Mandate of AI - by afra - Concurrent
substack.com · 3,536 words · saved by 2 readers
Silicon Valley believes its founders are carrying the future of AI into being. In China, who carries it?
The drive from a batch of AI labs in Haidian district to the robotics company in Yizhuang takes the better part of an hour. We are running half the length of the Fifth Ring, which is ninety-eight kilometers, top to bottom, through a city my Western friends — many of them in Beijing for the first time — keep describing as vast and obscure. The planning is so bad, one of them says. Beijing has a nickname: West Pyongyang. The city is built not in deference to technological development or civic convenience, but as the visible expression of the highest state organs and their will. Whole…
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