China's brightest children are being recruited to weaponize AI

First of all the practical difference between believing in something and behaving as if one believes in that is often neglectable. Especially when either of both things can be said about the majority of a society.

Secondly, nobody is immoral, nobody is vengeful or senseless - but having said that - the enemies of the state of course do not deserve moral standards as they don't adhere by those standards themselves ... "just watch the news if you want to know how many children they killed with their latest terror attack!".

The truth is - everybody loves slaughter bots as long as the right people get slaughtered - and who is that? Well, for the majority it's those labelled bad in the information sources they consume ... and are Chinese news independent? No, they aren't.

The Americans and Israelis love their drones - which aren't philosophically different from slaughter bots - and as long as those remove terrorists or taliban nobody would question those.

>> China is full of extremely bright, hardworking people. It is not a nation of brain-washed automatons

Thats a ridiculous argument: they are 1.5MM, im pretty sure you can find a few milions smart enough who fit the description of the parent comment.

Its not racist or whatnot.. every nation has its smart fanatics

Often it is used to shut down a line of argument when the comparison is entirely valid though.

> Do you not believe the Chinese government to be corrupt, authoritarian, and/or oppressive?

I believe it's way too harmful to simply categorize government into "free" vs "bad/corrupt/authoritarian/oppressive". There're a large number of other factors to consider. I agree Chinese government has tons of problems, just like US government has tons of problems of its own, just different.

At the bottom line, Chinese government is making tons of efforts to improve the economy of the country and improve the life of all the citizens. "According to the World Bank, more than 500 million people were lifted out of extreme poverty as China's poverty rate fell from 88 percent in 1981 to 6.5 percent in 2012, as measured by the percentage of people living on the equivalent of US$1.90 or less per day in 2011 purchasing price parity terms."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_China

> Do you not believe the Chinese government to be corrupt, authoritarian, and/or oppressive?

I agree there're corruption in Chinese government. Anti-corruption is a one of the main focus of Chinese government in the past few years. Moreover, corruption has nothing to do with 'freedom' vs 'non-freedom'. There are way too many heavily corrupted democratic government in the world.

Is it authoritarian? Yes there is only one party in power - the CPC. The party has close to 100 million members throughout the country, which is close to 1/10 of the entire population. You can't possibly consider a party like that to be a single entity. There's also semi-democratic process: People elect representatives and they form National People's Congress - highest organ of state power in China.

Is it oppressive? Well, media censorship is a thing, and if you had to go on the street and protest the government in the same way you'd protest Trump, the government might invite you to "have a talk". But people still talk shit about the government all the time in private and on social media. The comments are likely to get deleted / banned. That sucks, but it is not something that could hugely impact the quality of life of regular citizens. You can still hear lots of dissident voices on the internet, and the government would often respond to that in positive ways.

In a historical context, the minority groups are mostly people lived in different areas. Typically Han was in the central/east region in China, and there were other groups in north/west and sometimes south. There had been lots of wars in the past, and lots of peace as well. The fairly recent Qin dynasty was actually founded by a minority group in the northeast, and they ruled Han along with all other minority groups for hundreds of years. Most minority groups are heavily influenced by culture of Han, whether they controlled large part of China or not. For example, after Qin dynasty controlled the entire China, the emperors inherited plenty of traditions from Han; they started speaking Chinese and learning from classical Han literature; and they influenced Han culture as well. There are exceptions like Genghis Khan -> They occupied China but didn't care about local culture at all, and soon they left.

All the dynasties founded in the region, no matter if it was mostly Han people or minority groups, are considered part of China's history now. Just that Han had much higher weight in history books.

In a modern context, the main theme from textbooks is that all the minority groups live peacefully together and united as one nation, no matter what the history is. This is mostly true in reality, except maybe a small number of people in the west might want separation. You can find people from all minority groups living in large cities in the east of China, where the economy is most advanced. They mostly appear not much different from Han people, even though they might still carry some traditions from their own culture. Sometimes Han people might get curious when they meet someone from a minority group, but mostly they won't treat them any differently.

Being a part minority group is generally a good thing in China -> Among other things, they get bonus points in college entrance exams, which is a very big deal for vast majority of Chinese.