
Is China Beating America to AI Supremacy? - notlukesky
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/china-beating-america-ai-supremacy-106861
======
mindgam3
The entire idea of an “AI arms race” that we are losing to China is fear-
mongering by those with a vested interest in defense spending, ie military
industrial complex.

This is a human rights issue more than an arms race. The fact that SF is
banning facial recognition tech while the Chinese state is going all in (as
another commenter notes) is a win.

~~~
4ntonius8lock
I think furthermore, not only is it fearmongering, it's actually wrong.

What the article calls AI is just machine learning. And America leads the way
on this when it comes to cutting edge. Look at self driving cars.

It seems the article hinges on implicitly defining AI as adopting mass
surveillance/freedom restricting tech.

In reality if America cares about winning the 'tech development war' (I think
a better goal than the nebulous 'ai war') with China, it should be worried
about improving it's education system. And working on reducing corruption
(both in government spending and in private industry such as banking and
health care) - In the end, it was education, freedom and efficiency that
allowed the west to beat out totalitarian governments. Not the adoption of
totalitarian systems of oppression.

Imagine the US trying to adopt the USSR's system to 'obtaining and classifying
information' on dissidents since it was part of 'information technology'. I
find the article to have a borderline fascist/anti-western-ideals of freedom
undertone. Some people think in a way that seems to be completely lacking in
the ability to learn from history.

~~~
pmoriarty
_" In the end, it was education, freedom and efficiency that allowed the west
to beat out totalitarian governments."_

What about the massive catastrophe that killed off tens of millions in the
Soviet Union and devastated the country, while the US was left completely
unscathed by comparison?

In many ways education in the Soviet Union was far ahead of the United States,
particularly in mathematics.

Women were also far more equal to men in the Soviet Union, so in a way this is
an example where there was more freedom in the Soviet Union than in the United
States, since the roles for women in the US were far more restrictive and
curtailed their potential to a far greater degree. The US was also one of the
last countries in the world to outlaw slavery, and the lack of freedom that
black people were suffered under segregation in the US had no equal in the
Soviet Union at the time (though the USSR also had their own racism and
discrimination against Jewish people).

The USSR suffered not just from a lack of freedom, but crucially from the
concentration of power in to the hands of a highly paranoid and ruthless elite
and secret police who killed tens of millions of their own citizens, along
with a callousness towards the deaths of millions more in the redistribution
of resources and the overhaul of society in a race towards modernization.

The USSR also had to face the efforts of a far wealthier and equally paranoid
adversary that was determined to see it fail.

If there had been cooperation and mutual aid instead, if the USSR had suffered
no worse than the US during WW2, and if it hadn't been saddled with
bloodthirsty paranoid tyrants for leaders, the outcome might have been quite
different.

~~~
4ntonius8lock
If ... if ... if ... might

3 ifs and one might. Let's see: If my grandmother was male and if she was
catholic, she might be the pope. I only had to use two ifs to get to that one.

I'm really not sure what your point is.

Are you seriously arguing that overall there was more freedom in the USSR than
in America? I just want to be totally sure I get where you are coming from.
Because my post was the general freedom as in the literal definition of it:
"the power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants without hindrance or
restraint"

~~~
pmoriarty
No. I'm saying it's not black and white, and the post I was replying to was
overly simplistic and misleading.

It's interesting that your response was laser focused on freedom and utterly
and completely ignored every other point I brought up.

~~~
4ntonius8lock
I said the greater freedom in America helped it win the cold war. Of course it
is more nuanced than that. But that can literally be applied to everything and
anything ever said - if someone said being outside jail is good or not being
addicted to heroin is good... well its more nuanced... maybe someone would
benefit from being in jail or from being a heroin addict... sure, but at some
point you aren't really increasing understanding. You are just pedantically
noting things that are obvious in a way that detracts from meaningful
conversation.

It seemed to me you were arguing against my freedom point by trying to say
America wasn't much more free than USSR. Since such a position seems so
utterly disconnected from reality and history, I asked you to clarify your
position, maybe I misunderstood.

I also asked what your point was, since I honestly can't see what you are
trying to get at in the context of the conversation: should the US have more
anti-freedom ML technology applied to mass surveillance and social control? Do
you think that will help? Read the FA and opine, I'd be happy to hear a smart
analysis. You seem to be able to do that, you seem quite smart. But picking at
the edges of arguments without actually participating is kinda... detracting
from the goal of conversation and moving towards ego boosting.

Also, even if you are smart, if I understood correctly that you honestly
believe the USSR to be more free than the US in any significant manner based
on the definition of freedom, then I'm not going to participate in this line
of thought.

I've had a conversation once with someone I had just met. He mentioned
'dinosaur bones were placed there by the devil to trick us'. I asked if he
meant it. With a straight face he said yes. You could say I laser focused on
that, because after it, I never went beyond 'hows the weather' with him. He
has every right to see it that way, I and many others have every right to
think of him as slightly less 'there' and therefore avoid getting tangled with
what we see as incoherent.

------
TheFiend7
I'm unsure of if the American government is just extremely discreet in their
development of cyber warfare technology or America just isn't investing in
technology as much as other countries. But it seems like even Russia is
beating us...

Just look at our voting count machines. You think something like that would be
treated with extreme priority and would have a lot more security around it
than it does.

