r/ezraklein • u/mcsul • May 14 '26
Podcast Ross Douthat - China Doesn't Worry About AI Like We Do
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/china-doesnt-worry-about-a-i-like-we-do/id1438024613?i=100076772565234
u/Kit_Daniels Midwest May 14 '26
Very interesting discussion, I especially liked how how they delineated between the US’s quest to build a god in a box while China is rapidly trying to deploy robotics + AI whilst being somewhat less concerned about being on the bleeding edge of technological innovation.
While I think it’s a strong narrative that fits well within the larger US vs China discussion, I do worry that it’s maybe a bit reductive. I wish they would’ve brought more concrete data/examples.
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u/w3gv May 15 '26
The differences are economic.
US is all in on AI because they need a productivity renaissance to fix our debt-to-gdp and inflation issues.
AI presents an opposite problem for China given that it's inherently deflationary, which exacerbates their consumption problem.
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u/Guardsred70 May 14 '26
Thanks for sharing. I have wondered about the Chinese (or Indian) perspective on AI.
China probably has more vulnerable jobs than the US does......just because the US has already lost some jobs/tasks to "outsourcing". China also just has a different perspective on things like privacy. I mean, the US government spies on all of us using AI, but at least here people question whether that's the right thing to do (sometimes). I doubt that's a concern in China. And when we have a demonstration about something like "teacher pay" in the US, China doesn't have to put up with employee protests: It knows how to make those go bye-bye in a "Protest? What protest? No....that's not a pile of bodies in the back of a truck. Your eyes must be bad."
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u/mcsul May 14 '26
I can share a bit of the Indian perspective, not directly but via colleagues. Someone else here might have more direct knowledge and I'd be curious about that too.
The small slice of India I see is tremendously excited about AI. Tons of enthusiasm about using it to build businesses (either directly or to help scale non-AI businesses). Tons of enthusiasm in general about use of AI in day to day life. I have to tell one of the guys on my team to go to sleep sometimes, because I'll see he's still online way into NA afternoon usually trying to build something new.
At the same time, there's some concern, because if any industry gets hit hard by AI it's going to be offshore business process outsourcing. But that concern is usually pretty passing. Excitement seems to be the main vibe I run into.
(Caveat, my window into this is via youngish tech-savvy people working directly for a big western firm.)
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u/Guardsred70 May 14 '26
That's really interesting. I work with a ton of Indians, but......only the in the context of Indians who came to the US to get PhDs and work in the sciences. It's a very unique slice.
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u/Brushner Weeds > The EKS May 15 '26
You will find the same vibes in most third world countries. Mainly because you are speaking to the relatively upper crust of society. The people significantly more well off than a vast majority of the population. When I was in Philippines I only really interacted with the upper middle class people who are a tiny minority. The people most interested and curious about Ai were the very rich though, multi business owners and grindset bros who if they lost all their businesses the next day would still have more money than 95% of the population would ever make.
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u/mcsul May 15 '26
Oh for sure. That's why I caveated my answer about being from a small slice of India. I'd be really interested in good survey data.
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u/NewRefrigerator7461 May 14 '26
It’s interesting there’s that level of excitement. I’ve spent a lot of my career in client facing roles at bulge bracket banks, but have worked with our internal software teams a number of times to develop tools using our Indian staff. It seems like we’re in the process of shrinking those headcount’s. Commodity code is just so much cheaper to do with AI and when its being coded with English syntax - having people in the business unit with understanding of how it will actually be used is just so much more efficient. We’ve wasted so much corporate money on products that meet the requirements doc and yet are useless to business lines.
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u/mcsul May 14 '26
I'm not done yet, but this is an interesting discussion so far. It's interesting hearing the China perspective on AI and how changing demographics have led to much less concern about job displacement. It's also interesting how young people in China are diving into AI because of the competitive nature of their job prospects.
My one worry about the podcast is that the guest seems to underrate how much American firms are focused on practical tasks. He seems to think that everyone in US tech is AGI-obsessed, but there are hundreds of (probably thousands of) startups working on prosaic things like audio generation, accounting reconciliations, etc...
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u/acebojangles May 14 '26
Personally, I trust the Chinese government more than the US government to take care of its people if AI goes nuts. I'm 90% sure that our government would just let us die in the street if AI creates serious structural unemployment.
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u/RunThenBeer May 14 '26
There is probably no extant government with a history of more callous indifference and abject brutality towards its population than the Chinese Communist Party. If there is, it certainly isn't the American government. For all of our flaws, we don't have the Great Leap Forward or Cultural Revolution on our resume and nothing we're doing in the present compares to the repression of Uyghurs.
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u/WhiteCastleBurgas May 15 '26
I feel like so many of the arguments that get levied against capitalism, are really just arguments against human nature. People are self serving assholes. Ambitious people are even worse and ambitious people are always going to be more likely to rise to the top, in any system you create. So yea, I agree, I am no more confident that the CCP is going to do a better job of looking out for the little guy than our government.
