Yes, I hate AI. But my hatred is not passionate or pathological. I hate AI in the same way that many rock music fans hated disco, circa 1977.
Most of the AI applications that have been thrust at me as a consumer are merely useless, rather than actively harmful. They are solutions in search of problems. The proverbial nipples on the male anatomy.
Nevertheless, I’ve resigned myself to the fact that tech companies are going to force AI on us at every opportunity in the foreseeable future. The tech giants have over-invested billions in technologies that were overhyped from the get-go. Six- and seven-figure jobs are on the line at Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and elsewhere. Lives are at stake. Vice presidents of something or the other could be thrown out on the street!
AI is not going away anytime soon. Even if you don’t want it. Even if it serves no practical end.
Mark Zuckerberg recently built a MASSIVE data center for META in Georgia
– There are residential homes just hundreds of yards away – It uses so much water, residents no longer have water pressure in their homes – Their sink water no longer works – Their toilets don’t fill with… pic.twitter.com/UvApRZniNt
AI is already making my life worse, with the vast tsunami of fake news articles, and fake art, and fake videos that are proliferating online.
But all those things are minor inconveniences, in the big scheme of things.
In Georgia, meanwhile, some homeowners are being inconvenienced by the AI gorilla at a whole other level of magnitude.
Mark Zuckerberg built a massive data warehouse facility outside Atlanta to power Meta’s AI engine. The facility uses so much water, that it has left many residential homes without adequate water pressure. Some residents (watch the above video), now have to rely on bottled water in their homes.
These poor folks in Georgia do have a reason to hate AI. With a passion.
And all of this, so that the rest of us can get more AI-generated fake content on Facebook.
The Trump administration has just announced that smartphones and computers will be exempted from the 145% China tariffs.
This is good news. Tariffs are certainly one way to shoot an otherwise healthy economy in the foot. Trump was about to blow off both feet with a double-barrel shotgun.
As I pointed out in an earlier post: Apple has screwed the pooch, anyway, in a manner of speaking, by placing the majority of its manufacturing in China. I’m not saying that they have to make all their products in Ohio. But making 90% of iPhones in a quasi-hostile state is textbook corporate tomfoolery.
And that’s not all. The iPhone production process (much as I love my new iPhone 16!) is also a textbook example of corporate greed. I recently read The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone by Brian Merchant. As Merchant details in the book, Apple has become overly reliant on an outdated manual assembly process that literally cannot function without thousands of low-wage workers who are driven to extremes by tyrannical bosses in China-based supplier plants. (Read Merchant’s book for a detailed explanation of all this.)
Nevertheless, there is always a gap between what “should” be, and what is. Apple and other tech companies have been given a reprieve on China tariffs. They should use that reprieve to figure out how to make their products without relying on slave-wage labor. Have these highly paid, genius CEOs ever heard of automation, perchance?
I’m old enough to remember the heady days when China was “opened” to the West—back in the 1970s. Back then, American corporations believed that if they could just find a way to sell one widget to each of China’s one billion consumers—chop, chop!—riches would be theirs!
Shortly after that, China became a manufacturing base for American companies, thanks to the policies of Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, and his special economic zones (经济特区). Under Deng, China became “the workshop of the world”.
Deng broke with Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy. He was fond of aphorisms like “To grow rich is glorious,” and “It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white. What matters is: does the cat catch mice?”
Many people—me included, to the extent that I was paying attention—believed that China was going to become a much larger version of Japan or South Korea. Once the economic shackles of Marxism were set aside, we reasoned, liberal, Western-style democracy would naturally follow.
Then on June 3-4 1989, the Chinese Communist Party crushed a peaceful student protest in Tiananmen Square with tanks and AK-47s. The Beijing government massacred between 2,000 and 3,000 of its own citizens, many of them university students. I was a university student myself in 1989, so this one struck home. Had the circumstances of my birth been different, that might have been me.
Tiananmen Square should have been our first clue that the China of our wishful thinking was not the China of reality. We could easily have tempered our overly optimistic expectations and moderated our policies then.
But by then, the American business community was all-in on China. Yes, the Chinese government still maintained gulags and whatnot, but so what? Labor costs were cheap over there!
Then China became more militarily powerful, and the leadership changed. Deng Xiaoping, however much he repressed his own people, wanted peaceful relations with the West. But China’s new leadership, of which Xi Jinping is the latest incarnation, sought to apply the same heavy-handedness to foreign policy.
In April 2001, Chinese fighter planes forced a US Navy plane flying in international airspace to land on Hainan Island. The American crew was captured and detained for ten days. That incident got smoothed over, and was soon forgotten in the all-consuming shock and outrage over 9/11, which occurred about five months later. But still, another warning sign.
Then China unilaterally annexed portions of international waters in the South Pacific. This has brought China into near conflict with not only the USA, but also Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Australia, and Vietnam.
As if that wasn’t enough, in the 35 years since the Tiananmen Square massacre, we’ve had numerous reports of Chinese spying, cyber attacks, and intellectual property theft.
Oh, and then there was COVID-19 in 2020. I’m not going to attempt to untangle that whole ball of bat intestines, but this was yet one more really bad thing that came out of China. At the very least, the Chinese Communist Party’s mishandling of the situation made the pandemic worse. (And that is the most charitable interpretation of the CCP’s role, among all the interpretations out there.)
The COVID-19 pandemic is now five years behind us. Many US, European, and Japanese companies have been “decoupling” from China over the past half-decade.
But not Apple. Over half of all Macs (MacBooks, iMacs, etc.) are still manufactured in China. Some 80% of iPads are made there. And 90 percent—almost all—iPhones are still Chinese-made.
Which brings us to the recent tariff brouhaha. As a former economics major, I’m no fan of tariffs. As a former employee of several Japanese companies, I have nothing against foreign corporations, foreign products, or foreign trade. (I drive a Toyota.) As a lifelong lover of foreign languages and cultures, I’m certainly no xenophobe.
But only a fool of a CEO would approach China nowadays as American executives did 40 years ago. There are scores of reasons why any American company should have long ago begun its decoupling from the People’s Republic.
Yes, that is difficult. But to paraphrase Lance Ito, that’s why Apple CEO Tim Cook and other CEOs make the big bucks. Tim Cook’s annual compensation is now $74 million.
Any B-school student with a few economics classes under his or her belt could come up with the idea of reducing costs by basing manufacturing in a low-cost country like China. The process of decoupling from China is much more difficult, and requires a lot more creativity and innovation—the sort of task for which a CEO might be paid $74 million per year.
I might also mention that I’m an Apple devotee. I either own, or have owned, all the major Apple product lines. I’ve owned at least three iPods and two iPads. I’m now on my fourth iPhone. I’ve had multiple MacBooks and iMacs.
We have been told that an iPhone made anywhere but China (or a similar low-cost country) will cost $3,500. I call bullshit. Innovate, automate, figure out a way to do it more cheaply. For better or worse, that is now Tim Cook’s job. We’ll see if he can finally earn that $74 million. He should have foreseen this day long ago.
