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When we'll look back 20 years from now, we'll we see Google in the same light as we did IBM after helping the Nazi with their computers?

Will Google allow its DeepMind technology to be used to spy on Chinese citizens and dissidents?

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Was it known the nazis were evil when IBM helped them? Did IBM even know what their stuff was used for?

Different times, different situations. The US was full of anti-semites too, and didn't hesitate to put anyone with Japanese heritage into concentration camps after Pearl Harbor - and nobody cared. That stuff has been covered up / hardly mentioned, ever since. And the US and its citizens doesn't seem to have a problem putting "enemy combatants" into concentration / torture camps after 9/11 (Guantanamo Bay). And that's just the stuff we know of. There's also the much more mysterious CIA dark sites, who knows what went on in there.

I'm not saying China is any better from a moral standpoint, but the US and the businesses in there - often working together - aren't any better. See also the Snowden leaks, that proved the big tech companies were in cahoots with the NSA, amongst other things to profile for "enemy combatants" in the US.

> Was it known the nazis were evil when IBM helped them? Did IBM even know what their stuff was used for?

Yes. That was clearly shown in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

Edwin Black made a pretty convincing case that the IBM chairman Thomas J. Watson, Sr was quite aware of what the IBM equipment was used for - and actually quite enthusiastic about it all.

So think of that connection next time you use "Watson".

I find your argument rather lame.

First, Chinese government is not Nazi and Google is not IBM. You can't just say that a government is Nazi just because you hate that government.

Second, even if Google openly broke with Chinese government, it still has offices in China. I doubt that Google opens an AI center in China to "allow its DeepMind technology to be used to spy on Chinese citizens and dissidents", and I do think that Google has a big ambition than you can think in China. And I think that ambition is to advance AI with the help of local talents.

There is a difference between an analogy and a comparison. Just think of it as it working with murderers for commercial gain, and try again, as far as the analogy is concerned.

China is plenty totalitarian, too, so even as a comparison it's not that far off (though you won't be able to follow comparisons either if you think things have to be exactly the same thing to be compared). You might even say the Nazis weren't Nazis before they started and lost their war; if they had stuck with, say, attacking Poland and Russia, and had kept their concentration camps secret (i.e. plausibly deniable), they still might be darlings of Western business elites even today, as Hitler was before the stuff we now have 20/20 hindsight on.

Last but not least, a big ambition is living a life you then don't have to lie to yourself about. Compared to that, "advancing AI" isn't even an ambition, nevermind a big one.

> I find your argument rather lame.

not really, he managed to invoke nazis without it actually being godwins law. pretty impressive.

additionally, this is not a ridiculous comparison:

a) monopolistic, rights abusing dictatorship b) large us corp ignoring this to do business there and assist with 'dual use' tools which could be used for malice against its own citizens.

> You can't just say that a government is Nazi just because you hate that government.

similarly: you can't just dismiss a government's ills or to derail an argument because you like the people from that country or the stated intent of the action being peformed there by a company you like

At its core, the goal of the two regimes (China, Nazi Germany) is the same: control information so that the existing regime is portrayed in a good light that preserves stability. Just because China isn't genocoding Jews doesn't mean they don't have hundreds of thousands of political prisoners, disadvantaged minorities, and a completely authoritarian government. As is, you would never hear of the North Korean concentration camps that China supports, nor the Tibetan and Uighur genocides that are ongoing.

Google's move is purely financial. Google's biggest ambition is to control Chinese search, but its greatest ambition is to control all search, and the internet as whole. Google, as all other appreciably large tech companies, wants to hold a dominant position in the Chinse market, and to do so is willing to sacrifice market share in inferuor products. How much China gets involved is TB.

The really fun part? Watching corporate entities justify genocide, sexism, racism, etc. in their grabs for dominance over the remaining European provinces.

Can you give some credible sources on "Tibetan and Uighur genocides that are ongoing"?

Tibet: https://www.ncas.rutgers.edu/center-study-genocide-conflict-...

>"The Tibetan government in exile in India estimates that the death toll since 1950 due to starvation, outright violence, and other indirect causes amounts to 1.2 million. However, some Tibetologists place the figure closer to half a million. The non-governmental International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) released a report to the United Nations in 1959, and another in 1960, which documented accounts of atrocities and accused the Chinese of religious-based genocide in Tibet. "

Could possibly be biased by CIA it says.

Uighur: https://uhrp.org/featured-articles/arguing-genocide-xinjiang...

Ehh this is as biased as it probably gets and it doesn't really make it sound like genocide. I guess I had heard of this (and maybe Tibet too) as cultural genocides before, and got it mixed up.

Well a fun trivia, a research division of Chinese Policy Department(team named Trimps-Soushen), actually won top3 positions in ImageNet competition.

