At the AI Race’s Finishing Line: A World of Abundance or Automated Dominance? |
As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to advance, an important but unnoticed debate is taking place within the halls of Western power and among a handful of billionaire business leaders and investors regarding the shape of the world to come as this technology permeates every aspect of modern civilization.
Paradoxically, it is the US that has, in the past several decades — including throughout the entirety of the 21st century — perpetuated and even compounded existing poverty, illness, and violence stretching from Latin America to Central Asia and everywhere in between. The US has, in the past 26 years alone, invaded and destroyed entire nations, killing millions and displacing tens of millions fleeing from the poverty, illness, and violence stemming from US-led war.
Even within US borders, these same interests have ravaged the American population through predatory economic practices prioritizing profit and power over any semblance of societal or civilizational purpose. This has manifested itself as rotting infrastructure, inaccessible healthcare, unaffordable education, and the growing dearth of opportunities emerging from a society systematically exploited and neglected rather than built up and invested in.
For a Western-based billionaire, this reality may not be apparent because of the cocoon of luxury, comfort, and security immense wealth affords anyone, anywhere — but it is reality nonetheless.
China, on the other hand, has already spent the last several decades lifting hundreds of millions of its own people out of poverty, improving healthcare, and eradicating violent crime within its borders long before AI became a practical reality.
China Pursues Abundance, Cooperation, and Coexistence
Throughout the 21st century, China has not invaded a single nation nor participated in the sort of unilateral economic sanctions the US and its partners have used to target scores of nations around the globe with the explicit purpose of crushing economies and dividing and destroying populations to in turn induce “regime change.”
Instead, China has continued to rapidly build out its own infrastructure while partnering with nations around the globe, long neglected under decades of Western domination, to build desperately needed modern infrastructure, creating what China refers to as the “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI).
Nations like Laos in Southeast Asia — upon which the US dropped more bombs during the Vietnam War than the nation’s total population — received its first and only modern rail route thanks to China’s BRI — a high-speed rail line that has transformed the landlocked, impoverished nation into a logistics and tourism corridor between China and the rest of Southeast Asia.
Neighboring Thailand has also greatly........