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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 15, 2023

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Since when has this ever been true in anything else?

Like what?

I'm not American, I don't owe it to your paranoid star-sprangled hivemind to pretend that China is a thing worth paying attention to. There is no «Yellow menace», there is no «threat of Chinese eugenics»; for the world at large, China is about as relevant as Czech Republic, only quantitatively bigger. Do you want to talk about the Czech AI threat? If you want to talk about China, we can go off vibes. My read on vibes is diametrically opposite to yours. If you want to discuss the evidence, well, what is the evidence for this purported Chinese focus on AI?

Especially in a priority area like AI, why would they slow down to respect commercial ethics?

Because the CCP is well-known for cutting uppity businessmen down to size, and AI to the party bosses looks like «blockchain» or «fintech» – some new grifting scheme to syphon off some of their control over the system; another invention that's a bigger internal threat than external competitive edge. Remember when Americans were afraid that Choyna, ever ruthless and game-theoretically diabolical, will leverage their dominance in cryptocurrency mining? They've gladly regulated it out of existence instead.

It's accepted they're in a race with the US over the most important technology of the century. The US certainly thinks so, that's why they imposed their semiconductor sanctions on China.

Yeah, it's accepted by Americans, but does China notice that they're in an AI race? For all I know they're of the mind that semiconductors are needed only for drone warfare over the first island chain, monitoring Uighur camps and manufacturing automation – or, perhaps, to produce high-end smartphones; which is why the severity of sanctions and impossibility of compromise befuddles them so. Many Americans are, indeed, obsessed with geopolitical dominance of their Empire of Freedom, like some Avengers franchise characters or, less charitably, suicidal ants willing to lay down their livelihoods for the largesse of the colony. But I don't notice the same spirit in Chinese people; they're selfish, entrepreneurial, too engrossed with busywork to notice the big picture. Does Baidu or ByteDance believe they're forging the future of the lightcone? What are the names of Chinese Hassabis or Altman? How many mainlanders are even aware of this eschatological discourse?

Consider the Chinese anime-fication photo app that turned blacks into furniture, monkeys, whitened them, removed them entirely because it was clearly trained that blacks weren't beautiful. That would never pass from Google, they'd get pilloried.

Ironically, the underlying model was Stable Diffusion, or specifically a minor finetune of NovelAI. Stability is incorporated in London, UK. Novel – Delaware, US. Alibaba has never released Composer. I wonder why.

America has regulated its productive industries into the ground, shipbuilding, high-speed rail, construction of literally everything is strangled by red tape

Alternatively: Americans are obsessed with building, so they whine about red tape; the Chinese are obsessed with grifting, so they pretend to build. But what has China built concretely? Rail for empty trains, and empty apartment blocks? Automated ports to ship Aliexpress gizmos to the Americans? This is all immaterial in the AI race. Where are their new supercomputers? Buying out consumer GPUs? Centralized collection of annotations to train foundation models, incentivized with Social Credit score (does it even work yet)? They have many levers to compensate for their hardware and expertise shortcomings. Which ones, exactly, have they pressed? They've only ever gone in the opposite direction – prohibiting tech giants from harvesting data, imposing regulations, forgoing opportunities.

They'd rather take an unsustainable loan, erect another concrete dildo, stuff it with pigs and Huawei snout recognition and pat themselves on the back for being innovative. All the while some pig-like official collects gold bricks in the basement of his overpriced siheyuan in the countryside. That's what Chinese building is like.

I may sound a little racist here. But the bigger issue is that Mainland China is so incredibly sheltered. They don't have the sense of what is possible, their culture is a tiny shallow hothouse for midwit takes. It's like Belarus or some other stale post-Soviet backwater; actually worse. This is true of their entertainment as well as of their tech and politics. I've tried to take them seriously for a while, and came to this conclusion. Ignoring China and assuming they won't do anything consequential nor retaliate in any meaningful way when Anglos are kicking them in the balls has consistently been the rational choice.

