Description du poste
On Positionality: I am a non-Chinese person; I don’t speak Mandarin, and I have not lived in China before. I have written this piece after reviewing English publications on Chinese politics and AI-enabled extreme power concentration risk for ~12 weeks. I tried to account for my detachment by requesting feedback from people with China expertise.
SummaryI define Extreme Power Concentration (EPC) here as economic and coercive power being concentrated in the hands of the few who control the most powerful AI. The emphasis on the few is very important because the number of actors who end up in power differentiates between a world where power is “extremely concentrated” and another where power is "concentrated." Despite the recent attention to the AI-enabled extreme power concentration problem, little work has investigated what would happen if China-the first runner-up in the AI race happens to develop AGI first. The disparity between the American political system and the Chinese political system further limits the transferability of the current threat models and interventions to China and thus makes us less prepared for the manifestation of CCP-led EPC risk.
Through this project, I tried to assess whether the theoretical argument of AGI enabling ~ one person or an extremely small group to independently run an entire country (in this case, China) is plausible given the seemingly high propensity for one-man rule in China, and if so, what can we do about it. I start from the assumption that China managed somehow to secure the lead in the AI race over the US and that it solved its compute bottleneck and achieved chip sovereignty. Therefore, model distillation pathways won’t be sufficient for this scenario[^1].
My thesis is that while AI would make power more concentrated[^2] in China, extreme power concentration (EPC) is hard to materialize in the CCP. I argue that in a Fast EPC scenario, the power seeker would need buy-in from other actors in the AI tech stack and CCP offici