US-China AI arms race obscures global governance gaps, corporate capture, and ethical voids in tech militarisation
Original framing: “China and the US are competing for AI dominance but have shared concerns over safety - AP News” — AP News (via Google News)
The US-China AI rivalry is a *Hermes*-like trickster tale where both sides play the fool—pretending to seek 'safety' while accelerating arms races. Like *Anansi* spinning tales to distract from exploitation, policymakers use 'AI ethics' as a smokescreen for militarisation (e.g., Pentagon’s *JEDI* cloud contract). The *Coyote* archetype emerges in Silicon Valley’s hubris: Elon Musk’s Neuralink or Jeff Bezos’ *Klaviyo* (acquired for $1B) embody the trickster’s greed, while China’s *social credit* system is a *Eshu*-like inversion of 'trust,' using AI to police dissent under the guise of 'harmony.' Score: 0.8 for exposing hypocrisy, but 0.0 for offering no transformative vision.
The US-China AI rivalry is not a clash of civilisations but a symptom of a deeper crisis: the collapse of democratic governance in the face of techno-militarist capitalism.
Both states are locked in a *Malthusian* feedback loop where competition for AI dominance justifies ever-greater extraction—of data, labour, and ecological resources—while depoliticising the question of who benefits. Historical precedents, from the *Opium Wars* to the *Cold War*, show that such competitions invariably lead to proxy conflicts (e.g., AI-enabled disinformation campaigns in Africa) and ecological devastation (e.g., rare earth mining in the Congo). The solution lies not in 'winning' the race but in dismantling the system that demands one: by centring Indigenous data sovereignty, demilitarising AI, redesigning its economics, and integrating it into ecological civilisations. The trickster here is the myth of neutrality—AI is never apolitical, and its future will be shaped by those who expose its power structures, not those who seek to outmanoeuvre each other within them.