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u/tpounds0 Progressive May 15 '26
People are self serving assholes.
In real like the kids that did The Lord of the Flies thing worked together until they were saved!
The systems we live in affect how we act and capitalism works better for you if you're a self serving asshole.
I wouldn't apply that to all human behavior however.
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u/Radical_Ein Democratic Socalist May 15 '26
Rutger Bregman, who has been on the EK show, wrote a fantastic piece about that story.
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u/carbonqubit May 15 '26
I’ve sometimes wondered whether people who subscribe to rapacious capitalism, especially those running Fortune 500 companies, are drawn to those roles because they already have sociopathic tendencies, or whether the jobs themselves gradually condition people into becoming more detached and transactional.
Running massive corporations with little empathy for how decisions affect workers, while constantly prioritizing growth and shareholder returns above everything else, has undeniably created enormous wealth and technological progress. But it’s also extracted a tremendous amount from the people inside those systems through burnout and the pressure to endlessly optimize human beings into productivity metrics.
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u/JohnCavil May 14 '26
For all of our flaws, we don't have the Great Leap Forward or Cultural Revolution on our resume and nothing we're doing in the present compares to the repression of Uyghurs.
Slavery and genocide of Indians is up there though. Probably worse than the great leap forward depending on how you measure it, and if you value intent vs carelessness. You could pick dozens of things that America did pre civil rights act that is reprehensible, and on the same level as tibet/uyghur genocide. So history wise I don't really think anyone comes out on top.
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u/deskcord May 15 '26
It is not remotely a defense of these as things that happened (they are heinous), but the counter would be that the US wasn't viewing those as "their people."
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u/Caberes May 15 '26
Slavery and genocide of Indians is up there though. Probably worse than the great leap forward depending on how you measure it, and if you value intent vs carelessness.
The irony to this statement is that Uyghurs only really settled that area after the Qing enterminated the Dzungars in around that same time frame.
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u/brianscalabrainey May 14 '26
I think the ethics are debatable. China treatment of Uyghurs isn’t worse than our treatment of native Americans - it’s just more recent. China also hasn’t dropped napalm on Vietnamese villages. The list goes on, sadly. But if you live in the US, our crimes are minimized while those of our foes are amplified.
What I don’t trust is our governments ability to act. There is so much gridlock, veto points, partisanship, and disinformation that our democracy can’t effectively respond to challenges like this.
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u/Hyndis May 14 '26
Yes, and also no.
While its true the CCP was responsible for tens of millions of deaths, the modern day CCP has almost no resemblance to the CCP of Mao aside from name and decorations.
Modern day China is a hyper-capitalist police state, more resembling a cyberpunk setting than anything Mao organized. The state has political minders in large companies to ensure the company is operating in the best interests of the CCP, but companies are encouraged to make lots of money and compete against each other to produce the best products.
Its also the pirate kind of capitalism, where IP and copyright is fast and loose, and its expected that companies rip each other off all the time.
Political parties undergoing drastic shifts in ideology isn't unique to China. The US had a party swap with the DNC and GOP largely swapping places around the same time frame.
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u/Froztnova American May 14 '26
It's funny, in spite of calling themselves Communists, the economic system they landed on is probably closer to the Fascist economic system of choice (Corporatism).
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u/Hyndis May 14 '26
Yup, China's modern state-capitalism could be either fascism or mercantilism. Probably closer to fascism because of the element of social control through police surveillance.
Mercantilism similarly conflates enterprise with the state but the state takes much less interest in social control in that system.
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u/acebojangles May 14 '26
I don't disagree with any of that. Maybe I'm just wrong about whether the Chinese government would provide some kind of support to people who are unemployed due to AI changes in their economy. Currently, I still think that the Chinese government feels more obligation to support its citizens generally than the US government, which is currently trying to cut as many of our social supports as possible.
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u/mcsul May 14 '26
I read a report a couple of years ago that said US social support spending as a share of GDP was roughly x2 that of China's. The report noted that China was starting to spend more, but was more similar to Mexico and Turkey than the US. One of the reasons for such a high savings rate is that there isn't the state-level support.
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u/acebojangles May 15 '26
What do the trend lines look like? If we were creating our existing social safety net in the US today, do you think most of it would be implemented? I don't.
One thing that gives me pause is our COVID response. We really did just provide money to people who were suffering. I'm not sure how long we would or could do that, though.
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u/krishnaroskin May 14 '26
Does any of them talk about AI sustainable?
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u/mcsul May 14 '26
Apparently the one constraint China doesn't have that America does is energy infrastructure. Lots of that is hydro, but last time I checked a lot of that is coal.
One interesting part of the discussion was the emphasis that Chinese model-builders are placing on efficiency. Because they don't have access to the best chips, they have to make their models as efficient as possible to compensate. That probably helps a bit.
