More energy being spent cooling data centers on land ultimately heats up the whole system more, including the oceans. This is why you should pay attention in your physics class at school kids.

Importantly, it looks like this is going to be China’s position going forward.

looks like they took it down, but they did release it under Apache license originally, so here’s a fork https://git.sr.ht/~yogthos/quelmap

People in Africa are largely using phones from China which don’t run Android. For example, Huawei has its own HarmonyOS now, that was forked from Android a while back and it’s no longer compatible with it.

I do think that Linux based phones would be great, but it doesn’t seem like there are any viable options in the foreseeable future.

They’re not doing that, they’re using an alternative approach to EUV

• https://lilys.ai/notes/754616
• https://www.gizmochina.com/2025/04/24/china-quietly-cracks-5nm-without-euv/
• https://drrobertcastellano.substack.com/p/how-china-is-reaching-5nm-without

https://github.com/BICLab/SpikingBrain-7B

Correct, they built their own infrastructure and aren’t dependent on US big tech by design. Other countries can do this too.

The African Internet Exchange System project was launched by the African Union Commission to promote the exchange of intra-African internet traffic within the continent. Before the project, Africa was paying overseas carriers to handle this traffic, which was both costly and inefficient. The project is a key part of the Program on Infrastructure Development in Africa, which aims to establish an intra-African broadband infrastructure and has highlighted the importance of Internet Exchange Points.

The main difference between the AXIS project’s proposed system and the global internet is the way internet traffic is routed. The global internet often routes intra-African traffic through overseas carriers. The AXIS project’s goal is to keep this traffic within the continent by exchanging it locally or regionally through IXPs. This eliminates the need for international transit, which reduces latency and saves costs.

there’s some more info here

• https://au.int/sites/default/files/documents/32509-doc-axis-brochure_pida_-january_2017.pdf
• https://www.de-cix.net/en/africa
• https://af-ix.org/
• https://www.ujasusi.com/p/africa-launches-own-internet-system-breaks-european-control

You don’t see google doing much in China or Russia nowadays.

That’s because you have a myopic view of what this technology can be applied to born out of living in a society that’s deindustrialized. https://dialecticaldispatches.substack.com/p/the-ghost-in-the-machine

I find that generally we tend to see tech progress in China outpace predictions. For example, nobody expected China to start producing 7 and 5nm chips by now, nobody thought Huawei clusters would be able to compete with Nvidia, etc. Of course, doing new things is always tricky, and 2-5 years certainly sounds plausible to me.

There was so much bested interest in feudalism, and just go read up on how that turned out. All these different tricks the ruling class uses do kick the can down the road, but you can’t do that indefinitely. The reality is that the mechanics of capitalism ensure that wealth flows to the top, and the working majority becomes increasingly immiserated. We are rapidly approaching a point where the workers simply afford to make a living. There is growing domestic unrest all across western nations now, and it’s only going to grow. As Lenin put it, every society is three hot meals away from chaos.

If a system is working as designed, and the way it’s designed to work is at odds with applying technology in a way that benefits society, then the system is the problem. It’s very obvious this is what he’s saying, and I don’t know why it’s so difficult for you to acknowledge this fact.

Honestly, it’s difficult to say where plateau is right now. We simply don’t know what the impact will be because we’re still actively developing and learning to apply this tech. I do agree we are currently in a bubble, but it’s worth remembering that when internet started becoming popular there was a similar bubble, but the underlying tech did prove to be transformative.

All that said, I really don’t think his predictions about AI are what’s relevant. It’s the acknowledgement that capitalism is not a productive way to harness automation that’s his real insight here. It’s valuable to see prominent people like Hinton say this loud and clear.

when you definitely know what fascism is

Amazing counter point you’ve mustered. Truly highlights the quality of your intellect.

It’s kind of funny how you just confidently pull a number out of your ass here. On what basis do you think China is 5-8 years away from making their own EUV machines exactly?

The reality is that China is already starting to experiment with their own EUV approaches. A lot of the complexity in ASML machines comes from the fact that they need to be compact enough to ship around the world. China is looking at the approach of using an accelerator instead.