~~~
CharlesColeman
> Just look at our voting count machines. You think something like that would
> be treated with extreme priority and would have a lot more security around
> it than it does.

If the priority was to build a good system. However, powerful government
factions think that all government development must be farmed wholesale to
private business, because of a twisted ideological belief in the market. Those
private businesses are ruled by the ideology that shareholder value is the
ultimate and only good, so they slap their products together as cheaply as
possible.

The result of that toxic stew is that we can't have nice things.

------
jariel
The AI boom is overstated.

There is not a single piece of technology, not a single 'problem solved' that
necessarily requires Deep Learning this very day.

Some Voice and Translation apps are improved by it, but not by that much.

Yes, this will change over time, particularly as things like 'computer vision'
are effectively more dependant on it - and -that tech will enable things like
driverless cars ... but it's still overstated.

There is an ever growing army of AI researchers putting out stuff, and they
will all improve our lives marginally, but I'm doubtful that AI in and of
itself will be the thing that really creates change.

I suggest that the 'future robot that cleans your toilet and makes a ham
sandwich' will be 10% AI and 90% advances in every other kind of technology.
I'll bet that only isolated systems of such robots are primarily AI driven
(i.e. vision, motor control for fluid movement etc.) and the rest is just
plain old software.

------
josteink
I do t know about the all-in-all situation, but as an anecdote I had to return
a mid-range iRobot Roomba because it didn’t work near as well as expected. The
Xiaomi I bought for half the price worked excellently though.

The reason? I’m sure the mechanics are mostly the same, but the AI on the
Xiaomi seems way better so it actually figures out a good route throughout the
house in a way the Roomba never did, and after 30 minutes it is done, as
opposed to still trying to find the way out of the kitchen like the Roomba
was.

------
Havoc
Yes.

I don't see the US winning this one given China's brute force, no rules
approach. See their social credit thing.

SV as great as it is will have a hard time competing against that wild west
approach given that it is still constrained by rules.

~~~
OldHand2018
> China's brute force, no rules approach

Is there any evidence in all of human history that demonstrates that a "brute
force, no rules, unlimited resource" approach ever does anything but
eventually collapse upon itself?

~~~
Havoc
>Is there any evidence in all of human history

I don't think there is a precedent for what's happening over there. It's too
complete & all-ecompassing.

Deducing anything from history is dangerous when you're dealing with a
entirely different & new beast.

------
yters
Do we want to win the race to big brother?

~~~
Tempest1981
AI is a tool. It's algorithms. Those algorithms are going to be developed and
improved, regardless.

Your concern is with how those algorithms are used/applied in our world. Just
like CRISPR. It's a valid concern.

~~~
yters
A guillotine is a tool. You can use it for chopping watermelon or heads.

------
brij0102
It depends on where in the AI lifecycle we are ... I believe we are still
barely scratching the surface and mostly using it to solve old problems. This
‘race’ could just help improve the field enough that we can get to some real
fun stuff!

------
kresten
“AI supremacy” like it’s a podium.

------
rgbrenner
_the Party has given China’s top four facial recognition firms access to its
database of over 1.4 billion citizen photos. One well-informed venture
capitalist in this arena estimates that Chinese facial recognition firms have
one million times more images than their U.S. counterparts._

That doesn't sound right. 1.4b photos is nothing compared to facebook and
google.

Facebook + Instagram has 2.3b + 1b active users and each one uploads tons of
photos. Facebook uses these for facial recognition.

