China's Plan for World Domination in AI Isn't So Crazy
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
https://www.acast.com/theeconomistasks/theeconomistasks-howd...
The audio is totally amazing! One of the most significant silences I've heard in a long time.
When a Snowden for China finally emerges, I think it's going to be far worse than anyone imagined. And people like Shen are complicit with their silence.
This guy is actively building the instruments of oppression and making a ton of money doing it. Certainly doesn't match the kind of unilateral oppression connotated by the word "victim".
And there's a good chance that he does not or cannot even allow himself the freedom of mind to acknowledge it.
I've noticed something with the Chinese people I've spoken to, as much as they acknowledge that "the government is bad", they agree with them in all regards.
They quite simply cannot come to terms with the notion that the reality presented to the in school and by the media, throughout their entire lives, is simply a façade.
Is Shen complicit? Quite possibly. But the Chinese government seeks for all it's citizenry to act not as individuals but as a unified whole. Outside of the higher levels of government it becomes very difficult to allocate individual shares of blame.
with what data or experience do have to make this assertion?
There's nothing in an honest answer to the question he was asked by which could serve Beijing either from a political or a business perspective.
Likewise a propaganda based answer would have gotten him nowhere in any thinking society. I do not know what sort of punishment could or would result for him from any fallout from a radio interview the in western media.
That sheepish 'no' however, made me think not of some machiavellian monster, but of a scared little boy. I really do wonder, just what is he afraid of?
China's propaganda is rather up front about what it's about. Our propaganda lies/hides about what the state is doing. That's why it is shocking.
> And people like Shen are complicit with their silence.
How are they complicit? They are no more complicit than people who buy "made in china" goods or businesses who invest in china or tourists who flock to china.
You're commenting on a quote where they are explicitly not being open about what they do.
But bear in mind Shen isn't 'they'. He has no political role or cover. There's literally nothing he can say on the subject that couldn't get him in trouble and frankly he may not actually know all that much officially anyway.
The wet dream of an authoritarian government.
What kind of parameters can the government record which would actually make a credit rating more reliable?
The result is also not only used to put you at financial disadvantage, they use it everywhere there is a queue to put those good citizens into the front of the queue.
Source: https://www.ft.com/content/e8ccd7b8-6459-11e6-a08a-c7ac04ef0... [FT might be paywalled, but I was able to reach it via Google for free]
Maybe someone enterprising can start a service that automatically posts a bunch of innocuous stuff to a FB profile so I don't have to bother wasting my time with it.
Given that scoring bots in mass use will necessarily decrease the dimensionality of the data into fewer, more tractable features, and thus creating bots need only to target the dimensionality-reduction step, rather than reproduce "human behavior."
Which seems rather simple given the variance in natural language and normal human social interaction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System
Video describing a similar system (linked to from the wiki page):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHcTKWiZ8sI
Possibly one of the scariest concepts I've seen in a while.
There are other ways to think about credit worthiness. As an example your checking and savings account can be used to show how you actually do each month, you can look at social connections to see who my friends are and if you have something like Google Wallet or Square Cash or Venmo you can also look at how good people are at paying each other back.
So plenty of things to look at that aren't being recorded right now.
Currently, credit ratings agencies give ratings to organisations based on the fees of those same organisations asking them to rate them. This creates a conflict of interest. A large conflict of interest.
Like most FinTech, and change is more a question of law and regulation than it is technology 'disrupting' an opportunity.
In finance, laws or regulations change and Fintech tends to be the fastest to react. It is regulators who drive where Fintech goes (not in all cases, but in I'd argue most), however.
China's vision is much worse.
* Everybody is measured by a score between 350 and 950, which is linked to their national identity card. While currently supposedly voluntary, the government has announced that it will be mandatory by 2020.
* The system is run by two companies, Alibaba and Tencent, which run all the social networks in China and therefore have access to a vast amount of data about people’s social ties and activities and what they say.
