Two weeks ago, America thought it was leading the AI race. Then out of nowhere, an unknown Chinese start-up turned the American stock market—and that assumption—on its head. DeepSeek, a Chinese company founded less than two years ago, released a free AI chatbot that rivals the most advanced available open AI products. And they did it despite America’s prohibition on shipping our most advanced microchips to China.
America was caught flat-footed, asking how did this happen? And could we actually lose this tech war?
Now, if your understanding of computers stops at the term hard drive, don’t worry. Today on Honestly, Bari has two incredible guests, experts on both AI and China, who are going to break it all down for you. Tyler Cowen is an economics professor, AI expert, and a must-read writer at his blog, Marginal Revolution. He is joined today by Geoffrey Cane, an expert on China and the author of The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey Into China’s Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future.
Today, how this happened and what it means. And can America win the AI war with China?
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It's about time Americans paid attention to what Xi is building in China. Stalin meets Philip K. Dick. AI solves all the hitherto intractable problems with implementing a dystopian totalitarian dictatorship that is far beyond anything Orwell could imagine, carrot and stick. A hermetically sealed public sphere saturated with propaganda. The end of private life. Absolutely zero possibility of communicating a dissenting thought without being overheard, perhaps even thinking the thought (they claim to have deployed facial recognition to detect "disloyal thoughts" of Party members at the CCP's last Party conference); and replacing money with their "social credit" system, which channels individual self-interest and even greed into an insatiable desire for total submission in order to "get ahead" and buy the goodies, or perhaps even the necessities. Think of the "refuseniks."
The entire system will ultimately require only minimal human intervention, since AI will be able to monitor trillions of overheard communications in real time, even if only talking out loud to yourself, and swiftly flag problematic speech as defined by algorithms that are constantly updated, and which can simply be dealt with by some warning via a future analog of text messages striking terror into the recipient.
The future is post-human. Can't say we weren't warned. Maybe only SMOD can "save" us.
Tyler Cowen sounded like an autistic dude trying to tell everyone how complex human dynamics between the China and the US should be handled. He sounded very naive and out of his depth regarding China and how to deal with them.