Speaker 1: Welcome to zero. I'm akshatrati. This week lawyers Versus engineers.
Speaker 1: China is a country of superlatives. It makes the most
Speaker 1: number of solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, and electric cars.
Speaker 1: It also is the largest builder of new coal power plants,
Speaker 1: the largest builder of new nuclear power stations, and the
Speaker 1: country with the longest high speed rail network. The list
Speaker 1: goes on and on. Because China builds, builds, and builds.
Speaker 1: It's one reason why the country has become the fascination
Speaker 1: of the green movement. China now has a huge lead
Speaker 1: in all types of climate technologies, and it is using
Speaker 1: that to electrify its economy at a breakneck speed. But
Speaker 1: why has China been able to build while many far
Speaker 1: richer countries have fallen behind. It's not just because China
Speaker 1: is a dictatorship, argues technology analyst and author Dan Wong.
Speaker 1: In his new book Breakneck. He paints a vivid picture
Speaker 1: of the social, cultural, and governance differences that have turned
Speaker 1: China into a nation of builders. Dan says that China
Speaker 1: is a country with an engineer's mindset, while the US
Speaker 1: has a lawyer's mindset. I spoke with Dan a few
Speaker 1: weeks ago as part of the SOSV Climate Tech Summit
Speaker 1: to learn what China gets right, where it's going wrong,
Speaker 1: and what lessons other countries can take from China's extraordinary
Speaker 1: green tech buildout. Welcome to the SOSV Climate Tech Summit, Dan,
Speaker 1: and welcome also to the Zero podcast for Bloomberg Green.
Speaker 2: Great to be here at chot SO.
Speaker 1: I learned a lot about China from your book, Breakneck
Speaker 1: Congrades on its success. We are talking on a climate
Speaker 1: podcast and a climate tech summit, so there is a
Speaker 1: lot of interest from the climate crowd on what China
Speaker 1: has been able to achieve on its dominance in green tech.
Speaker 1: But before we come to that, let's start out with
Speaker 1: the main thesis of the book that you lay out,
Speaker 1: which is that China is an engineering state while the
Speaker 1: US is a lawyerly state. You have first time experience
Speaker 1: living in both countries and at interesting times. Could you
Speaker 1: briefly give examples that are illustrative to these two frames.
Speaker 2: The time that I lived in was between twenty seventeen
Speaker 2: to twenty twenty three in China, and which I felt
Speaker 2: like it really was a momentous period in which Donald Trump,
Speaker 2: in his first administration had launched his first trade war.
Speaker 2: China was growing ever more capable in all sorts of technologies,
Speaker 2: including clean tech. I also lived through zero COVID, which
Speaker 2: was the centerpiece of my experience. And the China is
Speaker 2: a country I call the engineering state in my book
Speaker 2: because various points it has been ruled entirely by engineers
Speaker 2: at the senior most levels of the Communist Party. The
Speaker 2: engineers in China treat the physical environment as a giant
Speaker 2: engineering exercise. They build a lot of homes and hyperscalers,
Speaker 2: and solar and wind and coal plants as well. China
Speaker 2: also treats the economy as a big engineering exercise, in
Speaker 2: which they tend to shuttle young people here and there
Speaker 2: in order to work on more strategic industries. And they
Speaker 2: also treat society as a big engineering exercise, as I
Speaker 2: show through the examples of zero COVID as well as
Speaker 2: the one child policy, which the number is right there
Speaker 2: in the name, and there's no ambiguity about what sort
Speaker 2: of engineering projects these are. I contrast that with the
Speaker 2: United States, which I call the lawyerly society. I mostly
Speaker 2: wrote this book out of the Yale Law School. It's
Speaker 2: still kind of surprising to me that every president needs
Speaker 2: to earn a degree from Yale Law before they can
Speaker 2: be in the White House. And the Democratic Party is
Speaker 2: especially lawyerly, but the Republicans are pretty lawyer as well.
