Implicitly I read you as most notably as (and please permit simplification and glossing over many additional points an subtleties, in order for me to later get to my biggest concern): “Look, China has been rather benign on a world stage, suggesting this may rather likely well stay so.”
But: To strictly derive, benign, kind intents, you’d have to claim that Chinese policy would have been unsmart for an ultimately self-serving regime or elite or population. Else your observation has very little epistemic content other than maybe to confirm: they were smart.
So: Would China, or, say, Xi Jinping or its ruling elite, or whaterver the relevant entity, really have had much to gain from aggressing countries in the meantime? Or, say, from aggressing them more than they did[1] in the past?
My “concern”: MAYBE RATHER NOT!?
Thinking about how much China was able to cumulatively grow, amass power and influence over the past decades, it seems to me rather really difficult to claim they did ‘much wrong’ in terms of pursuing an aim of becoming wealthy, powerful, important on the world scene.
Suggests: Non-aggression[2] fully paid off. That is of course an interesting lesson you could say. That it’ll also have to pay off, in a narrow material or so sense, once you have AGI, is, nevertheless, is simply not implied.
Sadly, this imho rather invalidates much of what I see the core intended positive conclusion from your post. I’d love to get relief of worries from your argument, but I think there’s no deep foundation for it.
Of course, this doesn’t proof it’s better for the US to be the one to unlock AGI. I have a lot of sympathy with anyone telling: Look, China was (rather) not aggressive so far and we might have not more to worry about it than, say, the (currently particularly nuts) US first getting AGI. But I also have, despite the super sad and dangerous state and development of democracies as of late, remaining sympathy for anyone defending the idea of furthering regimes who at least very officially have some core western values ChristianKI pointed out in a separate comment here, even if we’ve always been super duper bad in fully adhering to them. I therefore am worried if we end up simply dismissing the latter as “China Derangement Syndrome”—or at least worried if we’d end up automatically dismissing all forms of such argument as CDS—even if the term you coin can be useful to describe quite some of the exaggerated negative pictures about China.
I’m not in any way sanguine about to which degree some more or less regularly reported quarrels about, say, South China sea things etc. are important or exactly not here; idk much about them at all.
Implicitly I read you as most notably as (and please permit simplification and glossing over many additional points an subtleties, in order for me to later get to my biggest concern): “Look, China has been rather benign on a world stage, suggesting this may rather likely well stay so.”
But: To strictly derive, benign, kind intents, you’d have to claim that Chinese policy would have been unsmart for an ultimately self-serving regime or elite or population. Else your observation has very little epistemic content other than maybe to confirm: they were smart.
So: Would China, or, say, Xi Jinping or its ruling elite, or whaterver the relevant entity, really have had much to gain from aggressing countries in the meantime? Or, say, from aggressing them more than they did[1] in the past?
My “concern”: MAYBE RATHER NOT!?
Thinking about how much China was able to cumulatively grow, amass power and influence over the past decades, it seems to me rather really difficult to claim they did ‘much wrong’ in terms of pursuing an aim of becoming wealthy, powerful, important on the world scene.
Suggests: Non-aggression[2] fully paid off. That is of course an interesting lesson you could say. That it’ll also have to pay off, in a narrow material or so sense, once you have AGI, is, nevertheless, is simply not implied.
Sadly, this imho rather invalidates much of what I see the core intended positive conclusion from your post. I’d love to get relief of worries from your argument, but I think there’s no deep foundation for it.
Of course, this doesn’t proof it’s better for the US to be the one to unlock AGI. I have a lot of sympathy with anyone telling: Look, China was (rather) not aggressive so far and we might have not more to worry about it than, say, the (currently particularly nuts) US first getting AGI. But I also have, despite the super sad and dangerous state and development of democracies as of late, remaining sympathy for anyone defending the idea of furthering regimes who at least very officially have some core western values ChristianKI pointed out in a separate comment here, even if we’ve always been super duper bad in fully adhering to them. I therefore am worried if we end up simply dismissing the latter as “China Derangement Syndrome”—or at least worried if we’d end up automatically dismissing all forms of such argument as CDS—even if the term you coin can be useful to describe quite some of the exaggerated negative pictures about China.
I’m not in any way sanguine about to which degree some more or less regularly reported quarrels about, say, South China sea things etc. are important or exactly not here; idk much about them at all.
Again, simply to the degree that this describes the state of China’s history well; other commenters have more to say on that than I.