Is China Taking the Lead in AI?

Context: Is China Taking the Lead in AI?

I guess it really depends on what we consider progress to be and in what ways such progress is substantive and meaningful or superficial and fragile. It may be an undeniable fact that competition and adversarial sabre-rattling is as profoundly and normatively written into our modern psyches as it is an axiomatic and generative or causal factor in an accelerating race that is occurring on multiple parallel and divergent technical and technological vectors.

It is entirely unrealistic, I imagine, but beyond the pragmatic necessity of much contemporary technology being deployed to manage or counter the influence, effect and consequences of other technologies – I wonder what we might all be doing with the money, knowledge and resources invested here if we were not tracing an endemic, belligerent technological arc across history.

Most technological systems are now purposed to negotiating the consequences of other technological systems. The only real winner of these races (and all of their vigorous self-promotiona