Trump and Xi Jinping Meet in Washington Amid AI and Global Power Discussions
Stealing Thought: What the Trump–Xi Dispute Over Thinking Engines Shows About Power Held on Trust
When rulers bargain over invisible machines of calculation, the old questions remain the same: whose labor is it, by what right is it used, and who may call them to account?
I find it striking that men now send not ships, nor armies, but what I must call engines of artificial reason across borders, and yet the quarrel is an ancient one. We are told that a ruler of America and a ruler of China met in Washington, even as other states assembled in New York, and that among their matters was a claim that China is surreptitiously copying American contrivances of this sort. The instruments are new; the pattern is familiar. One side alleges that what its people have laboured to make is taken without leave. The other, so far as the public record here shows, has not yet answered in detail. Already the question of power and trust is before us.
In the Second Treatise of Government, when I described political power as a right to make laws for the public good, with penalties, I meant to mark a boundary: outside that definition, what calls itself government must justify itself or stand condemned as mere force. Here, two men meet clothed with great power, and they speak of copying devices wrought by the skill and thought of their peoples. The first inquiry must be simple: could free and equal persons, seeking only the preservation of their lives, liberties, and estates, reasonably consent that their rulers should bargain thus over the fruits of their labour? If not, the negotiation itself begins to smell of usurpation rather than of faithful trust.
Property, as I used the word, includes lives, liberties, and estates, but it begins in a man’s own person. The labour of his body, and, by the same reason, the travail of his understanding, is properly his. Whatsoever he draws by his industry out of the common provisions of nature, he joins to himself and so makes his property, so long as he leaves enough, and as good, for others. I confess I never dreamt of engines that learn from oceans of data and imitate the art of many men at once; yet the rule still holds. If American craftsmen of these thinking engines have mixed their labour with materials lawfully theirs, then to take the resulting contrivances, or their secret method, without consent, is to invade their property.
Here someone will object that ideas, once exposed, spread by a kind of necessity; that to treat every instance of imitation as theft is to chain up the very progress of arts and sciences. There is weight in this, and I would distinguish. To learn from what lies open in the marketplace of the world, to build upon what another has plainly offered the public, is no robbery. But to gain by stealth what a man, or a company of men, has kept in his chest, to copy it under a veil, and then to profit by it as one’s own, is nearer to breaking a lock than to reading a book. If that is what “surreptitious copying” means here, then the law of nature condemns it as a harm to another’s estate.
Yet though the wrong of theft is plain enough in reason, my concern, as a writer on government, fixes chiefly on the manner in which such quarrels are handled. When rulers, under colour of the public good, decide in secret how accusations of theft between nations shall be answered, and what sacrifices their people shall make to buy peace or advantage, then the old danger returns. The same men who stand accused of failing to protect property become judges in their own case. If they trade away the rights of some subjects to secure favour or quiet from abroad, they cease to act as trustees for all and begin to traffic in what was not theirs to sell, the understandings and industry of their people.
I have allowed, both in that Treatise and in my account of prerogative, that magistrates sometimes must act without a standing rule, even against the letter of it, where urgent necessity and clear public good require speed. But such prerogative is tolerable only while it is visibly for the people’s benefit and remains revocable by them. If, in managing this dispute over thinking engines, either government claims a power to monitor, copy, or control the mental labour of its inhabitants in secret; if it sets aside known laws in the name of national strength while denying those affected any impartial judge; then it lapses from government into arbitrary power, which is worse than the state of nature it pretends to cure.
Because our information about this particular meeting is thin, I will not presume to judge its precise terms. I care rather to insist on the standard by which such encounters of great men must be measured. First, no people is bound to see its ingenuity quietly copied in the dark; resistance and repudiation are justified where property in honest labour is plainly invaded. Secondly, no people is bound to trust rulers who bargain over that property without their knowledge, without clear law, and without recourse. When engines of artificial reason become occasions for very human domination, the only sure remedy remains what it has always been: power recalled to its origin in consent, or answered, in the last resort, by an appeal to heaven.
From the works cited
- Second Treatise of Government — Political power defined narrowly as the right to make laws, with penalties, only for the public good — anything beyond that definition must justify itself or stand condemned.
- Second Treatise of Government — The labour theory of property, with its spoilage and 'enough, and as good' provisos — ownership is earned by improvement and bounded by what leaves others no worse.
- Second Treatise of Government — Prerogative as revocable emergency discretion — legitimate exactly as long as the public visibly benefits and no longer.