China won’t win the AI race but would it be much worse if it did? — LessWrong
It seems to me accepted wisdom in the West that the US owned labs must “beat” the Chinese labs in the race for AGI/ASI. Even those who don’t think there will be a winner, that essentially the race is to see which country’s AI will kill/disempower us first, seem to believe that if there has to be a winner then better it be the US labs. (I haven't seen a survey, so I could be way off here.) For those in power and those heavily financially invested in the labs this of course makes sense. But what about for the rest of us? I had myself accepted the wisdom, in the nebulous way you consider propositions in domains where you don’t have any expertise. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is repressive, I thought. They are an authoritarian regime and therefore fundamentally a malign actor. Of course they mustn’t win. Then I heard Victor Shih, Chinese political system expert, talk on Dwarkesh’s podcast: “For the Chinese government, they’re very afraid that some actor—outside, but even inside the Pa