The Death And Rebirth Of Europe

They’re saying Europe is dying. “We need to be lucid, and recognise that our Europe is mortal. It can die. It all depends on the choices we make, and those choices need to be made now,” Emmanuel Macron said in April. Its two largest economies — Germany and France — have practically stopped growing, and unemployment is rising; they both have unstable governments with right-wing populists waiting in the wings. Long-open borders between EU member states have suddenly gotten tighter as countries clamp down to protect themselves from immigrants.

In Germany last fall, I expected to find a Europe in crisis; on my way to Kassel, home to the avant-garde cultural research organization Documenta, my train passed through Wolfsburg, where gigantic Volkswagen logos filled the green countryside. A few days later, I learned that three of VW’s plants were slated for closure — the first time in 87 years that the company would shutter factories. Tens of thousands of workers could be laid off. Fourteen million people work in Europe’s automotive industry, which generates about 7% of the total European GDP. Europe has an ambition to ban the sale of new cars with combustion engines by 2035. Where that leaves German car companies is anybody’s guess, but most are guessing pessimistically. 

All this anxiety about a changing world order is being channeled in different ways across the continent. The likes of Mario Draghi generate technocratic reports about the need to stay competitive. The folk demon Viktor Orbán voices it in more sentimental terms, as when he commented that “there are two suns in the sky.” He meant that Europe is trapped between China and the U.S. and cannot sever ties with either. Why not? What is it about either country that Europe needs so badly?

Silicon Valley venture capitalists and the Chinese government are united in an obsession with technological progress. “The CPC and the Chinese government view tech innovation as the core of national development,” China’s Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Lin Jian said at a briefing last September; Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel and other oligarchs say the same about technology in the U.S. and are increasingly intervening in American politics to remove any guardrails on their quest to beat China in the technology race. Many Europeans worry about being the subject rather than master of the two parallel tech revolutions happening in East (in energy) and West (in computation) today. 

Draghi’s September 2024 report on competitiveness recognized this dilemma by calling for a seemingly impossible €750-800-billion investment (at least 4% of the bloc’s 2023 GDP and more than double the investment under the Marshall Plan) in advanced technologies and decarbonization infrastructure to stay relevant as the two suns continue rising in Europe’s sky. The financial and technological relationship of Europeans to America, Draghi wrote in his foreword to the report, is like the relationship of the hinterland to the metropolis: 

If America dominates Europe from above, China is coming from below. Its increasingly adept control of high-end manufacturing has caused German industry — BASF, Volkswagen, hundreds of Mittelstand (small-medium-sized businesses) — that is at the heart of Europe’s economy to totter. (Interestingly, Volkswagen and BASF have both made multi-billion euro investments in China recently, so it seems like the future of Europe is tottering rather than the future of individual German companies, which may continue to thrive — but in a Chinese setting.) So Europe’s hardware is increasingly made in China and its operating software is American, making the continent neither the lord nor the worker in the world that is taking shape. 

What role can Europe play? With American diplomatic relations under Donald Trump in question, the Chinese still hope that Europe will be, if not a swing state, then at any rate neutral, driven to trade with China by a desire to avoid inflation and rebuild an energy infrastructure for a world in which fossil fuels are beginning to have an intolerable cost. Neutrality in a competition for sovereignty amounts to acquiescing to subordination. But the question facing Europe applies beyond its borders — the American middle class, which remains determined to have a meaningful life in an economy reshaped by AI, faces it too. Even though the frontiers of science and technology are every day being pushed into new terrain, the world feels somehow smaller and dingier, prompting many Europeans — indeed, people of many nationalities — to ask whether such “progress” is heading in a direction they want to go. Maybe Europe will be the place where these changes are digested in a democratic way.

On travels through the three economic blocs in the months before the 2024 American election, I noticed how advanced technoscience maps onto the same space and mental archetypes of settler colonialism — artificial intelligence in Xinjiang monitoring and suppressing ethnic minorities, Elon Musk swaggering through the Southwestern desert to gaze upon the border-crossing points used by migrants. Humanity, it seems more and more often, is being divided into the experimenters and the experimented upon. Despite its wealth, Europe’s population seems to be tumbling into the latter category.

Computation needs energy, and energy needs application, but the climate crisis has made it clear that decarbonization is not optional, so powering AI with oil and gas isn’t really a solution to the problems of today and tomorrow. From Nevada to Shenzhen, it feels so obvious that America needs Chinese renewable energy technology, and China needs American computation technology. Together, endless energy fueling ecologically sustainable computation could lead us to a post-scarcity world. But we’re not together, and the world that’s emerging feels more like a kind of oligarchic nouveau feudalism where, at the core of the developed world, a hole is widening under the middle class.

