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China’s AI Breakthroughs Show It Is Outcompeting Monopoly Capitalism

February 21, 2025 João Romeiro Hermeto, Geopolitical Economy. , , , , , ,
The Chinese company DeepSeek has made a major breakthrough in the development of artificial intelligence (AI), with the release of its deep learning model R1. As the Financial Times put it, “With DeepSeek, China innovates and the US imitates”. Until now, the West had deemed China incapable of innovation, and Western monopoly capitalism was considered the summit of technological development. China has quietly and gradually overcome not only crucial internal contradictions but, above all, impediments imposed by the West that sought to curb its development.

US Tech CEOs Admit They Want AI Monopoly And ‘Unipolar World’

February 3, 2025 Ben Norton, Geopolitical Economy. , , , , , , , , , , , ,
The CEO of Anthropic, a US AI company backed by Amazon and Google, argued that the government must impose heavy restrictions on China in order to maintain a monopoly on artificial intelligence technology. If the US government can block China from getting advanced semiconductors, we will “live in a unipolar world, where only the US and its allies have these models”, wrote Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. Calling for more aggressive sanctions on China, Amodei warned, “Well-enforced export controls are the only thing that can prevent China from getting millions of chips, and are therefore the most important determinant of whether we end up in a unipolar or bipolar world”.

Chris Hedges Report: Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism

January 30, 2025 Chris Hedges, Scheer Post. , , ,
The year 2008 signaled to many the weak foundations of modern capitalism in the hands of the greedy, untethered financial sector—the “vampire squid” investment banks as journalist Matt Taibbi called them. Rising from the ashes of the crash, these banks used government money—”socialism for the bankers”—to enrich themselves and Big Business. This money never got to the masses. Instead shares were bought back in traditional capitalist industries and an emerging powerful bloc—the Jeff Bezos’s, the Microsoft’s, the Google’s of the world—invested in what guest Yanis Varoufakis calls, “cloud capital.”

China’s Shocking DeepSeek AI Pops US Big Tech Monopoly Bubble

January 29, 2025 Ben Norton, Geopolitical Economy. , , , , , , ,
China is making enormous progress in the development of artificial intelligence technology, and it has set off a political and economic earthquake in the West. The stocks of US Big Tech corporations crashed on January 27, losing hundreds of billions of dollars in market capitalization over the span of just a few hours, on the news that a small Chinese company called DeepSeek had created a new cutting-edge AI model, which was released for free to the public. The UK’s leading newspaper The Guardian described DeepSeek as “the biggest threat to Silicon Valley’s hegemony”.

Supercomputer Talks Between Israel, Amazon, And Google Collapse

January 4, 2025 Palestine Chronicle, Orinoco Tribune. , , , , , , , , , ,
In a significant shift, talks between the Israel Innovation Authority (IIA) and tech giants Amazon and Google regarding the development of a government supercomputer have collapsed. Following the breakdown in negotiations, the Israeli government has opened up the project to other bidders, signaling a shift toward an alternative technological partnership. As reported by Globes, the tender for the supercomputer project is valued at NIS 290 million (approximately $79.4 million), with the winning bidder set to receive a government grant of NIS 160 million ($44 million).

Dark Oxygen: Deep-Sea Discovery Challenges Scientific Assumptions

August 5, 2024 Felicity Bradstock, Naked Capitalism. , , ,
The discovery of “dark oxygen”, oxygen produced deep under the surface of the sea, is shining a light on the potential risks of deep-sea mining for metals and minerals. There has already been great controversy over plans to approve deep-sea mining activities at the international level, to meet the growing demand for critical minerals, and the recent discovery demonstrates just how little we know about marine ecosystems. An international team of researchers recently discovered that oxygen is being made by potato-shaped metallic nodules deep under the surface of the Pacific Ocean. In July, their findings, which throw into dispute the concepts of oxygen production, were published in the Nature Geoscience journal.

Technocapitalism: Our Dystopian Present—And Future?

April 20, 2024 Chris Hedges, The Real News Network. , , ,
We are living through an incipient technological revolution. AI, blockchain, cryptocurrencies, commercial space travel, and other innovations are rapidly transforming everything from the workplace to the financial architecture of the global economy. While many of these technologies hold vast potential to benefit the social good, the multinational corporations and financial oligarchy that drive innovation and own its products are solely motivated by private profit. The consequences are unfolding all around us. As technology and the power of the oligarchy advances, the misery and disenfranchisement of the majority grows.

How The United States Is Waging Economic War On China

April 11, 2024 Radhika Desai and Michael Hudson, Geopolitical Economy. , , , , , ,
In our last two shows, we looked at China’s economy and where it was headed, busting major Western myths about it, and highlighting the differences between the Chinese and US economies that explain the dynamism of the former and the productive decline of the latter. We spoke about how China was embarked on engineering the next industrial revolution through a major structural transformation, not only to continue its high growth, but also to improve its quality, technologically and in human terms. And in doing this, China is increasingly taking the technological lead in more and more frontier sectors, including green technology, artificial intelligence, and nanotechnology.

