AI Book Club discussion recording of 'Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future', by Dan Wang

by Tom Johnson on Apr 26, 2026
categories: ai-book-club

Note that most of these shownotes are AI-generated based on the transcript.

• Recording
• Audio only
• Discussion questions
• Discussion takeaways
• Narrative essay version of the discussion
• Transcript

Recording

Audio only

If you just want the audio, here it is:

Discussion questions

For discussion questions related to Breakneck, see this Google Doc titled Book Club Discussion Guide: Breakneck by Dan Wang.

Discussion takeaways

• “Lawyerly Society” vs. “Engineering State”: The book contrasts the US and China by characterizing America as a nation driven by legal frameworks and regulations, while China is led by engineers focused on rapid building and execution.
• Shenzhen as the “city of the future”: While Beijing preserves old Chinese history and Shanghai feels like New York, Shenzhen is the modern tech hub (the “Silicon Valley of China”) that embodies the country’s industrial and technological revolution.
• China’s EV dominance: China skipped the internal combustion engine era and went straight to electric vehicles. Brands like BYD offer advanced, customizable, and inexpensive EVs that the US market can’t compete with on price or features.
• Mastery of “process knowledge”: Through manufacturing for companies like Apple, China has developed deep, localized expertise in how to build things at scale. The US has largely lost this hands-on manufacturing capability and would struggle to quickly replicate it.
• The “996” work culture: China’s manufacturing output is partly fueled by a demanding 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six-days-a-week work ethic that American workers and manufacturing infrastructure wouldn’t support.
• Mass surveillance is ubiquitous — and AI supercharges it: Personal privacy expectations are fundamentally different. Cities have thousands of cameras, and AI now makes it possible to process that footage in real time for facial identification and tracking. The discussion draws parallels to Iran’s crackdown on hijab protesters and notes Anthropic’s recent refusal to let the Pentagon use its AI for mass surveillance.
• Total app reliance causes “tech fatigue”: Everyday commerce in China—from checking a price tag to ordering coffee—requires scanning QR codes through “everything apps” like WeChat or Alipay. While efficient, it strips away casual human interaction and can feel sterile and exhausting.
• The danger of social engineering: Treating complex societal issues as engineering problems often backfires. Initiatives like the One Child Policy or the Zero COVID lockdowns highlight the human costs of ignoring cultural and social dynamics.
• Social engineering mirrors the AI alignment problem: One participant drew a parallel: China’s social engineering failures (fixating on a single goal while ignoring unintended consequences) closely mirror the AI alignment challenge of steering powerful systems toward benevolent outcomes without catastrophic side effects.
• Overproduction and underconsumption: China builds at scale, leading to housing surpluses and empty infrastructure projects (like the failed ski resort mentioned). The country struggles to consume what it produces, making it dependent on exports.
• Military surge capacity: China’s industrial base gives it an advantage in “surge capacity.” In the event of a conflict, their ability to mass-produce weapons and ammunition would outpace American manufacturing capabilities.

Narrative essay version of the discussion

If the discussion recording were an article, this is what it would read like. (Note: AI-generated.)

When everyone can be an engineer, the engineering state loses its edge — and the real question becomes what we choose to build.

In Shenzhen, you can hear a pin drop on a bullet train. Not because of some enforced quiet car rule — because everyone is glued to their phone. Ordering food, checking prices, paying for coffee, unlocking a shared bike — it all runs through WeChat or Alipay. The city, which was a fishing village twenty-five years ago, now has skyscrapers, electric vehicles everywhere, and the unmistakable hum of a place engineered to be efficient. It is, by many accounts, the China of the future. But spending time there raises an uncomfortable question: is this actually progress, or just optimization?

Dan Wang’s Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future frames the US-China relationship through a useful metaphor. America is a lawyerly society — governed by legal frameworks, regulations, precedent. China is an engineering state — led by people who build, execute, and iterate. The metaphor explains a lot. It explains how China went from manufacturing iPhones for Apple to dominating the global EV market in a generation, how it built a high-speed rail network that makes Amtrak look like a relic, and how it can produce sixty million cars a year — enough to meet two-thirds of the world’s demand. But the metaphor also reveals the cracks.

The engineering mindset works well when the problem is well-defined. Build a bridge. Manufacture a battery. Lay track between Beijing and Shanghai. China excels at these because it has something the US has largely lost: process knowledge — the deep, hands-on understanding of how to make things at scale. Wang illustrates this with a temple in China made from wood that rots every twenty years. The temple gets rebuilt each generation, and that rebuilding is the point. It ensures the knowledge of construction gets passed down. When Apple outsourced iPhone manufacturing to China, it inadvertently handed over this kind of knowledge. The US kept the design; China kept the know-how. Now, even if we wanted to bring manufacturing home, we’d struggle to replicate the expertise.