I. USA Parkway

“Error has transformed animals into men; is truth perhaps capable of changing man back into an animal?”
— Friedrich Nietzsche

NEVADA — Our neon green pickup truck sped along State Route 439, better known as the USA Parkway, where Google, Tesla, Apple and others host their cloud in giant data centers. Siri lives in these hills. In the vastness of the American southwest, the military-industrial complex, the nuts and bolts of big tech, huge land artworks and numerous utopian experiments all bump into one another. I was traveling with paleontologist Martin Sander, who digs up ichthyosaur fossils in the Augusta Mountains. It was about places like this that Robert Smithson — the artist known best for Spiral Jetty, the huge work of land art in the Great Salt Lake that is slowly being exposed as the water level there drops — wrote, “The strata of the Earth is a jumbled museum. Embedded in the sediment is a text that contains limits and boundaries which evade the rational order, and social structures which confine art.” Smithson asked what the land was trying to tell us about freedom, but here we Americans have rarely been willing to listen, preferring instead to set off explosions, dig for diamonds, gather for hallucinogenic orgies, build casinos and host data centers.

Most of the roads I drove down with Sander were rarely traveled by anybody besides miners. We spoke of “deep time” and the parallels between evolutionary biology and the evolution of our species. Without Deng Xiaoping, he told me, we might not have discovered how dinosaurs became birds. (It was during the economic explosion under Deng that a black market in dinosaur bones in Liaoning became formalized, which led to paleontological breakthroughs.) Sander’s work on the fossil record explores how compounded subtle changes over time can lead a species to evolve into something totally different, which was the feature of a Nevada Art Museum exhibition called “Deep Time: Sea Dragons of Nevada.” Human history — evolution, agriculture, industrialization, our climate crisis today — is, in planetary terms, just a blink of an eye, he told me, a blip in Earth’s deeper patterns. We came, we saw, we conquered and maybe we’re going somewhere else now, co-evolving with our technology and our planet’s changes, turning our gaze unto the stars.

Sander’s theory of sauropod gigantism suggests that some species naturally evolve to take up all the room available to them. In the case of his beloved ichthyosaurs, the quest for ever more Lebensraum prompted one branch of the species to become giant and warm-blooded. The cold-blooded ichthyosaur had a slow metabolism and didn’t need to eat as much, but it couldn’t survive the coldest depths of the ocean; by becoming warm-blooded, the sea dragons grew and grew, consuming more and more resources. But a warm-blooded beast has a fast metabolism, and it needs constant consumption to survive. At some point, the giant warm-blooded ichthyosaur went extinct, but the smaller cold-blooded one did not. Although this is a parable of how being gigantic doesn’t always work out, the warm-blooded ichthyosaur existed for possibly a hundred million years.

From here in the homeland of the American military-industrial complex, the megastructure of our hot-blooded and carnivorous society seems to be crashing and burning. But even as the climate degrades around us, a new form of sapience is emerging. This sapience thrives in deserts and pulses in mountains devoid of mammalian life. It is hot-blooded, with electricity surging through it. It gave James Lovelock, the originator of the idea that the Earth is a self-sustaining organism, hope at the end of his years that life, in some shape or form, will continue in the long run, perhaps in a more sophisticated form than what we have today.

If America was run by the Chinese Communist Party, Nevada would surely be covered with solar panels, like Xinjiang is quickly becoming. It’s not. Unless America, and particularly Silicon Valley, solves its energy bottleneck, AI development might slow down. Will sclerotic U.S. politics be able to catch up with technology, or have our technological capacities outpaced our cultural capacity to understand and to act?

II. What Makes Chinese AI Chinese?

“For progress, there is no cure.”
— John von Neumann

GUANGZHOU — Artificial intelligence has become a subject of obsessive interest in China, from the government to public intellectuals to ordinary people. The Institute of Public Policy (IPP), a think tank at the South China University of Technology in Guangzhou, hosted a conference late last September that brought together industry voices, scholars and that peculiar Chinese category of academics who are somehow also, in a hidden and nebulous way, policy advisors. Imagine an academic conference in which the mayor sits in the front row, asking questions. 

