Jumping to the Future We Can(not) See: Early Artificial Intelligence Imagination of Technicians in China (1950-1980s)

• In Event: Framing Scientific Practice

English Abstract

The development of artificial intelligence has been deemed a part of the Chinese project of modernization and played a significant role in the construction of the national myth of progress that legitimatizes the rule of the CCP. Therefore, in China and the Soviet Union, over a long period, it is hard to separate AI technology from various political discourses and doctrines. This article examines the transition of the imagination of AI in China by technicians in different historical stages. We will demonstrate an enormous change has taken place in how AI is conceived and envisaged in the past decades: AI has first been linked to modernity and treated as a symbol of technological progress, then to ethical codes, and eventually to a new mode of governance. On the one hand, we show these imaginings are typological variations and have subtle differences because of China’s political turmoil. And it is also due to the tightness and narrowness of the “machine room”: the computer machines developed are dismantled once they become outdated. In all, technicians use these over-updating imageries to drive their technology practices. In addition, while evolving AI systems promise future great technological development and social change for Maoist China, they also test the confidence and risk estimates of political groups, especially given the adaptive nature of the proletariat to computing technology. Thus, we also further consider the relationship between the development of artificial intelligence, technological imagination, and the possibilities of adaptation under the planned economic system in this study.

Authors

• Qing Xiao, University of Oxford

• Tianren Luo, Fudan University

• Jiyi Yang, Nankai University

• Jingjia Xiao, Fudan University