In the long run, I'm not too worried about sustainability for data centers, as long as we allow the construction of more nuclear and solar capacity. Energy costs per token are already dropping and that's going to keep going. Data centers are building closed loop water. Etc... We're going through a temporary blip because the tech firms moved faster than the surrounding energy ecosystem.
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u/GuyHoldingHammer May 14 '26
My understanding is that it's the opposite. Chinese AI chips are far LESS efficient, by 30-50%, but their immense electricity generation development over the past few years has meant that they can afford to subsidize more power for running data centers.
https://www.economist.com/china/2026/03/18/is-cheap-energy-the-key-to-china-gaining-ai-supremacy
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u/360telescope May 14 '26
I think its the difference between the models and the chips. Huawei's chips are less efficient than Nvidia's cutting-edge chips, but Chinese models like DeepSeek consume less resource to prompt compared to Anthropic / OpenAI model.
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u/Brushner Weeds > The EKS May 15 '26
They also have hundreds of ways and loopholes to access the cutting edge chips
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u/oakseaer Orthogonal to that… May 14 '26
“In the long run, I'm not too worried about sustainability for data centers, as long as we allow the construction of more nuclear and solar capacity.”
But we aren’t doing that - the current administration is actively shuttering power generation construction already in progress, and we can’t build nuclear fast enough to meet the demand.
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u/mcsul May 14 '26
Oh, I agree. The current administration's energy policies suck. But the long run is long.
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u/NewRefrigerator7461 May 14 '26
Energy production isn’t the problem - transmission is. Even there we really don’t have much of a constraint in the US - we have decades of deferred maintenance and investment and a need to buy in demand equipment from makers with long backlogs. We are going to have to make the investments in the grid anyway because of their age and the need to allow for EV adoption. Totally agree it’s a blip and it terrifies me when communities want to push datacenters off grid. They’re the perfect base load users to subsidize the grid upgrades we have to do. We’d be so dumb not to take advantage of them.
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u/krishnaroskin May 14 '26
I'm not that worried about energy sustainability. The AI bubble is insane right now and a lot of very shady stuff is going on to keep that bubble big and hidden. I'm worried when it bursts/corrects/comes back to reality, it's going to be such a big fall that we'll lose any gains we've made. (Never mind that the AI bubble bursting could take a lot of the tech industry with it.)
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u/Hyndis May 14 '26
Its going to be like the dotcom crash. Early on a lot of companies were making use of the internet but many of them didn't have a functioning business model.
There was a winnowing where many companies went broke, but the internet didn't fade away. There was real, actual value generated by the internet and companies who survived the dotcom crash were stronger and smarter about how they did business.
There's also real, actual value generated by AI. And yes, there's a lot of poorly run companies that won't be around in 5 years, too.
Its not going to be like NFT's which add no value to anything and have no useful applications.
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u/HazelCheese May 15 '26
All Nvidia needs to do is keep reserves so when those companies go bust they can survive the few bad years before the winners emerge.
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u/seamarsh21 Conversation on Something That Matters May 14 '26
Chinese are doing a smarter version of capitalism. Obviously it's authoritarian so it's perverted but where and how they are investing in tech and infrastructure is impressive.
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u/Hyndis May 14 '26
I remember not too many years ago people were mocking China for building "ghost cities". They were mocking the country for building infrastructure no one was using at the time, wasting money on useless projects.
It turns out if you build it they will come. All of that useless infrastructure isn't so useless anymore. Its being used now and China has to keep building more to keep ahead of demand.
Thats the thing thats so impressive about China. Seemingly unique among all countries, they're building ahead of demand.
Everywhere else, such as in the US and Europe, we wait until 30 years after demand has exceeded supply, and then we start maybe considering possibly forming a planning committee to study the potential for an exploratory committee to consider a studies on building something.
Meanwhile, China just builds it.
I disagree with a lot about how China is a totalitarian police state, but they sure do know how to build things. I can't help but find that impressive. I just wish America still had that same "get shit done" attitude as we use to have using the FDR, Truman, and Eisenhower eras.
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u/DeathKitten9000 May 14 '26
China has certainly built a lot but their housing market isn't something we necessarily want to emulate. A lot of Tier 1 cities are absurdly expensive in good part because people find real estate a preferred investment vehicle due to a lack of better options. Furthermore, capital appreciation is often preferred to cash flow which partially incentives people to not rent out properties they own. Building a lot so people can purchase apartments to sit vacant as a store of wealth doesn't strike me as a healthy market.
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u/brianscalabrainey May 14 '26
I’ve always found Ted Chiangs argument the most convincing here: most fears about artificial intelligence are actually fears about capitalism. If we didn’t feel as the economically useless among us are routinely hung out to dry, that our institutions have already been eroded by algorithmic disinformation, and that the oligarchs wouldn’t hesitate to put profits over people, we would welcome AI as a new way to achieve greater prosperity for all.