Better than China as a global model? Still, yes, probably. Potentially. Depends on how the next few years ago.
Even if America fails, I’d argue a global republic is a brighter potential future than a global dictatorship.
They might. I’m not. There is an analogy here to perfect being the enemy of good. Or, at the very least, the pragmatic better.
But to your credit you brought up the Pretti shooting. I have to analyze how that demonstrates why the “AI values” should reflect American ones.
Judge my enemies by their actions. Judge me by my words. About myself...
On what basis do you claim that US wrongdoing is forgotten? If you bring it up it's acknowledged and talked about. Debating it is within the realm of social acceptability. You can look it up on Wikipedia. Our AI models will happily discuss it with you.
Meanwhile the Chinese equivalent gets you the sorts of disingenuous interactions that can be seen here and domestically much of the information appears to be censored.
America debates and exhibits its faults, at least internally. The Tulsa Massacre is a movie and cultural discussion point in a way Tiananmen Square is not in China. Neither should have happened. And neither is universally acknowledged or atoned for. But if we’re debating which system AI should emulate, I know it’s not just the one that explicitly buries its faults.
> Judge my enemies by their actions. Judge me by my words
Judge both by both. The ability to have words about shameful actions is not meaningless.
This is a concept that a twelve-year-old has enough ego formation to understand. Not so for the shared nationalistic consciousness.
What is your goal here?
We are talking about China and the US.
> and not in good faith.
I am playing with open cards. No hidden agendas.
> You've failed to actually engage with what the person you're responding to wrote several times now.
We disagree on the very premises. That leads to one person saying something then the other one dismissing it then the first person dismissing what the second person says in turn. Completely normal.
> What is your goal here?
To bemoan people glorifying America as it invades countries and causes problems for the whole world.
Just like being a billionaire (or, super-wealther, if you will), you don't get to be a superpower by doing good things.
China and the US can both be bad, and they're both going to use AI for mass internal and external surveillance and weapon targeting.
It’s a lie in the way cats are round is a lie—actually a lie, but one nobody brought up.
I don’t think Dwarkesh is arguing for global American hegemony. Just that if AI becomes dominant, having AIs embedded with American cultural values, broadly, is probably better than having ones seeded with Xi Jinping thought.
> China and the US can both be bad, and they're both going to use AI for mass internal and external surveillance and weapon targeting
Agree. But I don’t think any Chinese AI companies get to sue the CCP over it.
I'd really rather have a choice of both rather than be forced to accept "AI that downplays a 2 year old genocide" over "AI that covers up a 40 year massacre".
You do. So do I. If American AI goes by the wayside, we cease to have that choice anymore.
Is it possible to live in a world where powerful entities have gotten there through ethical means? Sure. We don't live in that world, though.
And yes, if I said "name me one powerful person/entity that got there through ethical means", I'm sure you could give me a name. But that name would surely be an outlier.
An observation one can make when comparing a republic with the rule of law to one that ain’t, whether across time or geography. There is a real benefit to having the American experiment prominent and continuing.
These aren’t mutually exclusive. The world is better off for Athens and the Roman and Harrapan and Haudenosaunee republics. (Book request: history of the republic. I’ve struggled to find one.)
The CCP with internal elections was interesting and a genuine riposte to broadly-enfranchised republics. Xi as a dictator is not, not.
The American 'experiment' is one long history of the US doing really horrible things, but giving ourselves a pass because we dress it up in the name of freedom and self-determination.
If you ignore our slavery and the genocide of Native Americans, it's easy to paint China's slavery and genocide as evils that are unique somehow.
The real experiment of America is in seeing how self-deluded we can become if we continuously reinforce the false premise that our institutions are intrinsically good (or at least, nebulously "better").
Is that true of the US? Is there state-sanctioned/supported slavery in the US? Is the US committing genocide within its own borders? Arguably not?
This doesn't make the US perfect or wonderful. We've been politically and militarily supporting a genocide in Gaza, as a stark example.
But "the US did slavery and genocide in the past" and "China is doing slavery and genocide now" doesn't make the US and China equivalent today.
And on top of that, I can go out and protest my country supporting Israel's garbage in Gaza. If I were a Chinese citizen and tried to do something like that in China, I'd be jailed.
Thank you for proving my point about our propaganda. Yes, it absolutely is. Slave labor is explicitly allowed for prisoners, under the 13th Amendment's "Penal exception clause"[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_exception_clause
And that's not some unused vestigial thing, forced labor of prisoners (slavery) is endemic. [2]
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labor_in_the_United_Stat...
Many states make prison labor optional at least in principle (though some like Alabama have been proven to punish prisoners with e.g. solitary confinement to 'compel' them to work). Some (Red States, mostly) do not make it optional, and even don't pay prisoners:
> Arkansas possesses a concerning history of coercive and uncompensated prison work. Inmates, primarily Black, have been compelled to labor on extensive state prison farms, including the Cummins and Tucker Units, located on former slave estates.