Speaker 2: The issue with lawyers is that they block everything good
Speaker 2: and bad, so you don't have stupid ideas like the
Speaker 2: one child policy, so don't have very functional infrastructure anywhere,
Speaker 2: and it is really difficult to build clean technology on
Speaker 2: par with China in the US.
Speaker 1: And this framing of engineers versus lawyers, why do you
Speaker 1: think that was the important framing that people needed to
Speaker 1: know now versus say, what's dominated US China discourse, which
Speaker 1: is free market capitalism versus state led capitalism, or democracy
Speaker 1: versus authoritarianism, or academic terms like leninism.
Speaker 2: Yeah, all of these terms have a place, and I
Speaker 2: think that the US and China are both really important
Speaker 2: countries that are in competition and have a lot of
Speaker 2: frictions with each other. Most of these terms come from
Speaker 2: nineteenth century political scientists, so terms like capitalists socialist only
Speaker 2: Leninist comes from perhaps the twentieth century. And I just
Speaker 2: wanted to be inventive and playful and coming up with
Speaker 2: a new term for understanding these two countries. I think
Speaker 2: that what distinguishes China right now is construction, a lot
Speaker 2: of construction of homes hyperscalers again, coal, wind, solar, nuclear,
Speaker 2: or whatever it is. And the United States excels at obstruction,
Speaker 2: which is that it cannot build homes where it is needed,
Speaker 2: especially in big cities like New York and San Francisco
Speaker 2: and Boston. It is not building solar and wind or
Speaker 2: transmission lines at a fast enough pace. There are now
Speaker 2: thirty three nuclear plants under construction in China. There's zero
Speaker 2: under construction in the US. Maybe we can debate about
Speaker 2: whether there should be more nuclear, but I think there
Speaker 2: just should be more clean technologies of all sorts, and
Speaker 2: right now China is doing that. And I think that
Speaker 2: is just one of several frameworks that we can use
Speaker 2: to understand a lot of what has been happening in
Speaker 2: the US as well as a lot of what's been
Speaker 2: happening in China.
Speaker 1: And if we take the historical frame here for a
Speaker 1: little bit, we do know that America has built in
Speaker 1: the past, and it did so when there were lawyers around.
Speaker 1: So what has changed in America's mindset to build now?
Speaker 1: Because maybe the number of lawyers has increased, but it's
Speaker 1: not like lawyers were a rare commodity at that time.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, I think that the US has always been loyally
Speaker 2: among the founding fathers, most of them were lawyers. For
Speaker 2: sixteen US presidents from Washington to Lincoln, thirteen of the
Speaker 2: more lawyers. But the United States had been a proto
Speaker 2: engineering state. It built a lot when it was a
Speaker 2: mostly empty country where there were a lot of especially
Speaker 2: European immigrants drifting into mostly the East Coast, and there
Speaker 2: was a consensus among the elites that this big country,
Speaker 2: a vast empty space, really needed to build. And so
Speaker 2: the US used to be a proto engineering state when
Speaker 2: it built canal systems, train systems, skyscrapers in Chicago and Manhattan,
Speaker 2: and then in the twentieth century major projects like the
Speaker 2: Hoover Dam or the Manhattan Probably Checked Apollo missions or
Speaker 2: the Interstate Highway system. And what changed, I think, essentially,
Speaker 2: was the nineteen sixties in which the American engineering state
Speaker 2: made too many mistakes and that has to be frankly conceded,
Speaker 2: in which urban planners like Robert Moses had completely overrun
Speaker 2: a lot of dense neighborhoods in New York City in
Speaker 2: which the US Department of Agriculture was spraying DDT and
Speaker 2: other pesticides throughout the country, and in which people had
Speaker 2: grown really tired of a role by technocrats which were
Speaker 2: a little bit too cozy with the industrial companies, especially
Speaker 2: the automotive companies as well. And so I think the
Speaker 2: United States turned into a lawyer le society throughout the
Speaker 2: nineteen sixties for excellent reasons. A lot of the lawyers
Speaker 2: turned away from being creative deal making types of the
Speaker 2: sort that are most obvious on Wall Street, in which
Speaker 2: the lawyers were working with the railroad barons to raise
Speaker 2: bonds for them, or eminent domain people out of their way,
Speaker 2: and for good reason, a lot of the lawyers turned
Speaker 2: into were litigators and regulators, led by people like Ralph Nader.
