Why is Google risking it all for Project Dragonfly?

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4 points·PacktDataHub··4 comments

But Google isn't "risking it all" for China. It's merely attempting a business expansion that it's employees cannot seem to rationalize

"China is a huge social experiment at scale, with wide-scale surveillance and monitoring – in other words, data."

So the population control that a communist dictatorship utilizes is really all just an experiment in data collection?

So these are all benign? President Xi abolishing term limits, Uyghr detention, Chinese social credit system, massive surveillance, disappearance of chinese citizens (famous or not), quick summary executions of "corrupt" party members, huge arms build up, artificial island building, aggression against Taiwan, rampant IP theft.

The US and the west in general have some big problems, but the fawning praise of China by the tech industry is absurd. And another thing, HN has too many Chinese nationalists who act as apologists for egregious actions by the Chinese government.

Yes, very well put. Data was never the end goal of the Chinese experiment. But for tech companies, data, a side-effect of China's policies, is a valuable resource that other parts of the world are becoming less open to share.

The social experiment is far from benign - it's a systemic propaganda that plays on human vulnerabilities. In addition to suppressing dissension, it also fuels China's ambitions to become The one true superpower. Taming AI is crucial to tame the world. This is a super interesting technical problem for the tech industry where they can simply push the limits to what tech can achieve without worrying about its real-world consequences. They could always go back and it's not us, it was the Chinese government.

Profit.

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