Experimentation, Chinese and American
Is China's tech-state complex really so different from our own? And is it okay to use TikTok?
This is the first of what I plan to make weekly writings on tech/the left/culture. Please let me know what you think and if there’s anything you’d like me to discuss.
I’ve been thinking about a thread by @cyantist, a partner at Founders Fund, in which she considers an argument from Kai-fu Lee on why China will become ascendant in AI. I don’t think her argument is shallow fear-mongering, but I do think it misses some things.
To restate her argument: China is going to move fast in self-driving cars because the Chinese authority structure is going to tolerate a level of human casualties in the development of self-driving that the West won’t. The Chinese state and its technology businesses are integrated, so they will move quickly towards shared goals in a way Western workers are reticent to copy. She says we should be concerned that interacting with Chinese products bolsters an authoritarian regime that will spread its illiberal values as it becomes more powerful.
Another way to look at the first half of the argument is that China is willing to experiment more than the West, even if that leads to more loss of life, because the authority structure believes experimentation will lead to better outcomes over the long term. I suspect Cyan feels similarly to me about this framing: intrigued but apprehensive. Where I diverge from her argument is in believing that the West is already running experiments like this constantly, just with less direction and to less positive benefit. Large-scale endeavor can be modeled as experimentation whether it’s done consciously or not. The United States is running an experiment on whether a free market system can deliver healthcare to a population. San Francisco is running an experiment on what happens when you don’t build new housing and let landlords set prices arbitrarily. We’re experimenting at the cost of human lives all the time, we just fucking suck at it. Does undertaking an experiment with a conscious tradeoff, rather than laundering intent through a market economy, make it worse? I argue it does not.
The second half of her argument, that the Chinese state and semi-private industry are integrated, I also believe is subject to Whataboutism. American industry is deeply integrated with the military state. Ben Tarnoff was recently on TrueAnon Podcast to talk about the military history of the internet (subscriber-only episode). Noam Chomksy makes an argument that the US government knows full well that for a modern state to compete its industry and state apparatus must be integrated, so the US government funds the US tech industry (and other domestic industries) through massive overspending on defense; under that new kind of liberalism the only permissible state spending is on defense.
And finally, should we not use TikTok? To flip the argument around once more, should foreign governments welcome or resist Facebook? Once Facebook has taken off in a country, citizens quickly shift to receiving the majority of their news through Facebook (or a handful of other social platforms). Almost none of these platforms have so much as an engineering office in these hypothetical countries. Would the US cede its media ecosystem to a foreign, oft-hostile power? Even the minor success of a few Chinese platforms has triggered alarm among very smart Americans; I can’t imagine the US would abide a Chinese social monopoly.
But Whataboutism shouldn’t be used to shut down criticism, only to widen it. The US and Chinese states both have nefarious aims when it comes to the use of AI. We should be skeptical of media platforms that are controlled by private individuals, whether they are domestic- or foreign-owned. And it’s progress that workers at Google and Amazon have won small victories against their owners’ collusion with these states.
These are the questions I’ve been grappling with. I think about China a lot but I don’t have great sources. If you have recommendations for podcasts or documentary series on China, I’m interested in learning more about culture/tech there and China’s interaction with the West, especially from left-wing perspectives.