* In addition to measuring your ability to pay, as in the United States, the scores serve as a measure of political compliance. Among the things that will hurt a citizen’s score are posting political opinions without prior permission, or posting information that the regime does not like, such as about the Tienanmen Square massacre that the government carried out to hold on to power, or the Shanghai stock market collapse.
* It will hurt your score not only if you do these things, but if any of your friends do them. Imagine the social pressure against disobedience or dissent that this will create. Anybody can check anyone else’s score online. Among other things, this lets people find out which of their friends may be hurting their scores.
* Also used to calculate scores is information about hobbies, lifestyle, and shopping. Buying certain goods will improve your score, while others (such as video games) will lower it.
* Those with higher scores are rewarded with concrete benefits. Those who reach 700, for example, get easy access to a Singapore travel permit, while those who hit 750 get an even more valued visa.
* Sadly, many Chinese appear to be embracing the score as a measure of social worth, with almost 100,000 people bragging about their scores on the Chinese equivalent of Twitter.
From http://boingboing.net/2015/10/06/reputation-economy-dystopia...
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Many people have heard very little about Weibo so saying that by itself doesn't carry as much meaning and the name is irrelevant to the discussion.
You need a permit?
Right in practice this doesn't matter so much.... As long as you're not a dissident of course :/
obviously not true, Alibaba tried numerous times to gain some market share in social media, but all their attempts failed.
Surely that's a bit "deviant".
Honestly though it's more likely he's apolitical and doesn't actually care or know... I'd say like 80% of young Chinese I've met are mostly apolitical or at least won't let on at all what they think (both in China and in the US).
It highlights the disregard for individual rights and privacy. Giving your data away to a bunch of people trying to build new business is not something I want to be a part of.
Until it's not.
Good luck with that. It's not an easy problem.[1][2] AOL thought they were clever enough and release a bunch of search query data in 2006 only to find out it wasn't anonymous.[3]
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-anonymity
In the West, all sorts of data are already available to those with legitimate interests. Traffic data is used to optimise city planning; police can track your phone, with a warrant; power networks read your smart meter and so on. The key difference to the situation described in the OP is that there are controls around it.
In terms of reaping the benefits of AI, a willingness to discard privacy isn't as important as building the capability in data collection, warehousing, analytics, and so on. A lackadaisical attitude to privacy such as handing everything over to the private sector will just make it easier to commit all sorts of crimes: identity theft, blackmail, stalking, etc. Rather than a structural advantage to the Chinese system, it sounds more like technical (legal?) debt that may take years to pay back once it's acknowledged that privacy controls actually have a legitimate purpose.
As for the likelihood that these un-safeguarded powers will be abused for personal or political gain, well, like you said, technical/legal debt.
China's state may have a huge store of data but it seems fairly likely they will want to heavily restrict who gets access to this data - secrecy is the other side of surveillance.
Similarly, AI in the West seems to have advanced a lot by having open research sharing and a high level of intellectual integrity. China's authoritarian state seems to often encourage poor research - not that all science is bad in China but there's a lot of news about a lot of bad science there. Ironically, a lack of openness can make cheating more common (a Chinese team was caught cheating in AI challenge recently, just for example though of course these aren't necessarily restricted to China).
Also, the Internet is a huge store of data, imagenet is pulled from the Internet. Other huge data sources are youtube and so-on. Maybe all the data a huge surveillance state captures would be a good source but that just seems like one dimension in a multidimensional competition where the rest of the dimensions might not be in favor of Chinese efforts.
The 1980s was a commercial failure, but expert systems never really went away. One interesting project was Cyc a massive comon sense rule system, sort of like a thesarus; now into its 4th decade. Another is IBM' Watson which is a hybrid of rules and statistical large data.
