Original post title: AI in China: Xi Jinping and 25-member policymaking body Politburo have a “group study” session about AI
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Xi said China must develop its own AI technology, saying it was important for economic development, social progress and global geopolitics.
“AI is a vital driving force for a new round of technological revolution and industrial transformation, and accelerating AI development is a strategic issue to decide whether we can grasp opportunities,” Xi was quoted by Xinhua as saying.
Xi said China must ensure that it “occupies the high ground of AI core technology” and could firmly keep the technology in its hands by leveraging “China’s massive data and huge market potential”.
He said the country should use AI to upgrade its manufacturing, adding that it could be used in China’s pursuit of a leaner and greener way of economic development.
Xi also encouraged government agencies to adopt AI.
“We need to enhance the combination of AI and social governance and develop AI systems for government services and decision-making,” Xi said, adding that public security was one field in which it could be used “in depth”.
Smart decision from China perspective, they can't be reliant on something potentially so crucial with western technologies.
But I can't help but think how it will be used for monitoring of lives of everybody. You do one misstep, government will know about it. Effectively no privacy. Compared to what it may be (and probably will), current state of China is a hippie paradise.
Are you sure? We're already getting stories over here in the West where people are struggling with the results AI gives them when applied to people because the results are basically Wrongthink, and are trying to figure out how to get the AIs to conform better to their ideology and preconceived notions of what the AIs should be outputting. It's not a terribly far trip from there to Deutsche Physik or Lysenkoism, except wrapped in a much denser fog of complex math and enough complicated details to construct any narrative you want. Using AI to ideologically crack down on a population will eventually reach even the AI researchers and destroy their ability to maintain and develop the AI.
(I don't think it's an inevitable trip from struggling with AI outputs and preconceived ideological notions to Lysenkoism. But I think it is an extremely tempting path for the society as a whole. There are a lot of forces that push in that direction, as the nature of the AI and what they do and control moves from a scientific and mathematical matter to a political one.)
This has nothing to do with Deutsche Physik but it fits the narrative of some people to associate China with Nazi Germany or any other dystopian regime.
The connection between China and "dystopian regimes" seems pretty clear to me. The biggest difference is that the Nazis and the Soviets could only dream of the tools the Chinese already have and will have, though the Soviets definitely proved that even without tech you could get yourself a pretty solidly oppressive police state going.
Only time can tell if the result will be a state that explodes even more quickly due to the suppressed stresses coming out all at once at some point, or a stable totalitarian state will emerge.
China will explode, there will be a big riot and it'll split into multiple "democratic"(and in fact, oligarchy）states which are not united at all, after millions died. At that time, US media just won't care about Chinese people at all and celebrate
"democracy wins again!".
Rest assured, China's history told us even that were to happen, within 50 years some dictator-like leader(Hint: last guy is Mao) will rise abruptly leading her 500+ million rural population in poverty and unit the land again.
China lacks democracy, routinely "disapears" its own promenant people, censors the internet and has the death penatly for the purpose of organ harvesting for the rich[1].
In what way is China not already run by a dystopian regime?
If you propagandize one side like that, of course it looks dystopian.
You could do the same exact thing for pretty much any state, country or bloc.
> In what way is China not already run by a dystopian regime?
How about the fact that they lifted 800 million people? Or the fact that they increased literacy rates from 20% before they came in power to nearly 100% today?
Using your logic, everything is always dystopian because you only choose to see the negative.
Every country has positives and negatives. Every single one.
I don't miss this guy and his connectedness to our shadow ops, drone killings, and abuse of constitutional power that basically left a loaded gun in the white house for president dumbass now at his disposal.
Wow. Not just about AI - he's consistently insightful in that conversation, and demonstrates a systems-level mindset that one might even describe as hacker-esque...
"Part of what makes us human are the kinks. They’re the mutations, the outliers, the flaws that create art or the new invention, right? We have to assume that if a system is perfect, then it’s static. And part of what makes us who we are, and part of what makes us alive, is that we’re dynamic and we’re surprised."
