Elon Musk, Alex Karp, and Peter Thiel may want a sleek Blade Runner dystopia where they control the masses through surveillance and brutality, but it’s still a future we can kill before it’s too late. In the political global alt-right, the wheels are coming off for three of today’s worst: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Viktor Orban. Instead of a flying car, these mooks are behind the wheel of a Soviet-era Lada screaming at the dashboard as if that will make the engine start again. »

— Rick Wilson, co-founder of the Lincoln Project, at his Substack Rick Wilson’s Against All Enemies.

Book Reading- Post Employment Society: Whose Tech nobility? Whose Artificial Intelligence?

https://www.amazon.com/%E5%BE%8C%E5%B0%B1%E6%A5%AD%E7%A4%BE%E6%9C%83%EF%BC%9A%E8%AA%B0%E6%98%AF%E7%A7%91%E6%8A%80%E8%B2%B4%E6%97%8F%EF%BC%9F%E8%AA%B0%E7%9A%84%E4%BA%BA%E5%B7%A5%E6%99%BA%E8%83%BD%EF%BC%9F-Traditional-Chinese-%E9%9F%93%E6%B1%9F%E9%9B%AA-%E9%84%92%E5%B4%87%E9%8A%98-ebook/dp/B086DDCXF2

A rare Chinese Traditional characters easy reading book that address this global topic in the context of HK, especially under the increasing authoritarian CCP and HKCCP regime’s driving technology and state sponsored policies in HK.

A special point to be noted by USA and all naive Western governments as mentioned in Chapter 15. Just like the success of the Silicon Valley that received a lot of monetary investments from US government, especially the Defence Force’s demand for high technologies, same as Beijing’s ambitions to direct, interfere and drive the technologies funding and visions in HK. To them, HK is the perfect front and backdoor to bypass all US sanctions and Western sanctions. What US and Western governments don’t know or refuse to face the bloody reality is:

1. China has aggressive 1000 people plan to export people to HK via their lackey regime in HK to access to external knowledge and technologies, thks to the previous US special relationship Act and the many ignorant and greedy Western universities who set up partnership and collaboration with the tertiary education institutions in HK.

2. Under the authoritarian CCP and HKCCP’s tightly political driven policies, 22 major strategic labs (i.e. P3 grade or equivalent) are receiving government funding from CCP/PRC. Each lab receives one million RMB. MOST of the elites in these labs come from Mainland China. Their research directions, focuses, and topics clearly serve PRC’s state interests. 

Local HK students and scholars are increasingly margainalizeed. The research freedom and academic autonomy is questionable. Think about the fled of Dr Meng L Yang at the early stage of Covid-19 pandemic and the specific instructions of not ‘touching the red line’ approach she received from her supervisor and the corrupted P3 Lab director who PERSONALLY received lots of monetary benefits from PRC CCP, the extent of political interference and lack of academic and science research autonomy can be seen.

3. In foreseeable future, the future of HK’s tertiary education and science parks will be used by PRC CCP to access prohibited and restrictive Western knowledge and technologies to serve its One Road One Belt global domination. The new aristocrats will be mainly Mainlanders and very few cross-borders technology experts who serve as agents or benefit from the authoritarian regimes in Beijing and in HK while ordinary citizens have no share in the new big cheese cake.

 It becomes a tale of two cities within one city because they cannot catch up and board on this new techno-aristocratic high speed train. They will be even further marginalised socially and economically. At the most, they will be slaves of new tech savvy consumerism or the new lab rats. Their jobs may be displaced under massive scale of automation and commercialization of new AI technologies. Increasingly, they will find it hard to sustain the high living cost in HK. Like the American Indians being driven to the new ‘no where to go’ remoteness, same will happen to many common HK people-to remote counties, towns and cities (3rd or 4th tiers cities/counties/towns) in China while the HKCCP regime indoctrinates them to ‘enjoy’ the ‘new brave world’ of the Greater Delta region. One sentence in this book summarized this well to depict the excluded people in the process: if there is no (share in the) cheese cake to begin with, how can somebody steal it from us?!

To the West, if they don’t adjust their own universities’ research ‘collaboration’ and ‘co-operation’ programs with HK’s tertiary education that is rapidly losing the academic autonomy and freedom under PRC tyranny in HK to help advancing China’s neo-global colonialism, they will be the next displaced new American “Indians” back in their homelands and on the world stage, just like they drove out and displaced the indigenous populations of many countries under the colonialism two centuries ago.

Rather than bringing the ‘brave new world’, the global trend is a lot of people’s jobs are at risks. Less and less long term stable full time jobs with good career advancement prospective remain. More people are in contract, temp or much short term employment without even basic employment rights and benefits protection. They are the new serfs to the new lords who enslave them. In the gig economy, few technocrats elites dominate the world. They sleep with or lick the ass of other dictators to grow their own profits. They refuse to be regulated by democratic governments back at homes. They become too big as morons to be regulated by democratic governments. 

Democracy and social inclusiveness rapidly erode. The 1984 world becomes more part of the reality not only in authoritarian jurisdictions. What George Orwell failed to foresee was the new techno-aristocrats are the people who empowered the big brothers in the extreme greedy capitalism for their own profits at the expense of the entire free world. 

How could all these happening? Thanks to the neo-liberalism for decades. The same political ideologies that breed globalization has also given birth to the new dark age of global techno-authoritarianism, state censorship (not just happening in authoritarian regime but actually first stated in Western democratic countries in name of ‘counter-terrorism’ ) and a new  neo-feudalism ruled by the tech elites who covered the devil’s face with ‘tech savvy’ masks.