Western AI Panic Is Theology, Not Technology — SkimNews
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- Donald Trump issued an executive order renaming AI as "super" intelligence, then posted on Truth Social that anyone using "artificial intelligence" is "THE ENEMY," an echo of philosopher Nick Bostrom's framing in his book Superintelligence.
- The author argues Western AI doomers play a Puritan role predicting hellfire and unemployment, while accelerationists adopt a gentler Protestant posture with AI as loving savior, a split mirrored in sci-fi from Terminator to WALL-E.
- Chen Qiufan, author of Chinese sci-fi novel Waste Tide, told the author there is no single great God in Chinese thought; instead AI "tends to appear as an instrument, a bureaucracy, a servant or a family member" rather than a deity.
- Chen said China's deepest AI fear is "missing another industrial revolution," framing it as a historical race rather than the theological question, "who will save us or judge us," that Americans ask.
- Chinese audiences are currently obsessed with "system novels" (系统文), where an AI-like system treats the human as an avatar giving quests and points, encapsulating a view that AI will "work with us, live inside us and inspire us."
- The piece draws a policy contrast: the US lets companies replace humans with AI while fretting over superintelligence, whereas Chinese regulation aims to keep AI from worsening youth unemployment while racing to global AI supremacy.
Why it matters: If AI debates in Washington are actually proxy theology, the regulatory ground rules, from existential-risk mandates to replacement-of-workers rules, may be written from a premise that doesn't generalize. Chen's quote that China fears "missing another industrial revolution" more than machine enslavement reframes the US-China AI race as a clash of imaginations, not just chips and compute.
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