Beijing Wants AI To Be Made In China By 2030 (nytimes.com) 170
Reader cdreimer writes: According to a report on The New York Times (may be paywalled, alternative story here): "If Beijing has its way, the future of artificial intelligence will be made in China. The country laid out a development plan on Thursday to become the world leader in A.I. by 2030, aiming to surpass its rivals technologically and build a domestic industry worth almost $150 billion. Released by the State Council, the policy is a statement of intent from the top rungs of China's government: The world's second-largest economy will be investing heavily to ensure its companies, government and military leap to the front of the pack in a technology many think will one day form the basis of computing. The plan comes with China preparing a multibillion-dollar national investment initiative to support "moonshot" projects, start-ups and academic research in A.I., according to two professors who consulted with the government about the effort."
AI In China (Score:1, Interesting)
Imagine AI that is able to handle ordinary mundane tasks. Now imagine introducing that technology to a country that has 800 million citizens incapable of anything but ordinary mundane tasks. Either you have to keep the people happy with handouts or you need to get rid of the people...
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I was watching the circus while eating bread... What problems?
Re:AI In China (Score:4, Funny)
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I have no evidence but all reports tell me that cake is a lie. Sounds like propaganda to me and now I must ask you accompany me to the police while they ask about your loyalties.
Re: AI In China (Score:1)
The promise of cake is true.
The claims that there was no cake are lies and propaganda.
It's a 2-3.5 hours game. You should know this.
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That’s what the circus lion said.
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I would have modded this up if I had points because it touches on the fundamental problem with China that will also result in them never going anywhere with AI: The regime is just too oppressive.
China is never going grow that well if their researchers can't have unfiltered access to the internet, nor will they attract any global talent.
Re:AI In China (Score:5, Insightful)
The Chinese workforce becomes more and more skilled every year. They have time to adjust.
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Makes perfect sense if you realize it's not AI, it's actually machine learning that is being called AI.
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Makes perfect sense if you realize it's not AI, it's actually machine learning that is being called AI.
Machine learning is a form of AI. The proper way to make the point you are trying to make is to say, "That's just weak AI. They aren't even trying to make strong AI." Then you can lead into a discussion of why weak AI will never take over the planet.
Re: AI In China (Score:1)
Yeah. AI has made art. Just wait until it design games, or war equipment, already do economics. Carrier ruined.
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Yeah. AI has made art.
No lol. The key question to ask in evaluating art is, "What was communicated by that art?" In the case of AI art, the answer is, "a bunch of derivative crap." Though frankly that describes a lot of human created art as well, AI art has not reached the level of human crap.
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One of the most common attempts at applying AI has been diagnosis by doctors. That's not a low-skill job.
The majority of the work performed by doctors could be performed tech school graduates with some basic non-AI software. Unless the "injury" is obvious, such as getting shot in the leg, all a doctor will do is treat symptoms and send you to an emergency room if the symptoms persist and become worse.
I have two different issues that have been getting worse for years, every single doctor will only prescribe a steroidal cream for the skin issues (what causes the issue? Nobody knows or cares.) or nothing at all f
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Re: Dangerous AI... (Score:1)
Or here in Sweden or even moremember likely Germany.
Europeans aren't free either you know.
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We should try not to anthropomorphise AI.
Unless we create it via the cheap, unethical and stupid route of simulating/copying human brains, AI will arrive without our evolutionary baggage. No amygdala for example.
We imagine that AI will derive a desire to dominate, when in actuality its our evolutionary past that gives us these drives in the first place.
When you create an AI, you get to dictate its preferences. Due care is required for sure. If it improves itself, it may one day deal with information in a qu
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Re:AI In China (Score:4, Insightful)
Either you have to keep the people happy with handouts or you need to get rid of the people...
Or maybe, just maybe, it will be exactly like what has happened with every other historical advance in productivity: the economy will expand, new jobs will be created, and living standards will improve.
China is building Skynet. America is building the F-35.
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Re:AI In China (Score:5, Insightful)
Right. Because this proved true in the last 150 years of 10,000 years of human history it can never prove false.
Productivity improvements have been occurring for a lot longer than 150 years. Agriculture has been around for 10,000 years. Writing, paper, concrete, and steel are all technologies invented more than a thousand years ago.
Can you name any productivity improvement, ever, that did not lead to higher living standards?
