1. China has announced the introduction of a new "K visa" category aimed at attracting young and talented professionals, particularly in the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) from all over the world, an official statement issued on Sunday said. The decision, approved in August, amends the regulations on the administration of foreigners’ entries and exits and will take effect on October 1, 2025. The K visa, which observers are calling China’s version of the US H-1B, is designed to draw highly skilled talent at a time when countries around the world are tightening or recalibrating work visa rules. Earlier this week, the US unveiled a steep USD 100,000 annual fee on H-1B applications, sparking concern among Indian tech workers and IT service companies. Against this backdrop, China’s streamlined visa route is being seen as a countermeasure to attract foreign professionals, especially from South Asia, who may be seeking alternative destinations. (Source: indiatoday.in)
2. China installed 277 gigawatts of wind and solar capacity in the first seven months of the year, quadruple the utility-scale additions federal analysts in the U.S. project across all power sources for 2025. That could give China a big advantage in the power-hungry AI race. Chinese companies have also stepped up manufacturing capacity of batteries and solar modules, pumping out exports. Their global market share for those technologies has swelled to 75% or higher, according to BloombergNEF. Countries across the world “are going to be even more reliant on Chinese technology to power their economies, to make the cars they drive,” said Wally Adeyemo, who was deputy Treasury secretary under President Joe Biden. “It creates real chokepoints for China.” (Source: wsj.com)
3. Scientists have developed a brand new, clear coating that can be applied to any standard window to turn it into an effective solar panel – while still keeping the window largely transparent. It's the work of a team from Nanjing University in China, and the researchers have already developed a small working prototype. Scale that up across all the available windows in the world, and we could be talking about terawatts of green energy. (Sources: sciencealert.com, nju.edu.cn)
The most likely future is an economy dominated by a handful of tech companies, with AI tools automating a whole range of tasks previously performed by humans. This future would become a reality if AI advanced rapidly into artificial general intelligence—whereby AI models become as capable as expert-level humans in all cognitive tasks. But large-scale automation could proceed before, or in fact without, such AGI. This type of “so-so automation” would have a lot of the downside of AGI (rapid displacement of workers) but not much of the advantages (productivity gains would be limited).
Under our current institutional path with little antitrust enforcement and widespread political acceptance of Big Tech’s wishes, this automation future would likely witness continued consolidation in the tech sector, with a few behemoths not just dominating technology, but a growing range of other industries as well.
What’s more, this will usher in massive inequality—between a small cadre of highly skilled workers who continue to perform essential tasks and the rest who are either dispensable or displaced from their jobs, and between the tech barons in control of the leading AI companies and the rest. (Source: wsj.com)
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