China’s Confucian AI vs America’s oligarchic version

Nowadays in the United States, if you are a commencement speaker at a university graduation ceremony, you may want to avoid mentioning artificial intelligence (AI). Recent speakers at the University of Central Florida, the University of Arizona and Marquette University were all booed for touting AI. Students at the University of South Carolina and the University of Indianapolis protested their institutions’ partnership with AI firms. In contrast, speaking at Harvard, comedian Ronny Chieng was wildly cheered by graduating students when he shouted, “Fxxk AI!” The event has gone viral online. Young Americans are souring on AI. In a recent Gallup poll, Gen Z respondents (usually those born between 1997 and 2012) have grown considerably less “excited” and “hopeful” about AI, but “angrier” and more “anxious” this year than last year. This may seem strange at first. Young people are usually quicker to adopt new technologies, and America has been at the forefront of innovation during the post-war period. But consider this. US university graduates today are facing the toughest job market since the last financial crisis of 2007-08. And the biggest tech firms – which also happen to be the biggest AI investors – have been sacking workers left and right. Last month recorded the most number of workers laid off in almost two years amid a frenzied AI spending spree, by targeting more than 38,000 jobs. So far this year, the industry has announced more than 123,000 cuts, up more than 65 per cent from the same period last year. Employment for workers aged 22 to 25 in the most AI-exposed occupations – such as software development and customer support – has dropped by 13 per cent since 2022. In the US, AI has become the all-purpose excuse for companies to reduce headcounts. Young people looking for work understandably take a dim – almost Luddite – view of AI. The job situation is just as bad in China for young people, including new graduates. But there is a key difference. The central government considers it a policy priority to find them jobs and to discourage firms from firing people, especially against bosses using AI as an excuse. Courts across China have ruled that AI cost-cutting cannot be used to justify sacking staff. Globally, one in four workers is affected by AI in their jobs, according to the International Labour Organization. Junior and entry-level jobs bear the brunt of this shift. In China, the jobless rate for 16-24-year-olds, excluding students, rose to 16.9 per cent in March from 16.1 per cent in February. Unemployment among 25-29-year-olds, excluding students, stood at 7.7 per cent in March, while the overall urban unemployment rate was 5.4 per cent. However, the billionaire tech bros – who enjoy disproportionate influence in Washington – think it’s perfectly fine, even desirable, to replace human intelligence – meaning jobs – with intelligent machines. “In the US there’s a particular focus on AGI, artificial general intelligence, and to create something approaching an artificial superintelligence,” said Kyle Chan, a foreign policy fellow at the Brookings Institution, in an interview with The New York Times. “Some kind of almost machine God that can do virtually everything that any human can do, and more. You can see that [in] the amount of spending, the amount of investment, the amount of effort that are pouring into this.” China is running a very different race, according to Chan: “They do want to try to keep pace with their American competitors. But, that’s not all they’re focused on. They’re also focused on efficiency, making these models smaller, cheaper to run, easier to deploy … Another area they’re focused on is diffusion, trying to get AI into the hands of as many users as possible.” A key part of that strategy involves open source. “This involves giving away your models for free. That allows other people around the world, including in Silicon Valley, to download Chinese models and to also customise them and tweak them based on their own data and to make them work in a way that’s more tailored to their own needs. That’s the advantage of open source.” DeepSeek’s latest flagship V4 Pro model has been ranked among the world’s best on an intelligence-per-dollar basis, far exceeding OpenAI and Anthropic in cost-efficiency, after a 75 per cent permanent discount. There are other major differences, for example, in the locations and energy sourcing of data centres. AI requires massive data centres, which suck up enormous amounts of energy and water while generating air and noise pollution. They have cropped up across the US, and are now suffering a backlash from local communities. In China, though, under the policy of “Eastern Data, Western Compute”, data collected in the eastern seaboard, near the major urban and economic powerhouses, is transmitted to some of the world’s largest data centres in remote inland such as the Gobi Desert or otherwise vast open spaces in Xinjiang & Ningxia, and in Guizhou and Inner Mongolia. These are resource-abundant regions where renewable solar energy and wind can be cheaply and easily used to power massive computing clusters. Elon Musk has proposed putting data centres in space, but more practical if no less futuristic, China has been building them underwater. This can significantly reduce energy and water costs while saving land. In Hainan province, off the coast of Lingshui county, is the world’s first large-scale underwater data centre. The natural ocean cooling significantly cuts energy costs. Another offshore underwater data facility, located less than 10 km off the coast of Shanghai, runs almost entirely on energy from nearby offshore wind farms. In the US, the tech bros – enabled by Washington and Wall Street – are turning AI into vapourware, destroying jobs and disrupting the social fabric. But for many of them, AI is more like a religion than a technology. Under the guise of pseudo-philosophical ideas like transhumanism and accelerationism, human welfare doesn’t factor in the radical transformation of intelligence or consciousness by machines. Their cultish following – with Wall Street riding on top of it – may be blowing the mother of all investment bubbles. The so-called Magnificent Seven have been the biggest AI investors breaking the trillion-dollar mark this year. By sheer market cap, they have held up the US stock market while the rest have been going mostly sideways. Authoritarian Chinese officials and bosses have shown a deep Confucian sense of social responsibility towards citizens and workers alike. In the US, the oligarchic billionaire tech bros openly express contempt for them. They will take AI wherever they want so long as superior geniuses like themselves and their families come out on top.