AI will help boost global connectivity beyond boundaries
New technologies such as artificial intelligence are of course very much in the news at present.
One of the focal points of interest on this is whether China is about to become a technological leader.
I discovered another interesting take on this when I met up with Zhao Tingyang, one of China’s leading contemporary philosophers, just after Spring Festival. The professor at the Institute of Philosophy at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences told me over coffee at Cup One in Beijing how one of China’s famous ancient philosophical concepts could be brought to life by new technology.
He was referring to tianxia, which means “everything under heaven” in English and which was the concept of order in imperial China.
He believes that new technologies will lead to new forms of global connectivity between people that will make competing individual nation states less important. Everybody will effectively become “under heaven”.
“I am not sure how far in the future this is, whether 50 or 100 years,” he said.
Zhao rediscovered an interest in tianxia in the 1990s when he read The Clash of Civilizations by political philosopher Samuel Huntington from the United States.
Civilizations warring with each other could only lead to a failed world order, Zhao said.
He has since written a number of papers and books on the subject, including Redefining a Philosophy for World Governance, which is about to be published in English by Palgrave Macmillan.
Zhao recognizes that tianxia is not currently the dominant orthodoxy, with cultural clashes still dominating the postCold War world.
He, in fact, sees US President Donald Trump as the embodiment of “an old-fashioned hero from early modern times, with his misperception of the world as a battlefield instead of a shared community”.
But he can see a return of the philosophy which was embraced by both the Western and Eastern Zhou dynasties (c. 11th century256 BC).
Under the Zhou, according to Zhao, there was an attempt to bring the known civilized world together under one tent.
And he believes that technology in future will offer the same opportunity to do that again, in marked contrast to those who believe there will be a China-US technology race.
“I don’t see it that way. Technology will require everything to be global rather than be restricted by national boundaries,” he said.
“It will be individuals within these countries that have the connections. I envisage nation states being reduced to the status of local governments,” he said.
In the modern world, tianxia seems almost too Utopian (to borrow a philosophical concept from Thomas More) but, if achievable, it does seem an improvement on the world today.
Zhao, however, insists that tianxia is actually a rational world view. It is linked to the Confucian concept of ren, which means we are not defined by our own individual existence but in relation to others and that ultimately people want to live and let live.
Which country comes up with the best AI technology is therefore of no importance at all since it is potentially for the benefit of all mankind.
Certainly, it’s an uplifting idea on which to start the new year.