There's so much in this article that merits comment / discussion, but this sentence really jumped out at me. I'd been vaguely aware that this kind of thing was happening in the PRC, but not at this historic scale....
Western values matter more than ever. Here's hoping for a sea change this fall.
This should be universally obvious but fundamentally people are people no matter their origin or culture.
We need to bow out in the same manner with the debate against the East. There’s a billion people, if they don’t want free uncensored Internet, who are we to say anything? If they wanted it, they’d have it. They know the ins and outs of the idiosyncrasies of their society, the same way the west does (how the west reconciles virtual slave labor to maintain it’s lifestyle of affordable luxuries (everything from food to clothes to electronics)).
But, there is a new issue. Slavery in America was considered the ‘peculiar’ institution. Surveillance state is something we have to ignore, similar to, I don’t know, making your women wear varieties of face coverings (Islam), we have to accept they are acclimated to the mental gymnastics required to sustain their pride. Whatever. We shouldn’t waste our energy on that, it’s a losing battle.
But, the ‘peculiar’ institutions are the things we need to probe. A repeat of pre-extermination Holocaust in China is a no go. I hope the examination keeps up, and I hope we retroactively apply this new spirit to some of the trespasses that occurred in Palestine as well.
It's pretty much an official propaganda policy of CPC to maximally polarise the conversation, and convert it to "US vs them" format, with "our (imagined) values," and "their values"
Rather the other side of that conflict, really. This complicates things. I have to ask, especially seeing the 'cancel culture' and the suggestion that things have been getting worse for years, which definition of 'western values' you mean.
From where I'm standing, there's never been as much ability to advocate for your POV, including from groups that have historically been brutally oppressed. It's messy, but that's democracy for you. I think it's an instructive contrast with what's going on in China.
Western values can be a big pain in the butt, and yet I wouldn't have it any other way. We're living through a spectacular vindication of exactly Western values, compared to some other ideologies/ethos that have gained traction in the past.
With a number of people here for whom failure is not an option, it's a bloody destination, undermining anyone who tries, you will get the society you deserve.
In a resource-constrained, cut-throat competetive economy where everything is seen as a zero-sum deal, the average man will never hesitate to root for less-for-others if it guarantees more-for-me.
Where people's measure of worth is what one owns rather than what one does or how one lives, such a decadence is but a mere natural happenstance.The eastern scriptures depict this in an allegorical way - a time in the world where there's no evil (satya yuga, pure and natural), followed by a time where the world is deviating towards order (treta yuga), followed by a time in the world where the balance of dharma (righteousness) tilts slightly towards adharma (wickedness or everything opposite of righteous) which was Dwaparayuga, followed by the age where righteousness is nowhere to be found (Kali yuga which is where we are now) This being a cycle and the cycle continues forever and ever. A refresh will happen - how soon or later, nobody seems to know!
HRC was a principal driver of the Trans Pacific Partnership. I've heard claims that it was about containing China but they've always come with no citations. My general understanding was that the TPP would have made it easier to outsource to China even more, harmonizing (at least on paper) IP law to allow more outsourcing of things like programming, radiology, CAD, IT, accounting, paralegal, etc., which could have been a final nail in the coffin of the US middle class. These are among the last upwardly mobile middle class jobs that remain in the United States. While it's true that US manufacturing remains a large component of GDP, automation and efficiency gains have made it a declining contributor to employment.
I categorically cannot vote for Trump because he is a racist and is associated with fascists (categorical blacklist in my mind) and is personally constitutionally unfit to be president, but I fear that Biden will return us to a course of pretending China is a friendly nation. Like the last election where I unhappily voted against Trump (not "for" HRC), there is no good choice.
The motive for our China policy is of course the same as the motive for looking the other way at Saudi human rights abuses and their role in 9/11: money. Had Hitler found a way to line American pockets, I wonder if that holocaust thing would have mattered.
I've seen hopeful signs that standing up to China is now a bipartisan position, but 5 years ago it certainly wasn't.
There are 1.8 million Palestinians in Gaza.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_Strip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang#Human_rights
While Tethics and AI are buzzwords du jour, the problem is more general: The weakening of liberal democratic values.
We need laws and regulation that guarantee privacy more concretely as a foundational right.
By letting its foreign policy wonder into grey area by playing overtures with regimes of all kind without any reservations, it allowed for norms, and boundaries to be blurred, and resolve of its camp blunted.
What is happening now, is that the whole Western camp have descended into whataboutism with relation to what rogue regime each bloc member is playing ball with, without no authority left in the bloc "clean enough" to police it.
What rogue regimes made to the West in the last 20 years, is nothing, but a gang initiation in reverse.
First they lured the West into playing their dirty games, and when Western countries thoroughly dirtied their hands, then come and say "your hands are as dirty as mine, what's the point fighting now?"
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/159184620X?psc=1&ref=ppx_pop_...
I am very curious when exactly you imagine a period where "The West"'s hands weren't dirty. Both before and after WW2 ended, for example, many European nations still had colonial empires where unspeakable atrocities were happening under their direct rule (not as abhorrent as the Holocaust, but still extraordinarily disgusting). In the period that followed, "the West", just as much as Russia and China, immediately started supporting favorable dictators wherever there was some conflict - like the military anti-communist dictatorship in Greece with Allied backing, and many far-right regimes in South America and Asia.
