A simple statement or question may raise a big one. It happened that someone on X asked the loaded question: Can China win the race of Artificial Intelligence?
In the 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 resources 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 algorithms, so to speak.
The simple question of 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 evidence throughout thousands of years of mankind – and by tradition marked with the Exodus – all started in search and yearning 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 accurately, that there is no freedom without intelligence and no intelligence without freedom. They are wired and intermingled seen in the long run.
They can fall, they can stagger but in 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 effort: 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 in the long run needs freedom. And freedom we do not have in China.
All brutal dictatorships failed so far, failed because of the lack of freedom because the slave walked away in search of freedom seeing his choice in what is the very first and very most powerful and basic driver of intelligence: The yearning for freedom.