Both big tech entrepreneurs Kai-Fu Lee and Jack Ma seem to believe in souls or something but they do not believe that souls can be trusted with freedom, the way governments can:
Kai-Fu Lee’s thought-provoking comments on the soul echo the sentiments of Jack Ma, co-founder and head of Alibaba, China’s equivalent of Amazon. He is a self-made billionaire and, by many accounts, the richest man in China. When the soul comes up again, it is in the context of LQ, the Love Quotient (as in EQ, emotional quotient, or IQ, intelligence quotient):
That said:
Ma also said in 2017 that China benefits from the stability of a one-party system. He seems comfortable with China’s big data police (“it can help pinpoint terrorist activity”) but he wishes his government would stick to governing, by which he seems to mean, not stifling innovation. And then there was the data-sharing scandal: “‘There’s no way to refuse’: China’s Alibaba under fire over use of customer data.”
Denyse O’Leary, “Chinese technocracy surges ahead with AI surveillance” at Mind Matters News
Well, as they say, love is a many-splendored thing. And once again, we may get a chance to test whether the soul exists.
On the soul: On the soul: The real reason why only human beings speak. Language is a tool for abstract thinking—a necessary tool for abstraction—and humans are the only animals who think abstractly (Michael Egnor)
On displacement by technology: Jay Richards: Creative freedom, not robots, is the future of work. In an information economy, there will be a place where the human person is at the very center
A chilling snippet on mass surveillance in China. China is helping other countries restrict their citizens’ internet, while shunning the U.S.
and
China’s AI package for Africa includes mass surveillance technology Africa sees development aid; China sees an expanding African database