My Take | A humane Chinese AI versus a dog-eat-dog American AI

There is no artificial intelligence (AI) race to dominate the technology except in the minds of America’s billionaire tech bros and the ruling elites in Washington. Unfortunately, the global news media often uncritically adopt this dog-eat-dog narrative, including sometimes this newspaper.

Now, I am not denying the intense competition between China and the United States in AI and other major industries of the 21st century. I am, however, claiming that competition is basically an end in itself for industry and political insiders in the US – with their “everything else be damned” attitude – while it is a means to far more humane socialist goals in China.

The latter’s agenda aims to preserve jobs and advance labour welfare and benefits against the threats of AI. This extends from Beijing’s policy of “diffusing” AI use to ordinary people to developing a welfare safety net.

It takes two to tango, and the Chinese leadership’s AI priority is not supremacy, but domestic self-strengthening in terms of productivity and business value creation. That has been the century-old attitude of Chinese leaders towards Western-inspired technologies, rather than dominance or supremacy.

I am also not predicting which country will dominate AI in the future; most likely the US will remain dominant for a long time. But the outcome, which we are already seeing, is that China’s leadership and tech bosses worry a lot more about the social costs of AI. In contrast, the Silicon Valley tech bros and their rightwing Republican partners-in-crime in Washington are practically rubbing their hands with glee, with the share prices of tech giants rising whenever they lay people off.

Of course, in China, many workers are losing their jobs and fresh graduates can’t find work. But massively laying off workers is seen as a last resort, a matter of shame, not something for which alpha bosses pound on their chest to the cheers of Wall Street. It’s especially not something to boast about, unlike US CEOs who cite AI and its investment as the all-purpose justification to lay off workers. Despite record profits, Big Tech is sacking employees on a massive scale. It used to only happen when companies were losing money and downsizing.