My claim is that AI safety isn’t part of the Chinese gestalt. It’s like America asking China to support Israel for because building the Third Temple will bring the Final Judgement. Chinese leadership don’t have AI safety as a real concern. Chinese researchers who help advise Chinese leadership don’t have AI safety as a real concern. At most they consider it like the new land acknowledgments—another box they have to check off in order to interface with Western academia. Just busy work that they privately consider utterly deranged.
I think in the universe where the President is personally asking Xi to consider this seriously, Xi has a good chance of considering it serious. I do not expect to live in that world, but it’s not that much more unlikely than the one where America and the rest of the west rise to the occasion at all.
Imagine you are President Obama. The King of Saudi Arabia gives you a phone call and tries to convince you to ban all US tech companies because they might inadvertently kill God. That is the place we are at in terms of Chinese AI safety awareness in the leadership.
I reject the analogy. America is already winning the tech race, we don’t have to ask China to give up a lead, and westerners do not worry about existential risk because of some enormous cultural gap whereby we care about our lives but Chinese people don’t. This is a much easier bridge to cross than you are making it out to be.
My claim is that AI safety isn’t part of the Chinese gestalt. It’s like America asking China to support Israel for because building the Third Temple will bring the Final Judgement. Chinese leadership don’t have AI safety as a real concern. Chinese researchers who help advise Chinese leadership don’t have AI safety as a real concern. At most they consider it like the new land acknowledgments—another box they have to check off in order to interface with Western academia. Just busy work that they privately consider utterly deranged.
Stuart Russell claims that Xi Jinping has referred to the existential threat of AI to humanity [1].
[1] 5:52 of Russell’s interview on Smerconish: https://www.cnn.com/videos/tech/2023/04/01/smr-experts-demand-pause-on-ai.cnn
I think in the universe where the President is personally asking Xi to consider this seriously, Xi has a good chance of considering it serious. I do not expect to live in that world, but it’s not that much more unlikely than the one where America and the rest of the west rise to the occasion at all.
Imagine you are President Obama. The King of Saudi Arabia gives you a phone call and tries to convince you to ban all US tech companies because they might inadvertently kill God. That is the place we are at in terms of Chinese AI safety awareness in the leadership.
I reject the analogy. America is already winning the tech race, we don’t have to ask China to give up a lead, and westerners do not worry about existential risk because of some enormous cultural gap whereby we care about our lives but Chinese people don’t. This is a much easier bridge to cross than you are making it out to be.