The Song Dynasty (960-1279) established a state monopoly over saltpeter production, a critical ingredient in gunpowder. The government appointed officials to oversee the collection and refinement of saltpeter.
During the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), the government further tightened its control over saltpeter production, with the “Saltpeter Censorate” responsible for managing the state monopoly.
Limiting knowledge:
Chinese officials kept the recipe for gunpowder a closely guarded secret. The exact proportions of saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal were not shared widely.
Technical manuals on gunpowder production, such as the “Wujing Zongyao” (Collection of the Most Important Military Techniques) from the Song Dynasty, were restricted and not freely circulated.
Strict regulations:
The Ming Dynasty implemented strict laws and regulations on the private manufacture and use of gunpowder weapons. Violators faced severe punishments, including execution.
In the 14th century, Ming Emperor Hongwu issued an edict prohibiting the private production and sale of gunpowder and firearms, limiting their use to the military.
Emphasis on traditional weapons:
Confucian scholars and officials promoted the idea that traditional weapons, such as bows and crossbows, were more suitable for maintaining social order and harmony.
Military examinations during the Ming Dynasty focused on proficiency in traditional weapons rather than gunpowder weapons, reinforcing the importance of traditional warfare techniques.
What’s the saltpeter?
You make manufacturingprogrammable parallel processing hardware, above some certain baseline, a controlled item, and track at all times the location of the chipmaking tooling.
Every IC fab under international regulations would be inspected, and only low power ICs would be permitted without a licence. All our phones, game consoles, computers work as dumb terminals—very little compute is local (computers are all just remote terminals) and as much as possible is in licensed and inspected data centers.
Any internal source codes, documents, etc belonging to AI companies must be seized and classified under the same schema as nuclear secrets.
All software also is a restricted item—being a SWE is a licensed profession, you must have permission from the government (like planning approval) to author anything, and only government licensed software can run on a computer above a certain threshold. The “government software inspectors” will be checking to make sure the implementation isn’t just a lazy call to a neural network.
We need to have state controlled media promote the idea that intellectual labor, such as art and computer programming, is more suitable for maintaining social order and harmony. Propaganda must emphasize the danger of trusting any generated assets from AI as soulless cheap copies that will never work.
Schools need to remove any training on using AI from the curriculum—even discussing “prompt engineering” should be a crime.
It wasn’t until the the Opium Wars (1839-1842 and 1856-1860) and the Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895) where this ban caused substantial losses to China.
880 years! Getting 20 years out of an AGI ban, before falling to attack from AGI driven weapons from foreign rivals, sounds optimistic.
Just keep in mind the ultimate consequences. Imagine the Chinese soldiers facing machine guns and advanced 19th century warships.
Or: Prompt: draw a nation that banned AGI facing attack by foreign rivals. Show a battle scene, where all the soldiers in the foreground are old from a lack of regenerative medicine, and the enemy is mostly a sky blotting swarm of drones
This is actually a dynamic I’ve read a lot about. The risk of ending up militarily/technologically behind is already well on the minds of the people who make up all of the major powers today, and all diplomacy and negotiations are already built on top of that ground truth and mitigating the harm/distrust that stems from it.
Weakness at mitigating distrust = just being bad at diplomacy. Finding galaxy-brained solutions to coordination problems is necessary for being above par in this space.
What’s the saltpeter?
You make manufacturing programmable parallel processing hardware, above some certain baseline, a controlled item, and track at all times the location of the chipmaking tooling.
Every IC fab under international regulations would be inspected, and only low power ICs would be permitted without a licence. All our phones, game consoles, computers work as dumb terminals—very little compute is local (computers are all just remote terminals) and as much as possible is in licensed and inspected data centers.
Any internal source codes, documents, etc belonging to AI companies must be seized and classified under the same schema as nuclear secrets.
All software also is a restricted item—being a SWE is a licensed profession, you must have permission from the government (like planning approval) to author anything, and only government licensed software can run on a computer above a certain threshold. The “government software inspectors” will be checking to make sure the implementation isn’t just a lazy call to a neural network.
We need to have state controlled media promote the idea that intellectual labor, such as art and computer programming, is more suitable for maintaining social order and harmony. Propaganda must emphasize the danger of trusting any generated assets from AI as soulless cheap copies that will never work.
Schools need to remove any training on using AI from the curriculum—even discussing “prompt engineering” should be a crime.
It wasn’t until the the Opium Wars (1839-1842 and 1856-1860) and the Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895) where this ban caused substantial losses to China.
880 years! Getting 20 years out of an AGI ban, before falling to attack from AGI driven weapons from foreign rivals, sounds optimistic.
Just keep in mind the ultimate consequences. Imagine the Chinese soldiers facing machine guns and advanced 19th century warships.
Or:
Prompt: draw a nation that banned AGI facing attack by foreign rivals. Show a battle scene, where all the soldiers in the foreground are old from a lack of regenerative medicine, and the enemy is mostly a sky blotting swarm of drones
This is actually a dynamic I’ve read a lot about. The risk of ending up militarily/technologically behind is already well on the minds of the people who make up all of the major powers today, and all diplomacy and negotiations are already built on top of that ground truth and mitigating the harm/distrust that stems from it.
Weakness at mitigating distrust = just being bad at diplomacy. Finding galaxy-brained solutions to coordination problems is necessary for being above par in this space.
I’m imagining the cat masks are some sort of adversarial attack on possible enemy image classifiers.