The AI 2027 website remains accessible in China without a VPN—a curious fact given its content about democratic revolution, CCP coup scenarios, and claims of Chinese AI systems betraying party interests. While the site itself evades censorship, Chinese-language reporting has surgically excised these sensitive elements.
This is surprising if we model the censorship apparatus as unsophisticated and foolish, but makes complete sense if it’s smart enough to distinguish between “predicting” and “advocating”, and cares about the ability of the CCP itself to navigate the world. While AI 2027 is written from a Western perspective, the trajectory it warns about would be a catastrophe for everyone, China included.
Audience engagement remains low across the board. Many posts received minimal views, likes, or comments.
I don’t know whether this is possible to determine from public sources, but it would be interesting to distinguish engagement from Chinese elites vs the Chinese public. This observation is compatible with both a world where China-as-a-whole is sleepwalking towards disaster, and also with a world where the CCP is awake but keeping its high-level strategy discussions off the public internet.
The Chinese firewall works on a black-list basis, and it often takes months for even popular new sites to be banned. AI2027 is esoteric enough that it probably never will.
I guess it’s just that the censors have not seen it yet.
There’s a lot of situations where a smaller website doesn’t get banned e.g. Substack is banned in China, but if you host your Substack blog on a custom URL, people in China can still read it.
This is surprising if we model the censorship apparatus as unsophisticated and foolish, but makes complete sense if it’s smart enough to distinguish between “predicting” and “advocating”, and cares about the ability of the CCP itself to navigate the world. While AI 2027 is written from a Western perspective, the trajectory it warns about would be a catastrophe for everyone, China included.
I don’t know whether this is possible to determine from public sources, but it would be interesting to distinguish engagement from Chinese elites vs the Chinese public. This observation is compatible with both a world where China-as-a-whole is sleepwalking towards disaster, and also with a world where the CCP is awake but keeping its high-level strategy discussions off the public internet.
The Chinese firewall works on a black-list basis, and it often takes months for even popular new sites to be banned. AI2027 is esoteric enough that it probably never will.
Does it also mean that it won’t have a significant (direct) impact on the CCP’s AI strategy?
I guess it’s just that the censors have not seen it yet.
There’s a lot of situations where a smaller website doesn’t get banned e.g. Substack is banned in China, but if you host your Substack blog on a custom URL, people in China can still read it.