The difference this time is that deep learning appears to work in some cases and getting fast enough to operate in real time. One application is environmental object classification for self driving vehicles. The deep learning systems do as well as explicit algoritms and are easier to program. Secondly, I saw some papers at the recent SIGGRAPH where they replace procedural portions of graphics flows with deep learning and obtain good results. Whether deep learning can solve every problem under the Sun as some hypers claim is undetermined.
At best they will become an Orwellian nightmare then they currently are, World domination? Please...
They also have a pretty amazing group of ML developers, even if they haven't made the most public progress or had as much notoriety as Bengio, Russell, Lecun et al.
One thing I find striking is that Ng left Baidu with very little discussion of why given how much progress they had been making. It's possible that he felt his role was to start and grow the Baidu AI enterprise and then move on. However I would speculate that Baidu was increasingly collaborating with the CPC and he might have not wanted to be as heavily involved in that, given that he is more Western, being raised in London and was Hong Kongese rather than culturally Han.
The reason I want to point this out is "Han" means a lot more than the current status quo, which was transformed badly after the ruling party dominated the main land.
in the article (my cofounder is quoted)
If you are curious about anything, AMA.
More info below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15016850
We have people based in beijing analyzing the data. It's all on premise.
Do you know anything about this? 80 exabytes is an insane amount of storage and is orders of magnitude larger than any dataset I'm familiar with. I believe Common Crawl is in the petabytes range, and [0] describes training a neural net on 300 million images (which would be 300PB if each image was 1MB, but I suspect images are smaller). 80 exabytes is 80 million terabytes and would cost hundreds of millions to store.
My guess is that some journalistic error occurred here, or perhaps someone confused "80 exabytes of data are generated during heart ultrasounds" with "we've stored 80 exabytes of heart ultrasound data".
There are about 1600 hospitals in all.
Real time ultrasounds get synced to the cloud via devices planed in rural villages.
80 exabytes is not "journalistic error". We are building one of the largest AI research centers in china to accomplish this.
Wouldn't it be crazy if a brain drain from the west to Asia arised?
It's possible to get it on the right track. Tech jobs (especially depending on the province) provide incentives for a better path to something like this.
I'm directly involved with the fuzhou government deal. My cofounder chris is quoted in the article.
We are actually getting incentives and visas for foreign talent to move to southern china. We have a proper incorporation in china and everything setup.
Their goal is to build a large scale tech hub.
More of the news in mandarin from the launch:
http://www.mnw.cn/news/fz/1759144.html
http://fz.fjsen.com/2017-06/27/content_19717392.htm
http://news.fznews.com.cn/shehui/20170627/5951957fec4fc.shtm...
http://www.chinadevelopment.com.cn/news/cy/2017/06/1154087.s...
http://www.fjcl.gov.cn/xzdt/1709724.jhtml
http://health.gmw.cn/2017-06/26/content_24892813.htm
http://fj.people.com.cn/GB/n2/2017/0627/c181466-30385585.htm...
http://fj.people.com.cn/BIG5/n2/2017/0627/c181466-30385585.h...
http://news.fznews.com.cn/shehui/20170627/5951ab08e5189.shtm...
http://fz.fjsen.com/2017-06/27/content_19716514.htm
This actually made a large scale splash in china.
We will be the primary AI vendor for the implementation.
We are helping them build their own on prem infrastructure.
We are hiring in china for those interested in learning more! Email in profile.
Edit: updated to clarify about perm residency.
Of note here, it is possible:
https://www.travelchinaguide.com/embassy/visa/refusal.htm
It would come down to having a stable working job in china for an extended period.
That being said, your reply seems a bit "binary": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15016955
I don't seem to be completely wrong according to your comment here? The green card doesn't seem impossible, but I won't exactly claim to be an immigration lawyer.
Sounds like Beijing is finally taking the back foot to provincial and local authorities on visa policy.
I've long considered myself a vanguard economic migrant of the grandparent's brain drain. It's just impossible to have an independent career in R&D in much of the west and have any sort of economic security, much less start multiple businesses. My native Sydney is a particularly bad case.