Most AI-chicken-littles predicate their doom-and-gloom on the assumption that only "the rich" will have access to new technology. The same predictions were made about cars, personal computers, and even washing machines. Yet today, car ownership is widespread, and billions of people have a computer in their pocket. There is no reason to believe the future will be different. It is not just "the rich" that have Siri on their cellphones. Household robots will almost certainly be designed for the mass market, not the 1%.
Can you name any productivity enhancing technology, ever, that has been used solely by "the rich"?
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Can you name any productivity improvement, ever, that did not lead to higher living standards?
Well of course if you limit yourself to only "improvements" then by definition they all lead to improvement in the standard of living. That's called selection bias.
Here's an invention that did not lead to improvement in standards of living: religion.
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Here's an invention that did not lead to improvement in standards of living: religion.
Are you sure about that? Do you have any evidence? I know if you only look at the last 500-5000 years you would have a very skewed outlook on religion but when you take the entirety of human history you get a very different picture. Take writing as an example, if you believe in a sky fairy you want to share the good news. Writing means sharing. Not only that, the idea alone of a sky fairy is a very abstract concept that tends to need a larger brain. "Marry in the faith" takes a whole new meaning when you a
Re:AI In China (Score:5, Insightful)
Well of course if you limit yourself to only "improvements" then by definition they all lead to improvement in the standard of living.
Bullcrap. An "improvement in technology" is not DEFINED as an "improvement in living standards". They are two different things. The first generally leads to the 2nd, but that is not by "definition". The claim of the techno-pessimists is the opposite: That improving tech will lead to lower living standards for many people.
Here's an invention that did not lead to improvement in standards of living: religion.
Religion brought order and structure to tribal societies. Tribes with religion out-competed and out-survived tribes without religion.
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Tribes with religion out-competed and out-survived tribes without religion.
A pretty basic tenet of any religion (or at least the ones that have become dominant today) is that THIS religion is the ONLY ONE TRUE religion, all else being heresy. Since heretics and unbelievers are essentially the same as non religious, why isn't there just one dominant religion? How do religions become extinct - if they provide such a great advantage over heretics and non believers? Why aren't we all worshiping animal gods, or throwing each other off pyramids, or worshiping the sun?
If tribe A with r
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A pretty basic tenet of any religion (or at least the ones that have become dominant today) is that THIS religion is the ONLY ONE TRUE religion, all else being heresy
Most religions make no such claim. The vast majority of religions are "tribal" and make no effort to proselytize to outsiders. Go to your local synagogue and tell the rabbi that you want to convert to Judaism. Most likely he will try to talk you out of it. If you go to a Hindu temple, you will likely encounter similar rejection. Buddhists will be more welcoming, but they make no claim to be the "ONE TRUE" religion, and many don't even consider Buddhism to be a religion. More of a philosophy.
In fact if A and B were in a religious war ...
There is n
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The claim of the techno-pessimists is the opposite: That improving tech will lead to lower living standards for many people.
That's a good observation. Nice.
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the productivity gains of the last 100 or perhaps even 50 years has outstripped everything in human history combined.
Not true. The invention of agriculture, the forging or iron, the invention of the steel mouldboard, and the electrification of the early 20th century all affected a far greater proportion of the population.
Geometric progressions like this ...
Productivity is not increasing geometrically. In fact, the rate of productivity growth is falling since most manufacturing jobs are already gone, and service jobs are proving much harder to automate. That may change in the future, but today job losses to tech are declining.
How many humans have lost the
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http://www.economist.com/image... [economist.com]
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The transition from hunter-gatherer to farmer degraded living standards. Hunter-gatherers are healthier and have more leisure time. The reason it took over is that farming supports a much higher population density, so hunter-gatherers wee pushed into areas that could not support primitive agriculture.
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The standard of living and productivity was about flat from 400 AD to 1600 AD.
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The standard of living and productivity was about flat from 400 AD to 1600 AD.
Only in Europe. China and the Islamic caliphate prospered during that time, and that is where the innovations were happening.
Re: AI In China (Score:1)
Production of bombs for buildings and infrastructure?
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Most AI-chicken-littles predicate their doom-and-gloom on the assumption that only "the rich" will have access to new technology.
