And been written about since the 80s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

> If a majority of the Americans believed America was not generally the "good guys" it would be a sign of a failed democracy.

No, it would be a sign of critical thinking and self reflection.

Well, first, that's two overgeneralizations.

But, second, often precisely because they think we’re the bad guys.

If you see the world as dominated by an evil, overwhelmingly powerful empire that uses violence in a way that shows no concern for the continuation or quality of human life outside of the metropole then, even if it is bigoted, repressive, and unjust within the metropole, you still want to be in the metropole rather rhan peripheries.

It’s the usual feigned comparison. America is a republic and if you don’t agree well, go to Reddit and argue about it; meanwhile China is just a dictatorship. American “crimes“ are dismissed with some rhetorical non-response like “hmmph, no one claimed we are perfect”, or immediately contrasted with some arbitrary Chinese “crime”, then dropped just as fast; even someone bringing up contemporary killing of Iranian schoolchildren gets contrasted with the “Indian Removal Act stuff” as if, you know, someone didn’t just now bring up something that America did last week. You bring up the ideal of “the American experiment”, then when someone brings up inconvenient facts the Tiananmen Square Massacre makes an appearance.

But to your credit you brought up the Pretti shooting. I have to analyze how that demonstrates why the “AI values” should reflect American ones.

Judge my enemies by their actions. Judge me by my words. About myself...

It's not pessimistic or defeatist; you first have to recognize the limitations and failure modes of your system before you can think about changing it.

Is it possible to live in a world where powerful entities have gotten there through ethical means? Sure. We don't live in that world, though.

And yes, if I said "name me one powerful person/entity that got there through ethical means", I'm sure you could give me a name. But that name would surely be an outlier.

>AIs embedded with American cultural values, broadly, is probably better than having ones seeded with Xi Jinping thought.

I'd really rather have a choice of both rather than be forced to accept "AI that downplays a 2 year old genocide" over "AI that covers up a 40 year massacre".

Is there actually a benefit? Or are we just watching the slow motion collapse of another empire convinced of its own immortality? History is a graveyard of experiments that thought they were the exception to the rule.

> There is a real benefit to having the American experiment prominent and continuing.

The American 'experiment' is one long history of the US doing really horrible things, but giving ourselves a pass because we dress it up in the name of freedom and self-determination.

If you ignore our slavery and the genocide of Native Americans, it's easy to paint China's slavery and genocide as evils that are unique somehow.

The real experiment of America is in seeing how self-deluded we can become if we continuously reinforce the false premise that our institutions are intrinsically good (or at least, nebulously "better").

You quoted the article:

> The whole background of this AI conversation is that we’re in a race with China, and we have to win. But what is the reason we want America to win the AI race?

Right now there are two contenders for first in the AI race. The US, and China.

You spent the rest of your comment making the case that it is not good for the US to win. Implying, though not directly saying, we would be better off with China.

You can say "oh wouldn't it be nice if Europe won instead" but they don't have anything in the race right now. We're stuck with the US or China.

> the author positing "US AI dominance good to keep China at bay" is bad

My read is they’re saying we need an alternative to Chinese AI. Because with its industrial might, the default future is Chinese technological dominance.

People are certainly arguing this, and it's something I've come to believe as well.

I know people IRL that are so fed up with the US's bullshit that they do sometimes look at China and think their dominance might be better for the world. "Well, when's the last time China started a war or even deployed military forces in another country?", they ask... and I don't know how to respond to that (because they haven't, for at least 30 years that I can think of). And saying something like "well, they've been expanding their territory through extralegal means, and use coercion and grey-area tactics to get what they want" feels like an unsatisfying retort.

1800 people detained at "alligator Alcatraz" had their records purged from ICE databases, and are completely unaccounted for. Literally disappeared, and the only people whose word we have they're alive are the same people who disappeared them.

Yes, the Uyghur genocide and paramilitary suppression and settler-colonialism of Tibet and Xinjiang is horrific, and will (hopefully) be recognized in the future as a genocide on par with others that 'enjoy' historical notoriety, but let's not pretend we're not well on our way to doing that here.

The rhetoric of ethnic superiority and nationalism and birthright that exists in our government is the exact same rhetoric that exists in Xi Jinping's "Imperial Han" nationalism.

I’m surveilled across pretty much every aspect of my life between basic Snowden level scooping of my data and public tracking like flock cameras. Democracy is increasingly becoming a joke as the richest in our society explicitly are trying to break it and we look more and more like mid 90s Russia.

I want the US to win because I live in the US and it will probably benefit me, but we’ve largely stopped pretending to value the republic so I don’t think we can claim a moral standing on these topics anymore.

To reference your other comment, the common American man has as much de facto ability to sue our government and/or leaders as the common Chinese man

> We, westerner, want our values to prevail.

This comes to the core of the issue, and is where I think the disagreement comes from. Many Westerners in fact do not want "Western" values to prevail.

Why? For me those values have led to outcomes so horrendously antithetical to _my_ values, that I would not wish them for the rest of the world. Even worse, this Western centrism has led to jingoist conclusions for at least 400 years.

What's the difference between a court whose orders you can ignore and a court that doesn't exist? Sounds like a question for the philosophers.

"US not inherently better" is tantamount to fellatio to you?

You have some low standards of praise.