ChinaEconTalk

The Pentagon has a new tech strategy! What does it say, what impact will it have, and what do its authors think about technological change and warfare?

Dr. Nina Kollars, advisor to Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering (OUSD(R&E)) Heidi Shyu, and R&E’s Chief Data Officer Cyrus Jabbari join us to discuss in a wide ranging and at times philosophical conversation about

NYC ChinaTalk Meetup! https://partiful.com/e/taNb35oaCKjglbHHdEA1

Here's the strategy: https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/3389118/dod-releases-national-defense-science-and-technology-strategy/ R&E’s Chief Data Offcer yrHerus Jabbari

Music: a guy banging on pots and pans https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQEedhz9ERs

Midjourney is a prompt of an F16 with this late 19th century Japanese calligraphy https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/55820

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Dan Faggella, who for ten years has interviewed business leaders about the challenges of implementing AI, joins ChinaTalk to discuss about just how hard it is to get AI to diffuse across an economy.

We also get into:

NYC ChinaTalk meetup: https://partiful.com/e/taNb35oaCKjglbHHdEA1

Music: Uyghur drill, Ahh? Ohh! by Athree https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdfgc2yr9Co

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Jeff Ding is the leading US scholar on China and AI and author of one of the earliest China-focused Substacks, ChinAI.

He recently published a fire paper called, “The diffusion deficit in scientific and technological power: re-assessing China’s rise.” It makes the argument that diffusion capacity (not just innovation capacity) is critical to economic growth — and China actually fares much worse in diffusion capacity than mainstream narratives imply.

In particular, “In cases when the emerging power has a strong innovation capacity but weak diffusion capacity (diffusion deficit), it is less likely to sustain its rise than innovation-centric assessments depict. Conversely, when the emerging power possesses a strong diffusion capacity but weak innovation capacity (diffusion surplus), it is more likely to sustain its rise than innovation-centric assessments portray.”

Mainstream narratives, meanwhile, “only compare the U.S. and China’s ability to produce new innovations, neglecting their ability to effectively use and adopt emerging technologies. By revealing the gap between China’s innovation capacity and diffusion capacity, this paper argues that innovation-centric assessments mistakenly inflate China’s S&T power.”

NYC ChinaTalk Meetup: https://partiful.com/e/taNb35oaCKjglbHHdEA1

Cohosting is Teddy Collins, formerly of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and DeepMind.

Outtro music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17Y7-gm8STI

midjourney prompt: "frank quietly industrial revolution"

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PJ Maykish, Abigail Kukura, and Will Moreland from the Future Technologies platform team of the Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP) join the conversation to discuss critical technologies and the development of a national technology strategy.

The guests provide insights into how the United States can create a comprehensive technology strategy that prioritizes the development of critical technologies to compete with China. They also discuss the importance of international collaboration in the development of emerging technologies and the challenges faced in building consensus among different stakeholders.

This is the paper we primarily discuss: Platforms-Panel-IPR.pdf (scsp.ai)

Vishnu Kannan of Carnegie cohosts.

Midjourney art: the prompt is "A Bauhaus poster for a production of Shakespeare's Hamlet. Featuring a young man looking out from a turret on a castle out towards the sea" but I thought it has a bit of a tech forecasting vibe!

Music by the great Cab Calloway: Hi De Ho Man - YouTube

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On Monday, May 1, I interviewed Virgina Senator Mark Warner.

We get into the RESTRICT Act, state capacity to analyze emerging technologies, the future of industrial policy, the nature and limits to bipartisanship around China, as well as the government’s role in regulating artificial intelligence.

Check out the ChinaTalk newsletter for a full transcript! https://www.chinatalk.media/

Art via midjourney prompt: corporate America’s naïveté vis-à-vis China

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J. Edgar Hoover was a controversial figure who served as the director of the FBI for nearly five decades. In this episode, we explore his life and legacy with Beverly Gage, a professor of 20th-century U.S. history and author of the Bancroft Prize-winning biography "G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century."

We discuss

Outro music: G-Man Hoover by Van Dyke Parks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E566LbON5QA

Check out ChinaTalk.media for transcripts, analysis and more!

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How did Xi Jinping’s formative years influence how he views the world today? Veteran China scholar Orville Schell, the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations, looks back at decades of writing and working on China, weathering the cycles of the country opening up and shutting down and gives his two cents on what’s going on in Xi’s head.

We also discuss

—  Why Mao Zedong is a better read than Xi

— China’s reciprocity problem on the international stage

— How US officials reacted to Tiananmen in a secret meeting with Deng Xiaoping

— A history of accessing China for academics, businesspeople and journalists

— Xi and victim culture

Outro Music: Glenn Gould performing Contrapunctus, I, IV from Bach’s amazing Art of the Fugue https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqDCieiDWAE

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Stephen Roach is a Yale professor with extensive experience in China. He also taught the first China class I ever took, so it may be fair to say he's partially to blame for the entire ChinaTalk enterprise.

In our conversation (taped on February 23), we discuss:

Apologies for my audio quality in the second half of the show.

Outro music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRM70Jw7F4M

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Paul Scharre, Vice President and Director of Studies at CNAS, joins ChinaTalk to discuss AI, military, strategy, and US-China geopolitics.

Listen in for a discussion on:

Outro music: a missy elliot + spice girls mix from Arthi, a UK-based DJ who's also an economics correspondent for the times of london! https://youtu.be/iHkfmwy1-OI?t=252

Paul’s latest bestseller: https://www.amazon.com/Four-Battlegrounds-Power-Artificial-Intelligence/dp/0393866866

The cover image is Midjourney on “Dota 2–inspired F-35 dogfight”

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What actually is foreign influence, and how might Canada handle China’s interference in its domestic affairs? Akshay Singh is a research associate at the Centre for International Policy Studies at the University of Ottawa. We discuss:

Akshay on how democracies should respond to foreign influence: https://www.cigionline.org/articles/faced-with-foreign-interference-how-should-democracies-respond/

Outtro music: 公公偏頭痛 by Jay Chou https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DU-RuR-qO4Y

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