China offers an alternative to Western ‘technofeudalism’
China offers an alternative to Western ‘technofeudalism’
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Opinion | China offers an alternative to Western ‘technofeudalism’
106 comments
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According to the latest Edelman Trust Barometer, change is under way not only in technical capability but also in public sentiment. In China, 72 per cent of people trust artificial intelligence (AI), compared to 32 per cent in the United States and 28 per cent in the United Kingdom. Similar patterns hold across India, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand as developing Asian markets consistently outperform Western and developed peers on public trust in innovation.
I don't believe this is because Chinese bazinga AI is inherently more trustworthy, currently the AIs are all more or less comparable, you'll get a similar answer out of ChatGPT, Grok or DeepSeek on any given topic.
I think it is simply because it is inheriting trust created by the Chinese governing system. The AI in the rest of the world is inheriting distrust in the capitalist governing system.
Everyone can see how AI can be used to shape the truth. The Chinese population simply trusts that their government is going to carefully manage it to display the real truth and be positive towards the people, whereas the populations of the rest of the world believe that their governments can not be trusted to intentionally misuse it to harm themselves.
This is less about the technology itself and more about who is controlling the technology.
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💯
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I was wondering why the fuck this suddenly had 80 more comments and then I saw it
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yogthos posts rankle lib feathers like few others
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lost
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Opens another hopium article for something new.
Oh its just Chinese AI shilling.
Its good because its under the red flag lol. The Chinese are welcome to enshittify their economy, just remember crying US bad wont save you from these consequences.
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I do think that China's plan of figuring out a use case and then implementing the new technology with that use case is far better than the west's plan of "it'll probably make the rich a bunch of money, so let's just go all in on this and shove it everywhere and hope and pray it works."
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Is it a good alternative?
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Absolutely, especially given that a lot of it is based on open source technology such as RISCV. Similarly, China is releasing open models like DeepSeek while US companies are pursuing closed service approach.
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In contrast, I believe China is charting an alternative which I call “technomeritism”.
China is already technofeaudalist and is continuing to go down that path, so, you're wrong. Its just more organized at doing it due to its authoritarianism
Look up its encroachment of the legal system with bias automators (usually incorrectly called AI) if you wanna argue that somehow China is better for freedom.
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damn, i just looked up what the word 'authoritarianism ' means and now i'm freaking the fr*ck out. have you ever heard of this book called 1984? it sounds like China is a lot like that book except that big brother is now Chinese and everything is happening in the year 2025 and not 1984 like the book said it would. crazy to think about (and i love to think!)
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beautiful -
BIG BRAIN
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Isn't America the one with huge overinvested private AI company bubbles, that are all closed- source, and whose only chances at profits come from ignoring small creators' copyright?
Meanwhile China's contribution to the common good includes open sourcing one of the most efficient models to date, enabling anybody with a half- decent home computer to run one.
Not saying it's perfect, but that's a meaningful difference in attitude.
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Yes China is authoritarian. People actually respect authority figures and trust them. Innovation is based on merit and benefit to society rather than accumulating private capital. The future must be authoritarian.
In the West there is no authoritarianism. It is the jungle where the strong eat the weak and authority is replaced with cheap goods and fear.
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that's gonna be good
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Define technofeudalism
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Yanis Vourofakis's book defines it as rents almost entirely replacing profits, with technology being the replacement for feudal lands and with tech feudalists forgoing profits for pure rent seeking from the now lower class business owners i.e. merchants that can only rent capital instead of owning it and only sell in feudal markets like Amazon and gig workers i.e. tech serfs that have no workplace and float freely between tech feudal lords.
It's an interesting idea, at least.
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Not an expert but I'd put it somewhere around "using 'tech' (as in computers, software, etc.) to carry about fraudalism."
If you're wondering where I'd put feudalism, I'd be something like "limiting People's economic (and sometimes social) mobility through leveraging ownership of resources the person needs to survive".
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106 comments
that's pretty wild as a difference
In other words, people living in a dystopia are less optimistic about the future.
Perfect summary of the situation.
Generative AI is not an inherently evil technology. If I had any trust in Western institutions whatsoever I wouldn't have as much of an issue with it.