It makes far more sense for China's AI strategy to follow their broad accelerate-economic-development strategy

They've curtailed this strategy though, now it's about «the struggle for security» or something. Not like it'll work.

As much as I like your posts, I would like some proof that China isn't pursuing the police-state-on-tap form of AI, and that the people who could build it are more interested in bullshitting their way to their paychecks instead of actually forging the future.

Am I and the others worried about the potential for AI to be used in such a way just mistaken, seeing what technology could enable and projecting that fear onto the Chinese to the point where we assume it's already on the way?

Wut? Of course they're building an AI-powered total surveillance state, to the best of their ability to do so. They just don't need very much in terms of high-end AI research for this. It's overwhelmingly a boring and self-inhibiting strategy. More CCTVs, more gait recognition, more «safety from terrorists», more big brother stuff. Generative AI, AGI – not very helpful and kinda creepy.

You are, however, absolutely correct to worry that this is how the tech will be applied outside of China too, with some degree of obfuscation. The term of art is «turnkey tyranny» and it comes, of course, from Snowden, that traitorous bastard who gave the finger to the Empire of Freedom and took refuge in the northernmost Empire of Evil, where there are far more nuclear warheads than cutting-edge GPUs.

In China there are somewhat more cutting-edge GPUs, I gather, but that's mostly because they don't have a lot of nukes.

Ah, "turnkey tyranny" is the term I'm looking for.

But the bigger issue is that Mainland China is so incredibly sheltered. They don't have the sense of what is possible, their culture is a tiny shallow hothouse for midwit takes. It's like Belarus or some other stale post-Soviet backwater; actually worse. This is true of their entertainment as well as of their tech and politics. I've tried to take them seriously for a while, and came to this conclusion. Ignoring China and assuming they won't do anything consequential nor retaliate in any meaningful way when Anglos are kicking them in the balls has consistently been the rational choice.

Finally, someone else on The Motte who gets it.

Not a mod comment, but what is the deal with all the «brackets» used for emphasis? Is it just a stylistic thing, or is it a meme I'm missing?

I think this was discussed back on reddit. It's Russian quote marks.

Wasn't the confusion the source of some creepy red-name censorship that led to us ending up here?

It was admins [Removed by Reddit]-ing a comment which was, verbatim:

"Nazis do (((this)))

But « thiis » is just a different type of quotation mark used in French, German, Russian and so on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillemet"

@Amadan

Yes, I vaguely remember an admin interpreting them as the (((Jew))) flag. I just was not sure what they're actually meant to signify.

Do you want to talk about the Czech AI threat?

If the Czech Republic was over 100 times bigger, then maybe.

Firstly, I'm not even American. Secondly, AI is a major priority for China. From a conference chaired by Xi himself:

The conference emphasized the need to accelerate the construction of a modern industrial system supported by the real economy. This requires both going against the tide to achieve breakthroughs in areas of weakness and capitalizing on favorable trends to grow and strengthen areas of advantage. We must solidify the foundation of self-reliance in science and technology and cultivate new growth momentum. It is essential to consolidate and expand the advantages of new energy vehicle development, and accelerate the construction of charging stations, energy storage facilities, and the renovation of supporting power grids. Attention must be given to the development of general artificial intelligence, fostering an innovative ecosystem, and prioritizing risk prevention.

and

Zhu Songchun, a member of the CPPCC and director of the Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence, suggested in a proposal that China should elevate the development of AGI to the level of the “Two Bombs, One Satellite” of the contemporary era and seize the global strategic high ground of technology and industrial development.”

I don't know about future of the lightcone but there are leading voices who see AI as critical to China's status as a world power. They've spent enormous sums on developing domestic semiconductor industries. AI training can be brute-forced with trailing-edge chips at the price of higher capital costs and power costs. China has no shortage of either and they have an enormous amount of trailing edge wafer production.

