Just as a U.S. government report warns against Beijing stealing U.S. artificial intelligence secrets, a new poll shows that a majority of U.S. tech industry workers support working with China to end the tense standoff between the U.S. and Chinese tech industries. Analysts believe this may be because many of the respondents work for tech companies that do business with China or want to work with Chinese companies.
U.S. tech media outlet Protocol released the results of a survey of U.S. tech industry workers on Monday (March 15). The survey covered a number of hot topics facing the U.S. technology industry, from whether the industry has too much power and whether Section 230 should be reformed to how Chinese technology companies are viewed.
According to the survey, 56 percent of respondents believe that the U.S. is overly restrictive of Chinese technology companies, 60 percent support closer cooperation with Chinese technology companies, and 58 percent believe that the U.S.-China Cold War may weaken the U.S. technology industry. But on the issue of huawei, 46 percent of respondents believe the U.S. should ban Huawei.
This relatively friendly attitude of the U.S. tech community toward China’s technology industry contrasts with the U.S. public’s growing wariness of China. Earlier this month, the Pew Research Center released a poll showing that nearly 90 percent of Americans view China as a competitor or enemy. Among them, 84 percent of the U.S. public sees China’s growing technological power as a serious problem, and more than half of Americans support limiting the number of Chinese students in the United States.
A screen displaying the word artificial intelligence at a Huawei showcase event in Shanghai in 2019 (Reuters September 18, 2019)
Respondents to Protocol’s questionnaire included people working at all levels of technology companies, most of whom work for large U.S. tech companies – nearly 40 percent of respondents work for companies with more than $500 million in annual revenue, and most have thousands of employees at their companies.
According to Adam Kovacevich, a technology policy expert and former Google spokesman, the overall welcoming attitude of the respondents to the questionnaire toward Chinese technology companies suggests that most of them are likely to work for technology companies that do business with China, or would like their companies to work with Chinese technology companies.
But as tech wrangling becomes an increasingly critical player in the U.S.-China race, the U.S. government, from the Trump administration to the Biden administration, shows no signs of letting down its guard in guarding against Beijing’s theft of key technologies.
Earlier this month (March 1), the National Security Council on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI) warned in its report to Congress that Beijing is Washington’s most powerful adversary in the field of artificial intelligence and recommended that U.S. universities and relevant research institutions take steps to prevent sensitive technologies from being stolen by the Chinese Communist military. U.S. military experts warned that Beijing, with its “civil-military integration” strategy, sees artificial intelligence as a key capability to counteract U.S. military superiority.
Jacob Helberg, a senior adviser at Stanford University’s Center for Cyber Policy and a former Google policy adviser, said in an article in Foreign Policy last year that U.S. technology companies cannot remain neutral in the context of an all-out U.S.-China battle. He cited the disruption of Zoom’s online conference to commemorate the 31st anniversary of June 4 and the challenges faced by Apple, Google, Nifty and others in their China operations, arguing that U.S. tech companies cannot maintain a “one company, two systems” approach in terms of conflicting values, technological barriers, legal obstacles, ethical standards and geopolitics.
The largest consensus in the survey is that the U.S. tech industry is overpowered, but there is less agreement on specific problems and solutions.
Too much power in the technology industry
According to the survey, nearly 80% (78%) of respondents agreed that the U.S. technology industry in general has too much power, with only 11% disagreeing with this conclusion. Among them, for the mega tech companies Facebook, Amazon, Alphabet (Google’s parent company) and Apple, almost the same percentage (77%) of respondents believe these companies have too much power, with only 8% disagreeing.
However, nearly 70% (68%) of respondents also still want their companies to be acquired by or with the tech giants, and only 40% think Facebook, Amazon, Alphabet and Apple should be split up.
In addition, more than 40 percent of these respondents who have joined the tech industry believe that the impact of technology on society is doing more harm than good.
However, while respondents are concerned about the power and negative effects of the technology industry, most do not believe that antitrust enforcement is an effective solution to the problem.
What is “Section 230”? Should it be reformed?
With the explosion of social media in recent years, the question of whether to reform Section 230 has become a hot topic in the technology industry.
Section 230 is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which provides that Internet platforms are not liable for the speech of third-party users and allows them to limit offensive speech in good faith. It also allows Internet platforms to limit offensive speech in good faith.
According to the Protocol survey, 62 percent of technology industry workers “know what ‘Section 230’ is. Of those who know about Section 230, more than 70 percent (71%) agree that it needs to be reformed, but disagree on what exactly should be changed.
Sixty-five percent agreed that “technology companies should not be responsible for the content on their websites and products,” while 23 percent disagreed completely. In addition, a whopping 82 percent of respondents believe that the impact of Section 230 is not limited to large technology companies.
In terms of AI regulation, 73 percent of respondents agreed that the government should regulate AI, while only 9 percent disagreed and 18 percent were neutral.
The poll also showed that more than 40 percent agreed that big tech companies should stop cooperating with law enforcement altogether, with less than 34 percent disagreeing.
As large protests such as the “Black Lives Matter” event last year developed, more and more technology companies announced they would reduce or discontinue their cooperation with U.S. law enforcement. In recent years, there have also been initiatives by employees of major technology companies such as Google to suspend technology cooperation with the U.S. military. But there are also concerns that cooperation between large technology companies such as Google and Chinese research institutions could end up being used by the Chinese Communist military.
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