I’m a Westerner, but did business in China, have quite a few Chinese friends and acquaintances, and have studied a fair amount of classical and modern Chinese culture, governance, law, etc.
Most of what you’re saying makes sense with my experience, and a lot of Western ideas are generally regarded as either “sounds nice but is hypocritical and not what Westerns actually do” (a common viewpoint until ~10 years ago) with a later idea of “actually no, many young Westerners are sincere about their ideas—they’re actually just crazy in an ideological way about things that can’t and won’t work” that is a somewhat newer idea. (白左, etc)
The one place I might disagree with you is that I think mainland Chinese leadership tends to have two qualities that might be favorable towards understanding and mitigating AI risk:
(1) The majority of senior Chinese political leadership are engineers and seem intrinsically more open to having conversations along science and engineering lines than the majority of Western leadership. Pathos-based arguments, especially emerging from Western intellectuals, do not get much uptake in China and aren’t persuasive. But concerns around safety, second-order effects, third-order effects, complex system dynamics, causality, etc, grounded in scientific, mathematical, and engineering principles seem to be engaged with easily at face value in private conversations, and with a level of technical sophistication that there doesn’t need to be as much direct reliance on asking for industry leaders and specialists to explain and contextualize diagrams, concepts, technologies, etc. Senior Chinese leadership also seem to be better—this is just my opinion—at identifying credible and non-credible sources of technical information and identifying experts who make sound arguments grounded in causality. This is a very large advantage.
(2) In recent decades, it seems like mainland Chinese leadership are able to both operate on longer timescales—credibly making and implementing multi-decade plans and running them—as well as making rapid changes in technology adoption, regulation, and economic markets once a decision has been made in an area. The most common examples we see in the West are videos of skyscrapers being constructed very rapidly, but my personal example is I remember needing to go pay my rent with shoeboxes full of 100 renminbi notes during the era of Hu Jintao’s chairmanship and being quite shocked when China went to near cashless almost overnight.
I think those two factors—genuine understanding of engineering and technical causality, combined with greater viability for engaging in both longer timescale and short-timescale action, seem like important points worth mentioning.
I’m a Westerner, but did business in China, have quite a few Chinese friends and acquaintances, and have studied a fair amount of classical and modern Chinese culture, governance, law, etc.
Most of what you’re saying makes sense with my experience, and a lot of Western ideas are generally regarded as either “sounds nice but is hypocritical and not what Westerns actually do” (a common viewpoint until ~10 years ago) with a later idea of “actually no, many young Westerners are sincere about their ideas—they’re actually just crazy in an ideological way about things that can’t and won’t work” that is a somewhat newer idea. (白左, etc)
The one place I might disagree with you is that I think mainland Chinese leadership tends to have two qualities that might be favorable towards understanding and mitigating AI risk:
(1) The majority of senior Chinese political leadership are engineers and seem intrinsically more open to having conversations along science and engineering lines than the majority of Western leadership. Pathos-based arguments, especially emerging from Western intellectuals, do not get much uptake in China and aren’t persuasive. But concerns around safety, second-order effects, third-order effects, complex system dynamics, causality, etc, grounded in scientific, mathematical, and engineering principles seem to be engaged with easily at face value in private conversations, and with a level of technical sophistication that there doesn’t need to be as much direct reliance on asking for industry leaders and specialists to explain and contextualize diagrams, concepts, technologies, etc. Senior Chinese leadership also seem to be better—this is just my opinion—at identifying credible and non-credible sources of technical information and identifying experts who make sound arguments grounded in causality. This is a very large advantage.
(2) In recent decades, it seems like mainland Chinese leadership are able to both operate on longer timescales—credibly making and implementing multi-decade plans and running them—as well as making rapid changes in technology adoption, regulation, and economic markets once a decision has been made in an area. The most common examples we see in the West are videos of skyscrapers being constructed very rapidly, but my personal example is I remember needing to go pay my rent with shoeboxes full of 100 renminbi notes during the era of Hu Jintao’s chairmanship and being quite shocked when China went to near cashless almost overnight.
I think those two factors—genuine understanding of engineering and technical causality, combined with greater viability for engaging in both longer timescale and short-timescale action, seem like important points worth mentioning.
I fully endorse this post.