WE’RE OBSESSED WITH BEATING CHINA ON AI… WHILE IGNORING THEIR PEOPLE
StarLink is clearly getting out of control.
CONTEXTUAL CONTEXT
When we in the West talk threats regarding AI, the concerns are a plenty: jobs, meaning, alignment, environmental, existential, which has the coolest handle… to name but a few, with more added daily.
Agreed!
Given this plethora of concern, it should come as no surprise when big thinkers or economists, or environmentalists, or governments, or concentrated citizens, or my beer drinkin’ neighbour Ron, question whether we ought to take a log off of the Artificial Intelligence fire… ya know, just slow things down a tad until we have a better understanding. These multi-stranded concerns are met with a single-strand response:
“We have to win the AI race against China at all costs!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
And then their head explodes (pictured):
In other news… Punxsutawney Phil has predicted an early Spring!
Time and time again, this extremely complex discussion is reduced to a binary:
One Winner / One Loser
Apparently, national survival hangs in the balance of achieving Artificial General Intelligence first. The framing is so clean it feels like wartime propaganda even when the underlying competition is real. There absolutely is an AI race in important domains. The countries that come in 2nd and 3rd (and beyond) in the competition will be impacted by a superintelligence engineered using a completely different cultural structure.
BUT there is also endless nuance that gets flattened into team sports.
All of this can be true.
THE COMPASSIONATE QUESTION:
This is where I dismount the badly beaten, dead horse, and ask the Q that no one is asking:
WHAT HAPPENS TO THE CHINESE PEOPLE?
Not the CCP. Not the geopolitical chessboard.
The actual human beings inside a VERY different cultural system.
“THE GRIND” AS A CULTURAL OPERATING SYSTEM
China’s post-1978 economic transformation is, without a single doubt, the most impressive in history, given its speed and scale.
Eat your heart out, Guam!
The strategy was built on a high-pressure cultural and institutional package: cutthroat academic competition (the gaokao), 996 work culture (9 am - 9 pm, 6 days a week), “involution” (neijuan) to benefit the state… From a Western perspective, it sounds like running harder and harder just to stay in place… oh, and a social contract where performance and rising living standards bought legitimacy.
I have never regretted a prompt more than copyright-free Dennis “The Worm” Rodman.
I’m willing to bet most of us in the West have borne witness to this (I know I have, and it’s impressive): Chinese immigrants showing up and outworking everyone. The Dennis Rodman Effect, as I call it (seriously, he outworked way bigger dudes for those rebounds). This isn’t a stereotype pulled from thin air; it’s the visible edge of a system that demands relentless striving. That system produced miracles (China = economic behemoth in the blink of an eye). It also produced suicide nets at some Foxconn factories in the early 2010s after clusters of worker suicides.
And we in the West got our Apple iPhones while humans suffered. Always remember that there are many yucky realities to the awesomeness of having relatively affordable black mirrors in our pockets.
So ya, even before AI became the central obsession, cracks were showing in Chinese morale:
Youth unemployment became a socio-political problem. “Lying flat” (tangping) and “let it rot” (bailan) emerged as quiet refusals among young peeps who looked at their culture’s treadmill and decided not to run. What happens to the individual? What happens to the treadmill? Lots, but what I can confidently tell you is that the treadmill’s operator (the regime) treats social stability as existential.
That is existing domestic Chinese goings ons.
Sooooo…… awkward question…
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN A CULTURE OF GRIND LOSES ITS POINT?
Western AI doesn’t have to “win” in some Stanley Cup hoisting sense for this question to matter. W. Artificial Intelligence only has to erode the economic return on the kind of high-effort, mid-skill, compliance-heavy work for which a billion-and-change Chinese are wired. When a culture’s primary script for a good life is “outwork everyone so our country is undeniable,” and then large categories of that work become less necessary, you don’t just get unemployment…
You get a meaning and status crisis at scale beyond Western grasp.
The Chinese state’s existing toolkit for managing its people’s loyalty is not mysterious: surveillance, social credit systems, narrative control, internal migration management, state-directed employment projects, and heavy pressure on companies to prioritize stability alongside growth.
