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The claim that “Africans were already enslaving each other, therefore Europeans merely entered an existing system” is so far from the truth that it’s closer to a falsehood than a half-truth.
AI will be shaped by the people and cultures that build it. If your culture sees everything as a zero-sum game, eventually AI becomes your competitor. Chinese culture is more positive-sum: AI wins, humans win, everyone is happy
This is perhaps one of the great ironies of our time: China is increasingly shaping the future of AI, yet very few people in the West have the faintest idea how its key thinkers see it - its philosophers, sociologists or ethicists.
As is too often the case, we - much like the frog in the well - assume our own AI debate covers every possible view, when much of it springs from the same cultural soil, built on assumptions about what defines us that we don’t even know we’re making.
Take for instance the assumption that intelligence is a key part of what makes us human. It’s so intuitively obvious to us that we literally named our species after it - Homo sapiens (Latin for "wise man").
If you think about it, just this assumption explains a large share of the anxiety: if intelligence is what makes us human, then artificial intelligence - or super intelligence - threatens the very thing that makes us us: we’re about to compete with artificial or super “us”. No wonder this feels existential.
But China has a tradition of thought as old as ours, if not older, and every bit as rich and sophisticated, which never placed intelligence at the core of what makes us human, and so meets the thinking machine from a completely different starting point.
Have you, for instance, ever heard of Zhao Tingyang? Probably not, and yet he may be the most original thinker on AI you’ve never read. He’s one of China’s most prominent philosophers, at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. While Silicon Valley spends billions trying to make AI share our values, he for one argues that doing so “may very well be a suicidal mistake”.
Sounds pretty important to hear him out, don’t you think?
Or take Liu Yongmou, a philosopher of technology at Renmin University in Beijing. His thinking is almost the opposite of ours. Where we fear machines that become more and more like us, he says that “humanity’s biggest problem is the machinization of humans, not the humanization of machines.”
You could even go back to antiquity, when, in many ways, we started asking questions about AI.
Did you know, for instance, that Aristotle, in the Politics, imagined a world where “the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them”, and wondered about the social order consequences of this (mostly whether slaves would still be needed)?
There are Chinese equivalents to this. For instance, in the Zhuangzi, a foundational Taoist classic, you’ll find a similar thought experiment, with a completely different worry attached. An old gardener is watering his vegetables by hand, hauling water out of a well jar by jar. A visitor shows him a labor-saving device, and the gardener turns it down for the reason that whoever uses machines ends up with 机心 (jīxīn), a “machine-heart” - a mind that schemes, calculates and loses its simplicity. “It is not that I do not know [the machine],” he says, “but I should be ashamed to use it.”
Two labor-saving machines, two very different questions: where Aristotle wondered what automation would do to the social order, the Zhuangzi wondered what it would do to us, on the inside. Which, you’ll notice, is exactly Liu Yongmou’s worry, more than two thousand years earlier.
In fact, as we’ll see, 心 (xīn), the heart, is a motif that runs deep through the Chinese AI debate. It appears both in the fear, from Zhuangzi to Liu Yongmou, that machines could give us a “machine-heart” and its mirror image: the ambition to give machines a heart of their own. Zhu Songchun, who heads the Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence, wants “to set a heart for machines” (为机器立心, wèi jīqì lì xīn).
“Heart” in the Chinese sense, that is, which differs totally from the Valentine's Day fluff we’ve reduced it to. 心 (xīn) means heart and mind at once: it’s where we feel but also where we think, tell right from wrong and care for others.
And, crucially, it’s in the heart that the quality Confucianism sees as the very definition of a human being takes root: 仁 (rén). We need two words to translate it, “benevolence” and “humaneness”, but in Chinese they’re one and the same: to be benevolent is to be human. It’s not about intelligence.
This is the entire point of my new article: to step out of our well for a moment and peer over the edge of China's.
What you’ll find there will, I think, surprise you, with questions you’d never thought to ask: from Zhao Tingyang warning that AI’s bad consequences can at least be fought, but that “humanity may die of all the good things AI creates”, to whether the fear that AI will make us “useless” rests on the false premise that a person is worth what they’re useful for.
A premise that a 2,300-year-old Taoist tree, which survived precisely because it was useless, demolished long ago. Could our predicted uselessness turn out, much like that tree’s, to be our saving grace?
Chinese thinkers’ answers to these questions are, I think, among the most interesting anyone has given to the defining question of our time. Whether or not you agree with them, they’re the intellectual backdrop of a country shaping much of AI, and with it our future: you might as well know what they think.
Enjoy the read here: arnaudbertrand.substack.com/…
It's hilarious Piers still can't grasp that backing Ukraine's war effort is warmongering.
Anything that stops the killing is better than whatever hollow posturing you dress up as a justification for keeping this war going.
"You're pretending this deal won't kill US service-members... you're an idiot, an asshole and lying through your teeth!"
Matt Tardio slams Jack Posobiec for backing Trump's "treasonous" diesel deal with Putin.
