Tyler Cowen: prediction

Transcript context

…Well, it’s really remarkable. I got a chance to serve on the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, which studied this issue, particularly the AI competition between China and the US, quite, quite rigorously. China as a state, of course, is making enormous investments in AI through the doctrine of Military-Civil Fusion that Xi announced. He has essentially directed any technology company in China to ensure its technology is open and available for use for the People’s Liberation Army. You have a lot of things happening in China that are a deliberate strategy to make them the most competitive nation they can be on technology on a variety of fronts. Yet today, particularly with generative AI, the United States does seem to have a breakout advantage. My best guess for that is, in the end, we have structural advantages in a far freer market, far more freedoms, and none of the suppression that Xi has exerted over the tech industry at, arguably, his political peril the last few years in his quest to suppress dissent China-wide. My view is that they’re quite afraid of AI, that they understand it will disrupt a lot of social relations. American leaders, in a sense, are too asleep to even see that, so we just let things happen, and that’s for the better in the long run. But they throw their CEOs in jail, and they’re afraid it will take away power of the CCP, and they’re just not going to catch us. Well, that’s certainly true for the population-facing AI. The stories that we’ve all read this past week about generative language models in China being held up to make sure that 60,000 censored matters wouldn’t come up, right? It was delaying their deployment. That is a system of enforcement and censorship that is focused on the civilian population. There are also large institutions in China that are focused on solving military problems and advancing AI in the military that are not operating under those constraints. So, it’s important to split off what we see happening with the Chinese government’s attempt to control its own populace and what they’re doing to try and make the PLA a fighting force that can meet the military objectives that Xi has set for them.…

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