Live and Learn

Open AI, ChatGTP and Solow Paradox, Mao was librarian, learner, leader, the end of the end of history and the clash of civilisations, South East Asia's largest lake is full of plastic

May 02, 2023

UPDATE: The Editor of the Long Mekong took a short break for May 1 Labour day - a short but welcome break to gather strength for our launch of editions in ten languages over the next few weeks. Over 130,000 people get the Long Mekong Daily and with the addition of Arabic, Bahasa, Bengali, Chinese, English, Hindi, Russian, Portuguese, Spanish, Urdu.

On November 30 2022, OpenAI launched the AI chatbot ChatGTP, making the latest generation of AI technologies widely available. In the few months since then, we have seen Italy ban ChatGTP over privacy concerns, leading technology luminaries calling for a pause on AI systems development, and even prominent researchers saying we should be prepared to launch airstrikes on data centres associated with rogue AI.

Where does a rebellious spirit come from? What makes one renounce the status quo and become a revolutionary leader? For Mao Zedong, who went on to become chairman of the Chinese Communist Party and head of the People’s Republic of China, it was reading widely in the library.

American political scientist Francis Fukuyama declared in his “End of History and The Last Man,” published in 1992, that the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War era in 1991 marked “not just the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: That is, the end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

Freshwater plastic pollution is critically understudied in Southeast Asia (SEA). Recent modelling studies indicate that SEA rivers contribute vast quantities of plastic to the world’s oceans, however, these fail to capture the complexity of individual systems. We determine the volume of mismanaged plastic waste (MPW) entering Tonle Sap Basin (TSB)—the largest freshwater lake–river system in SEA, between 2000 and 2030.

A photo of a phone showing ChatGPT on the screen.

AI and the Solow Paradox

The rapid deployment of AI and its potential impacts on human society and economies is now clearly in the spotlight. What will AI mean for productivity and economic growth? Will it usher in an age of automated luxury for all, or simply intensify existing inequalities? And what does it mean for the role of humans?

Over the past half-century or so, workers around the world have been getting a smaller fraction of their country’s total income. This period has also seen huge developments in the creation and implementation of information technologies and automation. Better technology is supposed to increase productivity. The apparent failure of the computer revolution to deliver these gains is a puzzle economists call the Solow paradox.

Economist Robert Solow famously said in 1987 that the computer age was everywhere except for the productivity statistics. This phenomenon, which became known as the Solow Paradox, was resolved in the 1990s when a few sectors—technology, retail, and wholesale—led an acceleration of US productivity growth.
In part, the 1990s productivity boom reflected a wave of rapid, fundamental innovation in semiconductors that, along with design and manufacturing-process improvements, boosted their power exponentially in relation to their cost. Semiconductor improvements translated into surging productivity for that sector, and into higher-quality and higher-value inputs for downstream computer-equipment manufacturers, who similarly enjoyed a dramatic productivity improvement.
Also moving the needle were sectors with large labor forces such as retail and wholesale, both of whose productivity had for years been stagnant. When large-format players such as Walmart (in retail) and McKesson (in pharmaceutical wholesaling) used technology to transform supply-chain and distribution-center efficiency, they became both more productive and competitive. Other players responded in both industries, and productivity rose across the board.

Compared to previous technological leaps – such as railways, motorised transport and, more recently, the gradual integration of computers into all aspects of our lives – AI can spread much faster. And it can do this with much lower capital investment. This is because the application of AI is largely a revolution in software. Much of the infrastructure it requires, such as computing devices, networks and cloud services, is already in place. There is no need for the slow process of building out a physical railway or broadband network – you can use ChatGPT and the rapidly proliferating horde of similar software right now from your phone

It is also relatively cheap to make use of AI, which greatly decreases the barriers to entry. This links to another major uncertainty around AI: the scope and domain of the impacts. AI seems likely to radically change the way we do things in many areas, from education and privacy to the structure of global trade. AI may not just change discrete elements of the economy but rather its broader structure.

Adequate modelling of such complex and radical change would be challenging in the extreme, and nobody has yet done it. Yet without such modelling, economists cannot provide clear statements about likely impacts on the economy overall.

Although economists have different opinions on the impact of AI, there is general agreement among economic studies that AI will increase inequality. One possible example of this could be a further shift in the advantage from labour to capital, weakening labour institutions along the way. At the same time, it may also reduce tax bases, weakening the government’s capacity for redistribution.

Most empirical studies find that AI technology will not reduce overall employment. However, it is likely to reduce the relative amount of income going to low-skilled labour, which will increase inequality across society. Moreover, AI-induced productivity growth would cause employment redistribution and trade restructuring, which would tend to further increase inequality both within countries and between them.