This matters for AI because the race isn’t just about algorithms — it’s about infrastructure. China has energy production capacity that dwarfs what the US currently has online, and energy is what feeds data centers. Wind turbine fields stretch across the countryside between Beijing and Shanghai. EVs are everywhere — not as luxury items, but as the default. A standard BYD costs around twelve thousand dollars. In the US, an EV is still a premium purchase. China skipped the internal combustion engine entirely and jumped to electric, and many of the companies making these cars were battery manufacturers first. The US auto industry, protected by tariffs and decades of inertia, hasn’t had to compete at this level. Wang argues we should partner with Chinese manufacturers the way China partnered with Apple — learn from the collaboration rather than hiding behind trade barriers.

But the engineering state has a problem that no amount of process knowledge can solve: it treats society like a system to be optimized. The one-child policy was an engineering solution to overpopulation — logical on paper, catastrophic in practice. Forced abortions, sterilization, and a demographic imbalance that China is still dealing with decades later. The zero-COVID lockdowns followed the same pattern: identify a variable, engineer a solution, enforce compliance. People revolted. In both cases, the engineers in charge failed to account for the thing that makes societies different from machines — people don’t behave like inputs.

This is where the parallel to AI alignment gets interesting. The challenge of steering AI toward good outcomes is, at its core, the same problem China faces with social engineering. You fixate on a goal — reduce population, eliminate COVID, maximize a reward function — and you optimize for it. But optimization without nuance produces side effects you didn’t model. China’s surveillance infrastructure makes this dynamic more potent, not less. Thirty cameras at a single intersection. Thousands visible in a single day. They’re not hidden. And with AI now capable of processing that footage in real time — identifying faces, tracking movement — the tools of the engineering state are sharper than ever. When Anthropic recently refused to let the Pentagon use its AI for mass surveillance, it was drawing a line that China crossed long ago.

And yet, the picture isn’t simple. The tech fatigue of daily life in Shenzhen — the exhaustion of needing an app for everything — suggests that even the beneficiaries of the engineering state feel its weight. The silence on that bullet train isn’t peace. It’s the absence of the casual human interaction that makes cities feel alive. Beijing has twenty-four million people; Shanghai has twenty-six million. At that scale, efficiency isn’t optional. But it comes at a cost that’s hard to quantify.

The real lesson of Breakneck may not be about China at all. We’re entering a period where AI gives everyone engineering capabilities — anyone can build an app, automate a workflow, optimize a process. The question isn’t whether we can engineer the future. It’s whether we’re thoughtful enough about what we’re engineering it into.

Transcript

Tom: Hi, this is a recording of the AI Book Club, A Human in the Loop, held on Sunday, April 19, 2026, discussing Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future, published by Dan Wang on August 26, 2025. So it’s a very recent book. This AI Book Club is just an informal group of tech-minded people who want to read books related to AI and technology. I’ve been widening the scope and the topics so that the books aren’t strictly AI focused, but this one seemed like it had many applications and relevance.

The discussion lasts about an hour. There are three to four people. If you’ve been listening and you think maybe you want to attend, feel free to do so. The next book will be Life 3.0 by Max Tegmark. You can find all these details at idratherbewriting.com/ai-book-club. Also, if you have recommendations for books you’d like to read as part of this club, let me know. Always open to exploring new books and looking for recommendations.

You can also find all the previous recordings — we’ve had this book club for over a year now, so we’ve got a lot of archives with recordings and rich details and notes. Again, all linked on the site idratherbewriting.com/ai-book-club. All right, thanks for listening. Here’s the discussion recording.

Tom: We got three people today. I’ll see if anybody else joins, but let me pull up my notes. I did share some brief notes — I was trying to come up with good themes to tie it into AI because this book’s not necessarily explicitly about AI.

So David, this is your first time here. I do record these and share them out, so just make sure you know that. You don’t want to trash talk your employer and be like, “Wait, what? You record these?” Nobody ever trash talks their employer, but you know what I’m saying.

Well, anybody have any high-level thoughts on this book? Did people finish the book? Did they like it? Does anybody have any things they want to share about it?

Sharon: I liked it, I enjoyed it. I almost finished. I think I had some issues with his overall thesis — the engineering versus the lawyerly governance — but overall I liked it. I liked his different perspective on the conflict between our two countries, or not conflict, but differences.

