New Week #131
Global power dynamics in the Exponential Age
Welcome to this update from New World Same Humans, a newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.
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To Begin
I have something a little unusual for us all this week.
A cluster of stories from China pushed me deeper into an issue that’s long been on my mind. That is, the way emerging technologies are weaving themselves through 21st-century geopolitics.
The world’s two great power blocks, China and the US, are racing to own the Exponential Age emerging around us now. It’s a story I’ll be writing much more on soon. This week, I want to start the exploration.
Let’s dive in. At the end, I’ve dropped details on two steps you can take to learn even more about these themes.
🇨🇳 Tech with Chinese Characteristics
Three stories, this week, together provided a glimpse of just how hard China is racing to own a slice of the exponential future.
The Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center Company — you’ve got to love these catchy Chinese tech names — unveiled a new humanoid robot called Tiangong. The company says it’s the first Chinese-developed general-purpose humanoid capable of autonomously navigating complex environments.
In other words, Tiangong is China’s answer to the Digit humanoid currently on trial inside some Amazon fulfilment centres. And, of course, to Tesla’s Optimus.
The company behind Tiangong is described as ‘registered with the Beijing Economic-Technological Development Area’. That means it has the backing of the CCP.
Meanwhile, the same tech forum in Beijing saw the arrival of a new brain-computer interface.
Beijing Xinzhida Neurotechnology and the Chinese Institute for Brain Research showcased the system, called Neucyber, which involves implanting soft electrodes into the brain. They showed a demonstration video in which a monkey fitted with the system was apparently able to control a robot arm via the power of thought alone.
The company also set up this handy demo in the halls at the conference, complete with a prop stuffed monkey:
Neucyber, unsurprisingly, is being called China’s answer to Elon Musk’s Neuralink.
And if that wasn’t enough?
On Friday China saw liftoff of its latest mission to the Moon. If all goes to plan the Chang'e-6 lunar probe will be the first to collect samples from the dark side of the lunar surface.
This and similar recent missions are all part of China’s quest to land a human crew on the Moon in 2030.
NASA are concerned that this quest will clash with their own plans to put astronauts back on the Moon in the coming years via the Artemis programme. The Agency has even drawn up the Artemis Accords, an attempt to articulate a consensus legal framework around lunar exploration and exploitation of the Moon’s resources.
Over 20 countries have signed the Accords; China isn’t one of them.
⚡ NWSH Take:
Three quick slices of Chinese tech. But the deeper underlying truth here? The CCP believes that their future depends on a race toward the kinds of emerging technologies that have long been NWSH obsessions. And they’re right.
The world’s two great powers, the US and China, are racing to own the Exponential Age. Both sides know that the future belongs to the power block with the best machine intelligence and associated applications of it, including humanoids.
The geopolitical implications — and the implications for the tech industry — are huge. They’ll reverberate around us for decades to come.
We took at look at China’s quest for an army of humanoid robots in New Week #129. The underlying motivation on this front? The CCP are terrified of the demographic reality now unfolding around them. Their working age population is about to go into freefall:
If China is to become the 21st-century hegemon that President Xi dreams about, it urgently needs a tech-driven productivity miracle. That means a quest for infinite AI knowledge workers, and tens of millions of humanoids
The population story is a little better in the US, but not much. UN forecasts have working age population growth bumping along near zero for rest of century:
That helps inform the US drive towards AI, too.
And it’s quite some drive. In 2021 the Biden administration announced the CHIPS Act, a $270 billion investment in semiconductors, AI research, and other leading edge technologies. Even adjusted for inflation, then, this government drive for AI will cost more than the entire Apollo moon programme.
At the same time, the US is ramping up restrictions on sale of advanced AI chips to China. In the new world taking shape around us, compute power is a critical resource, and neither the US or China want to be reliant on the other side to access it.
This all has massive implications for the semiconductor industry, including current tech darling Nvidia (who design all these AI chips) and its manufacturing partner, TSMC.
TSMC make 90% of all high-end AI chips and are, of course, based in Taiwan. This makes the US extremely nervous: what if China moves on Taiwan and cuts off access to all those chips?
TSMC, for its part, is working as fast as it can to diversify out of Taiwan and into the US via three new plants under construction in Arizona. The company was just granted $12 billion of CHIPS Act money to accelerate that push.
In the wake of that funding announcement, TSMC promised that the first of the Arizona plants will open this year. And they say their leading edge process node will be manufactured first at one of the Arizona plants in 2026. This is exactly what the US wants: the world’s most advanced AI chip made on US soil.
TSMC, then, finds itself lying right across the Exponential Age fault line opening up between the world’s two leading powers. It’s doing everything it can to build new plants outside Taiwan, including in Japan and Germany.
Amid the rising tension, though, are quiet signs that some kind of arrangement may be under discussion.
President Xi visited the US in November: even taken alone, it was a huge deal. But where did he go? Not the US capital, but the tech capital, San Francisco. The Silicon Valley elite, including Apple CEO Tim Cook and Elon Musk, gathered to hear him speak.
Does this augur the beginnings of some kind of Grand Bargain for the Exponential Age? I don’t think it’s farfetched to believe the US and Chinese governments may agree to break up and share TSMC. They may even arrive at a broader deal on AI and compute resources.
After all, the Great Powers of the 20th-century arrived at just such a bargain — and divided the world up accordingly — over access to oil. In the 21st, then, we may see the same kind of arrangement deployed over what is now a defining critical resource: machine intelligence. AI will underpin so much that will unfold across the coming decades, including in the domains explored in this instalment: humanoids, brain-machine interfaces, and the burgeoning space economy.
This story is just firing up. I’ll be watching closely, and working to make sense of it all. More soon.
David.
💥 Go Exponential
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Thanks for the insights! So intriguing.
Thank you. Very insightful!