As a consequence, controlling the rate at which AI technology is adopted is likely to slow down the pace of societal and economic restructuring. This will provide a longer window for adjustment between relative losers and beneficiaries. In the face of the rise of robotics and AI, there is possibility for governments to alleviate income inequality and its negative impacts with policies that aim to reduce inequality of opportunity.

In traditional economic modelling, humans are often synonymous with “labour”, and also being an optimising agent at the same time. If machines can not only perform labour, but also make decisions and even create ideas, what’s left for humans?

Will AI bring us some kind of fundamentally new production technology, or will it tinker with existing production technologies? Is AI simply a substitute for labour or human capital, or is it an independent economic agent in the economic system?

Answering these questions is vital for economists – and for understanding how the world will change in the coming years.

Mao Zedong: Reader, Librarian, Revolutionary?

According to a 1976 American Libraries article by the librarian Stephanie Kirkes, the six months in 1912 that young Mao spent reading in the Hunan Provincial Library after he left secondary school “gave him the knowledge and skills to undertake the task of organising a new China and creating a new Chinese culture.” Mao spoke wistfully of this time with his biographer Edgar Snow:

During this period of self-education I read many books, studied world geography and world history. There for the first time I saw, and studied with great interest, a map of the world. I read Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, and Darwin’s Origin of Species, and a book on ethics by John Stuart Mill. I read the works of Rousseau, Spencer’s Logic, and a book on law by Montesquieu. I mixed poetry and romances, and the tales of ancient Greece, with serious study of history and geography of Russia.

When his father would no longer pay for his independent study, Mao enrolled in teacher’s college at the Changsha Normal College in the city of Hunan, where he quickly became a student leader, “considered a troublemaking dissenter by some, a righter of wrongs by others.”

Mao quickly realized that something was wrong, that the “scholars had moved away from the people.”

According to Kirkes, “In these five years his political ideas took shape. He was able to relate what he had been reading [in the library] to the national problem of altering and renewing Chinese society. He believed in the need to start a “cultural revolution,” put an end to feudalism, and restore military virtues, individual initiative, and conscious action.”

With the help of his mentor, Professor Yang, he formed the New People’s Study Society, “transforming a group of friends into an organization of some sixty or seventy students from many towns.” This was his first experience organizing people around shared goals, and it was a great success. When Yang moved to Peking (Beijing) in 1918 to teach at the University, Mao followed, hoping to meet and engage with the intellectual elites.

His reality was far from what he’d imagined. Mao needed money, so Yang got him a job as library assistant at the Peking University Library. He was stationed at a desk in the basement where he read books on the job and retrieved newspapers for the university students. At first he was excited by the access this position would afford him to the scholars at the school. He’d come to Peking thinking he might become a classical Chinese scholar, but he instead found himself in such a lowly position that the famous professors treated him with contempt. Meanwhile, his salary was so inadequate that he couldn’t easily cover the cost of food or shelter. He lived in a small house with other colleagues from Hunan, where they shared one overcoat and rotated sleeping on the one available bed.

Mao quickly realized that something was wrong, that the “scholars had moved away from the people.” This exposure to what Kirkes calls the “vanity and egotism of the intellectual who talked of humanism and socialism, yet cut himself off from the wretched masses of the poor,” primed him for Marxism. When his boss at the library, Director Li Dazhao, helped form the Society for the Study of Marxism, Mao joined the group and read Marx’s The Communist Manifesto for the first time. It had a profound impact on the young autodidact, who only questioned why Marx focused on urban workers and ignored the peasants. The writing and ideas of the library director were also influential. According to Kirkes, “Li Dazhao imparted to Mao two of his convictions: a belief in the surplus raw energy of the broad masses, however backward they might be; and faith in the immense potential of the peasantry of China still waiting to be tapped.”

The end of “clash of civilizations” and end of history!

A utopian, rosy picture of a world living a submissive, silent, and in Fukuyama’s word “boring” life under what turned out to be a sword of the Western liberal democratic military power. The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 was followed by the U.S. invasion of Panama a month later in December 1989. In 1991 Operation Desert Storm against Iraq ushered in the new era of “shock and awe” where Western liberal democratic powers used massive air power and weapons equipped with depleted uranium and harsh economic sanctions to subdue developing nations.

In the case of Iraq, the destruction of Iraq’s infrastructure and the subsequent sanctions killed more than a million Iraqis in one decade. 500,000 were children, whose death U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright bragged was a fair price to pay to contain Saddam Hussein.

This was followed by NATO’s bombing campaign against Yugoslavia in 1999. The 9/11, 2001 terror attacks in the U.S. gave a blank check to the U.S., Britain, and their willing allies to launch a series of invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria. The horrific war and famine in Yemen were rthe esults of this “war on terrorism”. These invasions destroyed whole state structures and gave rise to such awful phenomena as Al-Qaeda and Islamic State, making the self-fulfilling prophecy of the clash of the West with Islam a reality.

