@lanodan @gentoobro @hj @mangeurdenuage

> At least part of me feels like they're trying to make more and more of the population dependent on them,

They're spending a lot on trying to make that happen. And there's a lot of rhetoric (which may or may not actually represent what they're thinking) from the government about China getting better AI than us and being the "leader in AI".

> because it's like they finally managed to make a search engine which only returns the data they want people to see.

I think you've nailed it, I think this is it.

I wonder if this is a propaganda manufacturing scheme. The big deal in the 20th century was Bernays and mass communications. That fragmented: nation-states are trying to push back, but it is harder and hard to control the flow of information. When there are only four TV channels, it's easy, but decentralization has frustrated governments a lot, you don't know who is getting their information from where. But if you could flood the world with bots that tailor their information to the recipient and manage to stay on-message the whole time, whatever the message is, then it doesn't matter if communications are fully decentralized.

Then on the other end of this, the government has used things like long-ass lists of keywords to watch for: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnivore_%28software%29 . AI as a propaganda tool *and* a monitoring tool, I can see why that would be worth a hundred billion dollars.