The same probably holds without AI. China is still in the stage of development, where people reasonably expect that the future will be better. The West has not really been optimistic about the future since the 90s. There is always something around the corner threatening to make the future worse. Maybe it's the economy, maybe it's climate change, maybe immigration, or terrorism, or war, or whatever.

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crote a day ago | parent | next [-]

Don't forget the completely unaccountable megacorps who are increasingly invading our day-to-day lives, and the politicians whose main priority seems to be competing for their bribes.

The depressing part isn't that we are facing hard challenges and declining as a society. The depressing part is that it is a deliberate action.

	▲	ryandrake 15 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, we should not forget this. The West is not worried about some vague inanimate "something" around the corner threatening to make things worse. We are worried about people deliberately doing this. AI slop, omnipresent ads, job loss, fake reviews, income inequality, climate collapse, these are not natural phenomenon or amorphous "things" lurking in the shadows. They are deliberately being imposed on us by actual people that you could point to if you could get close enough to them.

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yogthos a day ago | parent | prev [-]

It's worth noting that China has seen decades of steady development, and has avoided the boom/bust cycles we see happening in the west. While we've lived through dotCom bubble, the 2008 crash, covid, and now the looming AI bubble, China has just seen steady progress without the working majority getting screwed every decade like clockwork. While future can always bring something unexpected, it is possible to have a resilient system that adapts to the problems as they surface.

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m4rtink 18 hours ago | parent [-]

Um, I do kinda remember hills made from bikes, empty cities, people laying a siege on failing banks & protests in Honkong being suppressed...

	▲	yogthos 17 hours ago \| parent [-]
		A lot of that was just propaganda, like the famous ghost city subway station story which then turned out to just be basic planning https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/rest-of-world/chin... The protests in HK weren't due to failing economic conditions either. And having been to HK recently, I can tell you it's far more developed than it was before being repatriated. China obviously has problems like any human society, and it's far from perfect. However, they demonstrably have not had the kinds of economic crashes we have in the west and the standard of living keeps rising steadily. And here are some numbers to put things in perspective. 90% of families in the country own their home giving China one of the highest home ownership rates in the world. What’s more is that 80% of these homes are owned outright, without mortgages or any other leans. https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2016/03/30/how-peop... Chinese household savings hit another record high in 2024 https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-jone... Social mobility in China being far better than in the US https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/18/world/asia/ch... The typical Chinese adult is now richer than the typical European adult https://www.businessinsider.com/typical-chinese-adult-now-ri... The real (inflation-adjusted) incomes of the poorest half of the Chinese population increased by more than four hundred percent from 1978 to 2015, while real incomes of the poorest half of the US population actually declined during the same time period. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23119/w231... From 2010 to 2019 (the most recent period for which uninterrupted data is available), the income of the poorest 20% in China increased even as a share of total income. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.DST.FRST.20?end=2019...