I think they definitely have, at least, the engineering strength to implement what crazy, SkyNet inspired system themselves, without help from Google/DeepMind ... Which is ... pretty sad, on many levels.

Spying on citizens and dissidents, even if true, is nothing close to Nazis. For the record,

- China was on the opposite side of Nazis in WW2

- China has 56 ethnic groups and has no plan to "cleanse" any of them

The fact is Communist China has a very deep history of "cleansing" what they define as undesirables, which continues today in various forms. Today (and for decades now) they're aggressively attempting to "cleanse" homosexuals using state resources, torturing thousands of people. [1][2]

China's Communist system also "cleansed" a vast number of people throughout its recent history. Over two decades they murdered (or sent to gulags) hundreds of thousands of intellectuals and similar, who were declared to be class enemies. This in fact likely set China's potential back by decades as Mao's horrific policies severely depleted China's resources.

[1] "China urged to stop using electroshock therapy to ‘convert’ LGBT people"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/11/14...

[2] https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/11/14/china-end-conversion-the...

So assuming what you described is true, why hasn't the rest of the world declared war against the communist China?

Because it's not close to what Nazis did. And that's my point.

Btw, from the articles that you linked, it is quite clear that treating LGBT as disease is not a government policy. In fact, it is against the law. The government doesn't actively hunt for LGBT people and send them for treatment. In fact I think they are less concerned about homosexuality than the churches are.

The world doesn't declare war on countries because of their internal wrong doings. Do you actually think ww2 was fought because the world wanted to stop German mistreatment of its undesirables?

> The world doesn't declare war on countries because of their internal wrong doings.

Yes, that's exactly what I wanted to say. Thanks for pointing out how China is different from Nazi.

Your logic is not sound. North Korea was recently described as a worse human rights abuser than Nazi Germany, by a Holocaust survivor no less [0]. In spite of this commonly-held perception, no country has declared war on them, for many of the same economic and military reasons that no country has or would declare war on China.

[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/north-korea/north-korean-gulags...

Okay. Let me break down my arguments in 2 parts:

[1] China is not similar to Nazi because the extent of "cleansing" is not on the same scale as Nazi (even if you count death sentences on illegal cult members)

[2] China is not similar to Nazi because it does not initiate new wars against other countries (Tibet was incorporated as a result of ongoing conflicts between China and other countries for decades, so it is not really an invasion)

I shouldn't have concluded that countries are not declaring war against China is due to [1]. However, it can be explained by [2]. Regardless, I believe both [1] and [2] stands.

I think you've taken more from the original comment than was given. Only you have compared Communist China to Nazi Germany on the basis of foreign policy, so that line of argument is irrelevant.

Historians criticize IBM for helping the Nazis to identify and exterminate political and ethnic minorities, not for improving their ability to wage war. In that respect, Western companies like Yahoo and Cisco have already been caught in similar arrangements with the Chinese Communist Party [1][2]. Hopefully Google's AI center will not continue this disturbing trend.

As to the scale of the CCP's "cleansing" to date, it's hard to know - they don't release any numbers, and foreign journalists are aggressively bullied, arrested, and deported if they try to find out [3][4].

We do know that China regularly humiliates and cracks down on members of its Muslim minorities [5], and that the Communist Party regularly intervenes in the appointment of Buddhist and Catholic religious leaders [6][7].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/07/business/worldbusiness/07i... [2] http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2015/03/china%E2%80%99s-go... [3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/03/bbc-crew-attac... [4] https://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2015/05/28/foreign-journ... [5] https://www.economist.com/news/china/21721680-bans-abnormal-... [6] http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-14533879 [7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_in_China#Diplo...

that's just propagandist fluff attempting to justify american intervention

If that is what you believe, I would encourage you to check out these two books on the subject [0][1]. Both are engrossing reads, and paint a damning picture of the regime from different perspectives.

I have taken a strong amateur interest in North Korea for years, and the full body of press, reporting, and firsthand accounts I have read would support the comparison to Nazi Germany.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Without-You-There-No-Undercover/dp/03... [1] https://www.amazon.com/Dear-Leader-Escape-North-Korea/dp/147...

All capable governments are spying on their dissidents. However, the CCP also detains dissidents on the basis of its spying even in low-profile cases[1], and has been using prisoners (in other words, more dissidents) as a source of organ "donations" for a long time[2]. All the articles I've read about this topic are about specific religious groups (Uyghurs/Falun Gong). The Chinese treatment of Islam is so openly hostile that it would make Breitbart proud[3]. China is (thankfully) not ethnically cleansing Tibetans, but they are at least cleansing its culture[4]. Also, hi from Taiwan, so thousands of CCP missiles are pointing at the city around me.

I agree that you can't compare the NSDAP to the CCP. But doing business with China is still a very different thing from dealing with most other countries (regardless of whose side they were on in 1945).

