AI Rush and the Chinese Society w/ Afra Wang
China seems to be living in the future. Facial recognition everywhere, a delivery drone overhead, a grandma paying for scallions by scanning a QR code, and AI woven into all of it. The society, the people, are astonishingly receptive to technology in a way that can make Silicon Valley look timid. AI is being radically embraced, hailed by the state as the engine of the "new quality productive force" that will carry the nation into its next chapter.
Is China the country building the future, the one the rest of the world keeps nervously watching? Or is it a brave new world where no one gets the option to say no, not to the technology, not to digital indulgence, and not to the grand future the state has already planned for you?
This talk examines not only whether Xi Jinping cares about AGI, but also the human stories behind Chinese society’s collision with—and embrace of—AI. It draws on three published pieces (linked below) by Afra Wang: one on the massive, cultish “AI class” industry; one on the “industrial-AI-slop complex”; and one on what independent vibe coders in China are really up to.
Readings:
New York Magazine: “The Country Cramming for the AI Revolution”
Big Think: “China is mass-producing slop at a scale the world has never seen”
The New Yorker: “What China’s Vibe-Coding Capital Can Tell Us About the A.I. Boom”.
Program:
4:30–5:00 p.m.: Arrival and mingling
5:00–6:00 p.m.: Talk by Afra Wang
6:00–6:30 p.m.: Moderated and audience Q&A (15 minutes of moderated Q&A between Afra Wang and Liz Yang; 15 minutes of open audience Q&A)
6:30 p.m. onward: Happy hour
⭑ about the speaker⭑
Afra Wang is a Bay Area-based writer and journalist who focuses on technological modernity through a humanistic lens, spanning China and Silicon Valley in the global AI age. She writes a Substack Concurrent.blog