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Comment by yogthos | Hacker News Reader

What I find interesting is the contrast between the West and China here. Most people in the West expect that AI will make their lives worse in some way. Meanwhile, 84% of Chinese are excited about this tech, and expect that it will be used to make their lives better. it's a really vivid contrast between the way new technology becomes integrated into each type of society.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-14/why-ai-op...

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The same probably holds without AI. China is still in the stage of development, where people reasonably expect that the future will be better. The West has not really been optimistic about the future since the 90s. There is always something around the corner threatening to make the future worse. Maybe it's the economy, maybe it's climate change, maybe immigration, or terrorism, or war, or whatever.

It's worth noting that China has seen decades of steady development, and has avoided the boom/bust cycles we see happening in the west. While we've lived through dotCom bubble, the 2008 crash, covid, and now the looming AI bubble, China has just seen steady progress without the working majority getting screwed every decade like clockwork. While future can always bring something unexpected, it is possible to have a resilient system that adapts to the problems as they surface.

Um, I do kinda remember hills made from bikes, empty cities, people laying a siege on failing banks & protests in Honkong being suppressed...

A lot of that was just propaganda, like the famous ghost city subway station story which then turned out to just be basic planning https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/rest-of-world/chin...

The protests in HK weren't due to failing economic conditions either. And having been to HK recently, I can tell you it's far more developed than it was before being repatriated.

China obviously has problems like any human society, and it's far from perfect. However, they demonstrably have not had the kinds of economic crashes we have in the west and the standard of living keeps rising steadily. And here are some numbers to put things in perspective.

90% of families in the country own their home giving China one of the highest home ownership rates in the world. What’s more is that 80% of these homes are owned outright, without mortgages or any other leans. https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2016/03/30/how-peop...

Chinese household savings hit another record high in 2024 https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-jone...

Social mobility in China being far better than in the US https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/18/world/asia/ch...

The typical Chinese adult is now richer than the typical European adult https://www.businessinsider.com/typical-chinese-adult-now-ri...

The real (inflation-adjusted) incomes of the poorest half of the Chinese population increased by more than four hundred percent from 1978 to 2015, while real incomes of the poorest half of the US population actually declined during the same time period. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23119/w231...

From 2010 to 2019 (the most recent period for which uninterrupted data is available), the income of the poorest 20% in China increased even as a share of total income. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.DST.FRST.20?end=2019...

Don't forget the completely unaccountable megacorps who are increasingly invading our day-to-day lives, and the politicians whose main priority seems to be competing for their bribes.

The depressing part isn't that we are facing hard challenges and declining as a society. The depressing part is that it is a deliberate action.

Yes, we should not forget this. The West is not worried about some vague inanimate "something" around the corner threatening to make things worse. We are worried about people deliberately doing this.

AI slop, omnipresent ads, job loss, fake reviews, income inequality, climate collapse, these are not natural phenomenon or amorphous "things" lurking in the shadows. They are deliberately being imposed on us by actual people that you could point to if you could get close enough to them.

I think a lot of what's underlying this is just a big difference in general societal optimism/pessimism

In polls 80-90% of Chinese say their country/govt is headed in a positive direction vs <30% in US

I think it's more about institutional trust than the technology itself. AI could be a great common good in the west, but look at the companies and politicians controlling its development. The notion that trump/elon/altman/zuck/etc would choose to deploy this in a way that helps the general good at the expensive of massively enriching themselves as much as possible is laughable to most people.

Of course this is going to be deployed in the most exploitative way possible. When have these people ever done differently? Elon just spent most of last year gleefully destroying the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. I'm sure he'll get right on developing a model to solve world hunger next...

I completely agree, how technology is applied ends up being an expression of how a particular society is organized.

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