I assume that cheap flying drones are the weapons of the future, not just in military but police too. Small drones everywhere of all kinds. The drones would at least be semi-autonomous as having a human behind every single drone sounds expensive at scale.
Luckily drones still have significant limitations on achievable flight time. Some of which are dictated by the laws of physics. So for the foreseeable future there won’t be any bird sized drones chasing you down. Military drones on the other hand are much larger and expensive.
Car crashes have important consequences anywhere in the world as well; I think people will simply accept the low incidence of drone-related accident as part of their environmental ambience.
I have had a friend die from a car accident. It doesn't exactly make you pro-driver (he was drunk).
If people can get used to cars, they can get used to anything. I mean, even as street furniture, they're hideously annoying. They monopolize roads, kill pedestrians, make noise, poison us, and do the same to our children, then you pay taxes to subsidize their manufacture. Drones sound far less obnoxious.
I sometimes wonder if weaponized self-replicating micro-drones are the great filter. It seems like such an obvious step to take in tech, and one that would probably consistently precede successful interstellar space travel. One wrong use of the tech and they’d run into a variation of grey goo extinction long before reaching another star.
I think China will create an AI bubble, currently studying in Beijing and all EE and CS students I know focus all their time at either stats, ML or data mining. While I think China might have a big shot at the AI race, I don't think it's useful to have to only focus on AI because it's hot right now, they may lack progress in other fundamental fields that may lead to more important breakthrough and technological change.
I think China has plenty of data as well, of its own people at least. It's a surveillance state, and the big corps work closely with the government and so also the universities. My point is more that they have a chance of winning the ML race, but that doesn't matter if there will be more important technological breakthroughs in other areas that will have greater impact on AI than ML.
China does want to gather data, it has deployed tons of sensors and cameras to monitor its population's habits on the street. With the personal credit score implemented it can monitor its population even more thoroughly. How much data it gathers on its population thanks to the Great Firewall we can only speculate.
Granted, population data is one thing since you can incentivize people to share it. Data gathering that requires investment of money into sensors and time for careful placement of them is a completely different thing entirely
It's not just China. At my German university all courses related to AI/ML/data mining/stats are oversubscribed by a factor of 2 to 5. One professor went so far as to stress that he didn't have any experience with deep learning and he'd only cover Bayesian statistics in order to discourage students. I don't think it worked.
I'm pretty sure that there's a similar surge of interest in all countries.
>>I'm pretty sure that there's a similar surge of interest in all countries.
Yup. Same here in India.
People talk as though singularity is next year or so, and like Y2K jobs they have to do AI programming jobs.
Went to campus hiring like a few weeks back. And everyone had one or two show-and-tell AI/ML projects on their resume. Like every one. Everything from fitness apps to face emotion recognition.
I could be quite wrong but wouldn’t a course in Bayesian statistics be a lot more useful for someone interested in inference or however you will say it?
It would certainly be useful. I'm interviewing a lot of people for ML roles, and I've noticed a new group of "deep learning only" people coming out of colleges. They know their DL, but have no exposure to what I guess we're calling "traditional ML". Since DL isn't appropriate for all problems, they don't have the skills we want.
Those students will be awfully disappointed when they graduate and discover that most commercial software development work involves just shuffling bits around with no AI in sight.
We’ve been here before with Japan in the 80s, and it led to an extended 2nd AI winter.
China’s efforts are much larger than Japan’s were, and they have a bigger housing bubble to go along with that to boot. It is interesting to see how history repeats itself.
All it takes for an AI winter to happen is for the hype to go way beyond the reality, the AI doesn’t have to not make money, it just has to make not enough money as expected. It is very much like a housing crash: the houses are still useful to live in, just that their value is not as high as expected.
