Funding the Commons

Arnaud Bertrand Verified account @RnaudBertrand · Oct 20

This is perhaps one of the great ironies of our time: China is increasingly shaping the future of AI, yet very few people in the West have the faintest idea how its key thinkers see it - its philosophers, sociologists or ethicists.

As is too often the case, we - much like the frog in the well - assume our own AI debate covers every possible view, when much of it springs from the same cultural soil, built on assumptions about what defines us that we don’t even know we’re making.

Take for instance the assumption that intelligence is a key part of what makes us human. It’s so intuitively obvious to us that we literally named our species after it - Homo sapiens (Latin for "wise man").

If you think about it, just this assumption explains a large share of the anxiety: if intelligence is what makes us human, then artificial intelligence - or super intelligence - threatens the very thing that makes us us: we’re about to compete with artificial or super “us”. No wonder this feels existential.

But China has a tradition of thought as old as ours, if not older, and every bit as rich and sophisticated, which never placed intelligence at the core of what makes us human, and so meets the thinking machine from a completely different starting point.

Have you, for instance, ever heard of Zhao Tingyang? Probably not, and yet he may be the most original thinker on AI you’ve never read. He’s one of China’s most prominent philosophers, at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. While Silicon Valley spends billions trying to make AI share our values, he for one argues that doing so “may very well be a suicidal mistake”.

Sounds pretty important to hear him out, don’t you think?

Or take Liu Yongmou, a philosopher of technology at Renmin University in Beijing. His thinking is almost the opposite of ours. Where we fear machines that become more and more like us, he says that “humanity’s biggest problem is the machinization of humans, not the humanization of machines.”

You could even go back to antiquity, when, in many ways, we started asking questions about AI.

Did you know, for instance, that Aristotle, in the Politics, imagined a world where “the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them”, and wondered about the social order consequences of this (mostly whether slaves would still be needed)?

There are Chinese equivalents to this. For instance, in the Zhuangzi, a foundational Taoist classic, you’ll find a similar thought experiment, with a completely different worry attached. An old gardener is watering his vegetables by hand, hauling water out of a well jar by jar. A visitor shows him a labor-saving device, and the gardener turns it down for the reason that whoever uses machines ends up with 机心 (jīxīn), a “machine-heart” - a mind that schemes, calculates and loses its simplicity. “It is not that I do not know [the machine],” he says, “but I should be ashamed to use it.”

Two labor-saving machines, two very different questions: where Aristotle wondered what automation would do to the social order, the Zhuangzi wondered what it would do to us, on the inside. Which, you’ll notice, is exactly Liu Yongmou’s worry, more than two thousand years earlier.

In fact, as we’ll see, 心 (xīn), the heart, is a motif that runs deep through the Chinese AI debate. It appears both in the fear, from Zhuangzi to Liu Yongmou, that machines could give us a “machine-heart” and its mirror image: the ambition to give machines a heart of their own. Zhu Songchun, who heads the Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence, wants “to set a heart for machines” (为机器立心, wèi jīqì lì xīn).

“Heart” in the Chinese sense, that is, which differs totally from the Valentine's Day fluff we’ve reduced it to. 心 (xīn) means heart and mind at once: it’s where we feel but also where we think, tell right from wrong and care for others.

And, crucially, it’s in the heart that the quality Confucianism sees as the very definition of a human being takes root: 仁 (rén). We need two words to translate it, “benevolence” and “humaneness”, but in Chinese they’re one and the same: to be benevolent is to be human. It’s not about intelligence.

This is the entire point of my new article: to step out of our well for a moment and peer over the edge of China's.

What you’ll find there will, I think, surprise you, with questions you’d never thought to ask: from Zhao Tingyang warning that AI’s bad consequences can at least be fought, but that “humanity may die of all the good things AI creates”, to whether the fear that AI will make us “useless” rests on the false premise that a person is worth what they’re useful for.

A premise that a 2,300-year-old Taoist tree, which survived precisely because it was useless, demolished long ago. Could our predicted uselessness turn out, much like that tree’s, to be our saving grace?

Chinese thinkers’ answers to these questions are, I think, among the most interesting anyone has given to the defining question of our time. Whether or not you agree with them, they’re the intellectual backdrop of a country shaping much of AI, and with it our future: you might as well know what they think.

Enjoy the read here: arnaudbertrand.substack.com/p/whats-left-f…

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