Speaker 2: But I think the challenge right now is that a
Speaker 2: lot of the law schools, a lot of the law students,
Speaker 2: a lot of lawyers are still obsessed with solving the
Speaker 2: problems of the nineteen sixties. Rather, I say, let's solve
Speaker 2: the problems the twenty twenties, which is in sufficient homes,
Speaker 2: in sufficient mass transit, and insufficient solar wind and transmission lines.
Speaker 1: So the loyally society has swung too hard towards obstructionism,
Speaker 1: is the case you make. So one place where the
Speaker 1: US has been able to build has been when it
Speaker 1: has a perceived enemy. A lot of the successes in
Speaker 1: the twentieth century come during the Cold War, for example,
Speaker 1: where you talk about the Apollo Mission. These are driven
Speaker 1: because there's an enemy and the US wants to be
Speaker 1: in a race where it wants to win. Now, many
Speaker 1: in the US see China as the enemy or want
Speaker 1: to try and compete with China. But if you flip
Speaker 1: that side of the narrative and look at it from
Speaker 1: the Chinese perspective, is the driving force behind the Chinese
Speaker 1: engineering mindset, the building mindset the same as it is
Speaker 1: in America to try and beat America.
Speaker 2: I think it is the same as America throughout the
Speaker 2: nineteenth century, in which there was a lot of need
Speaker 2: for infrastructure and not so much necessarily motivated by the
Speaker 2: external threat. Although that is a part of it, I
Speaker 2: think that we can also frankly acknowledge that there is
Speaker 2: an external component to China's building. The highway systems in
Speaker 2: Tibet are pristine not so much because the Tibetans really
Speaker 2: desperately needs excellent highways, but it is to prepare for
Speaker 2: military eventualities around the Himalayas. But I would say that
Speaker 2: in general, China's construction is mostly to meet domestic political goals,
Speaker 2: which is to demonstrate to the people that the Chinese
Speaker 2: government is able to deliver for their material welfare. If
Speaker 2: you are a resident of Shanghai, every year you're getting
Speaker 2: more and more parks every year. There is generally expansions
Speaker 2: of the subway lines, such as you're able to get
Speaker 2: around much more easily. If you're more rural in more
Speaker 2: rural areas, maybe you're getting new bridges, maybe you're getting
Speaker 2: connected to the high speed round network, and so that
Speaker 2: is also very real as well.
Speaker 1: And I think there's.
Speaker 2: Also a domestic political need for some degree of sovereignty.
Speaker 2: So I think that China has electrified very substantially, just
Speaker 2: as a share of electricity and total energy production only
Speaker 2: slightly behind Japan, which is the only other major economy
Speaker 2: that is more electrified, but China will overtake Japan soon enough.
Speaker 2: One out of every two cars sold by the end
Speaker 2: of this year will be electric in China. I think
Speaker 2: that is mostly due to the fact that it is
Speaker 2: pursuing some degree of energy sovereignty, such that they're reading
Speaker 2: all of these reports from the Americans to say that
Speaker 2: China has these choke points. The USS these choke points,
Speaker 2: China is very dependent on Middle East oil and gas,
Speaker 2: and so they can stop the flow of these ships
Speaker 2: in China's saying Okay, well, let's not be powered by
Speaker 2: Middle East oil and gas. Let's be powered through our
Speaker 2: cars with domestic solar, domestic wind, domestic nuclear, and domestic coal.
