The solid-state flash drive concept stores information passively, requiring a small amount of energy only to read and write. That means a hypothetical child’s companion Teddybot, highly competent in natural language and using present battery technology, could operate for weeks without recharging. The same would be true for portable tablet computers, which would expend 95% of their battery-power driving display screens and speakers. In contrast to large independent knowledge bases, the “cloud computing” concept seems a bad idea. Flash drive, or solid-state hard-drive, technology makes large independent knowledge and logical algorithm storage both reliable and cheap.

The Chinese, unencumbered by intellectual property rights, are probably no more than a decade away from achieving the world’s most intelligent population. Every Chinese citizen will have his or her own private electronic AI person that joins him in infancy, molds his natural language-based mind, and accompanies him throughout life. Of course each Chinese citizen’s AI person will periodically dump data back to “big brother” so “little brother” won’t get to “misbehave” much before “big brother” comes knocking.