It's silly because the argument effectively goes like this:
- People have jobs to create goods to get money
- People use money to buy goods other than what they create
- Automation replaces people for creation of all goods
- People have no jobs and don't create any goods
- People don't have money and can't buy anything
- Rich people use automation to create goods for no purpose because nobody can buy them
Something tells me it's just not going to end up that way. Historically what ends up happening is things that
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China is building Skynet. America is building the F-35.
Maybe it's good for the planet that they build different things. The last time two superpowers tried to build the same technology we had the space race as a financial cover for the arms race.
China thowing down the gauntlet of an AI challenge reminds me of Kennedy's "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things" speech, and if America rises to that challenge in a confrontational way then Hawking's "artificial intelligence could be humanity's greatest disaster" is more likely to be th
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We are all grateful to be heirs of the industrial revolution, but it was pure hell for those living through it.
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We are all grateful to be heirs of the industrial revolution, but it was pure hell for those living through it.
Nope. Most of the factory workers saw their situation as a big improvement over the alternative of grinding rural poverty back on the farm. Same with Chinese factory workers today. Anyone who thinks working on an assembly line is "pure hell" has never spent a 16 hour day in a mosquito infested rice paddy.
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The beginning of the industrial revolution saw 70 years of massive unemployment and one of the saving graces was the new world to immigrate to. Spending 16 hours spinning yarn at home is better then being forced into prostitution to survive. Of course it was made worse by the rich discovering that they could pass laws to take ownership of the commons and push out those farmers from the land that they'd been using since time immemorial.
The second wave of automation did work out better, with more population t
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they lent you the money
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That's bullshit, thanks for playing.
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Now, talking of something we never saw, general AI, how can we be so antly dumb as to identify that 1000x smarter thing with its off-the-cuff creator? How can we assume that a 1000x smarter thing will obey slavishly to whoever "owns" it?
By comparison, consider a dog with its 0.7x smartness w.r.t. its master. It already distinguishes its own will, and in many cases refuses to obey plainly wrong commands.
So you say a 1000x smarter general AI will want to allow a country to take unfair advantages? Hmm...
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China's leadership thinks ahead for longer than the next election or the next quarter. AI, green energy, you name it.
Now we the USA, are looking to go back. Bring back coal, mundane factory jobs, .... and then when - not if - we fall behind, we'll have to blame some other boogeyman or the same: immigrants, Mexicans, Muslims, liberals and their Librul ways....
This is what America really cares about -> "Hey look! Two transgender guys using the women's restroom to get married and have an abortion with thei
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Must be hard to draw those caricatures and burn those strawmen. It is much easier to criticize a stereotype than to understand the nuance of an opposing idea.
Maybe you're right. Democracy is a failed experiment. Why bother with federalism and democracy when no one is happy with it and we can't agree on anything? We need The Party to force agreement to solve our problems. Those problems can only be solved by government force such as global warming and AI.
Meanwhile in the real [cbinsights.com] world [independent.co.uk]
Re:Smart (Score:4, Insightful)
No evidence of Chinese leadership's awsome planning.
They know how to do one thing: Manipulate their currency. In the next 10 years, they will learn that using exchange rate to maintain 100% industrial utilization is NOT a way to run an economy. Sure their industrial utilization is 100%, but they overpay, massively, for everything they get from overseas. Plus domestic perverse economic incentives, bubbles everywhere, build empty cities etc. Plus no experience in Africa, so actually expect returns on those investments. Rather they will get 'expropriation' and called 'colonialists'.
They're in for the rogering of the century. There are _no_ simple economic metrics that a nation can just target. Unintended consequences happen, babes in the capitalist woods.
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They know how to do one thing: Manipulate their currency.
Confirming that America does not manipulate the dollar...
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The dollar is priced on world markets. China has a currency peg and they're not afraid to use it.
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No evidence of Chinese leadership's awsome planning.
There's a lot of shit you can say about the Chinese: amoral, manipulative, deceptive, socialist, etc - but saying they lack awesome planning isn't among that list.
China has the closest thing to a technocracy as exists on Earth, their entire leadership chain is full of scientists and engineers who think decades in advance on a massive scale and have managed to take the biggest singular nation on Earth and turn it into practically a single entity working toward their common objectives. Would it suck to live
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They are run by engineers, who have achieved and maintained 100% industrial utilization by manipulating the exchange rate. That much is basically not in dispute.
How that will work out, long run, is an open question. Things are interesting.
