Issue link: http://cp.revolio.com/i/5039
ai Bio enhanceD nano neuro humor ForeVer young 20 winter 2009 ai "below average in problem solving and creative thinking," "very conservative, unwilling to considering doing anything that is not established practice." One of them also noted that "local above-average talent insists on working for American, European, Japanese, or Korean (in that order) firms rather than Chinese firms. So, the best chance for AI breakthrough here is with a foreign research effort." I have heard this complaint about a "lack of creativity" before, but it runs counter to my own experience at Xiamen university. There, while I've encountered some conservatism, I've also met some extremely creative and individualistic young professors and students. In my experience, researchers in China are just as creative as anywhere else — but there are subtle sociocultural issues at play, with different implications in the corporate and university contexts. Chinese culture, in its current incarnation, tends to spawn social structures that suppress rather than encourage the expression of personal creativity. It also doesn't tend to support Western- style teamwork. There's a proverb to the effect that "a lone Chinese is as powerful as a dragon; but three Chinese together can't match a bug." These are real issues, yet ones that can be worked around with care, using different methods depending on the context. It must be understood that, regarding personal creativity as other matters, Chinese history has been powerfully cyclical. In his controversial recent book 1434, Gavin Menzies argues that the Italian Renaissance was launched by a fleet of Chinese ships that sailed to Italy and distributed advanced knowledge including encyclopedias from which leonardo da vinci indirectly derived many of his celebrated illustrations of mechanical devices, flying machines, and so forth. Whether or not this thesis is true, Menzies presents compelling evidence regarding the advanced level of Chinese engineering and science during that time period, before a change of administration in Beijing ended the period of wild invention and exploration and brought a new era of conservatism to China. My point is that Chinese "cultural DNA" has plenty of innovation and creativity in it, and one must be careful to distinguish stable characteristics of Chinese culture from cyclically- shifting ones. The pendulum of Chinese culture swings in a wide arc. In the corporate software development context, one strategy for working around counterproductive cultural tendencies and bringing out Chinese creativity is the adoption of "agile" software development methods. A 2008 article in InfoQ summarized the experiences of five Chinese software firms who adopted the "Scrum" development methodology — a very dynamic teamwork-based approach to making software that requires constant adaptive creativity on the part of the participants. Three found the approach successful; two did not. Those who didn't find success complained that the development teams or managers understood the formalities but not the essence of the agile approach — the cultural disconnect was too great. And this is surely related to the reason why Chinese universities are so eager to bring in Western professors, like Hugo de Garis. It's not just the research ideas the Westerners bring, it's the different intuitions, experiences and habits regarding directing a research lab and a research program. In this sense Hugo's emphasis on China bringing "creative brilliant Westerners ... to China to build artificial brains" may be savvy. If China can leverage its economic growth and openness to innovative research directions to recruit a sufficient number of Western research mavericks, then powerful things may happen. Imagine a situation in which every Chinese city has a number of labs, focused on Singularity-relevant technologies, in which Western research leaders are hard at work bringing young Chinese scientists up to speed on Western ways of doing creative team R&D. In this quite plausible scenario, the prospect of a Chinese Singularity doesn't seem so farfetched. As well as AGI, it's also worth noting the differences between Western and Chinese attitudes on another radical future technology: life extension. Westerners tend to greet talk of immortality with skepticism or even moral disapproval — after all, the standard Christian story is that God wants us to die and go to heaven. But the Chinese memeplex is stocked with thousands of years of Taoist tales of immortality. Traditional Chinese methods of