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Comment by cjbprime | Hacker News Reader

> OBAMA: The way I’ve been thinking about the regulatory structure as AI emerges is that, early in a technology, a thousand flowers should bloom.

I gotta say, I thought he'd be more familiar with that metaphor.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Flowers_Campaign

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Actually the "thousand flowers" metaphor is part of Silicon Valley culture going back 30 years.

At least I have heard this any number of times in relation to technology innovation, entrepreneurship, "lean startups", etc. I bet a lot of the people who use the term have no idea of its origins in Mao's China.

See for example, this article from Inc magazine in 1984, which begins as follows:

"Not too long ago, fortune 500 companies looked at small-scale entrepreneurial companies as fodder for acquisition -- if they were big enough to make the effort worthwhile -- and little more. The executive who dared to suggest that Goliath might learn from David was likely to be trampled by a herd of MBAs waving printouts on the economies of scale that flowed from a centralized and rationally managed organization... Then something happened...The micromillenium was born in a Cupertino, Calif., garage."

[excerpted from "Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom" http://www.inc.com/magazine/19840401/2895.html]

I think he knew the origin, but chose it anyway. It is an elegant phrase. Communists could be very eloquent.

How else do you think they managed to convince so many people to be communists?

The free stuff?

Free food. Unless you are parasite, in which case, gulag for you.

You spelt 'government' wrong.

I am not a communist, but I must point out, that it works exactly the same way with capitalism too. If you got some time, there is a great documentation called 'The Century of the Self', which shows (among other things) how modern marketing in western countries started and evolved.

Thank you, I'll have to add it to my list.

"How else do you think they managed to convince so many people to be communists?"

Once they had momentum? With rifles.

The metaphor seems to fit perfectly with what he wanted to say.

First you give people the liberty to explore and then you crush most of them with thousands of pages of legislation.

A little dark perhaps, but it fits.

Sounds like a perfect use for it. I'm understanding his use of it as that the thousand flowers should only bloom in the beginning, and later the field should be much tighter regulated. When you replace people's lives with different AIs, it becomes much less tragic, thankfully.

According to that wiki article, it is a BAD thing. People express themselves and then are imprisoned for it. That's bad.

Here's Ai Weiwei's interpretation of the phrase, that was a temporary installation in Alcatraz recently http://www.fubiz.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/blossomaiwei... (Cite: http://stefany-cordedoce.blogspot.com/2014/11/porcelain-bouq... )

Tone of your comments suggests that you're arguing with me, and yet, you didn't write anything that contradicts with my comment. Are you sure you understood what I wrote?

Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.

-- Ronald Reagan

Thank you for sharing. I hadn't heard the phrase before.

The way I've been thinking about AI is that it reduces the need for grasping administrators with a surface understanding of technology. I'm not too surprised that the head administrator would see it in terms of his office gaining manifold new powers, though.

Blooming flowers is a metaphor used by orators from practically every country and kingdom in the course of human history. I don't think this particular formula has anything to do with the hundred flowers campaign, in spirit or in origin. "Let a thousand flowers bloom" has been used by people opposed to heavy government regulation in the tech sector for decades. I even remember the head of FINRA using some variation of the phrase in the Senate hearings on Bitcoin (somewhat surprisingly).

EDIT: Actually, looking into the history of this particular phrase and its use in the West, I may be mistaken here.

Same as FDR's inversion of Sumner's Forgotten Man

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgotten_man

When some startup CEO says they are on a crusade to change customer service do you get visions of knights on horses riding through Asia Minor? When your girlfriend tells you not to put words in her mouth do you flash back to 2 Samuel 14:3?

Language is great at evolving and incorporating colorful and evocative phrases while stripping out the original connotations.

Yes, I expect this kind of reuse from most people. But it was surprising to hear one world leader using another world leader's most historic phrase from decades beforehand, where the phrase is historic precisely because it was murderous and insincere. So I mentioned it.

I'm reminded of another riff on that phrase from the book Nexus by Ramez Naam, which was also said in the context of AI and incredible (and potentially incredibly dangerous) technologies:

    Let a billion flowers bloom!

I also thought it was a slightly inappropriate metaphor, but it gets the point across.

By "the point," do you mean that the government intends to initially encourage innovation, only to later stifle, repress, and criminalize the elements it doesn't like?

I mean, that's the reasonable application of the metaphor, right?

My point was that, assuming most people are unfamiliar with Chinese history under Mao, the expression will have positive connotations.

And those who are familiar with China under Mao will also find historically accurate connotations with Obama's quote.

Obama's a thoughtful guy. I'm guessing he knew what he was saying. Perhaps it's a warning, looking at the history of tech, invariably all are tested for nefarious purposes, whatever the original purposes were.

that sounds like something Obama would do when you put it like that...

Maybe that was a Freudian slip?

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