Many Americans are, indeed, obsessed with geopolitical dominance of their Empire of Freedom, like some Avengers franchise characters or, less charitably, suicidal ants willing to lay down their livelihoods for the largesse of the colony. But I don't notice the same spirit in Chinese people; they're selfish, entrepreneurial, too engrossed with busywork to notice the big picture.

If so, shouldn't the US be able to recruit enough soldiers to meet army and navy recruiting goals? They can't: https://money.yahoo.com/us-army-could-see-cuts-201023045.html

If the Empire of Freedom is so powerful, it should be capable of finding soldiers to fight for it.

But what has China built concretely? Rail for empty trains, and empty apartment blocks? Automated ports to ship Aliexpress gizmos to the Americans? This is all immaterial in the AI race.

Their rail works and actually generates returns, per the World Bank. US rail is best known for not being built and wasting money in the case of California's HSR. In Los Angeles, train stations are very popular amongst drug addicts, where they imbibe (probably Chinese-sourced) fentanyl and make a nuisance of themselves, at great expense to the public who refuse to use the mobile drug dens but are stuck paying for their bloated, ineffective policing and inflated construction costs.

Where are their new supercomputers?

Well they finished Tianhe-3 back in 2021 and they apparently have another exascale supercomputer, though there's some level of secrecy in what they're doing. Fair enough, given they don't want to stand out and get any more sanctions.

Buying out consumer GPUs?

They've been buying American servertime because the sanctions apparatus is too dopey to prevent banned Chinese companies renting their GPUs for AI training or selling 'banned' components to intermediaries: https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcontent%2F9706c917-6440-4fa9-b588-b18fbc1503b9

Ignoring China and assuming they won't do anything consequential nor retaliate in any meaningful way when Anglos are kicking them in the balls has consistently been the rational choice.

What about 'biding our time', the strategy they used so effectively while the US flailed around wrecking the Middle East? Instead of being baited, they wait until the balance of power favours them most, then strike. It's a strategy that's paying off. The US now has a significant chunk of its strength tied down in Eastern Europe and Ukraine. You laugh but those MANPADs and ATGMs would be useful to have defending Taipei, which is certainly relevant to an AI arms race. The US has sent yet more troops to Europe due to the war in Ukraine, along with a fair few F-35s. South Korea is also within striking range of the PLA and the country's fate is effectively tied to Taiwan and the First Island Chain. Their food and fuel self-sufficiency is laughable. In one campaign China could destroy or deny the bulk of the world's chip production to the West.

It's a rational choice to taunt and abuse random people, right up until they drive up to your office building with a killdozer and raze it. They've been building a giant fleet, while the USN is dispersed, weakened by poor training and actively shrinking as they discard expensive, useless garbage like the LCS.

You can assume that someone is a coward if they don't strike back when you provoke them but they could also be waiting for the best opportunity. Likewise, if somebody isn't proudly proclaiming their progress, perhaps they have made little. Or perhaps they're concealing what they've achieved so as not to draw attention.

So China is sort of a big place. With a bit of effort you can dig evidence in any direction: that China is democratic, that China is woke, that China has a problem with murderous cardiologists, that China

…makes no secret of its eugenic ambitions, in either its cultural history or its government policies.

For generations, Chinese intellectuals have emphasized close ties between the state (guojia), the nation (minzu), the population (renkou), the Han race (zhongzu), and, more recently, the Chinese gene-pool (jiyinku). Traditional Chinese medicine focused on preventing birth defects, promoting maternal health and "fetal education" (taijiao) during pregnancy, and nourishing the father's semen (yangjing) and mother's blood (pingxue) to produce bright, healthy babies (see Frank Dikötter's book Imperfect Conceptions). Many scientists and reformers of Republican China (1912-1949) were ardent Darwinians and Galtonians. They worried about racial extinction (miezhong) and "the science of deformed fetuses" (jitaixue), and saw eugenics as a way to restore China's rightful place as the world's leading civilization after a century of humiliation by European colonialism.