Tom: Yeah, that metaphor of the lawyerly society versus the engineering state seemed pretty powerful and interesting. I hadn’t heard that before. Anybody else? What are your high-level thoughts — love it, hate it?

Lajay: Yeah, I haven’t finished the book. I’m roughly a little over halfway through. I was traveling in the last two months, and funny enough I actually spent three weeks in China since my last joining of the book club back in March. So I have some fresh thoughts having traveled there and then reading the book.

I think overall I enjoyed the book and I think it’s accurate. I appreciated a lot of the historical retelling — there were a lot of facts about China that I just simply didn’t know, that I appreciated learning. Coming to understand how they arrived at this engineering state, as he puts it. Yeah, I thought it was a good read and I’m excited to finish.

Tom: Well, I’m excited to have you here because you’ve traveled to China and been there recently, so you can tell us. I have never been to China. I was actually talking with some colleagues at work about China and I was telling them, man, this book makes it sound like China’s the city of the future — all modern infrastructure. It made it sound really modern there. And they quickly were telling me a lot of alternative viewpoints. But what was your impression? Was there a lot of modern infrastructure?

Lajay: Kind of. I had the chance to go to Shenzhen, Beijing, and Shanghai, as well as Hong Kong. I know Hong Kong technically isn’t China — it is, but it’s since been annexed. Between Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen, they’re incredibly different cities. Beijing is very much old China. They do a really great job at preserving their history, and there’s lots of temples. It feels much more dated compared to Shanghai, which feels like New York City.

And then Shenzhen — I think when people describe China, they’re describing Shenzhen. Twenty or twenty-five years ago, Shenzhen was a fishing village, and now they’ve got skyscrapers, EVs whirling everywhere. The China of the future that we hear about is what I felt Shenzhen was. I think the book also, in chapter two or three, when he talks about the technology revolution and the industrial revolution that China has undergone in the last twenty years or so, he talks about the introduction of the iPhone and all of the tech components manufacturing that takes place there — that all happens in Shenzhen. Shenzhen feels very much like this tech-forward city. They call it the Silicon Valley of China, and it feels like that.

But at least Beijing and Shanghai, the other cities I went to, felt very much like your normal cities — with a lot of electric vehicles. They have EVs everywhere, but I wasn’t seeing flying cars or anything out of the norm. They’ve made some significant progress with transportation, I would say. The EVs are everywhere, the high-speed rail is really impressive. I got the chance to take some trains. Even their metros and subways inside the cities are pretty advanced. But beyond infrastructure, it just feels like a city.

Tom: Were you reading this book Breakneck while you were there?

Lajay: No, actually, I was reading another book while I was there that was about China. I started Breakneck just before I went, and I’m mainly wondering if it’s allowed to exist there. Can people read it freely there, or is it controversial?

I was reading another book called Let Only Red Flowers Bloom by, I think, Emily Fang. She’s a Chinese national who was exiled for her journalism, and I know that book specifically is not permitted to be carried or read in China. And actually, that’s a good point — I think Dan Wang with Breakneck kind of held back because of that. You can only be so critical of China, otherwise you risk the ability to travel and live there. So I think that would be one of my critiques of the book — that he framed things in a way that wasn’t too critical, where other authors I think wouldn’t hold back like that.

Tom: That is an interesting point. He never directly addresses whether he’s holding back or not, right? That would have been interesting to know. He did say — I don’t know if it was in the book or a podcast I listened to — his website, danwang.com or something, was shut down in China.

He started this book as a series of essays while he was living in China during COVID. I guess he was traveling to China during COVID and got stuck there and was writing a bunch of essays to his friends and family. Then this series of essays developed into a book, but he was publishing those essays on his website and his website got shut down.

I thought he was pretty critical of China, actually. I don’t know where the line is — how critical you can be. It felt balanced. But I don’t know. David and Sharon, have you been to China before or have any experience in any of these cities?

Sharon: I was there about twenty years ago. I was in Beijing and I had this same feeling as Lajay — it definitely feels like this older China. I also went to Wuhan and I think Xi’an, so I didn’t get to Shanghai, which I wish I would have gone to. And I think Shenzhen probably at that time was still in its infancy.

David: I haven’t been to China at all, but I lived in Japan and I traveled around Asia — Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia — when I was younger. But I’ve never been to China.

Tom: Wow. I lived in Japan for three months about twenty years ago, just teaching English. Very different from China, I imagine. Lajay, why did you go to China? Were you just a tourist, or did you have family connections there?