From a Western liberal perspective:
These tools look extreme.
From the CCP’s perspective:
These tools are how you prevent the kind of chaos that could threaten the national project.
Neither description is false: Cultural Relativity.
Oh! Something to add that always blows my mind: In China, it don’t matter how important and famous you are, you can be vanished to maintain loyalty to the state. See Zhao Wei, Fan Bingbing and various government officials. This is in stark contrast to the seemingly bulletproof aristocracy of the West.
The Chinese have thrived… but they’ve done it through tough means.
AI potentially “frees” over a billion people… After all, the back-breaking grind can be effortlessly done by a machine.
Therefore, the open question is: Can a government that has long drawn legitimacy from turbo-growth and exponentially rising prospects manufacture purpose at a population scale when the old path of grind-and-advance becomes useless? Or do the Chinese people get deeper versions of the alienation and an uptick in quiet refusal already visible in parts of Chinese youth culture?
Believe me, the West will fall hard in the meaning and purpose department due to AI… but I worry that China will fall harder.
I trust my AI chose the right Chinese characters for this!
THE WEST AIN’T OFF THE HOOK
As a Westerner, I gotta admit…
It is tempting to look at this and ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ because Western freedoms and individualism are better adapted for the AI transition. Ethnocentrism.
And… there is a real case here:
Societies that treat identity as modular, where people are encouraged to reinvent themselves, where status can come from creativity, relationships, leisure, or eccentricity as well as pure economic output, may have more shock absorbers when the labour market shifts under them. In that culture, it’s easier to imagine that meaning can be more fluid like.
Buuuuuut individualism and freedom has its own body count. Deaths of despair, loneliness epidemics, and the quiet collapse of purpose among people who were told they could be anything and then found out the market (or the algorithm) disagreed… paralysis by too many damn options is also real.
The West’s risk is not a sudden crisis for over a billion grinders. It’s more of a slow slide into passivity, atomization, and competing forms of nihilism for a few hundred million in North America.
It ought to be made clear: This is not a controlled experiment in which our system is the healthy control group!
We in the West are running a different set of risks.
What we know for sure: The future is desaturated.
WHY THIS MATTERS WAY BEYOND CHINA
A crisis of meaning inside a nuclear-armed, highly centralized state of 1.4 billion people is not a local story!!!
This is a global stability question, a migration question, a geopolitical question, and a straight-up humanitarian question. I am legitimately worried about our Chinese brethren! The instinct that “we might all have to help” is not soft-headed. The adverse, treating the Chinese population as either a geopolitical blob or an afterthought in the AI race, is a failure of forecasting… and compassion.
For the record, I am cheering on the Western tech; I am a Westerner! … But you better believe that I am also cheering on safety and kindness and understanding and compassion and aid for everyone as we transition… to whatever the hell is coming next!
The popular Western discourse seems to prefer the simple movie version (big surprise): race, dominate, win at all costs.
I just pictured Western AI looking like a 1s and 0s John Wayne.
“Howdy, 01110000 01100001 01110010 01110100 01101110 01100101 01110010.”
The more interesting and more human version is comparative adaptive capacity under technological disruption. Which cultural and institutional arrangements handle the collapse of old meaning-scripts better? Which ones turn surplus humans into a controlled population? Which ones generate new forms of dignity when the old economic ones erode?
I don’t know the answer. I do know the question is almost absent from the conversation that claims to be about the future of humanity.
The grind built modern China. And wow. But, AI is going to test what happens when the grind no longer pays the same dividends… and over a billion people don’t have a place to apply their instilled superpower. How a society wired for extreme effort responds to that test will shape more than its own future… it will shape all of ours.
We should all be paying attention to the West vs. China in the AI race… but not as die-hard fanatics of one team… more like people who claim to care about what breakneck technological change actually does to human beings at scale.
THE (MAYBE) TWIST?
Maybe China’s got this figured and is fixin’ to lend the West a helping hand!
We’re all in this together.
Fin.