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Comment by kercker | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

> 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

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