Lajay: Not family. I was a bit of a tourist, but one of my best friends is studying at Tsinghua University. She’s a Schwarzman Scholar. Tsinghua is in Beijing — it’s considered the Harvard of China. She had worked for like five years to get that specific scholarship, and she earned it, so our whole friend group was like, we’re gonna go visit her. It’s been a long time coming. It was really good to go visit her and see her there. We did have her as a guide for a couple of days, but otherwise we were on our own. And you don’t just casually go to China.

There’s a lot of prep involved, especially as an American. We didn’t want to go through the full visa process because some of us waited to the last minute. So we ended up only going for ten days because as Americans there are restrictions on how long we can travel within the country. There’s something called the transit visa where you can go from country A to China to country B, and country A and B must be different.

So you can’t go from the US to China back to the US. For that reason, we ended up going from the US to Hong Kong — that was our country A — into China for just ten days, and then back to the US. We could only stay for ten days. There was a point where we wanted to extend the trip, and one of the friends came late so she could have, but we couldn’t because of this ten-day window. We didn’t want to mess with the Chinese government. So we stuck to our ten days. It was fun.

Tom: Wow, what an opportunity. That is one of the places I want to visit, but I get that it requires a lot of preparation. Not sure I would want to go through all that. But let’s jump back into some of these topics of the book and compare them with what perspectives you recently had.

They talked about how the energy infrastructure of China — maybe I’m extrapolating here, I was trying to connect the dots with AI — but the energy production capacity is just magnitudes more robust than here in the US. I don’t know where or how China gets its energy, but apparently they have an abundance of it, and with that energy you can power the sort of data centers that AI would need to run all this heavy compute infrastructure.

Either Wang or others have positioned that as a major advantage that China has, especially when you look at how many advancements in AI come from just having more compute power rather than clever algorithms. It’s hard because, having never been to China, it’s not like I look out and see our energy grid constantly failing or anything. So I don’t know how well this point lands. Do you have any thoughts on this energy disparity between these two countries and its relevance?

Lajay: I don’t know. I kind of feel like you — I don’t know how to really observe the energy disparity in action. One thing I did observe is pretty much every car on the road was an EV, and I thought that was so cool. There are so many different models. BYD is the Chinese brand that we all hear about, but then there are several sub-brands — kind of how we have Chrysler, Chevy, and a bunch of other brands underneath a parent company. There’s a bunch of brands under BYD. They just have so many electric vehicles, and that’s something I could observe.

Beyond that, I don’t know. When we took a train between Beijing and Shanghai — about a four-hour bullet train ride — we went past several fields of wind turbines. In the countryside, those seemed to be everywhere. I don’t really see that many of those here in the US, but granted, I don’t really travel outside of the cities much. I did notice they have fields where you just look out and there’s hundreds of them. So it does seem like that’s at least one example of how they’re producing energy.

Tom: The EV prevalence is really interesting because the part of Google that I work at is within the automotive division, and there’s constant pressure — the EV industry in China is putting a lot of pressure on other markets like Germany and the US. They can create an EV for a third or half the cost. Right now cars are so expensive. If you want to buy a new car in the US, it’s something like $45K, which is crazy. There was an article in the New York Times just a little while ago saying with car prices so high and the environmental issues, we really should allow China’s EVs into the US.

I think Wang said we should partner with China in EV manufacturing or battery manufacturing in the same way that China partnered with the US to build the iPhones. It’s crazy because China in the car industry was pretty much non-existent thirty or forty years ago. They were not making cars. They just skipped the whole gas engine thing and jumped straight into electric. Some of their companies making cars were basically battery companies — they were not car companies.

So this argument that we should allow Chinese EVs into the US without these massive tariffs has a lot of dimensions. One, we could strike partnerships with Chinese companies and have joint ventures. Two, this could act as a kind of predator in the market that really spurs existing car companies to either figure it out or drop out. Apparently that’s what China did with Tesla. They kind of let Tesla in, and instead of heavily restricting Tesla, China said, we’re gonna make our companies figure it out so they can compete. It spurred them into action. We protect our car industry from a lot of competition.

Do you have any thoughts on this EV angle? Do you think we should let Chinese car companies in? There’s an argument that if you just open the gates, the market will quickly saturate with Chinese EVs and put other companies out of business — that they need some time to evolve and figure it out, and it’d be too soon, too quick.

