Contrary to what you’re hearing, China is no threat in AI.
The issue is meant to further centralize Trump control, to automate it, and to hide it from the public.
China poses no threat because of deliberate decisions made by China’s government four years ago. Xi Jinping cracked down on his tech sector, cutting the growth rate of the nation’s cloud infrastructure, to make business subservient to his will.
Impoverishing the tech sector pushed people out of programming and into manufacturing. China’s government now has scant idea what its people are thinking. When you can’t use a medium to express yourself honestly, you don’t express yourself. You can’t create progress where imagination is stifled. You can only make and sell stuff.
ChatGPT agrees with me. I asked it to create an image of China dominating the AI world, and this is what it drew. No people, just machines. China is a Machine Internet world, not an AI world. There’s a difference.
Why Tell The Lie
The myth of an ascending China you’re being sold is also based on a lie. The lie is that it’s possible to create Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) powerful enough to rule the world. But Large Language Models don’t scale like that. Progress slows as they grow. We need to do a lot more basic research on how human thought works before we can even think of modeling it in software.
What China does have is a policy, guaranteeing government control of all data, making everything an input into whatever it develops. That’s what Elon Musk wants. All your data goes to him, to do with as he pleases.
China also has an enormous military, and that’s the real threat. But if China and the U.S. are both autocracies, and they are in the Trumpian universe, who cares? Taiwan is just a piece on a chess board. Southeast Asia is just an economic interest.
Instead of a creative AI regime, China has Machine Internet applications. It has automated warehouses, automated factories, and self-driving cars that work because the human element has been removed. The economy lacks soul, and thus competitiveness in an open Internet marketplace of ideas. Code is thought.
But there is a market that is winning the AI race. More on that next.
