> It’s interesting how America believes in these apocalyptic AI narratives while China doesn’t.

As the rest of the article alludes to, America is a services economy [0]. An industrial economy obviously doesn't have anything to fear from AI because their jobs don't primarily involve pressing buttons on a keyboard to justify their paycheck. That probably explains most of the difference; for China I'd imagine more AI -> More prosperity.

> A human is about 20 petaflops. All of this installed compute is only about a million people.

The number of effective humans might only be around a few million people. Gauss and Euler did a bit more for society than the average 20 petaflops of human flesh. One of the lessons of history is that being able to reliably connect a few really good humans has a lot more potential than a moderate number of more easily confused ones.

There are a lot of smartest cow in the herd phenomenons out there. Even a few hundred thousand AIs would probably outnumber the senior politicians of the world and reducing the damage those politicians do would be a huge win. Gargantuan. Possibly species level impacts like we've never yet seen if a major power like China did it.

> Oh sorry sorry, in a preemptive strike they obviously would have hit us if we didn’t attack them first. Yes yes, defensive preemptive attack. It’s just bullying. It’s stupid.

And I'm probably packing too much into one comment, but you can tell everyone knows this is stupid because the politicians consistently have to use lies instead of trying to argue things on the merits. As soon as people have to try and connect the actual facts to someone who isn't corrupt being better off the argument collapses. The worst people are the ones in the grip of that team-sports emotion where they just support "their side" despite the fact that a policy of war hurts the side engaging in it. The warmongers aren't even on the same side, they're their own lobby of psychopaths.

[0] A term which might be in for the "third world" euphemism treatment, but you never know.

China's actually far ahead in the AI adoption race for manufacturing. They're investing heavily into hardware AI, robotics and the like. The only reason we're not seeing fears akin to the US is because the financialization isn't as intense, layoffs are still controlled, and the population is aging out of employment.