"The China Debate We're Not Having" | Part 3: Tech, Rivalry, and Competing Visions of the Future

“I was in Shanghai last summer for the World AI Conference the same week as America's AI Action Plan dropped. And one of my counterparts in a dialogue came in and she had circled in America's AI action plan all of the references to the Pentagon and to the intelligence community. And she said, see, The US is now full on into militarized, securitized AI. This makes it very hard for those of us in China's system who are pushing for more guardrails to have space to advocate that. And I worry that we create a self fulfilling prophecy by flattening China into a monolithic other.”

“I think it's not that competitive in that I think The US is very far ahead when it comes to being positioned to win the AI competition. But where the rivalrous element comes in is as long as both sides believe that they're trying to benchmark against each other and that they're in this strategic competition, then you still have a rivalry. Like, I went to University of Iowa for undergrad. I don't think we have a rivalry with Nebraska, but our fans believe that we have a rivalry, even though we've been beating them every every year. But as long as there's that perception and belief, I think the rivalry continues.”

“For me, when I look at the rise and fall of great powers, ultimately, what countries compete over is productivity growth. If you look at all these patterns of first industrial revolution, second industrial revolution, US Japan competition, and the information revolution, the country that capitalizes the best on these technological breakthroughs is the one that's able to diffuse a general purpose technology throughout throughout its entire economy and achieve productivity leadership to sustain economic growth in the long term. And that sort of economic power then translates into other dimensions of the rivalry, such as geopolitical and military influence.”

“So, like, agents, like, Open Claw, which is an AI agent, has been absolutely, like, phenomenally popular in China. Like, people talk about raising lobsters, like people lined up outside Tencent's headquarters trying to get employees to help them install it on their, laptops. So and they buy things on Taobao, like ecommerce and, like, try to get it to install even if they don't know tech. So there is this real fervor and hunger for good AI technology regardless of where it's from. But the problems are, like, if you just leave these AI agents, which are autonomous, just running amok, like, without interoperable standards between The US and China, there's gonna be a really dangerous situation that's happening in the next six to twelve months.”

“America's the only country on the world where you can come from anywhere and become an American. It's not a race. It's a creed. And, like, I am here in this country because there was a time in America where we decided we had to win the space race. And so we took the best minds from all over the world, including my grandfather who built the retrograde engine on the bottom of the lunar lander and help work on the Polaris missile. And, like, we and they took actual Nazis, and we decided that we were gonna win a talent race. And, like, that that's what America can do if we're actually serious about winning this. It's not just about the fabs. It's not just about the trips. It's about the talent and that investment.”

“You know, I spent three years living in Cuba representing the US government under constant surveillance by an authoritarian state, being called a terrorist on the national news and a spy and a subversive and a contraboscenario and all these things. And if there is anything that living inside of an authoritarian state taught me, even though all of my work was directly with political dissidents, it is how nuanced and how how disparate feelings were among the human beings that were sitting inside of that country and how binary and how reductive that conversation became when it became about the nation state powers and who controlled that narrative.”

“You see this right, in the demand for Apple products, right, on the trust issue. Right? The the idea that Apple was resisting the FBI, that Apple was putting end to end encryption on its devices so that nobody could get in other than the user was the idea of US competition on privacy, on security, on trust. And I think that that's one of those areas where you really do see, like, that arms' length relationship that The US has traditionally had between industry and government, really coming in as a commercial advantage, that that you don't see in Chinese products because of the way the government demands certain kinds of access, because of the way the government has not allowed that trust ecosystem to grow.”