Transcript | "The China Debate We're Not Having" | Part 4: The AI Race Reconsidered

From the Johns Hopkins SAIS ACF Conference April 3, 2026

Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what’s happening in China’s politics, foreign relations, economics, and society. Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China.

I’m Kaiser Kuo, coming to you this week from my nearly empty, soon-to-be-on-the-market home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Sinica is supported this year by the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a national resource center for the study of East Asia. Listeners, please support my work by becoming a paying subscriber at sinicapodcast.com. I know there are a lot of Substacks out there, and they start to add up, but I think this delivers serious value, and I do need your help to keep doing this work, so please do subscribe so I can continue to bring you these conversations.

This week, I’m sharing the fourth and final installment from the day-long conference convened by the Institute for America, China, and the Future of Global Affairs, ACF, at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, or SAIS. That was on April 3rd in Washington, and it was called The China Debate We’re Not Having: Politics, Technology, and the Road Ahead. The first episode featured Jessica Chen Weiss’ opening remarks and the panel on what China wants. The second panel turned to the equally important question of what the United States wants from China, which is something Jessica has been particularly good at problematizing.

I’ve often borrowed her language to express the idea that recent American administrations seem somehow unable to articulate an affirmative vision for what the U.S. actually wants things to look like. Then you heard another excellent panel called Tech, Rivalry, and Competing Visions of the Future, which was focused, unsurprisingly, on artificial intelligence. This week, still more AI; The AI Race Reconsidered, featuring moderator Henry Farrell, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, Agora Institute Professor of International Affairs at SAIS, who will be in conversation with Alondra Nelson, who is Harold F. Linder Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study. This is a terrific conversation that you will not want to miss.

At the end, you will hear closing remarks from the organizer herself, Jessica Chen Weiss, ACF’s inaugural faculty director. Once again, my deep thanks to Jessica for organizing this terrific conference and for so generously letting me share this audio with Sinica listeners.

Henry Farrell: Please enjoy. I’m here to interview Alondra Nelson, and I’m really, really looking forward to the conversation that we’re going to have. So, Alondra is somebody who has had an extraordinary career over the last number of years. She is now the Harold F. Linder Professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies. Before that, she was the Director of the White House Office for Science and Technology Policy. But some of us have been following her work for a long time. Because if you are in this intersection where you’re thinking about the relationship between society and sociology, culture, technology, and political economy, this is something that you’ve been working in for decades. And I think your work has really made the field and established it.

I think it’s a really valuable perspective to have to bring together the stuff that you’ve been doing more recently, and also your deeper intellectual roots, because I think that they suggest a set of issues, a set of questions that don’t get nearly, nearly enough attention. So that’s, I hope if that’s okay, that’s what I would love the conversation to be about.

Alondra Nelson: Yeah. Well, I hope it will be a conversation and not an interview. And I think the theme of today is clearly sort of asking, you know, going to topic areas that we’re not quite getting to in this area, in this space. So, I’m looking forward to it. Thank you, Henry.

Henry: Okay. So what I would like to do is maybe begin with something that Selina said in the previous panel, and maybe add a little bit of spice, which is, so, you know, I look at the debates around AI, which framed the broader debate around U.S.-China competition. And in the United States, there are a number of rather unusual ideas that have managed to gain a lot of weight. So, I spent a lot of my misspent youth in Ireland in the 1980s and 1990s reading science fiction — some of it good, some of it bad.

I never expected that some of the ideas about the singularity, about sort of AGI, all of these ideas would actually begin to become major cornerstones of the U.S. debate about AI, where it is going and what it is going to do. So, I’m wondering if you could just maybe talk a little bit about that, where these ideas came from, what they point towards, and maybe what they hide from us as well.

Alondra: So, I think those of you who’ve studied technology sort of like in California, so I’m a Californian, if you’ve studied Silicon Valley, you know, work, social science work, popular sort of theoretical work in the sort of ‘80s, ‘90s up to the present, talked about things like the emergence of Silicon Valley out of cultural formations like the Well, out of cultural formations like formerly hippie communities, out of things like what would become called the Californian ideology, right?

In my home state, California, and Silicon Valley in particular, there has been, for good and for not, a history of kind of outré ideas. And sometimes these have brought us really incredible software development, new kinds of companies. You might think about sort of Steve Jobs and the fusion of both technology and design, aesthetics and