Moving to a foreign country is hard enough already, but it's even harder when the parts of the internet you can read/understand is blocked and circumventing the blockage is increasingly difficult and even criminalized.
I'm assuming like many other government processes dealing with non-Chinese Internet content, the registration process and operation is opaque and arbitrarily run, but it's better than trying to run a business from within China only upon VPNs.
> The whole concept of alienation found its first expression in Western thought in the Old Testament concept of idolatry. The essence of what the prophets call "idolatry" is not that man worships many gods instead of only one. It is that the idols are the work of man's own hands -- they are things, and man bows down and worships things; worships that which he has created himself. In doing so he transforms himself into a thing. He transfers to the things of his creation the attributes of his own life, and instead of experiencing himself as the creating person, he is in touch with himself only by the worship of the idol. He has become estranged from his own life forces, from the wealth of his own potentialities, and is in touch with himself only in the indirect way of submission to life frozen in the idols. The deadness and emptiness of the idol is expressed in the Old Testament: "Eyes they have and they do not see, ears they have and they do not hear," etc. The more man transfers his own powers to the idols, the poorer he himself becomes, and the more dependent on the idols, so that they permit him to redeem a small part of what was originally his. The idols can be a godlike figure, the state, the church, a person, possessions. Idolatry changes its objects; it is by no means to be found only in those forms in which the idol has a so-called religious meaning. Idolatry is always the worship of something into which man has put his own creative powers, and to which he now submits, instead of experiencing himself in his creative act.
-- Erich Fromm, who also said
> The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same form of mental pathology does not make these people sane.
But I agree that China so far seems to have little wish to dominate anyone else. Of course, when you have your population under control so much that they will build any sort of robots in any quantities for you, that might be reconsidered. Hannah Arendt wrote:
> If the totalitarian conqueror conducts himself everywhere as though he were at home, by the same token he must treat his own population as though he were a foreign conqueror.
Maybe this goes the other way, too? I don't know, but when the only thing between your resources is the mercy of organizations that know no mercy, it might.
Of course, the trouble with China is.. "us". "The" West, if you will. We have little moral standing to point fingers, no alternative vision. We have the dictum of the dollar rather than the dictum of the party, but that's not a meaningful enough difference IMO. I'm not saying we're just as totalitarian, but that we're not sufficiently non-totalitarian. China and Russia, for all valid criticism there is to make, are first and foremost awesome scapegoats that keep our side of the machinery humming.
This may well change once the Chinese economy is bigger than the US economy. It already is at PPP, but at current exchange rates China will likely surpass the USA within 10 years.
I have to disagree on this point. The dollar leads to objectivism. The party leads to collectivism.
It depends on your definition of morality. Do you value the individual or the society? Would you see the outliers, both good & bad, purged or preserved?
> Do you value the individual or the society?
.. or the dollar, which is entirely different from valuing people? Just one of a trillion examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkgFA9q7w0w
It leads to treating people like objects, and it makes it "rational" to destroy others for profit and "irrational" to care about them.
> It depends on your definition of morality.
It depends on your humanity, on the strength of your backbone. Do you have your "values", your experiences inside you, or do you have external measures, like dollars or party approval or a "definition of morality"?
You're falsely assuming that these "national" data sets are inaccessible to anyone outside the nation. Hackers, advertising companies, ISPs etc will gladly sell you a copy, which can in turn be duplicated and resold across the world ad infinitum.
[1]https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2017/03/08/the-demise-... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Barbarians
I don't see a problem with that. I have actually expressed the same idea multiple times here on HN.
Obviously eliminating humans by violent means would be immoral, but I don't see the problem with individuals deciding not to sustain humanity as it exists now.
For example, if you want to replace all human labor by robots, a lot of people would be against that, because they fear being unemployed. But if you don't intend to leave those unemployed people without food and shelter, I don't see anything wrong with still pursuing that goal.
