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Comment by john_strinlai | Hacker News Reader

>the real argument is that CCP will leverage AI against US interests

many people believe that the US will leverage AI against US citizen's interests.

Indeed. It already has. In particular I remember several extremely offensive slop pictures and videos being posted by someone in the White House. And I'm certain that's just the tip of the shitberg.

Yeah, but unlike China we have laws and ways to fight against it. China can and will do whatever the fuck they want they don't have to listen to the people of China.

The US has been doing whatever the fuck it wants without listening to its people lately, though.

Well good thing we have elections.

Every four years!

You have "representative democracy". It is not the same as democracy, whatever you had been told in school. And since 2001 it is painfully clear: whichever representative you had, eventually he went to throw bombs on people, and no one asked joe if he liked that.

The problem is that at the current moment with the current administration, it does not seem like we do "have laws and ways to fight against it".

I'm more optimistic about the likelihood of the US system of government to heal itself than that statement might seem to imply. But it's just also the case that at the current moment in the US, the rule of law is very much under threat. And as your comment suggests, that same rule of law is a very important thing to the way of life in the US. It's a very bad situation that we've allowed ourselves to slouch into.

Well that what the people voted for. In a few months you can replace these people that allow this. Good luck replacing anyone in the goverment of China.

This is not an argument that the Chinese system of government is better than the US system. Like I said, I'm more optimistic than a lot of people I know that the US will be able to pull out of the tailspin we've been in for the past decade. But it's also imminently reasonable to believe that this episode has raised real questions about the durability of the rule of law in this country.

> this episode has raised real questions about the durability of the rule of law in this country.

Ya, I'm not American, but I have seen people say "we can vote them out" a few times now. Assuming the democrats take the next election, they are going to have a massive mess to clean up with much of the damage not even being reversible. With peoples' fickle nature and seeming that is a very big right-leaning population in the US, there's a non-zero chance the Republicans just get voted back in four years later. Whose to say?

So, this might not be clear as an outsider to American politics, but to me this is not a "Republican vs. Democrat" thing. To me, it's about what kinds of Republicans and what kinds of Democrats are elected.

To me, as an American, what has happened this past decade is that a ton of vulnerabilities in the rule of law (and other things, but this is the one I care most about) have been exposed. But it's not a given that the next Republican president will take advantage of those vulnerabilities in the way the current president has. They might end up being a reformer who seeks to fix those glitches!

But on the more pessimistic side of the same coin, it's also not a given that the next Democrat will seek to fix the glitches rather than saying "they had eight years to take advantage of these vulnerabilities, we're going to do the same to make up for that and even the playing field!".

It's just very hard to know what is going to happen from here. So I'm very sympathetic to people in other countries not trusting us.

I was going to bring this up but was wary of getting too deep into a political hole when I'm not super on US politics (although in the past year and a bit I've been paying way more attention). Mostly, I have no idea what the Republican party will look like post-Trump or how any of that works and it's not clear to me what kind of influence they will have as the opposition next term. The current term has made the democrats look extremely weak.

Although, again, my over understanding of your political system is poor and I just relate it to the one in my country where they hold parliament and hurl schoolyard insults at each other.

What I would say is that to me the "Democrats look weak" thing is pretty silly. By design, if one party holds the presidency and both houses of Congress at once, they get to enact their preferred agenda (as long as it is deemed constitutional by the current judiciary, which is also controlled by that same party at this moment). So, like, by design Democrats are powerless at this moment. They aren't "weak", they are out of power, by dint of the design of the system and the desire of the voters. So if the current government administration and policy is bad (which, in my view, it certainly is), the blame lies entirely with the people in power. It's not because the Democrats aren't "fighting" enough. I think that's nonsense, they genuinely have no power.

Ok ya that makes sense, and makes sense why I get confused. That sort of thing can still happen here, though we can minority and majority governments, and I generally prefer when it's minority, even if my "preferred party I still don't really like" has power.

Yeah in our system, those kinds of governments happen when there is a split in Congress (one party has a majority in the House, the other in the Senate) and/or when Congress and the presidency are held by opposite parties. And this is actually more the usual setup! For instance, it was that way until last January, and it's very likely that it will be that way again this coming January. But it just happens that at the moment, and since the beginning of the current presidential administration, there has been totally unified government in which the Democrats have no power whatsoever.

To me, the thing that was "weak" was losing all those elections in the last cycle. But it's not "weak" to be unable to do anything with no power.

The american state routinely shoots and kills its own citizens in broad daylight with 0 repercussions. Thinking it answers to its citizens is severely deluded.

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Largely hypothetical, not very effective ways to fight against it. Meanwhile we have the entire Pacific Ocean and US Military between us and China.

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