ROGUE - Renaissance on globe with upheavals everywhere

Last week I said that we are ending a 50-year stagnation period. It is actually more than that. A new age for humanity is starting. It will uplift us all but it will not be easy.

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A friend thought my last post was delusional. He thought we had a real risk destroying ourselves this century.

I was right but he's also right. I say that the world is about to enter a new era and that the productive forces will develop at an unprecedented pace in this century. However, this does not mean it will be a rose garden. Let us not forget the last century. It was another period in which productive forces developed rapidly; asnd it was also the scene of the most extreme cruelty and the most brutal genocide.

Even tears have their duty. They clean up in readiness for the smile that will come later (Mevlana Rumi)

I expect the productive forces to develop much faster in future years for the following reasons:

• Knowledge revolution

• Increasing number of competent educated people

• Cheap energy

• Multipolar world

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Knowledge Revolution

There will be a tremendous increase in the productivity of knowledge workers. The most important reason for this is what we currently call Large Language Models (LLM), or GPT technology and the transformations they will trigger. I have written about LLM before. These are not Artificial Intelligence. Still, they will help in the following ways:

• Automatic execution of routine tasks by LLM

• Accessing the correct information quickly and putting this information into the form we want

• Facilitating communication between computer programs

The underlying technology, the generative transformers, is not limited to natural language. Any kind of work that can be described, will be done by computers under LLM/GPT control in the near future.

Don't listen to the AI whinges of pop sociologists on YouTube or other platforms. LLMs are neither a threat nor a savior. They are sust a useful invention, leverage for your knowledge. Think about how you can integrate LLM and its equivalents into your work. If you don't, someone who does may replace you in your work.

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Increasing number of competent educated people

In 20th Century, USA increased its university enrollments from near-zero to millions:.

I wrote about the importance of this for the USA last week. China, India and some other developing countries have been experiencing something similar in the last fifty years. For example, China:

To enter a university in China, it is necessary to pass very difficult exams. Therefore, think of the above figure not only as 'there were 8 million students in 2017', but as ‘the most talented 8 million out of a population of 1.2 billion were selected and educated’ in 2017.

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Twenty years ago, I had a PhD student from China. He told me that when he was a child his family lived in a cave house. Since it was very cold in winter, they used to put burning coal under the beds they carved into the walls and sleep like that. Of course, there was no running water nor drain pipes in the cave. Such business would be done outside. A child, who comes from such poverty, first manages to enter the best university in China through his performance in the entrance exams, and once he graduates he gets a scholarship and comes to Brisbane for his doctorate. He is now back in China, a lecturer at one of China's top universities. How many millions of stories like this are hidden in the graph above?.

These students, who have joined the knowledge production workforce in the last fifty years, set out first by learning technologies invented in the USA and other Western countries, but now they have started to implement their own designs.

Not only China but considering all other developing countries, it is safe to say that the global educated and competent workforce has increased severalfold in the last fifty years.

Imagine these people equipped with the knowledge levers I mentioned in the previous section. They'll change the world, you'll see.

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Cheap Electricity

The marginal cost of electricity will be zero in thirty years or sooner. Even today, the wholesale price of electricity can momentarily be zero. This will be the new normal with time.

New industries will come about, which can increase or decrease the production rate according to the instant electricity price will arise. Just to give an example off the top of my head, many metals, including lithium, can be produced economically by further processing heavily saline seawater waste exiting from the desalination power plant. If you can set up a production line that operates only at intervals of cheap electricity in the grid, it would solve the precious metal scarcity problem.

There is a lot to write about the effects of zeroing the marginal energy price on the economy, but for now I will just note how important a development this is.

By the way, you can download the Lazard report on the latest renewable energy costs here.

