Re:AI Is an Ideology, Not a Technology
by Animats on Tuesday October 13, 2020 @02:54PM
(#24768844)
The usual narrative goes like this: Without the constraints on data collection that liberal democracies impose and with the capacity to centrally direct greater resource allocation, the Chinese will outstrip the West.
In surveillance, yes. But that's not where China's productivity comes from. China does have some centrally directed resource allocation, but it's at a very coarse level. See "Made in China 2025".[1] That's industrial policy. Japan became an industrial power in the 1970s and the 1980s through good industrial policy, run by the Ministry of Trade and Industry. It's a help when you're developing a country, if done well. Most of the "Asian tigers" did that. Done badly, it's a disaster.
What seems to make China go now is a large number of medium-sized companies aggressively competing. Like the US up to the 1980s.
Re:AI Is an Ideology, Not a Technology
by tim333 on Wednesday October 14, 2020 @05:50AM
(#24774871)
Also in AI the real innovation seems mostly in the west - Google, Facebook, Open AI, Tesla, DeepMind etc. We're not going to get AGI by having lots of people label images.
In surveillance, yes. But that's not where China's productivity comes from. China does have some centrally directed resource allocation, but it's at a very coarse level. See "Made in China 2025".[1] That's industrial policy. Japan became an industrial power in the 1970s and the 1980s through good industrial policy, run by the Ministry of Trade and Industry. It's a help when you're developing a country, if done well. Most of the "Asian tigers" did that. Done badly, it's a disaster.
What seems to make China go now is a large number of medium-sized companies aggressively competing. Like the US up to the 1980s.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_China_2025