China begins construction of Tibet mega-dam
Once built, the dam could dwarf the record-breaking Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River in central China and is expected to power the Tibetan region.
It is planned to have five cascade hydro-electric dams, which together would generate as much energy annually as the United Kingdom consumes in a single year.
Beijing has said the dam will help meet power demand in Tibet and the rest of China without having a major effect on downstream water supplies or the environment.
Operations are expected sometime in the 2030s.
But the governments of India and Bangladesh have expressed concerns about the project.
The waterway being dammed, the Yarlung Zangbo, becomes the Brahmaputra River as it leaves Tibet and flows south into India and finally into Bangladesh.
Non-government organisations say the dam will irreversibly harm the Tibetan Plateau and hit millions of people downstream.
The chief minister of India's Arunachal Pradesh state, Pema Khandu, said earlier this year that such a colossal dam barely 50 kilometres from the border could dry out 80 per cent of the river passing as it passes through the region.
Mr Handu also warned that the dam could potentially inundate downstream areas in Arunachal and neighbouring Assam state.
India's foreign ministry in January said it had raised concerns with China about the project in Tibet, saying it will "monitor and take necessary measures to protect our interests".
China has meanwhile insisted the dam would not have any downstream impacts and would work closely with its neighbours.
At the official event marking the start of construction on Saturday, Chinese Premier Li Qiang described the dam as a "project of the century".
He added that special emphasis "must be placed on ecological conservation to prevent environmental damage," China's Xinhua news agency reported.
Despite the potential for regional tensions, a number of Chinese companies in the construction sector saw their share prices rise on Monday.
Government bond yields also rose across the board on Monday, with the most-traded 30-year treasury futures CTLU5 falling to five-week lows, as investors interpreted the news as part of China's economic stimulus.
The project, overseen by the newly formed state-owned China Yajiang Group, marks a major boost in public investment to help bolster economic growth as current drivers show signs of faltering.
"Assuming 10 years of construction, the investment/GDP boost could reach 120 billion yuan (AU$25 billion) for a single year," global bank Citi said in a note.
"The actual economic benefits could go beyond that."
Reuters/AFP
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The Advertiser
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On that day in 2017, Nvidia was worth a pretty handy $US100 billion ($152 billion); today it's worth $US4.2 trillion and is the world's most valuable company, after a three-year frenzy that has seen its share price increase 14-fold. The Nvidia-Baidu partnership doesn't seem to have been formally terminated, but it petered out a couple of years ago, around the same time as the US non-profit outfit OpenAI launched ChatGPT, kicking off the next era of AI. Since then, the US government under Joe Biden has been mainly concerned with regulating AI, partly prompted by the "Statement on AI Risk", published on May 30, 2023, by hundreds of AI experts, who declared: "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war." 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Another Chinese company, Moonshot AI, has released another, better, open-source model called Kimi K2, capable of autonomously doing complex tasks, prompting some commentators to call it another DeepSeek moment, and a significant step towards AGI. But now, as standard AI starts to infiltrate every corner of life and become an explicit source of geopolitical competition between America and China, the question on the minds of everyone involved in the industry is, when will AGI happen? And when (not if) it does happen, what will that mean? For the first question, I asked ChatGPT. It replied: "My best evidence-based guess — based on current trends, expert forecasts, and technical bottlenecks — is that a true AGI tipping point could plausibly occur sometime between 2030 and 2040, but not before 2027, and quite possibly not until 2050 or later." So, between five and 15 years — not long. What will it mean? Plenty, both good and not good. Human-level cognition and autonomy in machines will be profoundly disruptive to humanity. The risks are obvious: the elimination of white-collar jobs leading to high levels of permanent unemployment, collapse of aggregate demand, along with inflation and interest rates, more effective cyber-attacks, autonomous weapons, more sophisticated propaganda and surveillance. And then there's that thing they were warning about in May 2023 — extinction. If the machines are smarter and better-informed than us, can we control them? What if they do to us what we did to the Neanderthals? The benefits are potentially enormous as well: better, more personalised healthcare, an exponential acceleration in science and research, improved productivity, less mundane work, and more leisure. That's why the Productivity Commission's overview for its "five pillars" report in preparation for the productivity roundtable in two weeks says its recommendations will "aim to give people and businesses the confidence and certainty they need to safely adopt powerful new AI tools," although it doesn't specifically talk about AGI. The 25 great and good at the roundtable will probably talk about that for half an hour before getting back to arguing about tax and human industrial relations. Alan Kohler is a finance presenter and columnist on ABC News, and he also writes for Intelligent Investor.