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Multipolar world

One of the reasons why the first renaissance occurred in Western Europe was the weakness of political authority in Europe. Eastern Europe and Turkey were dificult places for free-thinking people, first under the oppression of Eastern Rome and later its successor, the Ottoman Empire. The situation was not much different in the Far East and China. Only in Western Europe was there relative freedom. For example, scholars and artists such as Galileo or Leonardo Da Vinci could fall out with a prince in a city and move to another one to continue pursuing their arts in their new home. If Christopher Columbus could not get money from the Spanish King Ferdinand to go on an expedition, he could convince the Queen of Portugal and set out with her support. Such a thing was not possible in the Ottoman Empire, for example, where all property belonged to the Sultan.

Nowadays, the world is moving from bipolar or unipolar to a multipolar order. If we add the increase in mobility between countries, this actually means a world of ideas and art similar to the conditions in the first Renaissance age.

This will bring new opportunities for extraordinary scientists and engineers. I am not saying that, as Thomas Friedman did, 'The World is Flat' and now smart kids from India can come to the USA and become rich. I say that the smart children of the USA, India, China and Turkey will no longer be obliged to a single country, they will have multiple options to develop their careers and will contribute to the world in their own ways.

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Renaissance on globe with upheavals everywhere

As I said above, we are not entering a rose garden, but a painful albeit rewarding period. I coined together the acronym ROGUE : Renaissance Overlaid Globe with Upheavals Everywhere. I call the period we are entering the Rogue Age. That means we are entering a vagabond period with an uncertain beginning and an unpredictable end. This will influence many areas of life. In the future, I will continue to write about 'Foreign policy in the Rogue era', 'Universities in the Rogue era', etc.

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Short Takes

Elon Musk's biography has been published. It was authored by Walter Isaacson. I read Isaacson’s biography of Leonardo Da Vinci and it was excellent. I am curious how he did address Elon Musk. How would you write about Elon Musk? I have not bought the book yet but I will, and will share what I find interesting.

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You Tube

Plenty of of lies and falsities are written about China. You don't know what to read and whom to believe. This week, I watched a critical video prepared by Siming Lan, about a few current books written about China. I haven't read the books she mentions, but I intend to read at least some of them on her recommendation.

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Pascal - Hagi

The weather is starting to warm up. Pascal and Hagi like to bathe once a day. Their washing styles are very different. Pascal walks into the water from one side, walks across, and comes out. If the weather is very hot, halfway through he lies on his back and wallows a little, that's all. Hagi, on the other hand, likes to stay in the water by flapping its wings rapidly. He wets himself and the whole surroundings with the fast flapping of his wings:

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Diary

Eleanor is with us two days a week. Meliz sets a playground for her slightly different each time:

As I watch Eleanor, I think about how one learns about the world. She wants the same books to be read to her. Meliz patiently reads them. I do too but more Meliz. Sometimes Eleanor holds Meliz’ finger and takes it to a word on the page she wants repeated. I think she memorized most of the lines but still likes to listen to the familiar sounds over and over again. She cannot speak yet, but I believe she can somehow visualize what is being read to her.

One of the things that catches my interest is, how she picks an animal, say a 'horse', from the trays where her grandma Meliz showcases wild and domestic plastic animal figures side by side, and then goes and chooses one of the books with that animal, 'horse', in it. I cannot imagine how she can mentally identify the two-dimensional horse pictures in the books with the three-dimensional plastic horse figures. I'm sure the bond forms because Meliz and I call both of them 'horse'.

Eleanor hasn't seen a horse yet, but she has seen a dog, and she can somehow realize that the real dog and the dog in the book are the same. How do I know this? She calls both of them 'woof' (she can't say 'woof woof' yet, just one 'woof'). Unfortunately, children forget these early ways of learning when they start talking. Otherwise, how interesting it would be to hear from them how they started to know the world.

When Eleanor's father, Taylan, was that age, I was working every day. I've never had the opportunity to spend as much time with him as I do with Eleanor now. Our elders always said that grandchildren are dearer than children. I think I understand what they mean now; I had not understood then.

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