Arthur Kroeber: evaluation

Transcript context

…That is a terrific question. That really gets to the heart of a lot of stuff. I don't have a great answer to that because fundamentally what you're saying is that there needs to be a communication system, a network of interactions between two highly competitive zones, the US and China, where they have to be able to operate with some degree of trust. I think the problem that we face in trying to analyze this is a lot of the analogies that you might reach for break down at some point. You brought up the red telephone, which basically is a reference to the line of communication the US and Soviet Union had during the Cold War. The threat that you were trying to avert there was nuclear holocaust. In some ways I think that's an apt analogy and we kind of need to think broadly along those terms. But the specific problem that we were dealing with there were these very self-contained systems that were clearly under highly centralized control by a couple of people. So having that one-to-one line of communication was an effective response to that particular problem. With AI, it's much more diffused, much more decentralized, much more unpredictable, what the problems could be. It's kind of easy, I think, to create… Easy, we say in retrospect, but it was hard at the time. But it was a sort of, if you will, maybe a two or three dimensional process to come up with game theory to enable us to manage the nuclear balance of terror. I don't want to minimize Thomas Schelling's achievement. It was great. But it was like a two or three dimensional problem. With AI, you have a more than three dimensional problem. It is consequently more difficult to figure out how to create a game theory solution to this that is kind of stable. I think what you can say at a minimum right now is that there are ways in which the US-China relationship today resembles that of the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1950s, that is before the Cuban Missile Crisis. I don't want to exaggerate this too much, but the sort of diminution in exchange in communication over the last six or seven years is really alarming. I’ll give a simple example on this. When Trump came into office the first time in 2017, he inherited a structure where there were approximately 100 working-level dialogues between US government and Chinese government officials. Plus you had all of this investment in private sector stuff that was going on. But just at the formal level, there were over 100 dialogues. He got rid of all of them, 100%. He then replaced them with one, which was the trade talks that he had in his first term. That was the only mechanism that we had of communication. Did this create a specific problem? It did. If you look at the early stages of COVID, back when SARS came out in 2003, there were staff members of the United States Centers for Disease Control embedded in the Chinese Centers for Disease Control or their equivalent organization. COVID, back when SARS came out in 2003, there were staff members of the United States Centers for Disease Control embedded in the Chinese Centers for Disease Control or their equivalent organization. That relationship, in fact, grew significantly, in part because of SARS over subsequent years. That was a very, very useful channel of getting information out. It was not perfect, it had plenty of problems. But the absence of that channel, I think, was really catastrophic in the early days of COVID where we literally had no way of understanding what was going on within the Chinese system. There was no background back channel that enabled us to get even a little bit of a head start on what was going on. I think that had very, very dire consequences. You can probably trace many, many, many deaths and a lot of social chaos to the inability of the US and China to communicate at that critical moment. We have essentially dismantled the whole structure of communication. The Biden administration basically took the same view. They introduced a few more things. There were a few more communication channels that they handed off to Trump that I think have not been made use of. So we're back to essentially zero, except for the trade. That is a very, very dangerous situation to be in with regard to global public health, any kind of global coordination, whether it be on macroeconomics or climate efforts or whatever And on these issues like AI. I think that's a really bad place to be. We're starting at a rather dangerous position. It should be a priority to figure out how we can get there. It's very hard to see how we get there given the political environment, frankly, in both countries. In the United States you have this narrative that China is this bad actor, they have an illegitimate government, they are a systemic rival. We basically have to contain, constrain, control them. Any kind of interaction with them is in and of itself dangerous. You have people in Congress saying, “I don't want to go to China. There's no point in going to China because I'll pay a political price for it. If I go there, I will be tarred as someone who went to China and therefore is tainted. And what can I possibly learn? I already know what I need to know.” So you have a deliberate effort in the United States to reduce the channels of information that we have with China and direct experience, which is very bad. I think one of the bad outcomes of COVID in China was that they kind of locked themselves off from the rest of the world for almost three years. They got really obsessed by this self-sufficiency industrial policy complex. The Chinese system has always had a lot of difficulty communicating with the rest of the world. This has been persistent for many decades and centuries. This gave them a great excuse to just not do the thing that made them feel very uncomfortable, which is engage in communication with the rest of the world. They concluded that that was kind of okay. So they also retreated into a very sort of paranoid narrative about what the US is up to, which is to a significant degree justified but not entirely. world. They concluded that that was kind of okay. So they also retreated into a very sort of paranoid narrative about what the US is up to, which is to a significant degree justified but not entirely. I think they lost sight of the value of a really robust communications alliance with the rest of the world. Both sides are entrenched in very suspicious, self-reinforcing narratives about the other, which makes it incredibly difficult to forge a better communication system. I have to say I'm fairly critical of both the Biden administration and the Trump administration, different ways of how they handled this. I think the Biden administration could have done a lot more, a lot faster. I think they sort of had the idea that it was good to have more communication, but they waited for two years before they did anything. Then they were very parsimonious about how they did it. I think they could have been much more aggressive. They weren't. That is a problem. Then I think the Trump administration unfortunately just doesn't place strong value on having respectful communications with anyone in the world, frankly. Then when you compound this with the paranoia about China, then it just creates more—I don't want to say paranoia, that's too loaded a term—but the suspicion, the fear, the distrust of China that exists. It's very hard to see how you get it. So I agree with you that we need something like that. I'm kind of pessimistic that we'll get there anytime soon, unfortunately.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.