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Jan Krikke

Jan Krikke

Jan Krikke is a former Japan correspondent for various media, former managing editor of Asia 2000 in Hong Kong, and author of The Corridor of Space: China, Modernists, and the Cybernetic Century. His special interest is the Eastern influence on the development on our emerging planetary culture.

China Opinion

Get ready for Chinese AI with a Confucian bias

Jan Krikke Jan Krikke

Chinese children will come home from school, show a photograph of their math homework to the home robot and get an immediate answer. Calculators may go the way of the abacus. In high school, homework will become more complex. Students may be asked to write a paper on complex contemporary issues: How can we apply the wisdom of Confucius to solve current social problems? Is Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism relevant to modern China? The artificial intelligence in the Chinese robot will probably give...

China Science

Leibniz: ‘The Chinese invented the first binary code’

Jan Krikke Jan Krikke

In 1789 Gottfried Leibniz published a paper announcing his invention of the binary code. Twenty-four year later, after a Jesuit in Beijing sent him illustrations of the Chinese trigram and hexagrams, Leibniz published a second paper crediting the Chinese with inventing the first binary code. The explanation for Leibniz’s remarkable claim had to await the advent of the digital revolution in the 20th century. In the 1920s, the so-called father of the information age, Claude Shannon, realized the binary code...

Europe Russia

The West bashes Russia while China is busy bridging the gap to Europe

Jan Krikke Jan Krikke

Russia-bashing has become the staple of the Western mainstream media in recent months. Some headlines suggest a level of paranoia not seen since the Cold War: “Russia is the world’s biggest threat to democracy.” “Our freedom under assault.” “Nato must strengthen its defenses.” It is unlikely that Russian tanks will be rolling into Western Europe any time soon. Instead, a steady stream of Chinese freight trains is rolling in from the Far East. They make a 12,000-kilometer journey across...

Culture Philosophy

Get ready for the spiritual economy

Jan Krikke Jan Krikke

In 2013, the book The Spiritual Imperative: Sex, Age, and Caste Move the Future by American futurist Lawrence (Larry) Taub reached the top of the Japanese bestsellers list. Taub had attracted attention in Japan since the 1970s, giving lectures and predicting global developments. Some of his forecasts seemed far-fetched. He predicted that a country in the “religious belt” — the broad region from the Indian subcontinent to North Africa — would experience a religious revolution. A few years later, Ayatollah...

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