Speaker 2: And so I think that the primary target for China
Speaker 2: in terms of a lot of energy production is more
Speaker 2: about the sovereignty than about climate, although in this case
Speaker 2: there are a lot of happy agreements between the two.
Speaker 1: And let's stick with that, because if we take the
Speaker 1: race framework, which definitely dominates American way of thinking, you
Speaker 1: could take four or five areas where the US is
Speaker 1: trying to compete with China AI chip making, trade, biotech,
Speaker 1: soft power. But then when it comes to green tech,
Speaker 1: America is happy to let China go ahead and dominate,
Speaker 1: whereas it's going to push fossil fuels. They are on
Speaker 1: two different lanes, so to speak. On the energy equation,
Speaker 1: and China as a result, has become the largest exporter
Speaker 1: of these technologies we've talked about. I mean, it's not
Speaker 1: just about Chinese products made in China going out, it's
Speaker 1: Chinese products made in other parts of the world. Almost
Speaker 1: every continent has some form of Chinese green tech manufacturing. Now, So,
Speaker 1: say at some point America realizes that climate change is
Speaker 1: real and the future is going to be powered by green,
Speaker 1: cheap electricity, what kind of strategic areas should America look
Speaker 1: to start to build in because it certainly cannot overcome
Speaker 1: all this lead that China has in every sector in
Speaker 1: green tech, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, No, I think the challenge with America really is
Speaker 2: that I think that it did not necessarily make any
Speaker 2: strategic decision that it will not pursue clean technology. Is
Speaker 2: it's just something that sort of happened. In the same
Speaker 2: way that there was not necessarily any high level strategic
Speaker 2: decision to have a lot of manufacturing move to the
Speaker 2: Asian Pacific and to China in particular. There's just something like,
Speaker 2: you know, a million and one business decisions, let's simply
Speaker 2: let it happen. I think one American superpower is wishful thinking.
Speaker 2: That they will never acknowledge that they are so behind
Speaker 2: in any technologies, because I think that still there's a
Speaker 2: lot of discourse from the American elites to say China
Speaker 2: is not at all a technology innovator. They are only
Speaker 2: capable of stealing, not innovating. This is something that a
Speaker 2: lot of American senators, for example, like Senator Tom Cotton
Speaker 2: is able to tweet that the Chinese are not actually
Speaker 2: economically competitive, they're just held afloat through industrial subsidies, which
Speaker 2: I think is at this point not true any longer.
Speaker 2: Perhaps it was true some earlier point in the past,
Speaker 2: and so I think this is going to be pretty challenging.
Speaker 2: I think, especially under the peculiarities of President Donald Trump,
Speaker 2: who is really against wind turbines, in particular, calling it
Speaker 2: the scam of the century. I find that quite interesting
Speaker 2: and strange. Perhaps if we want it to be very
Speaker 2: optimistic about US clean energy going forward, it seems like
Speaker 2: the Trump administration is much more friendly towards nuclear power generation,
Speaker 2: and so maybe at least for the next three and
Speaker 2: a half years, it seems like it is going to
Speaker 2: we're going to have to count on nuclear for generating
Speaker 2: most of the answers here.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Advance geothermal is the other one that Secretary Chris
Speaker 1: Wright talks a lot about because America has strengths to
Speaker 1: try and build on what it has through shale oil
Speaker 1: drilling that's been done in the oil and gas industry,
Speaker 1: but could be applied to geothermal, which is a much lower,
Speaker 1: almost clean source of electricity. But you brought up Wall
Speaker 1: Street there, and it's worth making a note that a
Speaker 1: lot of America is driven by Wall Street because your
Speaker 1: big massive pension funds are managed in Wall Street, and
Speaker 1: they vote with shareholders to try and decide where corporate
Speaker 1: America is going. And that program has very much voted
Speaker 1: for an asset light profit maximizing opportunity for American companies.