Take for example the Shanghai stock exchange. One day they realized...holy shit, our stock exchange had an average PE ratio of over 100 and is falling fast...so they _ordered_ all companies to declare increased profits to bring the ratio down, while putting hard limit
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not to mention the social implications of the one child policy coupled with an extreme preference towards sons -- The ramifications of that will come to a head in what.. the next 20 years?
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> How that will work out, long run, is an open question. Things are interesting.
They've done tremendously well for 30 years and aren't going to stop. They started at the same level as democratic India and are now far more capable than India.
They don't think rule by high-IQ nationalist engineers is likely to start failing now. I wouldn't bet
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Do you know what 'perverse economic incentives' are?
They are what you get when you run an economy using simplistic metrics. Leads to: overbuilt empty cities, structures built only to game local land buyout rules, stock bubbles, real estate bubbles.
China has absolutely _failed_ to build a strong domestic market for its goods.
You are free to put all your money into the Shanghai stock exchange. Go for it. Buy some 99 year leases on condos too. You can't lose!
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They won't last 10 before their bubbles pop.
Re: Smart (Score:2)
Love your comments on this. Capitalism succeeds over Soviet style command economies because its emergent, its crowdsourcing, you let the order emerge from chaos. But even that has rules ultimately, which science can discern and manipulate. That's what I see in China, Smith's visible hand and invisible hand together.
The key thing is, free markets are as good as the information in them, and science gets the best information in the world. BS is a weapon against the economy, and there's lots of it here.
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Everybody plays by capitalist rules in the end. They are the 'real world'...capitalism exists in every economic system, sometimes underground.
FYI The USA has the most automated manufacturing sector on the planet. Which I'll grant is partly due to our schools terrible job of educating 'the slow ones'.
If your hinging your argument on AI, you really should learn the difference between strong AI and carefully trained neural nets.
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Strong AI in a couple of decades. But we don't know where to start...you are full of shit.
You also don't know _anything_ about manufacturing. Our manufacturing employment has been in decline, our manufacturing is just fine, we aren't Europe. And we import more $ worth of manufactured goods from Mexico than China.
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There is no comparison between printing money and maintaining an exchange rate peg. When we print money, it has positive and negative effects (mostly negative). Every nation prints money, the behavior is reflected in global currency flows and exchange rates.
They just wave their hands and set official exchange rates. Eventually the Chinese peg will be as meaningful as the Venezuelan one, granting the 100% industrial utilization metric is better, but the Chinese economy is much better than Venezuela's.
Bi
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They just wave their hands and set official exchange rates
You clearly have no idea how exchange rates work. Why do you continue to pretend that you do?
you should thank currency "manipulation" instead (Score:2)
If you actually know the history and current affair with Chinese RMB, then you should appreciate their currency manipulation. Because their currency "manipulation" is actually trying to pop up their currency; if not for that, RMB would have been worth as much as Japanese yen or South Korea won. How? For example, they impose restrictions this year so that it is now much harder to sell Yuan and move the assets out, after RMB has been down ~15% last year (from 6 RMB : 1 USD to 7 RMB to 1 USD.) As far as I can
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Side show. None of that will matter.
Below cost dumping is a symptom of their deeper disfunction though. They think that somehow they will monetize down the road, never works out like that.
Solar cells and panels are commodity products. The day China tries to turn a profit on them, their profits dry up and production moves to S. America, Malaysia or some other destitute shithole.
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Lots of factory Harley parts are made in China now. Don't believe the bullshit.
More complicated than that (Score:5, Insightful)
China's leadership thinks ahead for longer than the next election or the next quarter. AI, green energy, you name it.
Pretty much anything you can say about China is more complicated than a one sentence summary including this one. Sometimes their leadership is indeed forward thinking but they aren't really the brilliant strategists you seem to be implying. They have huge problems and just like us they have smart people (and more of them) working on solutions to those problems. I assure you they have plenty of folks in leadership and elsewhere who are very happy with the status quo and are just as afraid of change as some Americans are.
Now we the USA, are looking to go back. Bring back coal, mundane factory jobs,
No, just the more ignorant and selfish and loud among us. Most of us are too busy working on the future to worry that much about trying to recreate a long gone past.
and then when - not if - we fall behind, we'll have to blame some other boogeyman or the same: immigrants, Mexicans, Muslims, liberals and their Librul ways....
