An interdisciplinary cross-cultural collection that decenters familiar narratives to provide a
fresh perspective on what artificial intelligence is today and what it might become.
Historians media theorists science-fiction writers philosophers and artists from China and
elsewhere reexamine the nation’s intense engagement with AI moving beyond the clichés that
still dominate contemporary debate. Today visions of the contested future of AI veer between
common planetary goals and a new Cold War as culturally-specific models of intelligence
speculative traditions and thought experiments come up against the emergence of novel forms of
cognition that cannot be reduced to any historical cultural tradition. This uniquely
positioned volume provides expert insight into this tension using China as a touchstone for
rethinking "artificiality" and "intelligence" as sites of difference in a way that is already
present in the difficulty of precisely translating the Chinese term 人工智能. Tracking the history
of Chinese AI from the pre-Cultural Revolution to the post-Deng Xiaoping eras right up to
contemporary debates surrounding facial recognition the writers in this collection draw on a
mixture of speculative thought experiments and cutting-edge use cases to offer singular views
on topics including AI and Chinese philosophy AI ethics and policymaking the development of
computational models in early Chinese cybernetics and the aesthetics of Sinofuturism.
Spanning borders between different worlds histories futures and foundational models Machine
Decision is Not Final is not only a timely reappraisal of the stakes of AI development but a
tool for constructing more global imaginaries for the future of AI. Contributors Blaise
Aguera y Arcas Bo An Benjamin Bratton Shuang Frost Vince Garton Steve Goodman Yvette
Granata Anna Greenspan Amy Ireland Xia Jia Bogna Konior Vincent Le Lawrence Lek Lukas
Likavcan Suzanne Livingston Iris Long Bingchun Meng Reza Negarestani Chen Quifan Gabriele
de Seta Hongzhe Wang Wang Xin Mi You
