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Comment by PeanutCurry | Hacker News Reader

I'm not working in machine learning so please cut me down to size if I'm just not getting it. But my big criticism of the article was that it just sort've glosses over the elephant in the room. China is going to have a massive data set... of Chinese citizens. With how much the ruling party exercises its authority over the nation and the nationalist nature of a lot of Chinese culture I don't see how this data will be broad enough to leverage against other nations in terms of making things like behavioral predictions. Everything I read about China makes these grand premonitions but really it seems like China is simply preparing to not need anybody except for China. Which is very Orwellian but a lot different from WORLD DOMINATION.

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Understand that China, culturally, doesn't focus on World Domination. They view China as being able to attain heaven on earth and that as the "Central" Kingdom, between earth and heaven, they have the mandate to hold at bay the "Four Barbarians."

[1]https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2017/03/08/the-demise-... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Barbarians

>China is going to have a massive data set... of Chinese citizens. With how much the ruling party exercises its authority over the nation and the nationalist nature of a lot of Chinese culture I don't see how this data will be broad enough to leverage against other nations in terms of making things like behavioral predictions

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.

Oh, I'm just taking "crazy" literally, rather than how it's meant in the article which is more like "unfeasible" etc. That's also an elephant in the room in a way.

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.

> But I agree that China so far seems to have little wish to dominate anyone else.

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.

We have the dictum of the dollar rather than the dictum of the party, but that's not a meaningful enough difference IMO.

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?

Oh yeah, objectivism. Ayn Rand being against welfare for other and the collecting it herself.

> 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"?

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