Civilizational AI

Discussion

Nathan Gardels:

.. on Kai-Fu Lee on Civilizational AI.

"LLMs will indeed carry the imprint of cultural-political values, he posited, not only in China, but everywhere. Different cultural zones with different values will censor different things. While the Chinese state might censor any criticism of the Party, in the West there is a kind of culturally driven “woke” or “anti-woke” censorship over sensitive speech on race and gender. In the Islamic world, there will be censorship over blasphemy against the Prophet Muhammad. Each “great space” will align what is acceptable or not in its LLM models according to their sensitivities.

While computational stacks are spinning a planetary web of communication, a singular monosystem is not what is emerging. Neither will the new configurations merely replicate historically defined territorial boundaries. Rather, the new map will blur into zones of influence where the weight of the major powers will be tempered by the diverse virtual territories of computational stacks adapted to the sovereignty of their own cultivated ways."

(https://www.noemamag.com/a-diverse-world-of-sovereign-ai-zones/)

Example

Vietnam's Policy on AI Sovereignty

Nathan Gardels:

Vietnam is claiming 'AI Sovereignty':

"Who gets to define the terms of intelligence itself?

The stakes are stack-level choices — black-box dependence or modular improvisation; opacity or legibility; someone else’s roadmap or a sovereign design of your own … The decision is the difference between consuming intelligence as a service and composing it as an act of sovereignty. One rents a mind, the other trains its own in the wild.

“This is, in essence, a claim to AI sovereignty — the ability to build and govern infrastructures on Vietnam’s own terms while still enabling cross-border flows of data, talent and computation. AI sovereignty here does not mean isolation, but authorship — deciding which data, models and rules shape, and will shape, how machine intelligence is built and deployed."