We won’t. China will.
There’s a powerful technical and institutional apparatus we’ve come to accept as having the final word on what we can and cannot do/share/see/say online, and it’s not the legal system. Rather, decisions about what billions of users can do on a handful of large tech platforms are left to the “trust and safety” teams inside the bowels of Big Tech. Jon Stokes.
Beijing’s approach to the AI resembles its approach to censorship:
get everyone in the room
make the process transparent,
secure everyone’s interests,
appoint a trusted person to run the program,
mobilize 1.4 billion people,
invest billions.
For millennia, they’ve appointed public intellectuals like Noam Chomsky to run their censorship program. He publishes the rules1 and explains his decisions,2 which helps sustain a widely trusted, thriving, half-trillion-dollar media market.
AI Consensus
Beijing is repeating the process with AI:
Transparency: Make AI algorithms transparent to consumers.
Literacy: 10 million high schoolers, using textbooks like this, graduated with at least one semester of AI in 2021.
Horsepower: One of China’s three exascale3 computers was designed for AI problems, like weather and the economy, with trillions of parameters.
Publicity: mobilize the nation, highlight successes like improved medical diagnosis.
Commitment: Xi Jinping personally oversees national programs like AI. Education Minister, Huai Jinpeng, a famous computer scientist, is responsible for the AI literacy of 156 million pupils and students.
Money: Beijing already outspends Washington 4:1 on R&D, and this is reflected in the exascale computer and support for AI startups.
The combination of these six elements explains why Kaifu Lee put China ahead of the USA in exploring and exploiting AI.
For everyone with more than five thousand followers/readers: no infringing, fake accounts, libel, disclosing trade secrets or invading privacy; no sending porn to attract users; no torture, violence, killing of people or animals; no selling lethal weapons, gambling, phishing, scamming or spreading viruses; no organizing crime, counterfeiting, false advertising, empty promises or bullying; no lotteries, rumor-mongering, promoting superstitions; no content opposing the basic principles of the Constitution, national unity, sovereignty or territorial integrity; no divulging State secrets or endangering national security.
In 2018, censors yanked a viral essay about the capital’s migrant workers, Beijing Has 20 Million People Pretending to Live Here, and explained, “This essay polarizes relations between prosperous Beijingers and the immigrants who sweep their streets and may thus inflame bad feelings towards such vulnerable people”. In 2019, netizens blamed the censor for laxity after a female doctor, targeted by social media, committed suicide.
Exascale computers perform a billion, billion floating point operations (FLOPS) per second, a thousand times more than the previous generation of supercomputers.
