I love the Pacific-Eastern "living systems" engineering mindset. It differs considerably from the Western "hard control" engineering mindset.
With regards to China specifically, the obvious route to take is to rapidly learn from China, catching up on the empirical literature and competing with/overtaking them with novel science. It's not so hard to do. We're already running effective LLM-enabled simulations on VSA, Hopfield networks for time-series progression over a novel root-based number-theoretic framework. I think this may be edging ahead of known Chinese developments for collaborative AI. The West can also play that competitive game, and it definitely must. Mostly, it depends on an organization's ai-enabled learning culture and an infrastructural dedication to capability-driven-optimal "curving up". My view is that the West still have a few aces up its sleeve. This is not a 1-horse race, but a critical race for this civilization. We can all contribute constructively. If China believes this to be a 1-horse race, then their strategy would weaken. I'm not convinced that they do. They seem committed to dominating global manufacturing and moving mass product. Why not? They're excellent at it. Exponential learning, smart work, dedicated enabling, and organizational support pay highest dividends. My critical perspective This is telling - Chinese literature: Prominent organizations and collaborative institutional names bearing industrial influence spanning project-dev years [IP PRODUCTIVITY] vs Western literature: individual heroes dumped in feeding pools - time agnostic [EGO PRODUCTIVITY]. e.g., IIT is about to challenged, as any theory should, and still conferences are being centered around it. If the labels aren't present, seems the academic groupie audience disappears. As Ben astutely pointed out with his Nietzsche quotation: asymmetry drives the exponential curve. On Wed, Jul 29, 2026 at 6:23 PM Matt Mahoney <[email protected]> wrote: > China produces 90% of humanoid and quadruped robots, but you can't buy > them in the US. The US has already banned drones from China and has a 100% > tariff on electric cars (passed under Biden) that China can produce for > $10K. The US produces 6% of robots. > > https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/29/tech/us-china-robot-ban-intl-hnk > > I understand that China could secretly plant backdoors in all their > electronics and achieve world domination any time they wanted. But we are > also losing the AI race. What is the alternative? > > -- Matt Mahoney, [email protected] > *Artificial General Intelligence List <https://agi.topicbox.com/latest>* > / AGI / see discussions <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi> + > participants <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/members> + > delivery options <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription> > Permalink > <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T90d796994776f3de-M01244f784c1ff8cc3fffd5ef> > ------------------------------------------ Artificial General Intelligence List: AGI Permalink: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T90d796994776f3de-M85a713ac6b139f8077e71ca8 Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription
