A woman walked five hours to buy a clock so her children could get to school on time. That was China, not so long ago. Today her phone has given her a shopping addiction and delivery drones hum above her apartment. Her granddaughter argues with an AI about which shoes to buy.
Progress. The wheel spins. You don’t ask where it’s going because everywhere it’s been was worse than this.
Sixty-nine percent of Chinese people say AI’s benefits outweigh its risks. In America, thirty-five percent agree. That’s not a gap. That’s two countries standing on the same planet looking at the same technology and seeing completely different things.
Some Chinese company released a video tool called Seedance that can generate a fight scene between Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise so convincing you’d swear it leaked from a studio vault. Hollywood saw it and panicked. Writers and filmmakers started drafting eulogies for their own careers. But in China, stocks surged. A famous director made a short film where he sat across from his AI-generated self and discussed the future of cinema. “I’m not worried about technology replacing movies,” he wrote. “What really matters is how people use technology.”
That’s either profound wisdom or the smoothest PR line since “your call is important to us.”
The difference, far as I can tell, is that the Chinese actually built useful things with AI. Driverless taxis in a dozen cities. Medical chatbots that help you skip the hospital queue. Shopping assistants that know your shoe size and your weaknesses. Practical stuff. The kind of technology that makes Tuesday easier. Meanwhile, in Silicon Valley, they’re burning billions trying to build a machine that thinks like a person — which is the tech equivalent of building a rocket to Alpha Centauri when most people just need a bus that runs on time.
The Chinese built the bus. America’s building the rocket. Then Americans wonder why they’re the ones who can’t sleep at night.
But here’s where the optimism gets interesting. China doesn’t allow independent labor unions. When people raised concerns about taxi drivers losing their jobs, state media called them Luddites — the people history proved right about everything except timing. Posts about autonomous driving crashes get scrubbed from the internet before the wreckage cools. The government isn’t just encouraging optimism. It’s editing out the alternative.
And it works. Some parents told researchers they’re comfortable letting their children play with AI toys because they trust the government wouldn’t permit anything harmful. I read that three times. In a country where you can’t Google “Tiananmen Square,” parents trust the same apparatus to curate their children’s digital companions. That’s not optimism. That’s faith. And faith has never required evidence — that’s the whole point of it.
Meanwhile, a feminist group found tutorials circulating openly on Chinese social media for making sexually explicit deepfakes. They tried to report them. Nothing happened. The wheel spins forward. It doesn’t look down to see what it’s rolling over.
Xi Jinping laid out a plan — AI penetrating ninety percent of Chinese society by 2030. The language reads like poetry written by an engineer: “promote a revolutionary leap in productive ability” and “create higher-quality, beautiful lives.” It’s a five-year plan that actually believes in five-year plans. And when you’ve watched your country go from five-hour walks for a clock to drone deliveries in a single generation, why wouldn’t you believe?
Americans have watched something different. They’ve watched factory jobs become gig work become algorithmic management become whatever comes next. Every “revolution” since the internet has come with a body count in the middle class. Of course they’re skeptical.
Skepticism is just memory with a bad attitude.
The thing that stays with me isn’t the robots or the stocks or the Hollywood panic. It’s that grandmother. She walked five hours for a clock. Her granddaughter asks a machine which shoes look better. Between those two women, the entire distance of modern China collapsed into a single lifetime. Everyone who sees that collapse calls it progress, because what else would you call it? The clock works. The phone works. The drones deliver.
Nobody asks whether the wheel knows where it’s going. Maybe that’s the wrong question. Maybe the wheel doesn’t need to know. It just needs to keep spinning, and the people standing on it need to believe they’re moving up.
Sixty-nine percent believe it. The other thirty-one percent might too, but their posts got deleted.
Source: Where are China’s A.I. Doomers?