Speaker 1: So when you say that manufacturing sort of moved to Asia,
Speaker 1: not through government decision, but because of things like Wall
Speaker 1: Street saying, well, making it cheaper in Asia is better
Speaker 1: for profits, whereas in China the system that exists is
Speaker 1: okay with inefficiency. They do want profits and they do
Speaker 1: want market dominance, but that can come later. Initially, the
Speaker 1: goal is to build, especially when it comes to companies.
Speaker 1: So if we want to go to a point where
Speaker 1: America starts to build. Wall Street is looking for efficiency.
Speaker 1: How do you make the two work, because initially a
Speaker 1: lot of the building will have to be inefficient, government subsidized,
Speaker 1: be strategic, and that doesn't seem like the flavor of
Speaker 1: the month.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, I think that is going to be one of
Speaker 2: these cultural challenges that the US needs to face. That
Speaker 2: it's not just the lawyers. I agree that Wall Street
Speaker 2: has a lot to answer for itself, that the Wall
Speaker 2: Street along with the corporate sector. There is this quote
Speaker 2: attributed to Tim Cook that is evil, that what Apple
Speaker 2: really wants is just in time production, the Toyota method,
Speaker 2: whatever it is. And so there is just this general
Speaker 2: drift in America towards some measure of efficiency, which could
Speaker 2: also be understood as considerable degree of brittleness, in which
Speaker 2: the US actually was not able to be very efficient,
Speaker 2: for example, in the production of masks and cotton swabs
Speaker 2: during the early days of the pandemic. That the US
Speaker 2: is not very efficient at producing something like munitions after
Speaker 2: it shipped a lot of shells to Ukraine and its
Speaker 2: self defense against Russia. So there are all sorts of
Speaker 2: ways in which the US is broken down. A lot
Speaker 2: of my book is about the cultural views of the elites.
Speaker 2: This is not a policy prescription book. I do not
Speaker 2: say which statutes and regulations really need to be changed.
Speaker 2: What I really really like is for the Americans to
Speaker 2: have a little bit of a better sense of valuing
Speaker 2: technology production, valuing communities of engine doing practice, and to
Speaker 2: be quite a lot better at being able to manufacture
Speaker 2: important things, value the circulation of process knowledge, and not
Speaker 2: be so much held back by these efficiency concerns and
Speaker 2: profitability concerns.
Speaker 1: After the break, I asked Dan what his vision for
Speaker 1: the US is and whether AI robots are the answer
Speaker 1: to the Malays. If you're enjoying listening to Zero, please
Speaker 1: take a moment to rate and review the show on
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Recently, Gwyneth Fries wrote, thank you, Akha.
Speaker 1: I always learned so much from how you structure the conversation.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Gwinnett. You're saying there is a vision that
Speaker 1: exists in China where the Chinese communist power is trying
Speaker 1: to meet the material needs of its people, and that's
Speaker 1: the social contract it has, and it's delivering on that
Speaker 1: contract so far, and so it's worked. Whereas America feels
Speaker 1: a little adrift. You know, there isn't a Cold War
Speaker 1: style enemy waiting. China sometimes is made to look like one,
Speaker 1: but really, you know a lot of people are still
Speaker 1: in the Francis Fukayama end of history. You know, liberalism
Speaker 1: has won, liberal democracies have won. Is there a new project?
Speaker 1: If you were to give Americans a vision for what
Speaker 1: they should aim for to be able to deliver on
Speaker 1: the things that you talk about, what kind of vision
Speaker 1: would you want Americans to grab.
Speaker 2: I think that the vision of America that I would
Speaker 2: like to see would be self motivated, and there would
Speaker 2: not be through treating China as an adversary, And it
Speaker 2: is to simply meet a lot of what it's people
Speaker 2: demand in terms of people complain quite a lot about
Speaker 2: cost of living, for example, cost of living in bigger
Speaker 2: cities like New York and Sanria, Cisco and Boston where
Speaker 2: housing is quite unaffordable. That people to some degree want
Speaker 2: mass transit, and people want a lot more public investments.
