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How “AI Safety” Traveled Through the Chinese Internet

yinwei.substack.com · 2,182 words · saved by 1 readers

In 2024, I searched the Chinese internet for existential risk and mostly found existentialism. Two years later, I tried again.

In 2024, I searched the Chinese internet for “existential risk.” I remember the results being mostly about existentialism: philosophy, existential crises, the meaning of life. Almost nothing seemed to have anything to do with AI. The same search on the English internet took me somewhere very different. “Existential risk,” or x-risk, already had a recognizable intellectual neighborhood: Nick Bostrom, LessWrong, effective altruism, superintelligence, AI alignment, and arguments about whether sufficiently advanced AI could pose a threat to humanity itself. The Chinese internet seemed to think…

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