Let me tell you a scary story about China. They are playing a very long game and they are boiling the frog.
I saw one of the world’s leaders in AI give a talk at an event. Kai-fu Lee. In this talk he touched on several things that still haunt me.
He talked about self-driving cars and said that China would be a leader in the space because they don’t have the same issues around human casualties that we have.
He said, at first there might be many but eventually there will be none and that’s for the greater good of China in the long run. Now, he’s not wrong. We won’t have self driving cars soon because we won’t accept a single failure from a robot, but we will from humans
He talked about AI and how they would be world leaders in the space and it would be the US vs China, with China taking India, Africa, South America and Russia.
When asked about freedom of speech, he said that someday the country will be so advanced that the people will demand these freedoms. That this is an ends justify the means sort of thing. Control everyone until you get there.
So hundreds of years they are willing to wait. They plan for a future that we don’t understand and aren’t part of and most likely are woefully behind on when it comes to technology.
When asked about AI, he said he has 10s of thousands of engineers and grooms the best for their companies. The rest he keeps educating until they are ready.
Another statement was that companies started in China don’t have any issue with the government being involved with their businesses because it is all part of this bigger plan.
He even said “we’d never do what Google has done”, in response to them turning down government contracts for defense of our country.
So, let me ask this. Is their ideology as a government something the free world wants infiltrating our businesses? Do we want to be part of their thousand year plan that will slowly erode our own freedom and our children’s freedom?
How many human casualties can we support? This is what Hong Kong is fighting for. They’ve had freedom and they don’t want to give it up, so they fight for it. This is why Taiwan needs to remain independent.
I’m afraid that our country has lost its ability to think long. We are caught up in cycles of politics that lose sight on the ball. Our freedom.
Make no mistake that if you are doing business in China, you are also doing business with the Chinese government. If you use TicToc, Chinese government. If you use face/makeup apps, Chinese government. Grindr? Chinese government.
Ask yourself, what do they want with our data? Why do they want our faces? Our children’s faces? While we lol and lulz at videos, we don’t realize what we are giving up.
