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.
this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2025
48 points (100.0% liked)
China
2141 readers
38 users here now
Discuss anything related to China.
Community Rules:
0: Taiwan, Xizang (Tibet), Xinjiang, and Hong Kong are all part of China.
1: Don't go off topic.
2: Be Comradely.
3: Don't spread misinformation or bigotry.
讨论中国的地方。
社区规则：
零、台湾、西藏、新疆、和香港都是中国的一部分。
一、不要跑题。
二、友善对待同志。
三、不要传播谣言或偏执思想。
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
Exactly, as long as the human bears the responsibility for the work, I don't see any problem with this either.
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
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.
well to be fair the USA does use it positively in many ways as well, USPS is largely ran on AI.
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.
my food-obsessed brain reading the opening sentence "There's a city called Hotpot? I bet it has good hotpot"
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?
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 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.
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 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.
I see the strength of LLMs as something that is for regular people to interact with. [...] E.g. Sometimes older people don't interact with technology well.
I think this argument is a bit flawed. If the main benefit of LLMs is facilitating the use of technology for the older generation, that, having not grown up as immersed in technology as we are today, is not as well versed in its use, then does this benefit not disappear when that older generation dies out and the new "older generation" will be those of us who have grown up with technology and are thus proficient in it? Why then do we still need this facilitator at that point?
In fact, i would take this line of thinking one step further: What happens when the new younger generation grows up with LLMs constantly facilitating their interfacing with technology? Will they perhaps become dependent on LLMs, having had no necessity to learn how to interact with technology without the LLM interface? Does this not just mean that LLMs will be self-perpetuating the need for their own existence? Is there not a risk that one day the skill to use technology without the crutch of LLMs will be lost altogether?
This is a risk vs reward question: Does the reward of convenience outweigh the risk of atrophy of certain skills? Of course this is basically a rhetorical question because i know what the historical answer of our societies to this question has always been, for any such new technology. It has always ended up being yes. And inevitably, we are going to end up embracing this new technology too, in some form or another, just like we did all the others in the past. That is just the way these things go.
If the main benefit of LLMs is facilitating the use of technology for the older generation, that, having not grown up as immersed in technology as we are today, is not as well versed in its use, then does this benefit not disappear when that older generation dies out and the new “older generation” will be those of us who have grown up with technology and are thus proficient in it? Why then do we still need this facilitator at that point?
As the new generation becomes older, they also will be faced with the next generation of technological paradigms that will be beyond their previous experiences. LLMs could be the tool to facilitate their understanding.
Is there not a risk that one day the skill to use technology without the crutch of LLMs will be lost altogether?
The LLM is a new form of interface to technology. It does add an additional layer of abstraction. If future generations don't learn the lower layers of technology, they will find it difficult to use them.
load more comments
(1 replies)
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 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.
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.
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.
I don't know what to think of this.
I don't know what to think of AI, dammit.
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?
My experience with AI is pretty limited to what I can fuck around with on my own system. So I'm not seeing its energy use as any bigger of a problem than how capitalists will be using it to further trim down production and steal even more wealth. I don't think anything about the current state of AI is great, but that has more to do with the current state of the world than AI itself.
In my perfect future, even if peak generative AI was an energy-draining unviable mess of a technology, the novelty would still be enough that I'd want to see it in a specialty museum, or the service available to the public in some way.
Yeah
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.
👍
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. It's like saying "I don't know what to think of knives." It's just a weird statement. Knives are just knives, you can use them for bad things like stabbing people or good things like cutting up some peppers to go in hot pot. No need to have an opinion on knives in general. Same with AI.
I'll consider this.
That's very cool.
view more: next ›