Xi Jinping urges China to use artificial intelligence in race for tech future | Hacker News Reader

Xi Jinping urges China to use artificial intelligence in race for tech future

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I think China will create an AI bubble, currently studying in Beijing and all EE and CS students I know focus all their time at either stats, ML or data mining. While I think China might have a big shot at the AI race, I don't think it's useful to have to only focus on AI because it's hot right now, they may lack progress in other fundamental fields that may lead to more important breakthrough and technological change.

AI bubble, currently studying in Beijing and all EE and CS students I know focus all their time at either stats, ML or data mining

Yes everyone wants to mine the data, but noone wants to generate or gather new original data in the first place.

I think China has plenty of data as well, of its own people at least. It's a surveillance state, and the big corps work closely with the government and so also the universities. My point is more that they have a chance of winning the ML race, but that doesn't matter if there will be more important technological breakthroughs in other areas that will have greater impact on AI than ML.

Comment of the year

China does want to gather data, it has deployed tons of sensors and cameras to monitor its population's habits on the street. With the personal credit score implemented it can monitor its population even more thoroughly. How much data it gathers on its population thanks to the Great Firewall we can only speculate.

Granted, population data is one thing since you can incentivize people to share it. Data gathering that requires investment of money into sensors and time for careful placement of them is a completely different thing entirely

> all EE and CS students I know focus all their time at either stats, ML or data mining.

I quickly checked zhihu.com's hot topics related to CS, zhihu.com can be regarded as the Chinese counterpart of quora.com

the topic AI has 1.34m followers https://www.zhihu.com/topic/19551275/hot

the topic e-commerce has 1.14m followers https://www.zhihu.com/topic/19550780/hot

the topic database has 0.8m followers https://www.zhihu.com/topic/19552067/hot

> they may lack progress in other fundamental fields

Well if they crack general intelligence maybe they can generate, copy and paste researchers in those other fundamental fields.

Lack of substantial practical applications might make it a substantial waste of time and money.

Does anybody remember the 5th gen computing stuff from 30 years ago?

It's not just China. At my German university all courses related to AI/ML/data mining/stats are oversubscribed by a factor of 2 to 5. One professor went so far as to stress that he didn't have any experience with deep learning and he'd only cover Bayesian statistics in order to discourage students. I don't think it worked.

I'm pretty sure that there's a similar surge of interest in all countries.

>>I'm pretty sure that there's a similar surge of interest in all countries.

Yup. Same here in India.

People talk as though singularity is next year or so, and like Y2K jobs they have to do AI programming jobs.

Went to campus hiring like a few weeks back. And everyone had one or two show-and-tell AI/ML projects on their resume. Like every one. Everything from fitness apps to face emotion recognition.

I could be quite wrong but wouldn’t a course in Bayesian statistics be a lot more useful for someone interested in inference or however you will say it?

It would certainly be useful. I'm interviewing a lot of people for ML roles, and I've noticed a new group of "deep learning only" people coming out of colleges. They know their DL, but have no exposure to what I guess we're calling "traditional ML". Since DL isn't appropriate for all problems, they don't have the skills we want.

Those students will be awfully disappointed when they graduate and discover that most commercial software development work involves just shuffling bits around with no AI in sight.

We’ve been here before with Japan in the 80s, and it led to an extended 2nd AI winter.

China’s efforts are much larger than Japan’s were, and they have a bigger housing bubble to go along with that to boot. It is interesting to see how history repeats itself.

AI actually makes money now. There will be no more AI winters as it can now support its own development without patronage.

AI made money before.

All it takes for an AI winter to happen is for the hype to go way beyond the reality, the AI doesn’t have to not make money, it just has to make not enough money as expected. It is very much like a housing crash: the houses are still useful to live in, just that their value is not as high as expected.

AI is general use. This is a good bet.

Few things in the world scare me more than the idea of Xi Jinping with control over semiautonomous flying robocops.

Other people worry about climate change. Some religious nutcases worry about paperclip maximizers and basilisks. I worry about Robocop.

I assume that cheap flying drones are the weapons of the future, not just in military but police too. Small drones everywhere of all kinds. The drones would at least be semi-autonomous as having a human behind every single drone sounds expensive at scale.

Luckily drones still have significant limitations on achievable flight time. Some of which are dictated by the laws of physics. So for the foreseeable future there won’t be any bird sized drones chasing you down. Military drones on the other hand are much larger and expensive.

And one crash will have high repercussion, even in China.

Depends if the other drones decide to stop you from speaking out.

Car crashes have important consequences anywhere in the world as well; I think people will simply accept the low incidence of drone-related accident as part of their environmental ambience.

They are completely different thing. I will be much more furious if some relative die due to drones than accident.

Why?

I have had a friend die from a car accident. It doesn't exactly make you pro-driver (he was drunk).

If people can get used to cars, they can get used to anything. I mean, even as street furniture, they're hideously annoying. They monopolize roads, kill pedestrians, make noise, poison us, and do the same to our children, then you pay taxes to subsidize their manufacture. Drones sound far less obnoxious.

Install (mini)Drone charging station on every mobile cell site, plus Tesla or other electric charging stations(e.g. poles).

Add auto landing .. to charging station with Magsafe-like connector for example.

Add on-the-fly battery swapping feature.

Develop support drone that can carry batteries, fly and attach itself to low battery drone, swap, detach and go back to station.

etc.

When Chinese leaders start talking about not being reliant on Western technology, rightly or wrongly, I immediately start thinking about their previous industrial espionage campaigns to remove the reliance on Western aerospace technology. [1]

I'd be a lot more relaxed about these sorts of announcements if the Chinese government took steps to curb Red Army cyber-attacks.

[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/10/31/us-charges-10-ch...

