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by ed_mercer 100 days ago
I’m worried that China will build said killing machines and that we’ll be unprepared.
11 comments

I'm worried that China will build said killing machines only because they see that we are and feel the need to be prepared.
If you compare how many countries China has attacked or invaded with how many the United States has attacked or invaded, it paints a clear picture of whom to fear.
This.

Everyone will do this, because everyone will believe that everyone will do this.

Even worse, there really is no guarantee that the great powers will create the best terminators. Everyone talks about China and the US. (And we should.) At the same time however, we should all keep in mind that nations from India and Indonesia, to North and South Korea will not be simply sitting on their hands while the US and China forge ahead.

A future where 4 million dollar American or Chinese terminators are easily overwhelmed by thousands and thousands of 5 dollar Indian autonomous devices is not at all outside the realm of future possibilities.

That's what makes it all so concerning. We can kind of see where it leads in terms of enhanced capability potential for non-state actors, but we can't really see a way to avoid that future.

Game theory in action
The last time China bombed a foreign country was 1979, 47 years ago. Has the US gone even 47 days in the last 80 years without bombing another country?
Of course! The only way to fight ai powered killing machines and mass surveilance is to make ai powred killing machines and do mass surveillance. It’s so simple, i don’t know why i didn’t think of it!

But seriously - you are describing the kind of thinking that caused ww1, and the nuclear arms race that almost caused human extinction. It’s a bad idea that goes bad places.

I reject that argument. I dislike China (the CCP, not the people), and having lived there 6 years I know it much better than most foreigners. But your argument leads to us becoming just like China (CCP). I'd rather hold to some moral values and humanity and be a weaker country, than discard them to be strong.
China is currently a more morally virtuous country than the US.
I'm more angry than most about what the US has become lately, but I also have a deep knowledge of what China is actually like from 6 years living and working there, and I can tell you that China is still worse. Granted, the US is heading that directly pretty quickly.
Believe me, China hasn't show its true face yet, but it will, just wait.

And while we are waiting, there're another few wars to be done.

Maybe the true face of China so far is that it hasn't shown its true face. While the true face of the US is what it has shown again and again.
It's gonna take a LOT for them to match the USA's depravity.
Let's not get crazy here
They welded shut the doors to Uyghur Muslims and had a bunch of donated food for them stacked outside their homes in one giant pile that they couldn't get to. It either rotted away or was eaten by animals.
Jack booted thugs shot a women in the face for the crime of sitting in her car and the administration called her a terrorist. Nothing happened to the thug.

Jack booted thugs shot a man in the back for the crime of defending a woman and the administration called him a terrorist. Nothing happened to that thug either.

Absolutely. But what people don't realize is this sort of thing happens in China too, it's just never reported or heard about, other than some whispers here and there, because of such tight control over the media, the internet, and public discourse. In the US, as much as the fascists are trying to take over, at least you can still protest and make your voice heard.
Source?
Me. I lived and worked there for a number of years. When you talk to the local people in confidence you find out about this stuff, and you sometimes catch glimpses of it before it's scrubbed from local social media. There's a very high level of control.
The myth of american moral superiority had been dead for a while. Why would china be any more evil than the US, which has waged far more colonialist wars and killed far more foreign lives in recent times (look at the news today for inspiration)
I don’t see any contradiction with what the OP said, though. You don’t have to be morally superior to still be concerned about a country’s forces killing you.
It's a reversal of the more likely situation which is the us getting it and china following in response. Nuclear weapons anyone? Remember who started those.
Uighur concentration camps? Falun Gong organ harvesting?
Vietnam war, iraq war, afghanistan war, iran war, gaza war, allowing iraq to get and use chemical weapons on iran, forced regime change in south america (then and now). Get real it's not equivalent in any way
How can you say the Uyghur genocide isn't "equivalent" to the things you listed? What math are you using to compare them? How do you compare regime change in South America to Uyghur genocide, for example? Is there a spreadsheet somewhere that lists the value you're placing on lives, war and geopolitical actions, in order to make a fair comparison?
The UN has released a report on human rights abuses in China, but has not called these a genocide. The more credible accusations of genocide came from a handful of political bodies in Western countries, but crucially the acting governments have not defined it as such.

There’s absolutely no consensus that the legal definition is met, in contrast with another ongoing situation which enjoys wide recognition.

It feels that this is more a geopolitical cudgel, pulled out when the discourse against the US becomes negative. But given the events in the last years, this seems like a lost cause even in the West, never-mind the rest of the world.

Surely that's only because China has a permanent position on the security council and wouldn't allow such a report to be made. Israel does not sit on that council, and while the current admin is quite cozy with them, the Biden admin became fed up with Netanyahu and his treatment of Palestinians, culminating in the US ambassador to the UN abstaining from votes against Israel rather than voting to protect it.

But that's beside my point. It's too late to edit my post, so pretend I used the word "culling" instead of "genocide." How does one weigh a Uyghur culling against a South American regime change? What's the exchange rate?

Nice! You got two!
They have to build them because we will build them...
“I’m afraid my neighbor would kill my son, therefore, I’ll kill my son myself”
I got scared when I saw China's synchronized drone swarms at the Beijing Olympics, which I believe was the point.
My thoughts were "why do we still buy fireworks. This is way cooler, and not really annoying"
Unless you're living in Taiwan, I don't think you have a lot to prepare for.
Just wait until China gets to the next stage of capitalism.

They're investing their trade surplus in assets around the world, especially the third world.

When those assets start to go bad and/or the government nationalizes them?

We'll see if China responds any differently than any of the other colonial powers with business interests.

while you are worried about China, USI have done a genocide and started a new war.
And the U.S./Thiel/Musk are trying to start an AI-powered nuclear war next: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_syst...