Is China really ready for AI to hit its workers?

Wargames, projections and even the best intentions may not be enough to prepare for the coming tech revolution

For America and China, AI will soon pose a dilemma. How do you compete with each other in the race to achieve the most frontier technology, while maintaining social stability (or in the West we might call it something like ‘social justice’) among a population turned upside down by the impact of the technology?

For my latest column I focus on the Chinese side of this question, that side being what I know better. After this latest Spring Festival Gala from CCTV where Unitree robots performed incredibly impressive kung fu, and seeing the creations made by SeeDance 2.0, ByteDance’s newly released AI video generator, I’ve realised that this conundrum will come very quickly indeed – and perhaps quicker than any of us can really imagine.

I spoke to afra, a friend, tech analyst and author of the brilliant Substack Concurrent:

“China is still in a phase of innocence on technology,” says Afra Wang, a tech analyst and writer of Concurrent, a Substack on AI and China. The country’s rapid economic rise has meant almost everyone is a winner compared with where they were 40 years ago. AI could be the first “divergent moment” where the losers are shaken loose from the winners.

The groups most at risk are the young and the poor. Youth unemployment is already up to one in five, with 12 million graduates joining the jobs market each year (and rising), while China’s hundreds of millions of migrant workers will be exposed to even more automation on factory lines or even in the gig economy (which has served as such a shock absorber in the recent years’ of economic downturn), given the advances in embodied AI in China.

In my column I lay out the options for Beijing: slow down AI progress, roll out much more welfare (something like a universal basic income), or continue to censor and suppress. Or all of the above.

Ultimately, though, as I can’t stress enough: this will be a problem facing all countries, and especially the U.S. which also wants AI supremacy. It’s not clear that anyone else has the answers either.

What I’ve been reading:

• Beijing’s Growth Model Is Still Broken – Dinny McMahon (Foreign Affairs) This is a great piece concisely setting out China’s economic conundrum: with the real estate industry’s slowdown, alternative growth should really come from consumption. But boosting consumption requires borrowing to fund a far more generous social welfare and a reform of the hukou system, and Beijing is allergic to that:

  Beijing is not afraid to borrow; after all, it allowed local government to rack up huge debts to fund infrastructure. The difference is that it sees infrastructure as an investment. Even if infrastructure doesn’t pay for itself, it can nonetheless create new wealth and value. By contrast, Beijing sees social spending as a recurring expense and an endless burden.

  (This is of course a relevant dynamic in any discussion of the AI future too: would Beijing really ever go for something like universal basic income?) So instead, it’s export, export, export.

• We had sex in a Chinese hotel, then found we had been broadcast to thousands – Wanqing Zhang (BBC) An incredible story and a cautionary tale for anyone who travels in China: a man finding that his intimate moments with a partner had been filmed by a secret camera. The BBC finds a labyrinthine system involving disappearing Telegram groups, cameras not picked up by retail camera-detectors, and, presumably, massive profits for the criminals behind them. Really puts into context the advice reportedly given to former prime minister Theresa May to change under her covers when visiting Beijing…!

• The depravity of Jeffrey Epstein’s reading list – Lily Isaacs (New Statesman) Sorry, don’t mean to overload with sex, and not a China piece either, but I defy anyone to not be fascinated/horrified/engrossed by the Epstein scandal, not least as it has brought down a prince and an ambassador in the UK. This is a thoughtful piece on Epstein hiding his depravities in plain sight: lauding the Vladimir Nabokov’s magnum opus, Lolita. Where does literary criticism end and evil begin?

And finally…

I leave you with not a photo this time, but a video. A documentary, more precisely: the journalist Clive James’s Postcard from Shanghai, filmed in the late 1980s and first aired on the BBC in 1990. I haven’t watched the whole thing yet but a four-minute clip came up on X (there can be joy on that platform!). It was nostalgic, mind-boggling (just think that this was only three decades ago), and CJ’s hilarious commentary alone is worth listening to.

I’ve bookmarked the full version for later watching…