> If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.
-- Stephen Hawking in a very lucid moment, https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/3nyn5i/science_ama...
Those who don't address that first, who cannot ENSURE that they're building a nuclear power plant and not an atom bomb, have no excuse.
Taking away peoples' roles and turning them into welfare recipients is not universally seen as a good thing. Many people get fulfillment from the work they do because feel like they contribute to society. Taking away their job and providing them food and shelter does not solve that problem.
You don't feel like you contribute to society when your job is easily obsolete/easily automated.
Many people got fulfillment from playing Chess, or Go, or weaving, or tilling a field with their own hands. Many, but fewer people, still enjoy doing these things today, although machines are better at it than them. Others have moved on to other ways of self-fulfillment.
If you oppose automation of activities people find fulfillment in, you should oppose game-playing AI much more than jobs being automated away. There are much fewer people that hate playing board games but have to do it anyway because it's the one skill they have that will put bread on the table.
An interesting hobby like Chess or Go by definition can't replace the need to be depended on and feel like you are contributing.
Still not sure what idols you're claiming are being worshiped. Fromm is discussing that there is misplaced mysticism that is imbued onto material "things." Not sure how that is conflated with my point - however I suppose it's an easy conclusion to make with a trivial discussion on the topic. Glad to see that my point has made impact, now it's about how to refine expressing it.
Also I didn't advocate building it in the shadows and in fact I don't think that's really possible anyway. Google doesn't explain to the public how it gets your search results, but experts are well aware of how it works. That's really all I'm saying. Simply that you don't need to tell everyone everything all the time because it's unnecessary.
You literally are intending to build something that you then consider "higher" or "better". A bunch of circuits and algorithms humans made. Or even just words, like talking about how it's the "logical next step in evolution". That's abstract ideas we're making up, and then pretending that's some sort of reality we have to adapt to. Erich Fromm's quote continues on like this:
> Among the many forms of alienation, the most frequent one is alienation in language. If I express a feeling with a word, let us say, if I say "I love you," the word is meant to be an indication of the reality which exists within myself, the power of my loving. The word "love" is meant to be a symbol of the fact love, but as soon as it is spoken it tends to assume a life of its own, it becomes a reality. I am under the illusion that the saying of the word is the equivalent of the experience, and soon I say the word and feel nothing, except the thought of love which the word expresses. The alienation of language shows the whole complexity of alienation. Language is one of the most precious human achievements; to avoid alienation by not speaking would be foolish -- yet one must be always aware of the danger of the spoken word, that it threatens to substitute itself for the living experience. The same holds true for all other achievements of man; ideas, art, any kind of man-made objects. They are man's creations; they are valuable aids for life, yet each one of them is also a trap, a temptation to confuse life with things, experience with artifacts, feeling with surrender and submission.
It's not so much misplaced mysticism as misplaced self.
> Also I didn't advocate building it in the shadows
No, you said you sadly "have" to.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15002805
> I'm hesitant to write it all out because I expect such a document would just be the source of opposition to implementation. Like putting war plans on the internet. If we make the progress we want I expect heavy opposition. However it's hard to build a movement in the shadows. I'd rather just be building things, and making progress toward the goal like I am now, than doing the politics of creating a movement before we have significant powers.
Okay, a charitable reading of "significant powers" might just mean "a working prototype, something more than nothing". But another way to read it would be to "not declare war until you ensured you have the bigger army".
The proof of the reality you need to adapt to is in the work, the output. If a machine can do everything you do practically, but in a way people would agree is more optimal - including being empathetic, just and kind with it's resources, then that's a reality you need to adapt to.
Okay, a charitable reading of "significant powers" might just mean "a working prototype, something more than nothing".
Effectively. What I mean is something that is interwoven into the fabric of our lives that can't just be shut off, like electricity. Something that brought so much progress that it would be irresponsible to remove it.