• https://www.tomshardware.com/news/china-aims-to-use-particle-accelerator-to-build-chips-and-evade-euv-sanctions
• https://www.eenewseurope.com/en/china-developed-euv-lithography-could-trial-in-2025/

I mean he’s literally saying we have a problem and the problem isn’t technology, it’s the way capitalism works. The only rational conclusion here is that capitalism is indeed the problem. There is absolutely no reason why this system needs to survive either. Systems have failed in the past, and capitalism is not exception.

He’s very clearly saying it’s the problem with the system by assigning fault:

“What’s actually going to happen is rich people are going to use AI to replace workers,” Hinton said. “It’s going to create massive unemployment and a huge rise in profits. It will make a few people much richer and most people poorer. That’s not AI’s fault, that is the capitalist system.”

It’s pretty clear that the casualties on the Ukrainian side are far worse and that Ukraine has a far smaller population meaning that Russia will prevail in a war of attrition. Meanwhile, if burning refineries would win the war that would again mean Russia wins the war because they’re doing the same thing in Ukraine on a far bigger scale.

Your point is intellectually dishonest. There are plenty of things LLMs effectively automate. These things excel at tasks like translations, transcriptions, and data analysis to give a few examples. The fact that there’s currently a bubble where people are trying to use LLMs for all kinds of silly things doesn’t mean there aren’t actual applications for these things. It’s the same story with the dotCom bubble that produced a bunch of noise along with real useful technology that underpins the internet today.

It’s pretty weird to be skeptical of the obvious fact that capitalism is at odds with using increased automation for the benefit of society.

That’s kind of missing the point. It’s not about AGI, but the question of how any automation is applied under capitalist relations. In a sane society, more automation would mean more free time for the people to enjoy their lives. However, capitalism requires people to work for the sake of working, and thus automation becomes something to be feared as opposed to celebrated.

Did you miss the part where he points out that capitalism is the underlying problem?

I mean we should praise China because they managed to ensure that the benefits of economic development primarily went to the working majority. Yes, there were new contradictions stemming from the influx of western capitalists, and there was exploitation happening as a result. Yet, the broader picture is that the lives of the majority of people in China were improved drastically.

90% of families in the country own their home giving China one of the highest home ownership rates in the world. What’s more is that 80% of these homes are owned outright, without mortgages or any other leans. https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2016/03/30/how-people-in-china-afford-their-outrageously-expensive-homes

Student debt in China is virtually non-existent. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jlim/2016/08/29/why-china-doesnt-have-a-student-debt-problem/

Chinese household savings hit another record high in 2024 https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-jones-bank-earnings-01-12-2024/card/chinese-household-savings-hit-another-record-high-xqyky00IsIe357rtJb4j

People in China enjoy high levels of social mobility https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/18/world/asia/china-social-mobility.html

The typical Chinese adult is now richer than the typical European adult https://www.businessinsider.com/typical-chinese-adult-now-richer-than-europeans-wealth-report-finds-2022-9

Real wage (i.e. the wage adjusted for the prices you pay) has gone up 4x in the past 25 years, more than any other country. This is staggering considering it’s the most populous country on the planet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cw8SvK0E5dI

The real (inflation-adjusted) incomes of the poorest half of the Chinese population increased by more than four hundred percent from 1978 to 2015, while real incomes of the poorest half of the US population actually declined during the same time period. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23119/w23119.pdf

From 1978 to 2000, the number of people in China living on under $1/day fell by 300 million, reversing a global trend of rising poverty that had lasted half a century (i.e. if China were excluded, the world’s total poverty population would have risen) https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/China’s-Economic-Growth-and-Poverty-Reduction-Angang-Linlin/c883fc7496aa1b920b05dc2546b880f54b9c77a4

From 2010 to 2019 (the most recent period for which uninterrupted data is available), the income of the poorest 20% in China increased even as a share of total income. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.DST.FRST.20?end=2019&amp%3Blocations=CN&amp%3Bstart=2008

By the end of 2020, extreme poverty, defined as living on under a threshold of around $2 per day, had been eliminated in China. According to the World Bank, the Chinese government had spent $700 billion on poverty alleviation since 2014. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/31/world/asia/china-poverty-xi-jinping.html

