Comment by intended
10 hours ago
Reading how AI is being approached in China, the focus is more on achieving day to day utilty, without eviscerating youth employment.
In contrast, the SV focus of AI has been about skynet / singularity, with a hype cycle to match.
This is supported by the lack of clarity on actual benefits, or clear data on GenAI use. Mostly I see it as great for prototyping - going from 0 to 1, and for use cases where the operator is highly trained and capable of verifying output.
Outside of that, you seem to be in the land of voodoo, where you are dealing with something that eerily mimics human speech, but you don't have any reliable way of finding out its just BS-ing you.
Do you have any links you could share to content you found especially insightful about AI use in China?
I don't know if it supports their particular point, but Machine Decision is Not Final seems like a very cool and interesting look at China's culture around AI:
https://www.urbanomic.com/book/machine-decision-is-not-final...
In the West we have autonomous systems to commit genocide, detecting and murdering "enemy combatants" at scale, where "enemy combatant" is defined as "male between the ages of 15 and 55".
Sometimes I'm not so sure about any so-called moral superiority.
I’ve been hunting for a link I found here on HN, which discussed how policy /government elites in China looked at AI.
Sadly, the search for that link continues.
I did find these from SCMP and Foreign Policy, but there are better articles out there.
- https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/11/20/china-ai-race-jobs-yout...
- https://www.scmp.com/specialist-publications/special-reports...
I’m not seeing the dichotomy as much as you do.
Are they not going to build a “skynet” in China? Second, building skynet doesn’t imply eviscerating youth employment.
On the other hand, automation of menial tasks does eviscerate all kinds of employment, not only youth emoloyment.
Well at least DeepMind is doing nifty things like solving the protein folding problem.