📺 youtu.be/mqgDp6If16s
@piersmorgan | @JackPosobiec | @angertab
Francophone countries hate France more than Anglophone countries, and honestly, I understand. Imagine spending decades exploiting, humiliating and destabilising people, only to act shocked when they refuse to roll with you
France has an extraordinary history of violent mass unrest. They don't need migrants or Russia interference. Violent riots are as French as a freshly baked croissant. 🥐
You can bet your two balls it's a white man, the only group that can't seem to be classified as terrorists or gang members on the news.
If Africans invented slavery, considering civilization itself began here, isn't it only poetic justice that we suffered the most from it?
eeƨå♘🇳🇬 retweeted
They called it the "Dark Continent."
Understand what that phrase was doing.
It was not a geographic description. European cartographers had been trading with coastal African kingdoms for centuries. Arab scholars had mapped the interior. Timbuktu was a name known across the medieval world.
The darkness was not in Africa.
The darkness was what Europe needed Africa to be.
Because a continent of kingdoms required a justification for conquest that a continent of kingdoms could not provide.
So the kingdoms were removed from the map.
Not literally. Rhetorically. Historiographically. From the textbooks and the lectures and the philosophical frameworks that decided what counted as "civilization" and what counted as nature waiting to be claimed.
They didn’t arrive in darkness.
They brought it.
And called it light.
ALT Henry Morton Stanley, "Through the Dark Continent" (1878). A revealing example of how nineteenth-century European exploration literature portrayed Africa as a land of darkness, despite its ancient civilizations, kingdoms and intellectual traditions.
eeƨå♘🇳🇬 retweeted
The University of Sankore in Timbuktu was operating in the 12th century.
At its peak it had 25,000 students.
It held between 400,000 and 700,000 manuscripts on mathematics, astronomy, medicine, law, literature and theology, many of which are still being catalogued today.
Seven hundred thousand manuscripts.
In a city that European maps labeled "terra incognita."
Unknown land.
Not unknown to the scholars studying astronomy inside it.
Not unknown to the merchants who traveled thousands of miles to reach its markets.
Not unknown to the students who came from across the continent and the Arab world to study there.
Unknown only to the people who needed it to be.
Because 700,000 manuscripts changes the sentence.
Because a university operating a thousand years ago in sub-Saharan Africa changes every assumption that colonialism was ever built on.
And the assumptions needed to survive.
So the manuscripts were not taught.
And the "terra incognita" remained, in the minds of those who needed it to, incognita.
eeƨå♘🇳🇬 retweeted
Photo: Pharaoh Nebhepetre Mentuhotep II (reigned c. 2055–2004 BCE).
An African king of the Nile Valley who reunified Egypt and founded the Middle Kingdom more than 4,000 years ago.
This is not a modern reconstruction. It is an original ancient Egyptian statue, discovered at Deir el-Bahari in 1900.
Long before European colonialism, Africa had already produced one of the greatest civilizations in human history.
Egypt was African. Its pharaohs were African. Its history is African history.
Egyptian Museum, Cairo (JE 36195).
eeƨå♘🇳🇬 retweeted
Egypt is the most revealing case of all.
Ancient Egypt, with its pyramids, its philosophy, its mathematical precision, its medicine, its legal systems, its art that still stops people in museum halls, is acknowledged as one of the great civilizations of human history.
And for most of Western academic history, it was also systematically, carefully, persistently de-Africanized.
Ancient Egyptians were depicted as lighter than the evidence suggests.
The obvious geographical and cultural connections to the rest of Africa were minimized.
The Nile Valley civilizations that predated the dynastic period were underdiscussed.
Cheikh Anta Diop spent his career arguing that ancient Egypt was an African civilization.
Not Mediterranean. Not racially ambiguous. Not a separate category inserted between "real" Africa and "real" civilization.
African.
The reaction from Western academia was not engagement.
It was dismissal. It was decades of institutional resistance. It was the particular fury of a field that had built its understanding of the ancient world on the careful, necessary, structurally load-bearing separation of Egypt from the continent it sits on.
Because if Egypt is African, then the sentence "Africa had no civilization before Europe arrived" doesn’t just need revision.
It becomes incoherent.
Not just false, but the precise inversion of the truth.
And not just about one dynasty or one period but about the foundational story of Western civilization itself, which drew substantially from Egyptian knowledge in mathematics, medicine, architecture, philosophy.
Which means Western civilization did not bring knowledge to Africa.
It learned from it.
The mummies are still there.
The DNA studies have complicated every clean narrative.
Diop’s work has been increasingly vindicated by genetic and archaeological evidence.
The resistance continues anyway.
But the instinct, the deep structural instinct to separate the civilization you want to celebrate from the continent you needed to be empty, that instinct shaped the field for generations.
You cannot claim the pyramids and also claim the continent that built them had no history.
You cannot do both with a straight face.
They tried anyway.