If you look at recent news and HN discussions, you'd be seeing some interesting patterns -
1. Tesla building its factory in Shanghai, China - "forced tech transfer, IP theft"
2. Xi pushes for AI, "it will be used for monitoring of lives of everybody"
3. 4 out of the top 10 biggest internet companies are in China - "censorship, repression, GFW"
I am wondering whether keeping 1.4 billion Chinese living with stone age tech is the real agenda of these people.
When Chinese leaders start talking about not being reliant on Western technology, rightly or wrongly, I immediately start thinking about their previous industrial espionage campaigns to remove the reliance on Western aerospace technology. [1]
I'd be a lot more relaxed about these sorts of announcements if the Chinese government took steps to curb Red Army cyber-attacks.
It is already a bubble. The number of no-nonsense applications (classification problems) is actually quite limited and depends on the quality of available datasets. Andrew Ng used to stress this in his courses.
To apply machine learning techniques successfully the phenomena in question should be, ideally, discrete, fully-observable, deterministic (very precise terminology from classic AI). Mere tweaking of parameters on nonsensical or too abstract data will lead nowhere.
Outside of academia ML already is an astrology with numbers instead of planets and stars.
> I wonder why we don't see a backlash against companies investing in China like we see against companies taking Saudi money?
It's a little, like the reaction against Google's project Dragonfly. However, it'd be much harder to sustain: it seems like nearly every Western company is investing in China or chasing customers there, so it's hard to single a few out for protest. You'd have to protest against all of them.
The Saudis aren't nearly so ubiquitous, so they're easier to reject.
China HAS the money to invest itself much like the Saudi’s do. Chinese VC money chasing Chinese investment opportunities is obviously not going to create a backlash. I suspect even YC China is setup to support Chinese VCs rather than to inject American VC into China, but I have no documentation to back up that hunch.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 142 ms ] thread.
Xi said China must develop its own AI technology, saying it was important for economic development, social progress and global geopolitics.
“AI is a vital driving force for a new round of technological revolution and industrial transformation, and accelerating AI development is a strategic issue to decide whether we can grasp opportunities,” Xi was quoted by Xinhua as saying.
Xi said China must ensure that it “occupies the high ground of AI core technology” and could firmly keep the technology in its hands by leveraging “China’s massive data and huge market potential”.
He said the country should use AI to upgrade its manufacturing, adding that it could be used in China’s pursuit of a leaner and greener way of economic development.
Xi also encouraged government agencies to adopt AI.
“We need to enhance the combination of AI and social governance and develop AI systems for government services and decision-making,” Xi said, adding that public security was one field in which it could be used “in depth”.
But I can't help but think how it will be used for monitoring of lives of everybody. You do one misstep, government will know about it. Effectively no privacy. Compared to what it may be (and probably will), current state of China is a hippie paradise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik
(I don't think it's an inevitable trip from struggling with AI outputs and preconceived ideological notions to Lysenkoism. But I think it is an extremely tempting path for the society as a whole. There are a lot of forces that push in that direction, as the nature of the AI and what they do and control moves from a scientific and mathematical matter to a political one.)
Only time can tell if the result will be a state that explodes even more quickly due to the suppressed stresses coming out all at once at some point, or a stable totalitarian state will emerge.
Rest assured, China's history told us even that were to happen, within 50 years some dictator-like leader(Hint: last guy is Mao) will rise abruptly leading her 500+ million rural population in poverty and unit the land again.
In what way is China not already run by a dystopian regime?
[1] https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/true-stories/the...
You could do the same exact thing for pretty much any state, country or bloc.
> In what way is China not already run by a dystopian regime?
How about the fact that they lifted 800 million people? Or the fact that they increased literacy rates from 20% before they came in power to nearly 100% today?
Using your logic, everything is always dystopian because you only choose to see the negative.
Every country has positives and negatives. Every single one.
I'm sorry but the ends do not justify the means.
Whilst all countries have positives and negatives any country where you can't publically ridicule the ruling elite is dystopian. Every single one.
That's the sort of claims you've fallen for, so why not?
https://www.wired.com/2016/10/president-obama-mit-joi-ito-in...