Kind of unrelated, but I remember reading this interview with President Obama and being really impressed with how much he seemed to know about AI:

https://www.wired.com/2016/10/president-obama-mit-joi-ito-in...

"either they’re drugging us to keep us fat and happy or we’re in the Matrix"

I miss this guy and his connectedness with our culture.

Wow. Not just about AI - he's consistently insightful in that conversation, and demonstrates a systems-level mindset that one might even describe as hacker-esque...

"Part of what makes us human are the kinks. They’re the mutations, the outliers, the flaws that create art or the new invention, right? We have to assume that if a system is perfect, then it’s static. And part of what makes us who we are, and part of what makes us alive, is that we’re dynamic and we’re surprised."

Hell of a quote.

Original post title: AI in China: Xi Jinping and 25-member policymaking body Politburo have a “group study” session about AI

Xi said China must develop its own AI technology, saying it was important for economic development, social progress and global geopolitics.

“AI is a vital driving force for a new round of technological revolution and industrial transformation, and accelerating AI development is a strategic issue to decide whether we can grasp opportunities,” Xi was quoted by Xinhua as saying.

Xi said China must ensure that it “occupies the high ground of AI core technology” and could firmly keep the technology in its hands by leveraging “China’s massive data and huge market potential”.

He said the country should use AI to upgrade its manufacturing, adding that it could be used in China’s pursuit of a leaner and greener way of economic development.

Xi also encouraged government agencies to adopt AI.

“We need to enhance the combination of AI and social governance and develop AI systems for government services and decision-making,” Xi said, adding that public security was one field in which it could be used “in depth”.

Smart decision from China perspective, they can't be reliant on something potentially so crucial with western technologies.

But I can't help but think how it will be used for monitoring of lives of everybody. You do one misstep, government will know about it. Effectively no privacy. Compared to what it may be (and probably will), current state of China is a hippie paradise.

These discussions reminds me how Nazis had their own physics…

I had never heard about this befoere. Now I have:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik

Absolutely nothing to do with it...

Are you sure? We're already getting stories over here in the West where people are struggling with the results AI gives them when applied to people because the results are basically Wrongthink, and are trying to figure out how to get the AIs to conform better to their ideology and preconceived notions of what the AIs should be outputting. It's not a terribly far trip from there to Deutsche Physik or Lysenkoism, except wrapped in a much denser fog of complex math and enough complicated details to construct any narrative you want. Using AI to ideologically crack down on a population will eventually reach even the AI researchers and destroy their ability to maintain and develop the AI.

(I don't think it's an inevitable trip from struggling with AI outputs and preconceived ideological notions to Lysenkoism. But I think it is an extremely tempting path for the society as a whole. There are a lot of forces that push in that direction, as the nature of the AI and what they do and control moves from a scientific and mathematical matter to a political one.)

This has nothing to do with Deutsche Physik but it fits the narrative of some people to associate China with Nazi Germany or any other dystopian regime.

The connection between China and "dystopian regimes" seems pretty clear to me. The biggest difference is that the Nazis and the Soviets could only dream of the tools the Chinese already have and will have, though the Soviets definitely proved that even without tech you could get yourself a pretty solidly oppressive police state going.

Only time can tell if the result will be a state that explodes even more quickly due to the suppressed stresses coming out all at once at some point, or a stable totalitarian state will emerge.

China lacks democracy, routinely "disapears" its own promenant people, censors the internet and has the death penatly for the purpose of organ harvesting for the rich[1].

In what way is China not already run by a dystopian regime?

[1] https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/true-stories/the...

If you propagandize one side like that, of course it looks dystopian.

You could do the same exact thing for pretty much any state, country or bloc.

> In what way is China not already run by a dystopian regime?

How about the fact that they lifted 800 million people? Or the fact that they increased literacy rates from 20% before they came in power to nearly 100% today?

Using your logic, everything is always dystopian because you only choose to see the negative.

Every country has positives and negatives. Every single one.

It's not properganda if it's true, it's just news.

I'm sorry but the ends do not justify the means.

Whilst all countries have positives and negatives any country where you can't publically ridicule the ruling elite is dystopian. Every single one.

'if'

They also boil little children during secret ceremonies.

That's the sort of claims you've fallen for, so why not?

It is already a bubble. The number of no-nonsense applications (classification problems) is actually quite limited and depends on the quality of available datasets. Andrew Ng used to stress this in his courses.

To apply machine learning techniques successfully the phenomena in question should be, ideally, discrete, fully-observable, deterministic (very precise terminology from classic AI). Mere tweaking of parameters on nonsensical or too abstract data will lead nowhere.

Outside of academia ML already is an astrology with numbers instead of planets and stars.

For a deeper background on this, I recommend "AI superpowers - China, Silicon Valley, and The New World Order" by Kai-Fu Lee.

I don't think the VC of hacknews will care. They only care if they can make money from it.

There is lots of money to be made riding the CCP’s hyped priorities, just not by the VCs outside of China. YC has a China branch.

I wonder why we don't see a backlash against companies investing in China like we see against companies taking Saudi money?

> I wonder why we don't see a backlash against companies investing in China like we see against companies taking Saudi money?

It's a little, like the reaction against Google's project Dragonfly. However, it'd be much harder to sustain: it seems like nearly every Western company is investing in China or chasing customers there, so it's hard to single a few out for protest. You'd have to protest against all of them.

The Saudis aren't nearly so ubiquitous, so they're easier to reject.

China HAS the money to invest itself much like the Saudi’s do. Chinese VC money chasing Chinese investment opportunities is obviously not going to create a backlash. I suspect even YC China is setup to support Chinese VCs rather than to inject American VC into China, but I have no documentation to back up that hunch.

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