THE USE AND ABUSE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE.


This is a superb article by Warwick Powell that looks at the different approaches to AI in China and the USA - the former is seen as a practical aid and the latter treats it as a 'metaphysical force' to advance human understanding (a kind of 21st century hippyism) - with the inevitable lapse into the film and entertainment industries where it is most profitable along with the huge draw on energy that the USA cannot provide...it looks at entropy (disorder) and its opposite, negentropy (order).


'The U.S. AI landscape, with its emphasis on AGI as a horizon goal, mirrors this obsession. When the promise of AGI fails to materialise (or at the very least, quietly fades away from the attention of the markets), attention pivots to entertainment and ephemeral applications, creating cultural and informational noise rather than systemic order.

Contrast this with China’s approach to AI, which is less encumbered by metaphysical or theological ambitions. Chinese AI strategy is pragmatic and pattern-oriented: the focus is on computational speed, efficiency, and controlled application in domains like logistics, finance, and surveillance. There is no obsession with AGI or the replication of human consciousness. Chinese planners and developers are acutely aware of the limits of both technology and mathematics, and this shapes a culture of bounded and grounded ambition. AI is a tool for optimisation, control and systemic improvement, not a project to dislodge metaphysical constraints..........The “AI miracle” is fraying on multiple fronts: physical, financial, conceptual and cultural. American AI’s pivot toward entertainment-focused applications is not merely a market anomaly; it is a symptom of structural and systemic misalignment.........The American AI boom points powerfully to the proposition that abstraction cannot escape its physical, conceptual and cultural substrate. Intelligence, however artificial, is not weightless. It is borne by circuits, cooled by water, powered by grids, constrained by supply chains and shaped by cultural preconceptions. When the material, systemic and conceptual cost of abstraction exceeds the order it produces, information ceases to be a resource and becomes a liability.

This is the paradox of A.I. with American characteristics. The negentropic promise of intelligence, is undone by the entropic logic of an outmoded energy system, fragile supply chains, speculative finance, philosophical misapprehensions and cultural overreach. Far from heralding a frictionless future, AI is dragging the U.S. deeper into the frictions of thermodynamics, scarcity and systemic instability.

Unless these contradictions are resolved - through sustainable energy, resilient supply chains, bounded conceptual ambition and cultural recalibration - AI is unlikely to symbolise the triumph of human intelligence but instead, reflect he tragedy of its disconnection from reality. Those gleaming, humming data centres may, one day, stand a monument to the systemic costs of ignoring the viability of value itself.'





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