EU Advances AI Rules Restricting Facial Recognition

June 15, 2023 Julia Conley, Common Dreams. , , , ,
Digital rights groups on Wednesday applauded lawmakers across the European Union after they passed a draft law that would strictly regulate the use of artificial intelligence including facial recognition technology and chatbots, potentially setting a new standard for protecting the public from the misuse of AI—but noted that some provisions could exclude vulnerable people. The European Parliament passed a major legislative hurdle as it voted in favor of the draft rules in the Artificial Intelligence Act, with 499 lawmakers supporting the provisions, 28 opposing, and 93 abstaining from voting.

Here Come The Militarized Robots (But There Go Our Civil Liberties)

April 19, 2023 Tom Valovic, Massachusetts Peace Action. , ,
Many decades ago, when science fiction was still whimsical and fun rather than dark and dystopian, we saw robots appear in popular culture that were benign and friendly. Some may recall Robbie the Robot from the movie “Forbidden Planet” and, of course, there was R2D2 in “Star Wars”, with a demeanor as cute as any Fox Terrier. But now our movies seem to be much darker for reasons we can only speculate about. Cinematically, perhaps, the turning point was the movie “Terminator” which introduced the idea of the cyborg human that was able to project overwhelming power. While the nation was busy coping with Covid, several dystopian trends seem to have sprung from a Pandora’s box.

Our Tech Overlords Offer Another Climate Solution Without Sacrifice

April 17, 2023 Kurt Cobb, Resilience. , , ,
My expectations are never disappointed when I read the news each day and find out that the solutions to the problems created by our modern technology are to be found in more technology. We do not need to restructure our society, reduce our consumption, moderate our desires or change our habits. Technology will solve our problems without us having to make any substantial change in our way of life. The breathless coverage of a university-based startup company that will draw carbon dioxide out of the ocean—thereby making room for more carbon dioxide from the air to be absorbed—may convince you that we can all sit back and let our tech overlords solve climate change.

The Digital Tools Unlocking Democracy In Our Cities

March 12, 2023 Hollie Russon Gilman and Grace Levin, Next City. , , ,
Digitization. It’s the threat that modern democracies, and especially cities, must solve – at least according to current dialogues on digital regulation. Many of the social and political problems our cities face today have been exacerbated by technology. Social media and other digital tools have increased the spread of misinformation and overall weakened public trust in our civic, social and political institutions. Recent developments in virtual reality and artificial intelligence raise new concerns for issues around surveillance, bias, automation and exploitation, especially with increasing public scrutiny on technology giants like Meta and Google.

Expanding Regenerative Agriculture Through Open Source Technologies

March 2, 2023 David Bollier, Bollier.org. , , ,
Dorn Cox is a family farmer who has long been in the vanguard of improving regenerative agriculture with open source technologies. He sees participatory science and knowledge commons as powerful tools for improving agriculture in countless ways:  crop yields, soil health, water usage, ecosystem resilience. All are especially needed in the face of climate change. I wanted to learn more, so in my latest episode of Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #36), I spoke with Cox about these topics, which are extensively examined in his new book The Great Regeneration:  Ecological Agriculture, Open-Source Technology, and a Radical Vision of Hope. 

After Rogue Experiment, Mexico Plans To Ban Solar Geoengineering

January 23, 2023 Sebastian Rodriguez and Joe Lo, Climate Home News. , , ,
The Mexican government said it will develop a strategy to ban future experimentation with solar geoengineering, which will also include an information campaign and scientific reports. However, the government did not announce more specific actions. “Mexico reiterates its unavoidable commitment to the protection and well-being of the population from practices that generate risks to human and environmental security,” said the government in a statement. Geoengineering refers to the act of deliberately changing the Earth’s systems to control its climate. One theoretical proposal has been to spray sulphur particles to cool the planet —which has been documented to briefly happen after volcanic eruptions. A recent United Nations report found that this practice, known as stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI), “has the potential to reduce global mean temperatures”.

Circuits Of War: On Biden’s Technological Offensive Against China

November 28, 2022 Marco d’Eramo, Friends of Socialist China. , , ,
A world war was declared on 7 October. No news station reported on it, even though we will all have to suffer its effects. That day, the Biden administration launched a technological offensive against China, placing stringent limits and extensive controls on the export not only of integrated circuits, but also their designs, the machines used to ‘write’ them on silicon and the tools these machines produce. Henceforth, if a Chinese factory requires any of these components to produce goods – like Apple’s mobile phones, or GM’s cars – other firms must request a special licence to export them. Why has the US implemented these sanctions? And why are they so severe? Because, as Chris Miller writes in his recent book Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology (2022), ‘the semiconductor industry produces more transistors every day than there are cells in the human body’.
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