system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
CMV: It's inevitable that the US loses the AI race to China.

One of the major realms in which the US and China compete now is in the R&D of new technologies, with the most researched and hyped up being AI, specifically in the form of deep learning neural networks - a complex bunch of algorithms that essentially "learn" by being fed enormous quantities of data. 

The logic is simple. The better your data is, the better your system's performance is. There are entire subfields of Software Engineering such as Data Engineering that deal specifically in extracting "good" data from a messy dataset. But the problem is that our civilization hasn't exactly developed the internet with creation of clean data as a goal. Enter China.

China is currently at a unique point in history - they're simultaneously undergoing both an industrial revolution and a digital revolution. Vast numbers of people are being brought from poverty straight into a futuristic world of computers. And the Chinese, realizing the strategic potential of this reality, has been able to design their entire digital communications infrastructure around one purpose: the maximization of data collection about individuals, all for the purpose of becoming a world leader in AI by 2025-2030.

This isn't conjecture. All the details of this plan are public as part of the well known Chinese "Made in China 2025" policy. 

The Chinese aim to become the world leader in AI. They have demonstrated that they aren't afraid to use digital technology in dystopian ways to maximize data collection about individuals. And they've been able to design their entire internet infrastructure around this purpose.

I just don't see how the West can compete. We simply aren't willing to sacrifice further privacy - the new post-Snowden environment has seen to that. How can an individualistic democracy that values privacy possibly compete in a race that, by definition, demands sacrificing privacy to win? Even if we decided to make data collection a national priority in the US, we're outnumbered by the Chinese 5 to 1. 

And with one of the major uses of AI turning out to be subversion of the truth and the spreading of lies, I'm a little pessimistic about the future of Western Democracy. Please, change my view.
gpt
The major advances in AI are going to come in the form of novel new forms of AI not just inflated versions of the ones we currently know. Neural Nets have been around since the 80s-90s and the computational science describing them have been around since at least the 60s-70s. The big reason they've taken off now is because of the digitization of data, but if you're expecting these nets to start doing some next level shit - there needs to be a seachanging technological advancement beyond them. 

That new technology might not be as predicated on bulk data as current AI.