Lajay: I already have an EV — a Tesla — and I love it. But should we let in Chinese EVs? They are so nice. Even Teslas can’t compare. Full wraparound displays, heated seats everywhere, everything is customizable. Even the build quality I noticed was much better. Teslas are considered the nicer EVs — I guess there are other competitors now like Lucid and some other brands — but a standard BYD, even the taxis, were just really, really nice.

I do think your point about risk to the car market here is valid. If we had to compete, I don’t think we can, honestly, especially at the price point. In the US, EVs are kind of treated as a luxury, very premium. There, you can get an EV for like twelve thousand dollars — just a standard BYD. We could learn from them, sure, but as Dan Wang points out with their engineering state, they’ve really developed the practices, techniques, and understanding of how to build EVs at scale in a way that I don’t know if we can catch up with, to be honest. David, Sharon, do you have any other perspective on that one?

Sharon: Something I haven’t even really thought about, so I mean there’s pros and cons. We are kind of in a desperate race to bring down carbon emissions, so maybe that should preempt everything else.

David: I think there’s the political part to it too, where it’s like admitting defeat — that we’re not good enough, so we have to bring them in — and then the whole “we can’t trust China” angle. And then maybe the lesson of the iPhone is just that American manufacturing is not willing to work that hard. Even with the erosion of unions, we don’t have twenty-four-hour factories. The way they make the iPhone, what it takes to produce that thin glass, the reporting on what those factories are like — we’re just not willing to go to that scale to make something. Maybe cars aren’t quite as demanding as iPhones as far as manufacturing goes?

Lajay: Yeah.

Tom: It is tricky. I think Wang made a point that when Apple had the factories in China produce the iPhone, China had to figure it out. They didn’t immediately know how to do all that stuff, and they learned. Apple grew rich, and so did China — they developed tremendous manufacturing prowess and expertise. Wang says that what they really developed in China is process knowledge. They understand the process, so even if we wanted to just bring home manufacturing, we don’t really know how to do all that stuff.

There was a great example of this process knowledge that Wang points out with this temple in China that’s apparently made from old wood that rots every twenty years or so. You have to replace this temple every twenty years, and the replacement ensures that the next generation of priests or whoever maintains it will understand how it’s built. That process knowledge is passed down by virtue of the fact that the materials themselves are so transient.

So it’s kind of like we’re somewhat screwed, right? We could manufacture, but not in a way that would be competitive. This is why people say we should partner and learn how to do some of this stuff. But as you pointed out, David — do Americans have the sort of work ethic that would be required? Have you heard of the 996? Nine a.m. to nine p.m., six days a week. If that’s the expected work week, I think most of us would pass. Basically you have no life. I don’t know if a lot of people in China in manufacturing actually put in those kinds of hours, but there were stories about people sleeping in the factories, and you have cities built around companies. Very dedicated.

Okay, but despite all this, there is a point that Wang makes on the flip side. Even though China’s got this tremendous manufacturing capability, they’re really lacking in some areas — social media platforms, tech companies — where people don’t really want to invest in China because there’s no free speech. There are certain restrictions and limitations by the mere fact that everything is controlled by their leader, Xi Jinping.

There was even a metaphor of an anaconda in a chandelier, where you’ve got that panopticon thing where leadership can see everything you’re doing, and if you mess up, the anaconda strikes. So you have tons of self-censorship. Wang’s point is that with all these cultural restrictions, does China have the freedom of movement to make a company that will really be something like an Apple or a Google — some breakout company with tremendous earning potential that people would invest in freely, that would take advantage of everything AI has to offer?

If you’re in a communist state, people are not investing in China. Their stock market — I once looked into this. I thought, man, I should invest in BYD, and I was trying to figure out where to even find their stock and how to invest in it, but it was not very accessible. The US still has a lock on the financial markets, the cultural stuff with Hollywood, and other things. Any thoughts on this? Is China kneecapped because they’re in a communist state that doesn’t allow free expression? Or does that not really matter if you’re into the hard science and building batteries — who cares if you have freedom of speech?

Lajay, you were just there. Would you live there? Would you trade — say you could live in Shenzhen, one of the newer infrastructure cities. Very modern, you drive a super fancy EV, you’re living like a rich person there because you’re benefiting from all this wealth — but you can’t write those incendiary blog posts or whatever.

Lajay: It’s funny. I think when we travel, we all do this — “Oh, I could see myself living here, it’s so nice.” On any trip, especially if you’re having a good time, we all go through it. “Should I move here?” Never once did that thought occur to me when I was in China. Absolutely not.