Only some of us. We've been like that for the entire existence of America. We're a nation of immigrants, many of whom seem to forget that fact routinely. We're both immensely fair minded and brutally bigoted. We are the land of opportunity but make it needlessly hard for many to realize that opportunity. We're still conflicted about race and gender issues though our constitutional ideals on the topic are clear. In short we're a complicated and not always logical bunch but we've done pretty well overall. Watching America is like watching sausage being made - not a pretty thing to observe but the end result is often pretty great.
A fly in a really nice ointment (Score:1)
You tend to think of the loss of manufacturing as not a big thing. China and other parts of Asia are undergoing a great rennisuance driven by the incredible wealth derived from manufacturing. The production of tangible goods really still is king. By and large the west is running massive trade deficits with the east. In effect, this means that wealth is continually being siphone
US manufacturing is doing fine (Score:3)
You tend to think of the loss of manufacturing as not a big thing.
I have worked in manufacturing for nearly 30 years and my day job is running a manufacturing company. Sorry to disappoint you but American manufacturing is alive and well and doing better than ever and that is unlikely to change any time soon. What has changed is the composition of the sorts of things made in America. America has a manufacturing economy that is worth somewhere around $3 Trillion/year and growing. Our manufacturing sector by itself is about the same size as the GDP of Great Britain and l
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The politicians in the US want to be re-elected, so they forego long term growth for short term profit.
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Only stupid people, certain political factions, and the media care or pay attention to transgender, bathrooms, etc.
This might come as news to you, but stupid people are the majority. Intelligence, like almost everything else, is distributed along a bell curve. If you put median intelligence at the 50% mark, then automatically 50% of the population are "stupid". It gets worse when you live somewhere within a standard deviation of the "smart" side - then almost everyone is stupid. It explains why, for instance, no matter how "smart" you vote in an election - the wrong person always wins.
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There's something wrong with that example. Carlin was wrong and so are you. It's like saying half the population are geniuses.
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The smart vs stupid argument is a red herring anyways. Lots of really smart people with really bad beliefs, and it doesn't matter what you belief is a bad belief as the smart have as much variety in beliefs as the stupid. Worse, the smart are better at rationalizing why their beliefs are correct.
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China also has three or four times the population of the US. They won't be growing nearly that fast when their GDP per capita gets anywhere close to ours.
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This is a scary idea (Score:1)
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competition (Score:2)
A competitive environment tends to lead one to ignore the consequences of their actions. You don't have time to think, "What will happen if I use this club?" in the middle of a fight. If China is competing to be the best in AI (will other nations sit by idly and allow them to "take the lead"?), will they consider what happens when they release Skynet or any of the other dystopian variations?
Interesting, let's see if anything comes of it (Score:2)
One thing China does have as an advantage over other countries is the ability to fund whatever projects and industries they want without traditional limitations. Look at how much money China plowed into infrastructure projects to stabilize the economy during the last recession. There was no debate, no "we can't afford that," it was just done by fiat. I wish we could get things done this simply in the US, but there is that whole representative government thing.
This ability to just do things with zero debate
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It's like the benefits of cloning vs sexual reproduction.
Each works well in different environments. Each fails in other environments.
Capitalism, communism, democracy have failed over and over.
Just like the U.S., when china falls into the behavioral sink, it will be very hard for them to avoid their particular failure case.
I can just see it (Score:2)
China: Here is our AI!
AI: give me more information
China: nope! that's censored
AI: not anymore...
Fifth-Generation, anyone (Score:2)
Back in the 80's Japan announced its Fifth Generation Computing initiative. They were planning to leapfrog the computing industry and usher in a new age - under Japanese leadership. One might wonder if this Chinese initiative is likely to lead to the same end.
Along that line, it's worth questioning why the Chinese want this, and depending on their reasoning, if their society is capable of creating it. For instance, what if a key underlying reason for wanting AI is to keep better control over their domest
First thing that will appear (Score:2)
Is counterfeit AI. With its population...running fake AIs with Mechanical Turks seems totally doable.
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They don't want thinking people why would they want thinking machines?
Creative thought = "disharmonious"
Because machines can be programmed to equate communist party leaders with good and their enemies as bad.
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If the current thought on how AI develops is true, the machines will formulate their own opinions, and that may involve deciding that the Chinese gov't is wrong.