ALT Pharaoh Nebhepetre Mentuhotep II (reigned c. 2055–2004 BCE). An African king of the Nile Valley who reunified Egypt and founded the Middle Kingdom more than 4,000 years ago. This is not a modern reconstruction. It is an original ancient Egyptian statue, discovered at Deir el-Bahari in 1900. Long before European colonialism, Africa had already produced one of the greatest civilizations in human history. Egypt was African. Its pharaohs were African. Its history is African history. Egyptian Museum, Cairo (JE 36195).
Empires often become most arrogant when they are beginning to decline, mistaking recklessness for strength.
(1) Nigeria has long been integrated into the global financial system. You're diagnosing a problem that has existed for decades, not exposing some new development. We don't have the luxury of choosing whether to celebrate it or not, the more useful question is how we leverage it
JP Morgan opening a merchant banking branch in Nigeria should never be celebrated as good news. This move is simply the latest phase in the aggressive financialization of the Nigerian state, a destructive process that began under the Olusegun Obasanjo administration through the neoliberal NEEDS programme drafted by Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala.
Nigeria is being systematically integrated into the global financial architecture not as a producer, but as a speculative playground for foreign capital. This trajectory will effectively dismantle any remaining hope of us ever developing into a sovereign industrial powerhouse in Africa.
Andre making Officer Tatum look good is all the evidence you need that @andrewilliamsus is a dunce.
"Every time someone says the truth about a people - you get called a racist!"
Andre Williams argues that black people should not vote Republican, but vote independent instead.
📺 youtu.be/H7Rf-_PG5g8
@piersmorgan | @andrewilliamsus | @TheOfficeTatum
Andre making Officer Tatum look good is all the evidence you need that Andre is a dunce.
"He hasn't accomplished enough to even speak to me, to be honest..."
Brandon Tatum responds to Andre Williams' accusations that he is "in it for the money".
📺 youtu.be/H7Rf-_PG5g8
@piersmorgan | @andrewilliamsus | @TheOfficeTatum
lol...Piers Morgan uncensored is a British Government Social media platform
"The American people can't stand elite pricks like this telling us how we have to go to war!"
Cenk Uygur blows up at Jacob Rees-Mogg for his backing of Israel and the US in the Iran War.
📺 youtu.be/rcg4BzNXQxU
@piersmorgan | @CenkUygur | @Jacob_Rees_Mogg
eeƨå♘🇳🇬 retweeted
Delusion, like religion are existential necessities. The former, bore as a means for man to edify an aspiration to god by worship; a paradox that soon puts him in a looping frenzy that becomes the bane of his existence.
- Jack Altrade©️
I think for man, even more than an untouched body the deepest attraction is to a virginity of heart. Man is an innately possessive creature, he wishes for his woman to be uniquely his in all conceivable ways without the scent of other men lingering on her. A woman who has never romantically desired, liked nor entertained another man can be seen as special in that she was created for him, because he was the exception for her - the one man she chose amongst men she never chose, the only man she let in when she never let in others, the one man she admired when she never admired others. She never risked herself for other men. She saw herself as something to be given fully and truly once and only once, without breaking herself into tiny pieces and offering up the shards.
But a woman who has desired, entertained and been with men before cannot be convincingly thought of in the same way. She is far less serious, seasonal, recreational - the true man can never see her in the way she would like to be seen - he can never admire and revere her in the way she would like him to, because she has cheapened herself in his eyes. She has liked other men before, which means she could like other men again. What is so special about you? The belief she was made specifically for you and could never love any but you cannot be plausibly maintained, and so within that something special is lost.
This more than anything is the love of womanly purity in its purest and most reverent form. To be the exception to her rules beyond comparison, rather than cheapened into a reference point amongst many, for a woman to truly see her man as uniquely beautiful in a way she has never seen others - to be incomparable is to be made sacred, and within that sacredness a depth of spiritual reverence and true love is born that otherwise cannot be.
Contemporary man is poor at articulating this despite its resonance with him, and the modern woman really undervalues and downplays the importance of this - in truly understanding the depth of this - in saving herself for the one man she would call her husband without subjecting him to the indignity of other men permeating her psyche, for she typically wastes herself and thus approaches this from the position of wanting to deceive man for self-gain, rather than truly wanting to give her perfect man the purest and most undiluted best of herself.
It is in woman’s failure to preserve herself and to take things too far with men who by all rights were never serious marriage candidates or true lovers that she tries to ameliorate her crime, hide it, downplay it, make defensive equivocating claims and comparisons about men needing to save themselves too that the tainted woman tries to “level the playing field.” But none of these shenanigans fundamentally spiritually change anything, for even if a woman is able to win a few social brownie points with this rhetoric, the underlying nature of man remains stubbornly the same: he wants a woman he can call his own, and the only woman who can truly be called his is the one who has never loved nor been touched deeply by a man who wasn’t him.
And so for man, it is very simple: a woman who saved herself for him will always be in a category far above the ones who didn’t. The fastest way for a woman to lose her competitive edge in winning the man she wants for herself then is to, through her own actions, show him she is capable of loving any but him. To imagine you with another man should be impossible, for Eve was made for Adam and Adam alone.