You don't build them on a drawing board, do you? edit: also, I think a lot of people would take issue with this. I'm no parent, but I know that when and if I'll be one, yeah, I hope my kid is bright and friendly and whatnot. But if they're disabled or have other issues, I'd still love them. I'd even love them if they were worse than me in every respect, and try to raise them as good as I can, but even then them being "more evolved and better" doesn't really strike me as something primary or even very important. I guess that's a nice thought until you actually see your child, then it goes out of the window. But I'm guessing here.
And sadly, many people do (worship their kids). They call it love, but confusing oneself with another, being fused with them, is not love.
> These are, born out of selfishness, the two methods of education of parents: tyranny and slavery in all gradiations, though tyranny can be very tender ("you have to believe me, I am your mother!"), and slavery very proud ("you are my son, therefore I will make you my saviour"), but they are two horrible methods of education, methods of anti-education, fit to stamp the child back into the ground from whence it came.
-- Franz Kafka, letter to Elli Hermann
> If a machine can do everything you do practically, but in a way people would agree is more optimal - including being empathetic, just and kind with it's resources, then that's a reality you need to adapt to.
The keyword being "if". As things are going, I see this as a carrot to keep people going; the carrot isn't actually where the road leads.
> Something that brought so much progress that it would be irresponsible to remove it.
And how does that go together with "fade into oblivion"? How would something that doesn't require us, but can afford to have empathy with us, diminish us in any way? What fabric of our lives are you talking about? The ones that faded into oblivion? Do you see no double think there?
Yea actually we (collectively) kind of do. I mean the massive institutional educational system, secondary, post secondary, neonatal care, preschool, faber, Montessori, Parenting books, videos blogs etc... are all systems and mechanisms and processes etc that are prescriptive for how to produce a positive, healthy functioning adult in [insert] society.
I guess that's a nice thought until you actually see your child, then it goes out of the window. But I'm guessing here.
Almost across the board, parents say the best thing they have ever done is to raise children. That their kids are smarter and kinder and better etc...than they were and on and on. Millions of words have been spilled for these legacies. Especially parents with disabled children, frequently laud how much more grounded and spiritual and "in the now" their children are. Whether they believe it, or it's objectively true or not is certainly up for debate, however it is true that people get pleasure in seeing their children grow up and are generally ok dying knowing their children will take on their legacy.
You're too focused on the fade into oblivion part. I'm hoping and AGI will help us figure out our existential problems - but maybe it can't or wont. Maybe it can help is figure out how to keep us all in a state of bliss forever, or upload us to computer paradise (ahem, matrix) or cure all of our diseases, or help us merge with it. Who knows, all I know is that we can't get past any kind of "singularity" level of technology with the slow pace of biological evolution.
It's simply a philosophical point that with a superhuman AGI we need not worry about what our fate as a human species is anymore because something else is taking the top spot in the food chain. It's a much more passive statement than you're interpreting it as.
These processes do not produce babies, they come way after the sperm fertilizing the egg.
And there is no top spot in "the" food chain. There are food chains that are separate from ours. And even assuming that's wrong: Do you see all the species of plants and animals just give up because humans exist? It has no bearing on their "aspirations" if you will. If I made a copy of you, a 100% exact clone, would you die peacefully? Or would it change nothing about your desire to live? My answer would be the latter.
> however it is true that people get pleasure in seeing their children grow up and are generally ok dying knowing their children will take on their legacy.
I don't actually believe this. People make their peace with their mortality -- or fail to do so -- on their own. Everybody dies alone. Actually, worrying about the future, and the gulags or world wars one's child might end up in, can have the opposite effect, people being fine about dying but worried about their children suffering.
It is strange how propaganda spins the narrative about the same thing so differently.
Anyone know if chinese media/propaganda does the same thing in regards to the west? Do they say "America or Europe's plan for world domination in AI Isn't So Crazy?".