14 min • 3 lectures
This three-lecture course examines China's rise as a technology and AI power and the resulting global competition. Lecture 1 covers the 2017 New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan, the AlphaGo defeats of Lee Sedol and Ke Jie, the 996 work culture, and WeChat's role as a super-app that supplies unmatched behavioral data. Lecture 2 addresses the silicon bottleneck created by U.S. export controls on NVIDIA H100 and A100 GPUs, the Cyberspace Administration of China's rules requiring AI to reflect core socialist values, and the performance claims of Baidu's Ernie Bot 4.0. Lecture 3 explores the Digital Silk Road, the Splinternet, AI agents, demographic-driven automation needs, and robot-tax proposals. The course connects these developments to questions of free will, alignment, and trust-building for founders, operators, and tech professionals.