One of Deng's legacies is China's current strategy of maximizing "Comprehensive National Power". This includes economic power (GDP, natural resources, energy, manufacturing, infrastructure, owning America's national debt), military power (cyberwarfare, anti-aircraft-carrier ballistic missiles, anti-satellite missiles), and 'soft power' (cultural prestige, the Beijing Olympics, tourism, Chinese films and contemporary art, Confucius Institutes, Shanghai's skyscrapers). But crucially, Comprehensive National Power also includes "biopower": creating the world's highest-quality human capital in terms of the Chinese population's genes, health, and education (see Governing China's Population by Susan Greenhalgh and Edwin Winkler).

Chinese biopower has ancient roots in the concept of "yousheng" ("good birth"—which has the same literal meaning as "eugenics"). For a thousand years, China has been ruled by a cognitive meritocracy selected through the highly competitive imperial exams. The brightest young men became the scholar-officials who ruled the masses, amassed wealth, attracted multiple wives, and had more children. The current "gaokao" exams for university admission, taken by more than 10 million young Chinese per year, are just the updated version of these imperial exams—the route to educational, occupation, financial, and marital success. With the relaxation of the one-child policy, wealthier couples can now pay a "social fostering fee" (shehui fuyangfei) to have an extra child, restoring China's traditional link between intelligence, education, wealth, and reproductive success.

Chinese eugenics will quickly become even more effective, given its massive investment in genomic research on human mental and physical traits. BGI-Shenzhen employs more than 4,000 researchers. It has far more "next-generation" DNA sequencers that anywhere else in the world, and is sequencing more than 50,000 genomes per year. It recently acquired the California firm Complete Genomics to become a major rival to Illumina.

The BGI Cognitive Genomics Project is currently doing whole-genome sequencing of 1,000 very-high-IQ people around the world, hunting for sets of sets of IQ-predicting alleles. I know because I recently contributed my DNA to the project, not fully understanding the implications. These IQ gene-sets will be found eventually—but will probably be used mostly in China, for China.

After a couple of generations, it would be game over for Western global competitiveness.

There is unusually close cooperation in China between government, academia, medicine, education, media, parents, and consumerism in promoting a utopian Han ethno-state.

My real worry is the Western response. The most likely response, given Euro-American ideological biases, would be a bioethical panic that leads to criticism of Chinese population policy with the same self-righteous hypocrisy that we have shown in criticizing various Chinese socio-cultural policies.

But then:

the guys running BGI didn’t want to piss off the Jews

Chinese scientist who produced genetically altered babies sentenced to 3 years in jail

China takes itself out of the race towards the Biosingularity

and of course

Welcome Polygenically Screened Babies. «Her name was Aurea, meaning "dawn"». Virginia, USA.

What I've learned is that Westerners can reliably dig up some random impressively-sounding titles and half-bullshit Orientalist translations demonstrating some grandiose coordinated Chinese agenda, and yet nothing. ever. happens. The Chinese nation does not have the capacity to act in its rational self-interest. The half that's not bullshit is mostly big character posters and interests of individual powerless weirdoes.

The director of the Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence argues AGI is an all-important topic? You don't say.

Attention must be given to the development of general artificial intelligence, fostering an innovative ecosystem, and prioritizing risk prevention.

Why not bold it like that instead? By the way you can listen the Congressional discussion and dig some much more ambitious quotes. Including «even if we pause to prevent risks, Choyna won't». Can you imagine Xi saying «we shouldn't focus too much on risks of AGI progress, because Americans won't»? I can't.

And did Xi talk to their equivalent of Sam Altman? Or is this just impotent political sloganeering into vacuum, one more conference among hundreds – about agriculture, climate change, real estate, football?

AI training can be brute-forced with trailing-edge chips at the price of higher capital costs and power costs. China has no shortage of either and they have an enormous amount of trailing edge wafer production.

Yes, but what does this matter for AI? Do you have any evidence that they prioritize AI work with those trailing edge chips?

