If I understand correctly, you’re trying to figure out what Xi would do with the unlimited power offered by an intent-aligned ASI, or how he would react to the prospect of such, etc.
Xi’s character might matter, but I am impressed by the claim here that a competent Chinese ruler will be guided first by notions of good statecraft, with any details of personality or private life to be kept apart from their decisions and public actions.
I’m sure that Chinese political history also offers many examples of big personalities and passionate leaders, but that would be more relevant to times when the political order is radically in flux, or needs to be rebuilt from nothing. Xi came to power within a stable system.
So you might want to also ask how the Chinese system and ideology would respond to the idea of superintelligent AI—that is, if they are even capable of dealing with the concept! There must be considerable probability that the system would simply tune out such threatening ideas, in favor of tamer notions of AI—we already see this filtering at work in the West.
I suppose one possibility is that they would view AI, properly employed, as a way to realize the communist ideal for real. Communist countries always say that communism is a distant goal, for now we’re building socialism, and even this socialism looks a lot like capitalism these days. And one may say that the powerbrokers in such societies have long since specialized in wielding power under conditions of one-party capitalism and mercantile competition, rather than the early ideal of revolutionary leveling for the whole world. Nonetheless, the old ideal is there, just as the religious ideals still exert a cultural influence in nominally secular societies descended from a religious civilization.
When I think about Chinese ASI, the other thing I think about, is their online fantasy novels, because that’s the place in Chinese culture where they deal with scenarios like a race to achieve power over the universe. They may be about competition to acquire the magical legacy of a vanished race of immortals, rather than competition to devise the perfect problem-solving algorithm, but this is where you can find a Chinese literature that explores the politics and psychology of such a competition, all the way down to the interaction between the private and public lives of the protagonists.
If I understand correctly, you’re trying to figure out what Xi would do with the unlimited power offered by an intent-aligned ASI, or how he would react to the prospect of such, etc.
Xi’s character might matter, but I am impressed by the claim here that a competent Chinese ruler will be guided first by notions of good statecraft, with any details of personality or private life to be kept apart from their decisions and public actions.
I’m sure that Chinese political history also offers many examples of big personalities and passionate leaders, but that would be more relevant to times when the political order is radically in flux, or needs to be rebuilt from nothing. Xi came to power within a stable system.
So you might want to also ask how the Chinese system and ideology would respond to the idea of superintelligent AI—that is, if they are even capable of dealing with the concept! There must be considerable probability that the system would simply tune out such threatening ideas, in favor of tamer notions of AI—we already see this filtering at work in the West.
I suppose one possibility is that they would view AI, properly employed, as a way to realize the communist ideal for real. Communist countries always say that communism is a distant goal, for now we’re building socialism, and even this socialism looks a lot like capitalism these days. And one may say that the powerbrokers in such societies have long since specialized in wielding power under conditions of one-party capitalism and mercantile competition, rather than the early ideal of revolutionary leveling for the whole world. Nonetheless, the old ideal is there, just as the religious ideals still exert a cultural influence in nominally secular societies descended from a religious civilization.
When I think about Chinese ASI, the other thing I think about, is their online fantasy novels, because that’s the place in Chinese culture where they deal with scenarios like a race to achieve power over the universe. They may be about competition to acquire the magical legacy of a vanished race of immortals, rather than competition to devise the perfect problem-solving algorithm, but this is where you can find a Chinese literature that explores the politics and psychology of such a competition, all the way down to the interaction between the private and public lives of the protagonists.