China @lemmygrad.ml ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆ @lemmygrad.ml 2d ago

As DeepSeek Expands, China’s Cities Roll Out ‘AI Public Servants’

www.sixthtone.com As DeepSeek Expands, China’s Cities Roll Out ‘AI Public Servants’

From Hohhot to Guangzhou, local governments are integrating DeepSeek AI in government cloud systems to streamline administration and public services.

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Ngl this stuff is kind of terrifying. not from a "China bad" perspective, but from just how much this technology is going to change. And how fast it's happening.
- We might be living through an equivalent of the industrial revolution here.
  
  This seems magnitudes worse, at least with the industrial revolution, you could argue that labor wasn't being fully eliminated, but re-distributed and re-oriented to mass production and factory work. AI is the total ELIMINATION of human labor altogether. Even with other big tech advancements like the internet, it still created work in terms of all the infrastructure that had to be built, the expertise required to maintain and improve it, as well as generally creating many jobs that could not exist without the internet.
  
  AI is the only situation I see where it can completely remove humans from the system, even for the purpose of maintenance and upkeep, it could do that on it's own. The infrastructure? It already exists. What do we as workers get from this? What's left to look forward to?
  
  I understand your fears and concerns, but I think you are slightly overreacting. Even with the inventions of better A.I. and robotics, there will still be more jobs created eventually. Supervision and improvement of A.I. and robotics, new industries that previously may not have been possible.
  
  The Chinese government has been very clear, that at least for now, robots/A.I. won't completely replace human labor or thinking, just supplement it.
  
  I don't think we'll see elimination of all human labour in the near future, what's much more likely is that human labour is going to be augmented by AIs. Ultimately though, to me the ultimate goal of a communist society is to free people from necessary labour as much as possible, and allow people to pursue their interests and self development. If all our necessities are met by automation, then we can focus on doing whatever we find interesting individually or collectively.
  
  The capitalists can't automate away labor. That's the whole fundamental limitation of the capitalist mode of production. The higher your "organic composition of capital", the lower your profit rates (for the industry as a whole). The organic composition of capital is the ratio of constant capital (buildings, machinery, robots, energy) to variable capital (human wages).
  
  The more the capitalists try to escape having to pay wages through automation (or escape competition through monopoly), the more they dig the graves of their whole class.
  
  In a practical sense as well, China leads the world in robotics because you need a vast government system to produce highly skilled engineers, reliable/cheap utilities and an industrial policy to generate demand for automation.
  
  I see the strength of LLMs as something that is for regular people to interact with. Not so much for automation of paperwork in a work setting although that is one application.
  
  E.g. Sometimes older people don't interact with technology well. They only see buttons and menus with very brief labels on them, which can be daunting. They're afraid of hitting the wrong thing. Often they don't submit forms online because they don't want to make a mistake. With many companies/organisations using online websites as a big part of their customer facing presence, older people get alienated.
  
  An AI that converses to guide them and answer any questions would make technology more accessible.
  
  You can never fully eliminate labor, that goes against the labor theory of value. Also robots cannot grease themselves & computer servers need maintenance. Just as the internet replaced a lot of hard print publishing, helper robots will free up people to work in less automated areas like building infrastructure.
  
  I don't think so. Until we get actual intelligence (called AGI now) and Fusion power we won't have a second industrial revolution. Because once the power issue is solved, we only have a resource problem. We'll see an explosion of industry if humanity can achieve fusion.
  
  A lot of automation can be done without AGI already. We can see automated factories, ports, buses, etc. There are general purpose robots being put to use as seen here. The article discusses how many processes within the government are becoming automated. All of this was human labor before. Just as automation created explosive technological growth in the 19th century, we could see similar kind of thing happen today.
  
  AGI isn't real, it's largely a buzzword without a rigorous definition. We will continue to gradually improve the quality of artificially intelligent systems as we improve the hardware and make more progress in understanding intelligence, but there will not be some turning point where there is a sudden explosion in progress from AI when we cross some non-existent AGI threshold. It will just continue to gradually improve over time.
  
  I'm not talking about it coming from current LLM slop. I mean an actual system that is completely new.
  
  I know the meme is that fusion is always 20 years away, but with recent developments and China's private companies achieving 2/3 critical conditions for extended fusion it really does feel like we're less than 2 decades out from commercial fusion. Will be world changing, for better or for worse, and I'm excited that we'll be around to see what it does.

30 comments