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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."
Someone pointed out to me that the first jobs lost to computers were not unskilled jobs, they were the highly skilled jobs of people who were very, very good at math (a job that was known, not coincidentally, as a "computer"). Even today, computers can calculate the trajectory of a rocket going to the moon far more easily than they can fold laundry. So you shouldn't think that AI will first replace low-skilled jobs. One of the most common attempts at applying AI has been diagnosis by doctors. That's not a low-skill job.
The Chinese workforce becomes more and more skilled every year. They have time to adjust.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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.
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"?
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.