I think they're straight up going to plug them in Xiaomi robot vacuums and those atrocious barking dog toys. This is what the challenger to American hegemony looks like.

shouldn't the US be able to recruit enough soldiers to meet army and navy recruiting goals?

Americans have always been subpar in direct combat and prevailed through air and artillery advantage, so this doesn't matter, especially in this age.

Well they finished Tianhe-3 back in 2021 and they apparently have another exascale supercomputer

This is normie shit for oil and gas exploration. Where are their AI supercomputers? Yeah, you're right: they use AWS. Do you suppose relying on regulators being «dopey» is a clever move? No, it's desperation. And they don't train anything of strategic importance in any case. It's more commercial and surveillance gimmicks, boring dystopia infrastructure, not AGI.

Elon fucking Musk has over 1 exaFLOPS of DL-relevant performance on a single pod. Google sports 4-exaFLOPS tier pods. God knows what Gemini is being trained on. By 2025, Americans will reach zettascale. Again, China is as relevant as the Czech Republic.

What about 'biding our time', the strategy they used so effectively

A nice cope, I suppose. One a Kung Fu sage could come up with in the MMA cage.

They'll keep biding their time, while Americans eat their lunch, their supper, their dinner and their nation.

You laugh but those MANPADs and ATGMs would be useful to have defending Taipei

Yes, excuse me but I'll laugh. Taiwan is a red herring, Americans can nuke the whole island just to be sure nothing goes to PRC, and it's impossible to defend TSMC anyway; if the invasion starts, fabs go down.

AGI can be completed with already available hardware, and the US-led bloc has like 95% of it, and total control over means of production. Intel has many 10nm-capable fabs and will have 5nm by 2025. China will maybe have 7nm in 2030 or something, if they don't implode first from overregulating pork, or a housing bubble, or some other absurd problem.

They've been building a giant fleet

A very Chinese strategy: build a massive junk fleet for the era of robot wars. Have you seen their exercises? Such moving choreography.

Likewise, if somebody isn't proudly proclaiming their progress, perhaps they have made little. Or perhaps they're concealing what they've achieved so as not to draw attention.

Or perhaps they want you to think that, so you're too wary to deliver the finishing blow.

Or perhaps they're just too busy to think about any of this, preoccupied with their small mercantile interests, unchanged in millenia, while the West rushes into posthuman Singularity.


You have to understand I hoped it won't be like this. I hoped that if not my own country, then China will be able to provide a second pole. I wanted to have a minimally livable refuge from GAE, somewhere on the outskirts of Chinese project – in some African mineral supplier or in Thailand, whatever. But that depended on China not squandering this decade. Not shooting themselves in the foot. Not being cartoon villains. Being actually rational.

But that wasn't their role.

I'm not saying China is a perfect state. The One-Child Policy was a bad move, amongst other things. But in a great many fields, they do better than the US does. There is a level of comprehensive strength and cohesion they have that the US lacks.

Can you imagine Xi saying «we shouldn't focus too much on risks of AGI progress, because Americans won't»? I can't.

Unlike the blatherings of US elected officials, (one of which started a diplomatic furor by threatening to blow up TSMC in scorched earth policy as you linked, which is not helpful to the US) Xi knows that officials are forced to pick over everything he says with a fine-toothed comb if they want to get ahead. Everything he says is super super bland and dull-sounding but it's never into the vacuum. Xi Xinping Thought is big and important in Chinese officialdom, just as Biden 'Thought' is laughable in America and routinely corrected by officials. Xi consistently says the time for struggle is near, we must be resolute, train more soldiers, prepare for confrontation. That's what the fleet, air and rockets are for. Why is Xi's China building such a gigantic fleet if not to challenge the US? If he wanted just to defend Fortress China, he could just stack up ICBMs, land-based missiles and SAMs.