During this same time, gay people were legally persecuted across "the West" just as much as elsewhere (though, oddly enough, with a short reprieve in early communist Russia - before WW2, before Stalin) - including, famously, war heroes like Alan Turing. Lynchings were still happening in the USA. In fact, the USA at this time had a system of first class and second class citizens with explicitly racist laws.
And in the years that followed, while civil rights movements grew in power in Europe and the US (with strong opposition from the government, for a very long time), "the West" only escalated its fight against democracy in the rest of the world - either by supporting brutal dictatorships established by others (Indonesia, South Vietnam, a lot of South America, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, even in communist bloc countries such as Romania), or by orchestrating their own coups to install loyal dictators in place of elected leaders (with initial success in Iran or Nicaragua, or ending in failure in Cuba, North Vietnam). Other European countries supported horrible regimes in their former colonies, usually supporting white or loyalist people against revolutionary or "brown" people - such as Swiss, UK and US support of the apartheid state in South Africa in the 1980s.
How does that saying go? "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it". Thank you Google.
With such a government, any future wouldn’t be desirable. Imagine such government in charge of unemployment benefits, health services, the military, anything really: it’s grim in any case.
Moreover, universal basic income is universal, by definition. If a government denies it to some particular citizens according to some criteria, it is not universal anymore. It becomes an income provided to anyone who is in favor of the government, which is a very different thing. So, if universal basic income existed, even the Chinese government would have to give it to everyone... or otherwise give it another name.
The likelihood of universal basic income being completely strings free is very low. You get convicted of some felony, you lose it, you are guilty of domestic violence you lose it, you say something very un-PC you lose it. And you may say, yeah, so what, those are bad people. But it would be like “hate speech”. Hate speech in the 90s was one thing, today it means someone disagrees with you on policy.
UBI gives government a lever to control people by threatening to reduce or stop payments as a form of punishment.
You are perhaps imaging a scenario where UBi is provided by a NGO?
My employer can fire me for any or no reason and no notice and I’d be left with a short COBRA runway of suddenly-expensive healthcare, which I now can’t afford because I was just fired.
My employer can (and does) change my insurance provider, add or remove benefits, and I have zero say over that process. I certainly can’t vote for a new CEO or request a different provider from my company. Take it or leave it.
My health and well-being is tied up with the same entity that tells me what to do for 8 hours a day. That doesn’t feel like “freedom” to me.
Universal healthcare as a concept is not by itself related to authoritarianism. Indeed, guaranteeing healthcare (whether it be state-run like the UK or all-private like Germany) and paying for it through tax revenue rather than through employment subsidy is a feature of many Western democracies.
Medicare has worked pretty well for the elderly for years. Old people and their families don’t lose everything for routine care anymore. Until it comes time for long term nursing home type care.
Everyone else is one car accident or cancer diagnosis away from ruin.
That is like saying "In the dark future of unrestrained capitalism will sell ads to sex slaves chained in the basement - where they have no money or freedom." It might tug at heart strings but it makes so little sense it sounds like an outright parody of such sentiments.
Palantir, on the other hand, has a direct role in this process of concentrating undesirables.
“Until they secure their personal liberty, at some unimaginable cost, free people everywhere will have to hope against hope that the world’s most intelligent machines are made elsewhere.”
I don’t agree, with the “right” people in charge, the intelligent machines pose a risk to humankind everywhere.
AI is a race that absolutely must be won by good actors rather than totalitarian states.
Developments like these will just turn that up to 11
This article and a lot of the literature assumes the same tools are not also turned upon the managers of society (i.e. that they get to use the times in secret). Many fear that knowledge of our lives will support interference in our lives. Perhaps any such interference must be just as observable and prohibited by law in a free society.
Who watches the watchers? We all could. When there is a conflict or question we have records to review and public opinion to adjudicate.
Of course we would have to rethink a number of assumable cultural expectations.
I'm sure people will misinterpret what I am trying to say. But, it is framed as a "democracy or tyranny" question. I believe that although the authoritarianism is quite horrific in some ways, in some respects there are actually advantages. Which, if you are still reading, is not to suggest in any way that it is the correct path, but maybe is a hint that our current "democratic system" may not be quite what it is cracked up to be either.
Again, in no way suggesting we should get closer to a closed system, but I feel like honest evaluation will see very significant deficiencies with western governments such as the United States. For example, looking at the extreme political divide in the country sometimes makes government seem like a joke.
I personally believe that the best and maybe the only way to move forward constructively is to be realistic about the flaws in both extremely divergent views (east and west) and think of a totally new shared philosophy and way for government to operate..
But most likely that will not happen, and I also personally believe that another world war may be stimulated by poor technical adjustment to global accounting collapse (along with the complete failure of cultural and political integration). I think if this occurs then it will prove that humans are not fit to control the planet, and hope that we will soon have competent and (one can hope benign) but much more sophisticated AIs that we can pass the torch of evolution to.
What occurs after?
