I’m very much a luddite when it comes to AI, I’m unequivocally against its usage and development. The social and environmental costs AI incurs and proposes to incur are overwhelming. The celebration of AI with Chinese characteristics is often justified by the idea that AI can be useful, and the reason why it’s OK to be vehemently against it otherwise but support it when it’s being implemented by China is because AI can only be a force for evil within the capitalist framework. I agree with the latter point obviously but find it hard to accept that China driving AI advancement is a good thing for the world.
I don’t want to have a debate about whether China is a revisionist state, but I think we can all agree that China has refused to take the role of the Soviet Union in exporting socialism to the world. What happens when it exports AI to countries world over that very much operate within a capitalist framework while China does nothing to advance world wide socialism?
China's models are afaik much less environmentally intensive and cheaper to operate, which means they are actually undermining the capitalist models and providing an alternative for users which is much less destructive. Unfortunately people are going to use it whether we like it or not, so having a Chinese alternative which isn't destroying the planet nearly as much is the only alternative to the maximally destructive alternatives.
Related to that, China's models getting better quicker could help to burst the AI bubble sooner which would be the best thing to happen to slow the capitalist march towards destruction. The people running the capitalist models are openly evil freaks and the only way to stop them aside from a revolution is for Chinese models to outperform the capitalist models, take market share from them, and show that the capitalist models are just worse in every way.
China is also regulating AI on the social side in a very progressive and pro social way, so they are also building a legislative and social framework of how to ensure AI is not having such negative social impacts.
It feels similar to nuclear deterrence. I'd rather no one has nukes, but the worst scenario is the US being the only one to have it
How so? And this leads to my point. We can agree that there are negative social impacts, we can agree that China is mitigating them, but what of the workers of the rest of the world?
These are a couple quick examples I pulled up from Google but I saw another recently about AI generated slop content being regulated recently as well.
I agree that all this is a huge problem and I am pretty anti AI outside of contexts that scientists and researchers are using it. Unfortunately the capitalist models are not going to stop so a Chinese counter is truly the only mitigation