Years ago, during the Chimerican period, Shenzhen built what California invented. During the ongoing divorce — or, perhaps, the temporary split before a reunion — both sides, which once worked hand in hand, are left with crippled limbs, only halfway able to realize their goals. If the quest for advanced technologies is a race, the U.S. is in the lead but keeps glancing back over its shoulder, while China maintains the concentration that comes from staring straight ahead at a rival.

Unlike China’s, the American economy is consumer-oriented. America’s sexiest AI applications — ChatGPT, Sora, Midjourney — have gotten a wide uptake from ordinary people who want to play around with the technology. In contrast, China is a production-oriented society, and Chinese AI companies are (mostly) more inclined to seek business providing big-data solutions to large companies and industries like health care, transportation, energy and education. China being China, many of those enterprises are state-owned. 

Here, AI is less about chatbots and more about making trains run on time, irrigating deserts, enhancing agricultural productivity and providing health care to poor regions without adequate numbers of doctors and hospitals. If that sounds pretty Communist, that’s because it is — Chinese AI serves the goals of the Chinese government, which are not about maximizing investor returns so much as improving and perfecting national infrastructure, health care, educational outcomes for deprived regions and fueling what Xi Jinping has talked about as the Fourth Industrial Revolution. 

Chinese AI, therefore, is funded and directed in a different way than American AI. Whereas in the U.S., barely regulated venture capitalists pour funds into startups, Chinese scientific research and technological development emanates from tightly controlled Chinese universities and research institutions like the Chinese Academy of Sciences. 

At the IPP event, both keynote speaker Hwang Kai and conference host Zheng Yongnian highlighted the risks of AI at great length — not just of some superintelligent machine ruling the Earth, but AI displacing human jobs here and now. A figure of 80 million food delivery and taxi drivers was repeatedly cited. What will these people do when autonomous cars and drones can do their jobs for them? (I was not able to confirm the 80 million figure in official data, suggesting that pessimism about AI taking jobs is a narrative that has become engrained deeply enough that people readily accept dubious numbers; there are, however, unquestionably millions of such drivers.) 

Marxist political economy is built on recognizing labor as equal to capital; if the workers of the world unite, they will be strong, as demonstrated by China’s rise on the back of manufacturing to the point that it can challenge the global capitalist order. But what if automation means that capital no longer needs labor? All of a sudden, the majority of the human race will become superfluous to the ongoing movements of capital and technology. Like the stray cats of New York who coexist with financiers without having any real awareness of or influence on finance, so most human beings will simply be irrelevant to what we call the “economy” if AI and automation make labor unnecessary. At that point, the question of what to do with these people is a political one rather than an economic one.

To some extent, as Chinese factories automate and robotize at a rapid pace, this problem is already becoming visible. But some find a silver lining in the fact that as China’s workforce ages and the population of elderly needing care swells, humanoid robots (or “embodied AI”) can both soothe the lonely elderly and also keep the economy pumping even as the number of total workers declines. If there are fewer workers in the future but they’re highly paid white-collar engineers supervising robotic machinery, some speculate that factories will be able to produce just as much with higher productivity.

I got the sense that, left to their own devices, many Chinese would rather halt or tightly control AI development; the risks of social instability, inequality between classes and regions, and environmental destruction were mentioned by speaker after speaker. In China’s tiered class system, memorably described by Hao Jingfang in “Folding Beijing,” the working class is at risk of being subsumed underground forever, replaced above by droids. Will they agree to stay down there? 

At the same time, Zheng said, if the U.S. is the only one at the decision-making table, then China will be unable to protect itself or its population from American capitalists who might not care much about social instability or income inequality. China needs this technology to have a seat at the table, he argued. 

To me, it feels like Chinese AI development is reactive and defensive, searching for useful applications to solve Chinese social needs (like expanding health care and education to rural areas, tracking the adverse impacts of global warming or making factory work safer and more pleasant). The drive for scientific progress to keep up with the U.S., Zheng mentioned, might force institutional reforms that result in, for example, China’s disparate provinces cooperating and coordinating on technological solutions to various social, environmental and health challenges. But ancient prerogatives and rivalries are hard to give up. Perhaps the sense of a challenge from the outside is the only force capable of melting Chinese internal parochialism. It seemed clear to most Chinese speakers that in the AI race, the U.S. and China are the only two protagonists, to the occasional frustration of European attendees.

