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

Oh my fucking God. Like, mere weeks after releasing AI and the Chinese are already using it to make society better. What have the US and Europe done with it? Deep fake porn, spam, and ruining everything.
- It's pretty incredible to watch how differently this tech is applies in China and the west. It's such a great illustration of how different sets of social and economic rules impact the development of society as a whole.
- well to be fair the USA does use it positively in many ways as well, USPS is largely ran on AI.

Robots are dubbed “pearls on the crown of the manufacturing industry.” A country’s achievement in robotics research, development, manufacturing and application is an important yardstick with which to measure its level of scientific and technological innovation and high-end manufacturing...China will be the largest robot market in the world
--- Xi Jinping

my food-obsessed brain reading the opening sentence "There's a city called Hotpot? I bet it has good hotpot"

That's very cool.

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 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.

I don't know what to think of this.
I don't know what to think of AI, dammit.
- I think it's a net positive as long as there's a human in the loop. The key bit is this in my opinion:
  While AI is playing a growing role in government work, officials say it is intended to assist, not replace, human workers — despite referring to such systems as “employees.” Futian’s regulatory framework requires each AI system to be monitored by a designated human supervisor to prevent errors and ensure compliance with ethical standards.
  “The guardian of the AI-powered employee is responsible for overseeing its operation, and if any issues arise, the guardian is held accountable,” said Gao.
  The AI isn't the decision maker, it's an automation tool that allows a human worker to do their job more efficiently, but responsibility still lies with the human.
  
  I'll star this to keep the quote in mind.
- I always thought AI was really cool, like inherently and on the face of it. Generative AI makes you feel like you're out of Star Trek sometimes. The distaste so many people have with AI comes down to the fact it violates copyright in a nebulous way (lib shit) and that it's a genuine threat to the livelihood of artists (real shit.) It will be easier to feel optimistic about AI when we can be sure we're living in an economy that prioritizes lives over profit, because only in that society can generative AI and artists truly live together peacefully.
  
  What about the energy consumption?
- Just get off the AI derangement syndrome forums that are convincing you to hate tech and realize technology is just a tool which can be good or bad depending upon its application and you do not need to have a generalized opinion on it as a whole.
  
  I'll consider this.

As the article mentions, the AI assistants being rolled out are required to be supervised by human employees, meaning they are more like pocket calculators than AGI robotic workers. There doesn't really seem to be much of an issue here tbh.
- Exactly, as long as the human bears the responsibility for the work, I don't see any problem with this either.

I think AI is stupid, no matter if it's China or America that is doing it. 🤷‍♂️
- I don't see how one can reconcile being anti-technology with being a Marxist. You'd be better served in an anarchist community.
  
  It's very silly to say that because I don't like LLMs, that I'm anti-technology.
- I think that some of the criticism levied at AI, certainly in the way that it is used under neoliberal capitalism, is absolutely valid. And i have my own worries about how it may affect human development going forward when you can essentially "cheat" your way to answers to a broad array of problems without ever having put in the work to really learn and understand the subject you are dealing with.
  But we have to acknowledge that, good or bad, this is still a powerful tool. The question is, how should socialist societies approach this new tool? And unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your viewpoint), i think we're already past the point where we can afford not to use it. Pandora's box has already been opened and there's no turning back the clock.
  In a way this is a bit like the atom bomb. Yes, it may be dangerous and perhaps humanity would be better off if it had never been invented. But the one thing we can't do is allow only the enemies of socialism to possess this weapon.
  
  Well said