Artificial Intelligence and the Chinese Habitus

The emerging technology of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is fast becoming an integral part of everyday life world-wide. In liberal democratic countries the benefits of and problems posed by AI are hotly debated, with some supporting the rapid unfettered roll-out of the technology (viz. US President Donald Trump’s coining of the term ‘Super Intelligence’) and others warning against its increasingly evident impact on jobs as well as potential to pose an existential threat to human society. After initially repudiating AI as antithetical to individual authorship, educational institutions in those contexts are now scrambling to develop ways of managing the technology at a policy level. In China there is, in official public contexts at least, a generally more positive attitude to AI both in terms of its perceived capacity to increase socioeconomic activity and to add positively to society. There is also an embracing of AI by cultural workers and institutions. This includes the contribution of AI to ‘generative’ art and the use of culture to bridge the gap between science and wider society. Differing attitudes toward AI between liberal democratic countries and China would seem to pivot on questions of control. The key threat posed by AI is the proven ability of the technology to exceed human control (‘go rogue’) and to substitute for human decision making. In socialist China, again officially, that threat is downplayed in favour of a more integrative view of the relationship between AI and society and the role of technology in advancing the socioeconomic base. In this short paper I will speculate on differences in attitude to AI in liberal democracies and China and their relationship to contrasting discursive outlooks in those spaces. While Western post-Enlightenment conceptions of modernity look towards human mastery of technology and the environment, including humans’ ability to turn around the deleterious impact of industrialization on the natural world, China’s long-standing cultural habitus emphasises dynamic reciprocity between humans and nature. A fundamental aspect of which is the Chinese classical concept of Wu wei (Effortless Action) and its boundary blurring signification of spontaneous human agency in accordance with the ‘way’ of nature.