> In fiscal year 2019, Arkansas' unpaid jail labor generated over $4.4 million in externally marketed agricultural products, alongside an extra $7.5 million designated for prison food services.[69] Eyewitness testimonies indicate that imprisoned laborers experienced severe mistreatment—disordered working environments, maltreatment, and insufficient safeguards—evoking parallels to historical slavery.[70]
How would you contrast the responses to the Tiananmen Square Massacre [1] and that of Pretti’s shooting?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests...
We are just as unwilling as a society forcefully to halt our governments' evils as China is their's. Our government is just as bloodthirsty and fascist as their's, regardless of whether you're allowed to point that out or not (also, Palantir is adding you to the database if you do, we just haven't found out what they're planning to do with the database yet).
The idea that anyone would be better off with China supplanting the US is asinine. This is the same government that committed the Tiananmen square massacre and still doesn't acknowledge that anything happened.
China invaded and annexed Tibet in 1959. To the degree we had a classical definition of intent-based genocide, Beijing continues to commit it in Tibet and Xinjiang.
America’s conscious is stained. But it’s downright nonsense to go off about surveillance when the comparison is China.
I want the US to win because I live in the US and it will probably benefit me, but we’ve largely stopped pretending to value the republic so I don’t think we can claim a moral standing on these topics anymore.
To reference your other comment, the common American man has as much de facto ability to sue our government and/or leaders as the common Chinese man
Yes, the Uyghur genocide and paramilitary suppression and settler-colonialism of Tibet and Xinjiang is horrific, and will (hopefully) be recognized in the future as a genocide on par with others that 'enjoy' historical notoriety, but let's not pretend we're not well on our way to doing that here.
The rhetoric of ethnic superiority and nationalism and birthright that exists in our government is the exact same rhetoric that exists in Xi Jinping's "Imperial Han" nationalism.
The same government that helped murder 2M folks in Iraq. The same gov that paid death squads to kill nuns in El Salvador.
At least China isn't in a position to have to reckon with how deep white supremacy runs in its culture.
In fact, when I hear folks from the US talk about china without understanding their own history of racism and genocide and how that shit is still going on, all I can conclude is that they are operating under the same racist delusions that have historically brought the US to do such horrific things to the world.
Han Nationalism is rooted in racial supremacy.
It's explicitly been pushed as the People and the Culture being inseparable, and the Culture being superior. That is the same "don't say the ipso facto part" that white supremacy uses to whitewash its bigotry too:
"It's not 'white nationalism, it's Christian nationalism, but not like, all Christians, just the white ones, but it's totally definitely not white nationalism!"
I think it's instructive that all 3 superpowers of the 20th and 21st centuries (and certainly most that I can think of historically) have a history of racial supremacy and nationalism, and engaging in genocide.
I think you don't do the stuff that gets you to be a superpower without it. Hence, why I assert that ALL superpowers are immoral.
The only purpose in trying to argue for a hierarchy between them is to lessen the impermissibility of one. They are impermissible, period.
My read is they’re saying we need an alternative to Chinese AI. Because with its industrial might, the default future is Chinese technological dominance.
> The whole background of this AI conversation is that we’re in a race with China, and we have to win. But what is the reason we want America to win the AI race?
Right now there are two contenders for first in the AI race. The US, and China.
You spent the rest of your comment making the case that it is not good for the US to win. Implying, though not directly saying, we would be better off with China.
You can say "oh wouldn't it be nice if Europe won instead" but they don't have anything in the race right now. We're stuck with the US or China.
This is you putting words in my mouth. It's bad if either wins.
You seem to be operating under an unspoken personal belief that an AI race "win" inevitably spills out into global dominance.
I don't know that it won't, but you likewise don't know that it will, and I'm not beholden to debate things from your chosen premise.
I think AI will be bad for whoever is being targeted by it's controllers, but I don't think it will intrinsically disrupt the military spheres that exist now as a result of nuclear weaponry.
China will use its AI to hurt the people it's hurting now.
The US will use its AI to hurt the people it's hurting now.
Imho, the idea of an AI arms race "winner" is just the new face of the securitization rhetoric that we used to justify our military excursionism during the Cold War.
Read up on what it means to "imply" something.
Speaking of putting words in people's mouths:
> You seem to be operating under an unspoken personal belief that an AI race "win" inevitably spills out into global dominance.
This is the belief of the article we're all commenting on. Intelligent people are able to discuss concepts without endorsing them.
No. There is no court in Beijing that can tell Xi to knock it off.
> China hasn't bombed girls' schools
Read up on the treatment of Uyghur girls in the Chinese schools. It’s Indian Removal Act stuff, except right now.
Again, nobody is arguing America is a beacon of anything right now. But between America and China, one is an explicit and proud autocracy.
SCOTUS isn’t being ignored.
> Sounds like a question for the philosophers
And lawyers. It’s an interesting series of hypotheticals.
SCOTUS rules 90%+ for Trump (lower courts are 90%+ against). They've given him freedom from investigation and criminal prosecution. They aren't much of a bulwark.
This comes to the core of the issue, and is where I think the disagreement comes from. Many Westerners in fact do not want "Western" values to prevail.
Why? For me those values have led to outcomes so horrendously antithetical to _my_ values, that I would not wish them for the rest of the world. Even worse, this Western centrism has led to jingoist conclusions for at least 400 years.