Fukuyama’s teacher Samuel Huntington, steeped in British geopolitics and perpetual war mentality, dampened his student’s apparent “optimistic” views with a call for the liberal democratic West to be on the alert. In his 1996 book “The Clash of Civilizations and The Remaking of The World Order”, based on a series of articles published since 1993, advocated that a clash between the dominant Western liberal democratic order on the one hand and Islam and a Confucian China on the other was inevitable.

Huntington wrote: “The West is and will remain for years to come the most powerful civilization. Yet its power relative to that of other civilizations is declining. As the West attempts to assert its values and to protect its interests, non-Western societies confront a choice. Some attempt to emulate the West and to join or to “band-wagon” with the West. Other Confucian and Islamic societies attempt to expand their own economic and military power to resist and to “balance” against the West. A central axis of post-Cold War world politics is thus the interaction of Western power and culture with the power and culture of non-Western civilizations.”

Three decades after these “prophesies” were pronounced, tens of millions of innocent people have been killed, maimed or made homeless seeking refuge around the globe, economies destroyed, and trillions of dollars wasted on weapons and ammunitions.

Still, the world looks more unsafe than ever, and a cold war, in the best of cases, or a hot WWIII, in the worst case, are looming. Those in Western corridors of power, who are drunk with the fantasy of the superiority of a flawless Western liberal democratic system, are sleep-walking the whole human civilization into extinction through a thermonuclear holocaust.

Asia’s rise source of optimism

The only bright spot in the past three decades of serial wars and economic-financial crises is the rise of Asia with China at its core. More and more nations are gravitating towards this new centre of economic power, optimism, and a belief in a common future of all mankind. This process, representing a new paradigm shift, was accelerated with the launching of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) by Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2013, the 2014 Fortaleza Declaration of the BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), and the expansion of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) into a garden of nations of Confucian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist Christian, and other faiths across Eurasia.

As the world’s developments and challenges increased and became more complex, China backed the BRI with the Global Development Initiative (GDI) in 2021, the Global Security Initiative (GSI) in 2022, and just recently, the Global Civilization Initiative (GCI).

A breakthrough in global governance and relations

The GCI, which was launched by President Xi during his keynote address at the Communist Party of China (CPC) Dialogue with World Political Parties High-Level Meeting on March 15 this year, is a unique proposal for establishing the goals of global governance and relations among nations and cultures. It raises the bar of political dialogue to a completely new level to address such philosophical issues as the purpose of the existence of nations and civilizations and the means through which the achievement of a peaceful co-existence among nations of the world who are so diverse in culture, history, religion, way of life, and political and social systems is reached.

President Xi, in his launching of the Global Civilisation Initiative has revived that optimistic spirit for a dangerously divided world today. It can potentially bury both the “clash of civilizations” and “end of history” insane and dangerous fantasies.

Xi started his speech by posing a number of deep and timely questions regarding the path towards modernization which China and also other nations may take. He said: “Polarization or common prosperity? Pure materialistic pursuit or coordinated material and cultural-ethical advancement? Draining the pond to catch the fish or creating harmony between man and nature? Zero-sum game or win-win cooperation? Copying other countries’ development model or achieving independent development in light of national conditions? What kind of modernization do we need and how can we achieve it?”

In summing up the importance of inter-civilizational dialogue and mutually beneficial cooperation, he said: “The CPC will continue to promote inter-civilization exchanges and mutual learning and advance the progress of human civilizations. Around the world, countries and regions have chosen different paths to modernization, which are rooted in their unique and long civilizations. All civilizations created by human society are splendid. They are where each country’s modernization drive draws its strength and where its unique feature comes from. They, transcending time and space, have jointly made ian mportant contribution to humanity’s modernization process. Chinese modernization, as a new form of human advancement, will draw upon the merits of other civilizations and make the garden of world civilizations more vibrant.”

Finally, Xi said: “Here, I wish to propose the Global Civilization Initiative. We advocate respect for the diversity of civilizations. Countries need to uphold the principles of equality, mutual learning, dialogue and inclusiveness among civilizations, and let cultural exchanges transcend estrangement, mutual learning transcend clashes, and coexistence transcend feelings of superiority.”

It is of utmost importance that, at this time of deep security, environmental, economic, and financial crises, that a voice of reason is raised to pull back humanity from the edge of the apocalyptic precipice it finds itself stirring at. Such an initiative for a “dialog of civilizations” rather than a “clash of civilizations” reminds humankind and nations about the purpose of their existence and the meaning of taking the best of what was bestowed upon them by previous generations and civilizations, and what they can contribute now and leave behind for their future generations.

