Wade In’s the Answer

Turning from one form of work, say answering emails, to another like reviewing a book chapter can loom arduous.  You’re knocking off emails at swift clip, but soon you will do something that requires different pacing, different sinews.  And you don’t really know what you’ll find or precisely how you’ll summon something to say.  Wade in’s the answer.  Read them and then you’ll see.

They’re fascinating, fortunately, these are two chapters from a book about Artificial Intelligence.  There is the rest of world.  You can’t forget the rest of the world.  And then there is the United States and China.  The two economies have the resources and the market scale to allow for the manipulation and mining of supra-national data sets.  They both have the civilizational imperative needed to do it their own way.   

China traditionally catches up.  China for the last hundred and seventy years, needed to fit itself into someone else’s regimen.  But if China is, in this instance, able to meet or out innovate the United States in Artificial Intelligence, it will author the future for us all subjectively.  In that world, the U.S. or anywhere else and its reaction to China’s innovation will become the objective reply. China’s way will increasingly seem like the de facto method that others all need react to.  China may then define the arc of innovation.  And it reminded me of how critical it is for us not to give up with all this trade inflammation between the nations, but rather double-down on confidence building measures, wherever possible.  Ironically both sides desperately need one other to be innovative and to be humble.  It all remains to be written. 

Tolstoy is generally corpulent.  Weighty reading, though I don’t get to read to my daughter every night.  She’s generally busy.  Sometimes I’m pooped as well.  Seven-hundred-and-ninety pages into “War and Peace” we stumbled upon the scene this evening where Prince Nikolai Bolkonsky, declines and dies.  He labors to communicate with his daughter, Princess Marya Bolkonskaya.  She listens and comforts and reaches out until she is repulsed, by his lifeless body.  It was an interesting section to read with one’s daughter.  I asked and she confirmed that it was rather remarkable.  And after that we let the rest go unspoken. 

Wednesday 5/02/18