Situating the beautiful island

 I am concentrating on the technological aspects of Taiwan’s place in the world order because there is a need to rely on that point to temper people’s reactions to what I have to say about Taiwan.  The truth is that Taiwan is a small island nation and its impact on world affairs from a dollars-and-cents standpoint does revolve around its high-value tech exports.  As an Asian Tiger economy it is used to that.  Of course, further examination will reveal that it is much more than that when the deeper and more humanistic analysis comes into play.  Taiwan is in a similar place in Asia that the United States is in in the rest of the world in not having to justify the necessity of its democracy.  That is to say, the sensibility has almost totally won out in both countries that democracy is common sense. 

Compare this to China where people seem almost confused about how to discuss democracy.  My impression, having lived in both places for a time, is that something special happened on Taiwan that is unique to it and of which there are only vestiges left on the mainland.  Obviously we would actually prefer these things to be spread as widely as possible, but it is in the nature of things to be best understood in places closest to their birth.  And so it is that Taiwan has a sort of indispensability like the sort that America has, to the world.  The problem is, few know about this because Taiwan is not a great economic power and a large country like others.  But Taiwan shows its indispensability by precise and sophisticated interventions in the global order, like commanding the manufacture of silicon computer chips, which we have all come to rely on.  We are ignoring its great natural beauty (it was named “the beautiful island” in Portuguese for a reason) and its other contributions to global culture by focusing on the computer aspect of it, but do we have a choice sometimes but to marvel at what they are doing so well as to be above critique?  It’s amazing and so necessary for democracy and peace. 

The real picture is more complex and more interesting.  Taiwan is at the forefront of computing not only because of the luck of ages; rather because it was making computer electronics as a state-planning economic initiative to produce quality home manufacture.  The State apparatus that allowed for this had certain distinct advantages compared to others in Asia because it commanded a captive workforce.  The former one-party state ruled by the Kuomintang (KMT) had laid hold of Taiwan in 1947 by force and fiat.  Assuming the command of Japanese colonial planning for Taiwan under that Empire’s defeated plans for Pacific domination, they seized control of the island easily but with immense bloodshed and governed it under martial law for decades.  Taiwan’s unique structure in political economy has a lot to do with this double colonialism that has links to the long history of Asian and European colonialism and imperialism on Taiwanese soil.  The Portuguese who named it Ilha Formosa - the beautiful island - and the Dutch have been there in a more or less colonial way, and the influence from those days still remains to some extent especially in the global networks of political economy.  The Dutch, for example, are involved in making the special lithography equipment that is used to create semiconductor wafers.  These facts can’t be denied although the situation has evolved since then and they problematize the political economy we are talking about when it comes to silicon chips.  Taiwan’s geopolitical station is still bound up to some extent in these colonial networks of trade.  But the biggest colonial influence on Taiwan is still the KMT, which is still a political party on Taiwan.  These politics are complicated.  A student political movement from 2014 challenged some of these aspects of Taiwan’s political society.  This Sunflower Movement has to a certain extent been absorbed into Taiwanese political life and reinvigorated policy, including for Taiwanese representation on the global stage such as the UN, as a goal.  The DPP, a party that formed as the opposition to the KMT during the days of martial law, has made this a policy goal.  The Sunflower Movement was much like the ongoing movement in the United States to Occupy Wall Street in its relative scope and in the fundamental ideals behind it.  Some of the leaders of that opposition movement have become central to the progressive wing of the DPP in the years since 2014.  In addition, there has been a reinvigoration of the body politick due to the action of Sunflower Movement participants.  A longstanding media and human rights watchdog group, Taiwan Communique, sent its final report out when the administration of President Tsai Ing-wen was elected in 2016, in recognition of Taiwan finally substantially achieving full democratization.  That administration is serving its last term, and the question is whether the DPP can earn another four years to advance its agenda, and this is an open question.  In advance of the January elections the most important thing that can be said is that maintaining a democratic spirit free of Chinese Mainland influence is of the utmost priority, nonetheless everyone expects that some form of some such influence will appear.  

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On the role of A.I. in the context of Taiwan’s moment, it may be worth it to go back for a minute to those in Taiwan who look to benefit from the technology.  It is true that Jensen Huang’s company NVIDIA stands to gain a lot from widespread A.I. adoption.  It is true that Mr. Huang’s given the commencement address at National Taiwan University this past spring.  But it is instructive to look at for what A.I is being touted for: rendering digital images and enriching video game experiences as a first major case for application, and coordinating manufacturing at a distance for another.  Neither of those looks like a complete A.I. takeover, and that is the kind of application most in industry are flocking toward.  On the other hand the large language models look like they have more human limitations being put on them as anyone watching the news on this will know.  A.I. models are not capable of working without training data, of which a large number of the data are copyrighted: a big problem for A.I. companies, that they can’t easily get around.  There are a lot of legal things to be worked out about A.I., and these intrinsic limitations bring forward the contention that A.I. not only won’t be allowed to replace creative workers, but it can’t, for two reasons: 1) because it can’t exist but for training data scraped from copyrighted works and 2) because it is limited against using its own productions within its model.  A.I. large language models are mostly parasitical on the large cultural production of the world.  This will largely limit the widespread reproduction of A.I. works in works online — the very works A.I. LLMs scrape for training data — or else introduce a destructive element — A.I.’s own productions — into its calculations.  Too much use of A.I. LLMs on the internet will tend to limit the amount of acceptable training data for A.I. by exactly as much as it produces.  A.I. proliferation is bad for A.I., at least in the large language models, and so it is very much nonsensical to be writing off real human creative endeavors due to A.I..  A.I. in a long view, of a mature A.I. ecosystem, isn’t capable of creatively overtaking real work done by humans: if you look closely at the system that is producing A.I., it is aiming at more modest goals.  Advertising, perhaps, but not creative works of art and culture.  Coding, perhaps, but not writing great novels or plays.  And coordinating assembly lines, but not replacing the human labor necessary to make things.  A.I. is not the answer!  It is self-limiting as a central concept, it is at best peripheral.  This is not to even start getting into some of the societal hurdles.  So what can we say about Jensen Huang’s NVIDIA and all that?  This is all part of an electronics ecosystem leading to the next big computing paradigm.  A.I. itself is not it: the true end game at this point is the “data center as computer” and the geopolitical game plan of Taiwan as a global data hub in a post-Hong Kong democratic world.  A lot of pieces are moving.  A.I. is at most a pivot point in the development of ever more powerful computing, up to the next paradigm which will finally be able to catch up to the dire demands of the climate crisis: quantum computing, from which we may finally get the power to calculate the processes behind climate change.  Technological progress moves apace, and yet A.I. is but one temporary toehold in the progress ever higher, which may leave behind the hype very shortly.