Speaker 2: And I want the US to be the best version
Speaker 2: of itself, and I want the Chinese to be the
Speaker 2: best version of themselves as well. And the way that
Speaker 2: I think that we can get here a little bit
Speaker 2: better is for the US to become let's say, twenty
Speaker 2: percent more. Engineering does not have to be very high,
Speaker 2: but let's just build a little bit more of the
Speaker 2: things that the people want. For example, California high speed rail,
Speaker 2: which was approved by referendum now nearly twenty years ago,
Speaker 2: and very little of it has been built. This is
Speaker 2: kind of just I believe, a national embarrassment that California, says,
Speaker 2: one of the richest entities in the world, wants to
Speaker 2: build this and is simply unable to build very much
Speaker 2: of it at all. And I wish that China can
Speaker 2: be fifty percent more loyally. I would really love for
Speaker 2: the Chinese people to feel like they can be in
Speaker 2: a country where they can flourish in which the state
Speaker 2: does not feel need constantly to strangle their creative impulses,
Speaker 2: that the state actually learns to value individual rights and
Speaker 2: actually means it, and that I would also really love
Speaker 2: if the Communist Party could just one day learn to
Speaker 2: leave the people alone rather than trying to engineer them
Speaker 2: towards some measure of national greatness.
Speaker 1: Well, that's a good place to come from a vision perspective,
Speaker 1: but I do want to hit on one dark side
Speaker 1: of the engineering state that you'd referred to earlier in
Speaker 1: the conversation, but also you spend a bunch of time
Speaker 1: in the book looking at the one child policy, the
Speaker 1: zero COVID policy, you know, the one child policy which
Speaker 1: your parents and the friends that they had back home experienced,
Speaker 1: the kinds of brutality that you note in the book,
Speaker 1: plus the zero COVID policy that you know, half of
Speaker 1: it was pretty great for you, but then the other
Speaker 1: half was pretty brutal. What is it about the engineering
Speaker 1: mindset that leads to that kind of brutality.
Speaker 2: I think that the engineering state is made up not
Speaker 2: only of hydraulic engineers. Fundamentally, the problem with the engineering
Speaker 2: state is that they are fundamentally also social engineers, and
Speaker 2: they cannot stop themselves from treating society as if it
Speaker 2: were just another vast hydraulic system to be shifted this
Speaker 2: way and that through a series of valves. And I
Speaker 2: think a lot about, you know, for example, the detention
Speaker 2: of ethno religious minorities, especially in qing Tiang region. I
Speaker 2: think a lot about zero COVID, and I think a
Speaker 2: lot about the one child policy, which they treat people
Speaker 2: as yet another building material to be torn down and
Speaker 2: remolded as they wish. And I think the problem with
Speaker 2: some of China is that living in China made me
Speaker 2: realize that a state could be too efficient, that you
Speaker 2: could have too much state capacity if people are unable
Speaker 2: to resist something like the one child policy, which, over
Speaker 2: the course of its thirty five year existence, according to
Speaker 2: China's official statistics, they conducted about three hundred million abortions,
Speaker 2: which is roughly the population of the United States. And so,
Speaker 2: you know, to have these sort of national traumas being
Speaker 2: visited by a highly efficient state against the people, I
Speaker 2: think that this is something that we don't want to see,
Speaker 2: which is why I wish that China could be fifty
Speaker 2: percent more loyally to have to some extent a federal
Speaker 2: traditionary that is separate from the executive that is able
Speaker 2: to protect the rights of the people. I don't think
Speaker 2: we'll ever get there so long as the Communist Party
Speaker 2: is in charge, but I would really love for there
Speaker 2: to be actually substantive legal protections for Chinese to be
Speaker 2: able to resist some of the worst impulses of social engineering.