[1] http://www.zeit.de/feature/freedom-of-press-china-zhang-miao... [2] https://international.thenewslens.com/article/82726 [3] https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/world/2015/05/05/china-orde... [4] https://thediplomat.com/2017/08/china-tears-down-the-tibetan...

Would you say providing public education and moving people from dangerous area to safer places as a way of cleansing their cultures? If you are really interested in China, you should just go somewhere and see for yourself. Media from China and anywhere else in the world are just slanted mirrors. When some Uyghur terrorists hit a train station in southern China and killed innocent civilians, some western media titled them as "terrorist" and implied they were repressed. As for Taiwan, It's still a legacy problem of Chinese civil war, It's really unlikely that China mainland will really do anything about Taiwan, speak of missiles, actually there was a missile missent and crashed by Taiwan towards mainland in recent years.

> Would you say providing public education and moving people from dangerous area to safer places as a way of cleansing their cultures?

I actually agree that the cases of Tibetans and Uyghurs are not as black-and-white as the Western media portraits them, and I'm not sure if I should've brought up Larung Gar. But even your best-case interpretation sounds a lot like the standard justification of colonialism.

> If you are really interested in China, you should just go somewhere and see for yourself.

Been there twice. The only on-topic anecdote I have is that I went to see the Forbidden City, and a protester undressed and tried to hold up a banner at the same time. The Chinese handling was unlike anything I've seen in other countries: plain-clothed security guards wrapped her up in just seconds and carried her away (I couldn't even decipher her banner), and none of the domestic tourists around us even batted an eye. It was like a glitch in the matrix that everyone collectively pretended didn't happen. Pretty chilling, makes you wonder how many issues go unheard.

I'm planning to travel further West next time, but what do you suggest? Should I just stroll into Xinjiang and ask some locals if there's any truth to this organ harvest rumor, then come back to post on HN? That's the job of journalists, and they can't do their job.

> As for Taiwan, It's still a legacy problem of Chinese civil war

That doesn't really explain why the number of missiles keeps increasing.[1][2]

> actually there was a missile missent and crashed by Taiwan

Clumsy, sure, but we all know why Taiwan needs to handle these missiles in the first place, and it's not for offense.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-taiwan-china/china-on-tra... [2] http://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/208...

> - China was on the opposite side of Nazis in WW2

so was Stalin - are you saying comparisons between Stalin and Hitler would not be warranted?

Mao wasn’t really, he was content to let the KMT fight off the Japanese while the communists would conserve their strength for the oncoming civil war; Chiangkai Shek knew this and tried to play the same game, but the Americans wouldn’t let him.

Mao is actually on record for thanking Japan in one of his weird off the cuff remarks:

> "(Japan) doesn't have to say sorry, you had contributed towards China, why? Because had Imperial Japan did not start the war of invasion, how could we communist became mighty powerful? How could we stage the coup d'état? How could we defeat Chiang Kai Shek? How are we going to pay back you guys? No, we do not want your war reparations!"

It was more like irony, Mao also thanked Chiang who killed his some of his family members and he thanked America who killed his son. If you read history, Mao insisted on fighting against the Japanese invaders before Chang did. Do not forget KMT had America assistance in civil war, but they lost, because they were just too messy with economies and care too little about 90% of Chinese poor people.

Mao insisted on the KMT fighting Japanese invaders before Chiang did for sure, but he still didn’t bother committing substantial forces to the war. Mao also didn’t care much about poor people, see how many Chinese civilians died in the Seige of Changchun.

Mao was basically a sociopath even if Chiang wasn’t much better; he was basically a smarter Donald Trump of his time, who knows what he would have written on weibo if it existed at the time!

There was a group of communist soldiers fighting against Japanese invaders in northeast China Manchuria when KMT didn't officially do anything about that. Actually Chiang attacked communist army even when they were fighting together against Japan in later years. When it comes to Seige of Changchun, why KMT didn't go out fighting and just stay and rob people's food? Why didn't they just surrender or went out start to fight? Why waited to surrender in the end but with poor people had nothing to eat. That was a shame indeed. It was a cruel civil war, I cannot say which side is strictly morally superior, given innocent people got starved . Mao was a complicated person, there are people who thank him throughout life and people who hate him till death. He has done good and bad, he got rid of land lords, get the country united again, push hard on public education and extreme equality, but he also conducted the great leap and destructive political battles. it'll wait for probably another century that some historians can have some better estimation.

Okay, that was a rather weak point, I agree. Regardless, I do think there are more differences than similarities between the current China and the then Nazi.

China was sided with US, and today is actually the anniversary of Nanking Massacre.

Sadly no, in 20 years the whiny relativistic people in charge of whichever authoritarian regime they have legitimized via their own apathy will be complaining that people didn't think that this was a 'cool' effort, much as they are doing here.

You don't like China. So cute

That was exactly my thought, and I do already see them in a similar light.

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