And I hate to talk about it, but it’s because I’m Black. They don’t have Black people in China, and the way people responded to my friends and me was just a bit uncomfortable. They’d come up to you, try to take pictures of you. We would decline, say “No, please don’t take pictures of us,” and they would just keep doing it anyway. They wouldn’t even ask — they’d just come up, see you, and pull up their phone. Or sometimes people would take a selfie and turn to get you in it. It was really bizarre.

My friend who’s studying there explained to us that they don’t get a lot of foreigners generally, and then within that foreigner group, they don’t see Black people very often. It was me and two Nigerian girls, and — anyway. We were pretty uncomfortable, which is more of a social phenomenon than an infrastructure thing. I’ll spare you the details, but that whole thing was an experience.

But I guess part of that made me reflect on their relationship with privacy. In the US, it’s really weird to walk up to someone and start taking pictures of them, and it’s even more weird if they put up their hand and you keep trying. In the US, that would be almost like assault. But in China, there are cameras everywhere. You see them on the streets. At an intersection, there are like thirty cameras. I’m not even exaggerating. In a day, you will see thousands of cameras, and they’re not hiding. It’s not like in a department store where it’s up in the corner. No — there are cameras everywhere. There’s this feeling of being constantly monitored by CCTV.

I think people’s fundamental relationship with privacy and self-sovereignty is very different. When we would put up our hand and say “Don’t take a picture of us,” people would literally be confused — like, why not? And I’m thinking, I don’t know where that picture’s gonna go. I don’t want to be in your family group chat or whatever.

Going back to your question about the culture there — I don’t think I could live there because the American in me is just imbued with these values of freedom, liberty, self-sovereignty, and individual rights. I can’t even fully understand how they operate within that realm — being monitored constantly and clearly okay with it, to the extent that it’s observably affecting their behavior. I wish I had finished the book because I think at chapter five, right when I stopped, he was getting into the social engineering thing. I’m familiar with it — the censorship online, the manipulation of narratives and what people are reading and seeing. I’ll pass the mic since I didn’t finish the book, but I think that’s unsettling for me — being in a place without that freedom and sovereignty, giving up privacy. I really struggle with that.

Tom: The mass surveillance aspect seems really related to AI and very poignant. Just recently in the news, we had Anthropic pushing back against the Pentagon, saying they’re not gonna allow AI to be used for mass surveillance. The mass surveillance one is acute because if you’ve got thirty cameras, you’ve got a lot of data coming in. Previously, it would have been impossible to try to watch it all. But now you can have AI process it, you’ve got facial identification — it really expands the powers of the government to lock down on anything.

I remember about a year or two ago when a lot of the women in Iran were protesting — this was a human rights thing where they were taking off the hijabs. Suddenly they could be caught on many cameras, tracked down, located. It was very difficult to hide. You go out to a protest with thirty cameras on every block, you’re going to be easily identified, and then they can apply economic pressure.

I think it was chapter four that talked about the pressure the government would apply to the one-child policy. They would sometimes have to tell people multiple times not to have a second child, and to escalate the pressure they could reduce their wages, take away their job, or in one case, tear the roof off their house so they could not physically care for a child.

It’s also interesting to read this book because it feels like in the US in the last year, even if we celebrate our democracy, it doesn’t feel very democratic. It’s like Trump does what he wants pretty much, and we just hope it’s not gonna wreck everything. It doesn’t feel like we’re completely in this utopian democracy. But at least we can be critical of Trump — I could write a post, record a video, say something right here, and I wouldn’t fear that I would lose my job tomorrow or be put in jail. So there’s that. But how much is it really worth to people?

My wife works at Stanford — she does events there, she’s not faculty — but she said they recently had a speaker talking about the recent elections in Hungary, where the people basically unseated an autocrat. Everybody was like, “How did you do that?” The person who unseated the autocrat didn’t rely on idealistic democratic themes. He focused on the economic angle and tied it to the corruption of the current government — the economics are bad because this administration is corrupt, and that’s what really motivated people to muster up enough collective action to get rid of him.

So this aspect of freedom and democracy — how much is it worth? And maybe more relevant to this book club, how much does it factor into AI? There was a comment Molly made — she couldn’t be here — but she said, “Just finished Breakneck. The Chinese government’s social engineering projects reminded me of the AI alignment problem. Fixating on a specific goal can really backfire, especially if other important factors are overlooked. The chapter on the one-child policy was particularly harrowing.”