I miss this guy and his connectedness with our culture.
"Part of what makes us human are the kinks. They’re the mutations, the outliers, the flaws that create art or the new invention, right? We have to assume that if a system is perfect, then it’s static. And part of what makes us who we are, and part of what makes us alive, is that we’re dynamic and we’re surprised."
Hell of a quote.
Other people worry about climate change. Some religious nutcases worry about paperclip maximizers and basilisks. I worry about Robocop.
I have had a friend die from a car accident. It doesn't exactly make you pro-driver (he was drunk).
If people can get used to cars, they can get used to anything. I mean, even as street furniture, they're hideously annoying. They monopolize roads, kill pedestrians, make noise, poison us, and do the same to our children, then you pay taxes to subsidize their manufacture. Drones sound far less obnoxious.
Add auto landing .. to charging station with Magsafe-like connector for example.
Add on-the-fly battery swapping feature.
Develop support drone that can carry batteries, fly and attach itself to low battery drone, swap, detach and go back to station.
etc.
America! Fuck yeah! Comin' again to save the motherfuckin' day, yeah!
I forgot the HN golden rule, never say anything negative about the USA however true it is.
Yes everyone wants to mine the data, but noone wants to generate or gather new original data in the first place.
Granted, population data is one thing since you can incentivize people to share it. Data gathering that requires investment of money into sensors and time for careful placement of them is a completely different thing entirely
I quickly checked zhihu.com's hot topics related to CS, zhihu.com can be regarded as the Chinese counterpart of quora.com
the topic AI has 1.34m followers https://www.zhihu.com/topic/19551275/hot
the topic e-commerce has 1.14m followers https://www.zhihu.com/topic/19550780/hot
the topic database has 0.8m followers https://www.zhihu.com/topic/19552067/hot
Well if they crack general intelligence maybe they can generate, copy and paste researchers in those other fundamental fields.
Does anybody remember the 5th gen computing stuff from 30 years ago?
I'm pretty sure that there's a similar surge of interest in all countries.
Yup. Same here in India.
People talk as though singularity is next year or so, and like Y2K jobs they have to do AI programming jobs.
Went to campus hiring like a few weeks back. And everyone had one or two show-and-tell AI/ML projects on their resume. Like every one. Everything from fitness apps to face emotion recognition.
China’s efforts are much larger than Japan’s were, and they have a bigger housing bubble to go along with that to boot. It is interesting to see how history repeats itself.
All it takes for an AI winter to happen is for the hype to go way beyond the reality, the AI doesn’t have to not make money, it just has to make not enough money as expected. It is very much like a housing crash: the houses are still useful to live in, just that their value is not as high as expected.
1. Tesla building its factory in Shanghai, China - "forced tech transfer, IP theft" 2. Xi pushes for AI, "it will be used for monitoring of lives of everybody" 3. 4 out of the top 10 biggest internet companies are in China - "censorship, repression, GFW"
I am wondering whether keeping 1.4 billion Chinese living with stone age tech is the real agenda of these people.
Do you want to say that in China there isn't forced tech transfer, intense surveillance, censorship and repression?
Or do you want to say, because people on HN pointing out those things, they are racist?
I'd be a lot more relaxed about these sorts of announcements if the Chinese government took steps to curb Red Army cyber-attacks.
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/10/31/us-charges-10-ch...
To apply machine learning techniques successfully the phenomena in question should be, ideally, discrete, fully-observable, deterministic (very precise terminology from classic AI). Mere tweaking of parameters on nonsensical or too abstract data will lead nowhere.
Outside of academia ML already is an astrology with numbers instead of planets and stars.
It's a little, like the reaction against Google's project Dragonfly. However, it'd be much harder to sustain: it seems like nearly every Western company is investing in China or chasing customers there, so it's hard to single a few out for protest. You'd have to protest against all of them.
The Saudis aren't nearly so ubiquitous, so they're easier to reject.