Yuan Xiaohui of the Tencent Research Institute shared perhaps the most optimistic view (and most aligned with American AI discussions): By eliminating repetitive tasks, she suggested, AI could enable creativity. Tencent, for example, offers AI tools for small businesses making advertisements. Our humanity is our creativity, she argued, and in this way, AI will make us more human by freeing us from mundane tasks. Still, most Chinese today are engaged in mundane tasks, and given the opportunity to pursue alternatives, they might not do anything creative. In any case, a large-scale digital economy and automation isn’t China’s future — it’s China’s present. The future is already here, just unevenly distributed; in China, it is more present in Shenzhen and Shanghai, and some areas of Beijing, than it is in Guizhou, Gansu or Heilongjiang. There is a real fear that AI will exacerbate the trend of economic growth, boosting some at the cost of making social inequalities more visible.

Of course, one central factor in the calculations about AI competition between China and the U.S. is the ban on the sale of advanced semiconductors to China. Although some reports suggest a black market allows Chinese scientists ways to get around this, Keun Lee, a Korean expert on China’s economy, shared his research, which suggests that China is beginning to get an intimidating advantage on less-sophisticated chips. Indeed, many of the massive industrial applications that China is pursuing are less data-intensive than ChatGPT. Running Chinese high-speed trains really is simpler in some ways than creating Instagram memes. 

Lee alluded to the fear among many American companies like Intel that China’s development of its own chips will lead to a huge Chinese price advantage at the lower end of the market. In this world, America would be at the cutting edge of semiconductors (which American companies like Apple could still purchase for installation in China-made devices), but American companies would be, effectively, a luxury segment, dominating the higher end while China made the chips used in a myriad of ways in daily life. 

In this scenario, as Huawei and BYD are doing, Chinese AI companies might be the top players in markets in the Global South with products and services that, having been developed for Chinese provinces, are equally useful in places of similar developmental levels, like Brazil, Indonesia, Turkey and elsewhere. Even if the most sophisticated chips are in short supply, traffic lights, map applications and weather forecasts don’t need them. Chinese technology could both lag the Americans in frontier applications and dominate global markets with efficient, useful systems. So China cedes the frontier to dominate the heartland — although, of course, most Chinese technologists aren’t ready to cede any frontiers just yet.

The conference closed with the rural sociologist Lin Huihuang giving a rousing speech on the social responsibility of technology. We in this room, he said, are in a golden circle of knowledge and technology. Do not forget those who are outside the circle: those whose labor AI seeks to replace. We are human because of our work. Without our work, how can the global and Chinese poor affirm their humanity and have a meaningful place in the world?

The Chinese energy transition is occurring at a breakneck speed of jerks and starts, creating “ghost solar” much like the ghost cities of yesteryear. Scanning WeChat, I found articles from the Xinjiang government advertising its suitability for AI research. Come here, they wrote; we have unlimited supplies of renewable energy and we don’t know what to do with it; we’ll give it out for free to startups. China’s energy transition, which in the short term results in oversupply or overcapacity, might offer cheap and sustainable electricity sources to operators of LLMs in a way that no other region in the world today can replicate. 

What kind of world will it be when automation and free electricity together drive down the cost of, in particular, transportation and agriculture? China might be about to find out. Their semiconductors are good enough for industrial AI applications, and the amount of solar coming online is outpacing the ability of the grid to absorb it.

III. Deutschland im Herbst

“Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge.”
— Paul Gauguin

When I brought up the Draghi report to people in Berlin, one venture capitalist sighed. It feels almost like a preemptive I told you so aimed at the history books, she told me, rather than a real program of action. Europe doesn’t lack brilliant and talented people. But if both the U.S. and China are running as fast as they can to keep up with each other, many in Europe were simply living their lives, what the Chinese would call “过小日子” or “passing small days.” 

If Trump’s first term was a big shock to China (but one the CCP has already internalized), Trump’s return will make European Atlanticist elites into orphans. With the dialectical shock of realizing that America is, in the end, a very different sort of place — a rival more than an ally — Europe may finally do what it should have done a long time ago and create a single market “with teeth” (as former Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta put it), put together a partnership with China on the energy revolution, and pursue the unifying task of integrating Ukraine and the Ukrainians (some of them anyway) into a European way of life, thereby resolving the historical tensions between Europe’s west and east. 

In the years to come, Europe’s role may be as a grand meeting point for nations, a moderating point for technologies and a proving point for the energy transition. That role is not small; the question is simply whether Europe can rise to the occasion. If, in today’s Europe, some of the most disturbing questions — Why is Germany’s alt-right party led by a former Chinese investment banker? Does the sort of growth that Hungary and Poland are notching offer any useful lessons? — come from the east, its future does as well.