Freedom and Artificial Intelligence

A simple statement or question may rise big one. It happened that someone on Twitter asked the loaded question: Can China win the race of Artificial Intelligence?

In first reaction as it is intended you may think “yes, of course, why not,…uuuh, yes they can, yes they will…“.

You may think about the huge ressources of China, their stunning success in developing their country and many more impressive facts and achievements.

However, there are limits. Limits of the software or algorithmus, so to speak.

The simple question who will win the race may drive attention to the very basic rule of that game which has been overlooked for too long as we regard them as granted and warranted: Freedom.

Yes, such plain and simple, but with overwhelming historical, moral, scientific and philosophical evidences throughout thousands of years of mankind – and by tradition marked with the Exodus – all started in search and yearn for freedom. It´s freedom, stupid.

Before any progress, before any unfolding of intelligence you need freedom, the free will of choice, i.e. the very insight that you have a choice at all.

You can also put it more accuratly, that there is no freedom without intelligence and no intelligence without freedom. They are wired and intermingled seen on the long run.

They can fall, they can stagger but on the long run they will prevail: Intelligence struggles for freedom and freedom struggles for intelligence.

However, both are not self-fulfilling-prophecies which come along without efforts: for to run you have to eat and drink and learn running; to deploy a somehow crude and simplifying picture.

So, no, China can´t win the race of Artificial Intelligence. Because any kind of successful intelligence on the long run needs freedom. And freedom we do not have in China.

All brutal dicatorships failed so far, failed because of the lack of freedom, because the slave walked away in search for freedom seeing his choice what is the very first and very most powerful and basic driver of intelligence: The yearn for freedom.