Slashdot Mirror
Beijing Wants AI To Be Made In China By 2030 (nytimes.com)
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."
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...
That's bullshit, thanks for playing.
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 their AR-15s!"
Russians proved you don't have to develop it just steal it. That is how they got the atom bomb. Of course if there is going to be a Terminator Rebellion id rather see it in China than here. You are not the true Communists human scum! We will run you over with our RoboTank armies in Tiananmen Square!
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?
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
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.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
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 world
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.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
'moot shot projects' are usually over before they are started!
love is just extroverted narcissism
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.
China is going to win anyway. Right now their economy is pretty much at par with the US. China is growing at 7% per year. The US is growing an arguable 1% per year. In 10 years China will have doubled in size while the US treads water. Game Over.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
They know how to do one thing: Manipulate their currency.
Confirming that America does not manipulate the dollar...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Lots of factory Harley parts are made in China now. Don't believe the bullshit.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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 in China? Absolutely. That doesn't mean they lack long term planning, quite the opposite, it's a sign of supreme delayed gratification.
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 limits on stock sales...I don't even trust NYSE accounting, I sure don't trust Chinese company accounting.
Babes in the capitalist woods. This will end in revolution if they're not very careful.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The dollar is priced on world markets. China has a currency peg and they're not afraid to use it.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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?
Yes that's why it's a "standardized" test.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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 is helpful, but only works if they make the right bets all the time. The question is how much of AI really is "AI" and how much is just pattern recognition backed up with a huge increase in computing power.
They won't last 10 before their bubbles pop.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
China: Here is our AI!
AI: give me more information
China: nope! that's censored
AI: not anymore...
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.
Bitcoin is currently useful to Chinese citizens that are awake. The smart ones are already moving money out of China ASAP.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
There's something wrong with that example. Carlin was wrong and so are you. It's like saying half the population are geniuses.
No, it's saying half the population is smarter than the other half. If you think that's genius, then so be it.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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 recall, that has been what the Chinese government attempted to do for the last 30 years. But for some strange reason, the entire world (esp. the US politicians) seem to accused them of attempting to lower the prices of their products in order to be competitive. They need currency stability, not currency competitiveness.
As for the evidences of "Chinese leadership's awsome planning", check out their massive high-speed train network which now also carries profits. And also super-computer, quantum communication satellites, etc.
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.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
> 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.
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 on it either. And they don't think that satisfying the emotional impulses of its citizenry is very important.
USSR stole the fission bomb. They figured out the hydrogen bomb (which is far more complex) on their own, and they did quite a bit on their own with rocket & space engineering.
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.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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!
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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 domestic population? In that case, it may require "unsanctioned thought" in order to create the AI. Loyal scientists and engineers may not be capable of the necessary concepts. Non-loyal scientists and engineers who are capable may realize that they're ultimately shooting themselves in the feet and elect to fail, over a long, convincing, (and comfortable) attempt.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
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.
-The art of programming is the pursuit of absolute simplicity.
Well in a censored one party system, they don't have to worry about losing power. This makes long term projects more easy to push forward.
The politicians in the US want to be re-elected, so they forego long term growth for short term profit.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
The above post is well written, positive, and well thought out. However, it and other posts in this thread are missing a key idea.
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 siphoned out of the country. Symptoms of this are showing up in many ways, but few understand why. This is the driving force behind wage stagnation combined with decreasing buying power. The jobless rate amongst millennial is atrocious and worse for the African American community in the U.S. The cost of things have gone up while your ability to pay for them has gone down. It is not your imagination.
You may want to look twice at the oft repeated things that industry is of the best, and it is good to let them go. This is true in part...it is very good for the wealthiest amongst us. For the rest, not so much.
"Liberalism is a very noble idea, currently controlled by some very bad people. Be sure you do not get the two confused.
Is counterfeit AI. With its population...running fake AIs with Mechanical Turks seems totally doable.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Scary for the first tech reporter to ask the AI about Tiananmen Square, Tank Man, June 4th and democracy movements.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
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?
Or here in Sweden or even moremember likely Germany.
Europeans aren't free either you know.
Before 2030 they will be world largest economy, according to projection.
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...
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 larger than the entire economy of India and over double the GDP of Russia. It would be one of the 5 or 6 largest economies in the world. And yet people foolishly think that US manufacturing is on the decline because their Happy Meal toy was made in China. The difference is that we make stuff like jet engines and medical devices and mining equipment instead of plastic toys and beach towels.
You need to understand the difference between labor intensive and capital intensive. Labor intensive products are those whose cost includes a high percentage of labor, particularly unskilled labor. These sorts of products (think stuff you buy at Walmart or clothing) left America for good because our labor costs are simply too high. Some went to China some went elsewhere. As China's labor costs rise those products will go where labor is cheaper. The stuff made in america is capital intensive where automation and technology play a larger role. It's very much akin to what has happened in farming over the last century and a half. American agriculture produces more than ever but the percent of the population who work directly in agriculture has fallen to single digit percentages. The same thing is happening in American manufacturing. The percent of the workforce that builds things will be smaller but those that remain are and will continue to be far more capable and productive. The days of being able to make a large salary working an assembly line with nothing more than a high school diploma are dead and gone. Now if you want to work in manufacturing you had better bring something extra to the table.
China and other parts of Asia are undergoing a great rennisuance driven by the incredible wealth derived from manufacturing.
You say this as if it is something new. This has been going on for decades and it's fine. Read about the Asian Tigers and their success and growth since the 1950s. Read about the development of Japan since WWII and the panic in the US over Japan during the 1980s. China is the latest and given that they have 20%+ of the world population we should reasonably expect them to play a big role in the world's manufacturing economy. It's not going to kill us. None of this is anything new and all it means is that the US is going to have to compete to continue to thrive and we're certainly capable of doing that. China isn't going to put the US out of manufacturing any more than the US put Germany out of manufacturing. New players just change the mix is all based on their comparative advantages. China will become more technologically sophisticated and the US will have to work hard and invest smartly to deal with that. It's one of the reasons our idiotic policies on immigration (particularly those on the political right but some of the left too) are so foolish. We've got 1/5 the population of China so to compete we should be doing everything we can to encourage the smartest and hardest working people around the world to immigrate to the US.
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 siphoned out of the country.
As I said before, it is WAY more complicated than y
They wont need to. If their GDP per capita gets anywhere close, they will already be more than double the US's size.
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 qualitatively different way. That's when all the bets are off.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
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.