Over the past 40 years, the number of people in China with incomes below $1.90 per day – the International Poverty Line as defined by the World Bank to track global extreme poverty– has fallen by close to 800 million. With this, China has contributed close to three-quarters of the global reduction in the number of people living in extreme poverty. https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/lifting-800-million-people-out-of-poverty-new-report-looks-at-lessons-from-china-s-experience

None of these things happen in capitalist states, and we can make a direct comparison with India which follows capitalist path of development. In fact, without China there practically would be no poverty reduction happening in the world.

If we take just one country, China, out of the global poverty equation, then even under the $1.90 poverty standard we find that the extreme poverty headcount is the exact same as it was in 1981.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/07/5-myths-about-global-poverty

Sure, it’s hard to predict exact timing on these sort of things, so another 5 years is a plausible timeline. It does tend to be easier to do things the second time around. When you’re doing something from scratch then you don’t know what the right approach will be, you’re going to have false starts, and so on. When the general idea has been proven, it’s much easier to replicate because now you know what the general direction to pursue is.

It’s pretty clear that Russia has already won the war without the need for China to be involved directly.

I fully expect that the west will start becoming more racist and isolationist because the relations with the global south are already antagonistic. On the other hand, it’s very likely that Russia will go in the opposite direction because it is economically dependent on the global south. Increase in trade and tighter economic relations will necessarily translate into better social relations and more mutual respect.

I imagine they will be able to produce bleeding edge chips within a year or two tops. What’s even more interesting though is that China is now producing chips on different substrates like gallium that don’t have any equivalents in the west. https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3323448/luo-weiwei-former-nasa-scientist-who-became-chinas-semiconductor-trump-card

Exactly, copyrights are designed for the benefit of capitalists first and foremost. They’re not there to protect small artists.

I can’t think of a more appropriate frontman for the Burgerland

Yeah it took a competent government decades to build up these programs. If you haven’t noticed, the US today is a very different country from back then. The US that was able to mobilize during WW2 no longer exists today.

It’s pretty weird to say that battery technology hasn’t progressed since the 80s given the rapid developments BYD has been making. https://fortune.com/2025/03/17/byd-battery-system-charging-5-minutes-tesla-superchargers/

Technological progress is indeed stagnating in the west, but the picture is very different in China where technological progress is accelerating on all fronts.

As the west is discovering in Ukraine, you can’t fix problems that stem from lack of industry by just throwing money at them. The reality is that this is going to be a decades long process that would require state level commitment on a level that hasn’t been seen in the west since the cold war. Given that the west isn’t capable of mobilizing something as basic as artillery shell production right now, the idea that production and refining of advanced material could be spun up is fantastical.

Thorium reactors are a clear example of such tech, 5/6g and quantum networks are another. The Europeans and Americans are not able to build anything equivalent. For the other tech I listed, China is far ahead in terms of scale and penetration of deployment. There is a qualitative difference between what China and the west are able to do rooted in China’s massive industrial base and far larger population.

Thorium reactors, rail guns, 6g comms, quantum networks, using solar power at scale, refining rare earths,production of over 75% of the world’s lithium-ion battery cells.. These are just a few examples.

Here’s a study from last year outlining why China is technologically advancing more rapidly than the west. https://itif.org/publications/2024/09/16/china-is-rapidly-becoming-a-leading-innovator-in-advanced-industries/

I never said every project China does succeeds. You have to try lots of things when you’re pushing the envelope, some will be dead ends. However, China has managed to make a lot of things others abandoned succeed.

Historically, China has a pretty good track record bringing this kind of stuff to fruition faster than people expect.

I’m referring to this bit:

Developers say airborne power generation system ideal for disaster relief and isolated locations, such as islands and oilfields

The goal is to set these up in remote areas or for temporary measures where traditional windmills would be impractical.

If you actually read the article, you’ll see that it’s not meant to replace the current wind industry.

It’s kind of funny how China is now showing what solar punk would entail in practice, and turns out it needs a massive industrial base as a prerequisite.