China See Features and What to Know

There is a strikingly different perception of AI in China versus the United States. Corbyn, do you want to talk us through that chart because I think this is perhaps more than anything strikes me about the different trajectories of these two countries? Yeah, absolutely. So here we have two axes. Does AI make you feel excited or does it make you feel nervous? And so what we really see is that China is right out there on the right hand side of the chart. you know, upwards of 80% of the Chinese population surveyed um uh are very excited about the prospect of AI and they show much lower levels of nervousness. You compare [snorts] that to the United States which is far out on the left hand side and corner uh of the

chart. I mean I think what this really shows is that the Chinese population has become very adept to technological change and actually in the past 20 or 30 years technological upgrading has brought massive gains for China. They've only known improving standards of living with technological change and I think it's understandable they'd be very bullish on the prospect for that to continue. Yeah. I wonder how long sort of how long that lasts. Imagine that happening in lots of sectors and bits of the economy that have mopped up gig workers actually being automated themselves delivery particularly. How quickly does that Chinese dot start to move towards fear? Let's ask Sarah

because Sarah, when you talk to your friends who are seeing their job prospects change that dramatically, do they have this sort of 80% optimism or are you beginning to sense um more concern? Yeah, I mean I think for other reasons that Corbin laid out, I do think the general Chinese population is a bit more optimistic and less worried about tech. But I think you also see a lot of similarities. Um, for instance, in Chinese tech workers, I they're seeing tons of layoffs, and it's hard to attribute that solely to AI. Tech firms are always hiring and restructuring and firing, but I think in China, there are also unique anxieties. Um, for instance,

there's the curse of 35. It's really hard to get a job after you're 35. Um, there's a ton of discrimination. Finished. We're all just worried here. It's okay. Corbin and Archie are still okay. Thanks. Thanks Sarah. Zani and I now feel totally redundant. But that's all just to say like when I was in Shenzhen, which is often at the forefront of technology, um the tech workers I spoke to are nervous. They're having to they're seeing their jobs transformed like their roles are expanding to take on a lot more um responsibility. But I think when you talk to the ones in robotics, they're super optimistic about just how this is going to reshape society, liberate people from

repetitive, dangerous work. Um, but I was also curious about the people that could potentially be displaced. And so I spoke to a lot of gig workers while I was in Shrinen, too. um including a young woman who had applied for jobs um either filling the coffee for the Robo Barista or um folding clothes to collect uh training data for the humanoid robots. Um and I think speaking to them, they do feel like China's very much on two tracks. Um that they're not part of that world of robo taxis and delivery drones. Um, but at the same time, a lot of the bluecollar workers I spoke to, so the parcel delivery guys, um, the food delivery guys, they're also super pragmatic. They just said like, "This is normal.

Technology is always going to develop. We'll figure things out." So, I think there's a lot of pragmatism across society here. Ed, how do you feel about a future folding clothes to provide training data for the humanoid robot? I think it sounds absolutely ghastly and the and the person that Sarah mentions in her excellent piece actually tries it out for half an hour and decides it's not it's not for her. So I can understand that actually listening to that you write a lot about um how Americans attitudes towards AI and the kind of political economy of AI in the US. When you listen to Sarah um what is your reaction?

I do just wonder if that collided with the American political system as it well may in the next few years. I mean that would be explosive. I think it gets to that really interesting question of kind of in some sense the Chinese political system can be a little bit more uh able to not accommodate to the second you have a kind of data center uprising and as you do in parts of the US that affects primary election that instantly filters through then everyone gets very anti data centers in some sense politically there's a bit more space maybe in China in some sense also as Sarah was saying population might be more pragmatic but then you have to also in the same way that China is the future

in some respects in some ways you can imagine the US being the future for China, which is you're having a big AI backlash right now. If any of that moves towards China and collides with political system that has a very low tolerance for descent, as we saw during the zero co process, that could be quite explosive, too. Sarah, tell us how the Chinese government is already uh behaving because it's not ignoring these concerns. Not at all. In fact, the opposite and I think precisely for the reasons that Archie said that it even though it's good at diffusing technology, it's not good at diffusing tension. So, it wants to stay ahead of that. And so, we can

already see this year the government's been signaling that they're going to make big plans for um to respond to AI's impact on the labor market. And so far, that's only been documents. Um but uh speaking to government adviserss, they are really thinking this through and um they're struggling because I think they're caught between this sense of wanting to assuage these anxious workers, the public, but also they don't want to stifle innovation. They're aware that you can't saddle these companies with inefficiencies if you want them to perform. Um so I think the government is paying close attention. And actually, one of the more concrete, if not fully fleshed out, um, policies that they've

announced is that they plan to monitor the creation and disruption of jobs over the next five years. And they want to look at um through power usage, through payments. They want to look at how AI is actually impacting um jobs in key sectors, in key cities. and they want to set up these warning systems. Um, so if there's a mass layoff coming, they want to be ahead of that. They want to figure out like, can we cushion that? Um, so I think it's a government that's alert to these risks and is very worried about instability and so its response so far has been um wanting to really closely monitor what that impact looks like.

I was going to say I think it's important to understand this is a hard problem is it's very hard for any society to solve this problem and the more rapid the change that AI brings the harder the problem. So you I've been reading lots of reports on sort of what you should do about this over the last few weeks. And you know, everyone sort of comes back to we have to have uh retraining. We have to have um constant education. We have to make sure that schooling is right. And of course those things are sensible, but whether they're match the scale of the task, I really doubt.