Americans can nuke the whole island just to be sure nothing goes to PRC

Well by this logic, Russia can just nuke the US tech sector to ash. Sarmat and Topol can fulfil their destiny, do what they were made to do. If nukes are on the table, then that radically evens the playing field. In a scenario where megadeaths are locked in, why not have a full exchange?

According to Reuters, CHina can shrug off US AI sanctions using the dumbed-down US H-800s, theft and smuggling. The US is terminally dopey. They don't learn from their mistakes. Do you think Kamala Harris is going to lay down some really effective, well-thought out AI policy? Her presence reveals a level of unseriousness - she was previously supposed to be border czar where she did next to nothing to defend US national interests.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/chinas-ai-industry-barely-slowed-by-us-chip-export-rules-2023-05-03

Americans have always been subpar in direct combat and prevailed through air and artillery advantage, so this doesn't matter, especially in this age.

They overwhelmed their enemies with industrial output. Now they face China. Anyway, my point was that if the US is so united and committed, they should be able to put boots in the ground.

This is normie shit for oil and gas exploration

Well you asked for supercomputers, I gave you supercomputers! How can China be capable of putting together a FP 64 supercomputer on par with the US but not FP 16? Everyone agrees that they have first-rate chip design skills. They designed a TPU-equivalent back in 2018: https://www.networkworld.com/article/3289387/baidu-takes-a-major-leap-as-an-ai-player-with-new-chip-intel-alliance.html

Now I can't find out what exactly came of these chips, I can't read mandarin and China doesn't have a habit of announcing everything they do for foreign audiences like the US does. (America's previous plan to undermine CCP rule by economic liberalization and free trade failed for precisely that ludicrous, anime-tier insistence on declaring how their attack works, as they use it in battle). You're free to say that it's a nothingburger, another dancing robot puppy. I will say that something's powering Tiktok, which is a truly impressive soft-power/adversary cultural degradation tool. Profitable too. Nobody seems to know where they trained and refined their algorithm but it's still important.

How much division and conflict in the West has it's root in Tiktok? Libsoftiktok, those abhorrent social media trends, shortening attention spans of the youth. Where is the US equivalent, if they're so far ahead in AI? Now I sense you'll think of me a strident boomer, maniacally warning against the evil Chicoms corrupting the youth. Well, it's still true. Fentanyl and Tiktok are corrupting Western society, though it's like pissing into an ocean of piss at this point. Shouldn't we expect the leading power in AI to get to these things first? Shouldn't there be some American Tiktok-equivalent that can make patriotism really cool, get kids into STEM, make it fun to hate China? The US is still doing analogue stuff like NAFO and brigading reddit, stuff that can't even pierce the Great Firewall. And why can't the US make anything superior to Huawei's 5G on cost-efficiency? That's not AI but it's AI-adjacent.

Why can't the US produce commercially valuable products if they're so far ahead? Sure, ChatGPT is coming online now but there are Chinese equivalents, multimodal too (though I'm not willing to pay for Chinatalk's substack to see. This looks fairly decent, especially the trick question noticing stuff: https://www.chinatalk.media/p/baidus-ernie-china-reacts ). If they're just leveraging the huge amount of Chinese data they've sucked up to counter their crappier hardware, then so be it. That works too.

Now I'm not saying the US is behind China, just that it's close enough for the conflict to be interesting.

A nice cope, I suppose. One a Kung Fu sage could come up with in the MMA cage.

Well, at the cost of trillions of dollars and about 130,000 US veteran suicides plus a good chunk America's global reputation, what was the outcome of the Middle East Wars 2001-2023? Iraq and Yemen are now in the Iranian sphere of influence, by extension they're in the Chinese sphere. Saudi is flirting with Beijing, Russia is now wedded at the hip. Maybe if US diplomats studied Daoism and practiced a little inaction, they'd have saved blood, prestige and treasure while getting a much better outcome. The Chinese sage spent over a decade building up strength while the musclebound MMA thug bashed his head into the wall. This is what skilful diplomacy looks like, cheap victories over expensive losses.