Even the headline of Friedman’s column incorporates standard CCP lingo: “shared future”: “What I’m Hearing in China This Week About Our Shared Future” (The New York Times, March 25, 2025).
The shared future according to the Party’s idea of it is a future in which the Chinese Communist Party, led by Xi Jinping or the Chinese dictator du jour, is the father-dictator and controller of everybody. We will all share in the delightful experience of being serfs of the Chinese Communist Party.
Shared future
In this “shared future”—as opposed to the supposedly splintered and disparate time flows we’ve all been treading water in up to now—Friedman foresees “the birth of artificial general intelligence.”
This purportedly impending birth—not CCP censorship, not CCP surveillance, not CCP kidnapping of Chinese nationals in other countries, not CCP cyberattacks on American, European, and Asian organizations and networks, not CCP intellectual theft, not CCP genocides or forced organ transplants, and not CCP assaults and/or continuously escalating military and other pressure on the Republic of China and the Philippines and so forth—this non-impending “birth of A.G.I.” is what’s really important for Xi and Trump to hash out.
Let us please, you guys, not talk about the “golden oldies” (Friedman’s simperingly cynical characterization of tariffs, trade, Taiwan), Friedman idiotically advises. After all, why would the Taiwanese, Filipinos, Japanese, Europeans, or Americans want to feel that President Trump is taking appropriate diplomatic and other steps to deter Chinese aggression? No no no. Talk about the AI.
Friedman imagines himself saying to Trump and Xi: “Excuse me…. There is an earthshaking event coming—the birth of artificial general intelligence. The United States and China are the two superpowers closing in on A.G.I.—systems that will be as smart or smarter than the smartest human and able to learn and act on their own. Whatever you both may think you’ll be judged on by history, I assure you that whether you collaborate to create a global architecture of trust and governance over these emerging superintelligent computers, so humanity gets the best out of them and cushions their worst, will be at the top.”
There must be consciousness, and there must be intelligence and reasoning, before there can be “superintelligence” or “moral reasoning.” But never mind that now. We can talk about in five zillion years, when “real” artificial intelligence—as opposed to programmed mega-data-churning that coughs up advice to eat rocks and pour glue on pizza—will still be just around the corner, almost here, not quite, but almost, for real this time.
Dumb and dumber
Even dumber, much dumber, than the notion that the automatically operating circuits and lines of code are about to become aware and intelligent, even super-intelligent—is Friedman’s history-immune, current-events-immune notion that totalitarian China will happily and truly and beatifically do exactly the right globally regulatory thing, without concern for its censorship, propaganda, and data-stealing agenda or its totalitarian agenda more generally, in order to make the nonexistent field of artificial intelligence safe and secure for all in accordance with the Friedman guidelines.
Before these A.G.I. systems take hold and scale up, we need the two superpowers to get serious about devising a regulatory and technological framework that ensures an agreement for imbuing these systems with some kind of moral reasoning and embedded usage controls so they are prevented from being used by rogue actors for globally destabilizing activities or going rogue themselves. We need a system of governance that ensures that A.I. systems always operate and police themselves in alignment with both human and machine well-being.
“Machine well-being.” Whatever, dude. (It’s okay, reader. You can still throw your machines in the trash when they stop working.)
In addition to all the other things that Friedman concocts or forgets in his cutting-edge blarney, he is forgetting something that is so very easy to remember: “Don’t trust China! China is [expletive deleted]!”
Put it on a Post-it Note and attach it to your monitor or keyboard.