Google owns Android (2.5b active users).. and if you've enabled face auth,
Android is sending your photo to google to be analyzed. They could also use
Google Photos and Youtube videos (although I don't know that they do).

Amazon owns Rekognition.. and if you're using it, they're taking the photos
you process with it and using it for training. They're used by law enforcement
and a variety of companies, and I'd be willing to bet they have more than 1.4b
photos.

These are probably better data sets for training too.. since they show people
in the real world vs China's ID photo database of people posing for a photo.

~~~
bllguo
facial recognition is a particularly weird example too. the data is skewed
from the onset when your image sources are pretty much all han chinese. This
has already been a problem in the west with most photos being of white people,
but china would have this issue to a far greater degree.

------
threatofrain
> So while San Francisco recently banned facial recognition technologies, the
> Party has given China’s top four facial recognition firms access to its
> database of over 1.4 billion citizen photos. One well-informed venture
> capitalist in this arena estimates that Chinese facial recognition firms
> have one million times more images than their U.S. counterparts.

~~~
yorwba
If Chinese companies have access to billions of images and that's a million
times more than their Western counterparts, Western companies are limited to
small datasets in the thousands. That doesn't make sense. Microsoft used to
hand out the millions of images in their Celeb dataset for free, and Facebook
can use every image their users ever posted.

------
thekingofh
No.

------
carapace
[https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n19/john-
lanchester/docu...](https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n19/john-
lanchester/document-number-nine)

"Document Number Nine" by John Lanchester

> There’s no off-the-shelf description for China’s political and economic
> system.

> This system-with-no-name has been extraordinarily successful, with more than
> 800 million people raised out of absolute poverty since the 1980s.

> There is a strong claim that this scale of growth, sustained for such an
> unprecedented number of people over such a number of years, is the greatest
> economic achievement in human history.

> Since Deng Xiaoping instituted the policy of ‘reform and opening’ in the
> early 1980s, there has been a general view in the West that the gradual
> encroachment of capitalism in China would lead to a turn towards democratic
> government. This reflected a deeply held, largely unexamined belief that
> capitalism and democracy are interlinked.

> The Chinese government favours the doctrine of ‘cyber-sovereignty’, in which
> countries have control over their own versions of the internet. Kai
> Strittmatter was for many years the Beijing correspondent for the
> Süddeutsche Zeitung, and his excellent "We Have Been Harmonised" is an eye-
> opening account of this issue. (‘Harmonised’ is a euphemism for ‘censored’.)

> > The days when the party eyed the internet with fear and anxiety are long
> gone. The regime has not only lost its fear; it has learned to love new
> technologies. The CCP believes it can use big data and artificial
> intelligence to create steering mechanisms that will catapult its economy
> into the future and make its apparatus crisis-proof. At the same time, it
> intends to create the most perfect surveillance state the world has ever
> seen.

> In 2013, an amazing paper from the highest reaches of the CCP, catchily
> known as ‘Document Number Nine’, or ‘Communiqué on the Current State of the
> Ideological Sphere’, came to light. (The journalist who leaked it, Gao Yu,
> was sentenced to seven years in prison and is currently under house arrest.)
> Document Number Nine warned of ‘the following false ideological trends,
> positions and activities’: ‘promoting Western constitutional democracy’;
> ‘promoting “universal values”’; ‘promoting civil society’; ‘promoting
> neoliberalism’; ‘promoting the West’s idea of journalism, challenging
> China’s principle that the media and publishing system should be subject to
> party discipline’; ‘promoting historical nihilism’ (which means
> contradicting the party’s view of history); ‘questioning Reform and Opening
> and the socialist nature of socialism with Chinese characteristics’. The
> paper, which is cogent and clear, takes direct aim at the core values of
> Western democracy, and explicitly identifies them as the enemies of the
> party.1 It sees the internet as a crucial forum for defeating these enemies.
> The conclusion speaks of the need to ‘conscientiously strengthen management
> of the ideological battlefield’, and especially to ‘strengthen guidance of
> public opinion on the internet’ and ‘purify the environment of public
> opinion on the internet’.

> Document Number Nine is thought to have been either directly written by, or
> under the auspices of, President Xi Jinping. It marked a new turn in the
> history of China, and quite possibly the history of the world: the moment at
> which a powerful nation-state looked at the entire internet’s direction of
> travel – towards openness, interconnection, globalisation, the free flow of
> information – and decided to reverse it.

