue chips
Even as the supercluster is proving an effective workaround, China is also attempting to develop EUV machines equal to or better than ASML’s. Reuters says the project, referred to as the “Manhattan Project” for lithography, is shrouded in secrecy. It’s known, though, that China definitely has a prototype. How soon it will be ready for prime time is anyone’s guess. It could be as late as 2030 or as early as next year. Its ultimate capabilities also are a bit of a mystery. The guesses, based on filed patents, range from the production of 2nm or even smaller chips to not working at all. But on top of its record of success in achievements no one had thought possible, China is proceeding with certain advantages: It can learn from ASML’s experience, factoring into its data everything it has seen and everything that has been publicly available about what ASML has gone through. It can take into account bottlenecks ASML has had and the choices it made. Not to mention that one of ASML’s former leading engineers is working with China on this project.
China is also employing different technologies, with lasers that are different and, in some ways better. Betting against China and assuming it will take it a long time to complete this project ignores history. A few years back, the head of ASML said it would take China decades to catch up with what the EUV machines can do. We wouldn’t be surprised if by the end of 2027, China’s ability to create and innovate in these materials surpasses the Dutch EUV machine. It pays to remember that if you’re driving a car and look in the rearview mirror and see a Bugatti, it’s only a matter of time until it passes you.
The most dramatic workaround that China is exploring, and doing so aggressively, deals with analogue chips. Today’s chips are binary (0s and 1s), whereas analogue chips are not. Think of the binary as an on/off switch and the analogue as a dimmer, which theoretically has access to all of the numbers between 0 and 1. On its face, it follows that analogue chips would be much faster. So why don’t we use analogue? Because it is very hard to keep analogue chips within range. They give so many choices that the exact same one does not come up every time, and so you don’t get the exact same result every time—and in AI, as in all technologies, exactness is critical. China’s workaround to this dilemma is resistive random-access memory (RRAM). It uses memory chips with special insulation, which ensures storage of information in many more than two exact states. The results are game-changing chips that combine both memory and calculation and are exponentially faster and more energy-efficient than any chip produced today. This is not pie in the sky, as China has produced prototypes of 7nm RRAM chips. In other words, even if China completely strikes out in its attempt to surpass ASML’s EUV, it will still have the ability to produce and use transformative technologies.
The creativity that China embodies and expresses has allowed it not only to catch up when most thought it impossible, but also to transcend existing technologies across the board. If we are ever going to create AGI, it is going to come out of this mindset, in which AI is used to supplement human creativity rather than replace it altogether.
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