There is a pressing need for discussing on a global scale the true nature of humankind and its purpose in existence. The Global Civilization Initiative is a timely and perfect launching pad for such a dialogue.

Plastic waste in Southeast Asia’s largest freshwater lake: Tonle Sap Basin

Using economic, population and waste data at provincial and national levels, coupled with high resolution population and flood datasets, we estimate that ca. 221,700 tons of plastic entered between 2000 and 2020, and 282,300 ± 8700 tons will enter between 2021 and 2030. We demonstrate that policy interventions can reduce MPW up to 76% between 2021 and 2030. The most-stringent scenario would prevent 99% of annual MPW losses by 2030, despite substantially higher waste volumes and population. If successfully implemented, Cambodia will prevent significant losses in natural capital, material value and degradation in TSB worth at least US$4.8 billion, with additional benefits for the Mekong River and South China Sea.

Plastic pollution has emerged in recent decades as one of the greatest contemporary threats to global ecosystems, representing a major challenge for water quality, aquatic life and overall human wellbeing in the twenty-first century. The ever-increasing global demand (and disposal) of plastics has led to profound changes to the natural world, as plastic has progressively leaked from the Anthroposphere. Plastic has since evolved into one of the most-recent, novel, and widely-recognised pollutant in the environment. Such is the comprehensive infiltration of plastic into the environment, across an entire spectrum of forms and size, plastic pollution is now irreversible and planetary-scale in nature. Consequently, plastic has already met two of the three conditions of a planetary boundary threat. It is unclear if or when plastic may exceed the final threshold of global systemic change to the planet.

Plastic pollution in many aquatic systems remains critically understudied and most research has focused on the marine environment. Freshwater is one of the most important natural resources available on Earth and the security of good-quality freshwater resources is an increasing global concern. Plastic pollution is compounding the mounting contemporary issues of climate-change, eutrophication, invasive species, and existing, legacy damage, caused by nutrient loading, acidification and shoreline modification. Specifically, the freshwater systems of Southeast Asia (SEA) are highly vulnerable, whilst the adaptive capacity of the population is comparatively low. While studies of riverine plastic pollution in SEA have grown, there are no dedicated systematic studies of plastic pollution in major SEA rivers, such as the Mekong River (MR).

Recent global modelling studies of riverine plastic pollution transported to the world’s oceans have demonstrated that SEA rivers contribute some of the highest quantities of plastic from continental interiors. However, whilst these studies have been successful in producing large datasets, and identifying rivers or regions for further examination, the uniform approach used for global aquatic systems have failed to capture the complexities of individual systems. This would imply that a higher degree of accuracy in the global estimates of plastic losses could be achieved if key sites were examined in detail. To address this disparity between global-scale modelling, and local spatial- and temporal-scale complexity in assessing plastic pollution, we develop and apply a rigorous modelling framework to investigate the past, present and future volume of mismanaged plastic waste (MPW) that has entered Tonle Sap Basin (TSB: comprising Tonle Sap Lake (TSL) and Tonle Sap River (TSR)) in Cambodia. We target TSB as it is the largest freshwater lake–river system in SEA and of global significance due to the unique flood-pulse annual cycle, cultural and historical heritage, and TSB’s connection with the MR, South China Sea and world’s oceans. In addition, TSB is a key site to directly investigate the impacts of MPW from a large population and a rapidly growing, lower-middle income country. Finally, we examine how targeted policy interventions could reduce MPW inputs into TSB and the growing global threat of MPW.

Tonle Sap Basin (TSB), situated within the 800,000 km² MR Basin in SEA, has a distinctive wet and dry season, causing water levels and hydrological inputs to the lake to fluctuate on an annual basis. Every year, the southwest monsoon creates a flood-pulse upstream in the MR Basin. The pulse of water is subsequently propagated through the main stem of the MR towards TSL via the TSR at the confluence of rivers in Phnom Penh. The rapid increase in water level in the MR causes the TSR to reverse its flow towards TSL. Mismanaged Plastic Waste losses projection from 2000 to 2030.

We estimate that ca. 221,700 tons of plastic entered TSB between 2000 and 2020. In 2000 we estimate that 1,750 tons year entered TSB, which rapidly increased between 19 and 41% per year until 2006. By 2010, we estimate that 9,411 tons year entered TSB. The annual increase to 2020 is slower but still amounts to 21,062 tons year entering TSB, representing a 124% increase from 2010. By 2030, under a Business As Usual (BAU) Scenario, we estimate that 34,392 tons year will enter TSB equating to an additional ca. 282,300 ± 8700 tons between 2021 and 2030.

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