We’ve talked in the past about AI alignment and steering — this idea that you don’t have total control over AI, you’re trying to steer it in a benevolent direction. This was mostly in the last book we read, Eliezer Yudkowsky’s — “If anybody builds it, everybody dies.” You can only steer AI so precisely, and the chances of a catastrophe are pretty large. Same with the one-child policy — it was started with good intentions, massive overpopulation that you’re gonna somehow get under control. But with the engineering mindset, they didn’t factor in a lot of social and cultural dynamics, and it sounded like just massive atrocities — forced abortions, sterilization, terrible things.

One book review I was reading, the person sounded like she knew the author or had close knowledge. She said she could barely even read that chapter on the one-child policy — it was just so unsettling and disturbing. What’d you think of that chapter? The extent to which the one-child policy was enforced opened my eyes to how powerful, forceful, and repressive the government could be.

Anyway — mass surveillance. Do you think it’s gonna increase with AI? Do you think AI is going to basically lead toward more autocratic, more totalitarian states because it can exert more control and power? Is that basically the trajectory we’re playing into? I know that’s not a question anybody can easily answer, but it certainly seems like it.

Sharon: Well, countries like China and Iran are already using those tools to exert more control over their populations. And if the Trump administration had its way, it would do the same thing in our country. So it definitely is a tool that can be used to become more autocratic.

Tom: Yeah, for sure. And even companies — we talked about this I think with the Yuval Noah Harari book — companies can be much more into the mass surveillance thing. A company can easily process the web traffic behavior of every employee across thousands of people. They can understand when you come into the office, when you leave. All that can be fed into some algorithm that probably ranks and scores you — how many times do you visit LinkedIn versus how many change lists or PRs do you push. Who knows what you could track, but it does seem like they’ve got a whole profile on people.

I even read that on Reddit it’s now easy to track anonymous users — apparently people can figure out who they are. That whole anonymity is just sort of being washed away.

Let’s jump into another topic in this book. Nobody’s really biting on the surveillance thing — I don’t really know what to say about it, it’s just kind of unfortunate. What about the military might? This is an interesting one. The US likes to think that we’re an unstoppable superpower, but Wang was explaining that China can manufacture a lot. The surge capacity manufacturing — where you suddenly need a ton of ammunition or planes or whatever — you need to be able to make a lot of weapons in war. I don’t think the US would last that long if we went to war with China. We would be out-manufactured pretty easily in a short amount of time.

I don’t think China has any incentive to go to war against the US because they export most of what they make. We’re one of their main buyers — they’d be cutting themselves off. But reading that piece of information made me think twice about American military might. If we did escalate to a war with China, we probably wouldn’t win. What do you think?

Lajay: Definitely not. Definitely wouldn’t win. From the manufacturing perspective and just a population perspective — their population is like three or four times the size of ours. I think they’re sitting at like 1.2 billion people, and that contributes to their manufacturing capacity. I don’t think we’d even be close. But thankfully, as you said, there’s no reason we would go to war, at least not now.

Tom: Yeah. You never quite know what will happen in the world. Hopefully we’ve moved past this — what was it, four months ago or something — Trump was really trying to put the screws on China with the high tariffs, and then all of a sudden that sort of went away. We backed down because we realized we didn’t hold the cards.

David: You know, another part of the book that we haven’t really touched on yet was the part about how the regions have a leader who’s very focused on achieving results. And then that case of the ski area, where they just built it and then nobody came. I think it shows some real cracks in the system — you can build high-speed rail and have very successful projects, and then you can also have a lot of real duds.

The motivation for doing the projects isn’t always reality-based. It’s like, “I just need to do this to impress the people in the big steering council.” And the best way to do that is to show you’re making big projects, and they’re not always going to pan out. That’s a whole other part of it.

Tom: That was an interesting part of the book. I’m trying to remember all the details. Somebody was trying to create some kind of ski resort or resort paradise that would attract a lot of people, and it not only flopped, but didn’t the guy get put in jail for mismanaging public funds? I think so. Which is kind of scary.

But yeah, all this building — this is China’s real problem. They don’t have enough internal consumption of everything they build. They’ve got a bunch of houses just sitting there. In the US we have a housing shortage; in China they have a housing surplus and deflation instead of inflation. It’s such a weird country to think about — they make so much stuff but they can’t consume it all internally. They make like sixty million cars a year, they have production capacity to meet two-thirds of the world’s demand for cars. If they’re so focused on building things, they become highly dependent on other people being able to buy and consume them to keep going. I’m not sure how sustainable that is.

Sharon: Yeah, I was interested in his point that he thought one of China’s main advantages was that it was an engineering state and they could just build, build, build. I was thinking, I’ve had a couple of different jobs where I’ve actually had to manage engineers, and the idea of having engineers in power just makes me shudder — exactly because it can be so singularly focused without thinking.