Speaker 1: And in the last few minutes I've left, I want
Speaker 1: to try and look a little bit forward, because AI
Speaker 1: features in your book briefly to try and tell sort
Speaker 1: of a little bit of the history where it comes
Speaker 1: from cybernetics that was developed in Soviet Union. The goal
Speaker 1: was to try and figure out whether you could actually
Speaker 1: create a society using these hydraulic engineering type methods to
Speaker 1: create that perfect socialist society. Well, we are now in
Speaker 1: an age where AI is way more powerful than the
Speaker 1: computers that existed in the past, and there is this
Speaker 1: temptation to try and use it for all sorts of things.
Speaker 1: So how do you think AI fits in the way
Speaker 1: in which governance of these two countries should take advantage
Speaker 1: of this technology and where is the risk?
Speaker 2: I think that AI right now is one of these
Speaker 2: things where there is definitely a race between these two countries,
Speaker 2: and I don't know how exactly it will shake out.
Speaker 2: Because there's some people in Silicon Valley who believe that
Speaker 2: AI is something like God in a box which will
Speaker 2: just reach superintelligence and it will just solve pretty much
Speaker 2: all of humanity's problems. I'm a little bit skeptical of
Speaker 2: that approach, and I think what I want to suggest
Speaker 2: is that we can't count China out on artificial intelligence.
Speaker 2: In part because China is just building so much electrical
Speaker 2: power at a much faster pace than the US, and
Speaker 2: at some point AI will become a power problem in
Speaker 2: which the US will need to solve a lot of
Speaker 2: its energy challenges. Right now, there's a lot of talent
Speaker 2: in the US which are of Chinese heritage who went
Speaker 2: to Chinese universities. Right now, they are living and working
Speaker 2: in California, but it could possibly be the case that
Speaker 2: they decide to move to China in part because of
Speaker 2: the erraticness of the Trump administration right now. Right now,
Speaker 2: China is constrained on a lot of chips. But again,
Speaker 2: here's where Donald Trump, being very erratic, might simply gift
Speaker 2: a lot of these chips to China so long as
Speaker 2: Nvidia pays an export tax. And so, you know, a
Speaker 2: lot of these things are uncertain. But I think that
Speaker 2: the US and China are racing towards AI, and that
Speaker 2: race is actually profoundly uncertain. I think that we can't
Speaker 2: count China out and we can't expect necessarily for the
Speaker 2: US to win.
Speaker 1: So last question for you, do you think that AI
Speaker 1: and AI powered robots would be necessary if the US
Speaker 1: is to bring back manufacturing, bring back building.
Speaker 2: It probably would have help, But I think that I
Speaker 2: would just focus on manufacturing much more directly, because I
Speaker 2: think that it is really important to make things, and
Speaker 2: we can't outsource all of our views to AI. AI
Speaker 2: might be unfriendly. AI might only be really good at
Speaker 2: making us make better power points, and so I think
Speaker 2: that to target manufacturing, we should actually work on building
Speaker 2: better manufacturing.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Dan, Thank you very much a chat, and
Speaker 1: thank you for listening to zero. Now for the sound
Speaker 1: of the week. That's the sound of scuba divers seeing
Speaker 1: a coral reef. The world has reached its first catastrophic
Speaker 1: tipping point, where at current temperatures, scientists say widespread diebacks
Speaker 1: of corals have begun. They say the world's warm water
Speaker 1: coral reefs will not remain at any meaningful scale unless
Speaker 1: immediate steps are taken to bring global average temperature rise
Speaker 1: back down to one point two degree celsius compared to
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Speaker 1: Podcasts and Spotify. This episode was produced by Oscar Boyd
Speaker 1: with the help of Annam Asarakus. Our theme music is
Speaker 1: composed by wonderly special thanks to Samersadi, Moses Andam Laura
Speaker 1: Milan and Sharan Chan. I'm Akshatrati back soon.