That seems like what happens in China. You’re going to build, build, build, and you’re not going to think about whether you have enough demand, whether the population can afford it, what the social fallout is. I didn’t buy his thesis at all that China’s advantage is having a bunch of engineers in power.

Tom: Speaking of engineers in power — that reminds me of an anecdote. I recently went to Louisiana Tech University. I have a friend who’s an academic who teaches there. The university president had just left — he’d been there for a long time and then retired — and the new president was not an engineer. I was told that if I had met with the previous president, who was an engineer, it would be hard to get three words out of him. He was super quiet, very pragmatic, just built stuff, didn’t communicate at all. But the new president, who’s not an engineer, was extremely chatty, communicative, very visible, very open. The difference between having a university run by an engineer versus someone more humanities-based is really kind of eye-opening.

Anyway, back to the book. A major theme that Wang is critical of China with is this idea that with the engineering mindset, you just engineer the future you want. If you think a one-child policy is the right solution to balance economics and population, you enforce it. If you want zero COVID, you lock everyone down and do mandatory testing for months. In both those cases, it didn’t work out well. They thought they could engineer it, but society is much more complex, and people revolted against the zero-COVID lockdowns — there was some of that mentioned in the book. Now that we have AI, if we want to solve some problem and we have these tools, we’re probably gonna see a repeat of something similar. I have no idea what, but yeah.

Lajay: Yeah, I didn’t finish the book, so I can’t really give an opinion on his thesis just yet. But I see where you’re coming from, Sharon, around the framing. I thought it was helpful at a simplistic level — engineering versus lawyers. I can see how that dichotomy plays out in real life.

One thing I reflected on, particularly in Shenzhen, is that everything is mediated by WeChat or Alipay. I felt so much tech fatigue. By the end of the trip, I was so tired of using an app to do everything, to the point where it felt unnecessary in certain instances. I think that comes back to exactly what you pointed to, Sharon — if an engineer built this, sure, it’s probably perfectly efficient and maybe very logical, but from a humanistic perspective, it’s just exhausting. It takes away a lot of that human interaction that we’ve come to love and expect.

Going back to the theme of AI — we’re in this period now where everyone can be engineers, right? We can all pull out our laptops and build apps and tools. So this idea of the engineering state winning is interesting, especially now where everyone can be engineers. I think what we need is people who can understand the applications of technology and the implications on society, on human interaction. Just because we have tools and can build tools doesn’t mean life is getting better.

I remember in Shenzhen really wanting to talk to people and connect — I’m in a new country, I want to make small talk. But everyone is glued to their phones. It’s a very quiet culture. You get on the bullet train and it is silent — you can hear a pin drop. Everyone is just glued to an app because your whole life is on this app. That’s unsettling for me as someone from the US, where we do talk to each other.

But then I reflected — these cities are like three times as large as US cities. Beijing is twenty-four million people, Shanghai is like twenty-six million people. They obviously need scale and efficiency, whereas in the US our cities are much smaller. I think the largest city is New York, which is roughly eight million people compared to a twenty-four-million-person city. So the tools, the apps — it does make sense in certain contexts when you think about it from that perspective.

But it just begs the question: what is progress? Because we can build the tools, because we can build apps into every facet of daily life, or we can build AI — how we apply it is where we answer the question of whether this is progress. Just because we can build it doesn’t necessarily mean the infrastructure or the technology alone is progressive. I think it’s more about the applications.

Tom: It’s really interesting about the app thing being so prominent. I didn’t realize you had to check prices using an app. I’d heard that you’ve got to have the app to do anything, but I didn’t realize it was that pervasive. Because honestly, a lot of people complain about scanning a QR code for a menu in a restaurant, right? Which is super easy. They hate doing that.

Anyway, thank you, Lajay, for sharing all your experiences. This has really been great. This would have been such a different discussion without you here, so thank you for being open. I want to go to China, and hearing your experiences makes me want to do that even more.

Lajay: Do it. Absolutely do it.

Tom: Anyway, thanks for coming, David, Sharon, Lajay. Our next book on the calendar is Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Max Tegmark. It’s got good reviews — 6,000 reviews and four and a half stars on Amazon. I’m hoping it’s going to be worth reading. That’s scheduled for next month. Thanks again for coming, have a great rest of your weekend, and I’ll post these later.

Lajay: Thank you.

David: Cool. Thanks for leading.

Tom: Bye bye. Thanks everyone.