Introducing Logogram
Offering analysis on China & AI
Welcome to Logogram! Here I will offer information and analysis of China’s AI ecosystem, with a focus on frontiers and risks, and occasionally China and/or AI more broadly.
In doing so, I humbly build on the foundations established by excellent colleagues on the China/AI beat, for which I am extremely grateful. But the fact remains that we have still only scratched the surface. Important information still fails to be noticed in English language circles, and crucial context is often missing when it does. Machine translation is excellent these days, but when exact word choice can make a world of difference, as it often can in the rarefied heights of policy wordsmithing, it leaves too much up to chance. When it comes to one of the most important countries and most important technologies of our time, we cannot afford to skimp on understanding.
I bring a combination of education and experience spanning both coasts — of both the US and the Pacific — having studied, lived, and worked in San Francisco, Shanghai, DC and Taipei. I am as comfortable reading Party documents in the original Chinese as arXiv papers hot off the LaTeX presses, with a keen attention to detail and nuance. Although I am a proud American, I also try my best to understand China on its own terms, informed by 16 years spent studying Chinese language, culture and history. In my opinion, the AI discourse could use many more types of voices, and I hope mine has something to add.
If you would like to join me, you know what to do:
About the name
You might be thinking: that’s all well and good, Karson, but what’s up with the name? Well, I think it sounds nice, and it serves as an apt metaphor for my intentions for the platform.
Let me explain: The English-reading public often has the impression that Chinese characters are either tiny drawings that depict whatever their meaning is, or else symbols that directly represent an idea, i.e. that Chinese characters are either pictograms or ideograms in technical jargon. Both of these are mistaken. Technically, Chinese characters are logograms, that is to say, a character represents nothing more and nothing less than a word. (Except, of course, for the handful of exceptions where the popular conception is correct.)1
My conviction is that although this may seem minor, it’s hard to have a deep, useful understanding of how the Chinese language works without clear thinking about these subtle distinctions. And by analogy, it’s hard to have a good understanding of China, or AI, without a precise grasp on the concepts, technology, institutions, and dynamics at play. At Logogram, my commitment is to help readers acquire a more precise understanding of China and AI, using approachable language to clarify topics that can often be confusing. I will insist on calling a logogram a logogram, but don’t worry — I’ll explain it when I do.
Etymologically, logogram comes from the Greek λόγος “word” + γράμμα “something written.” While a more pretentious way of saying “wordscrawl” would perhaps already be a fitting title for yet another Substack, my intention is rather in the Aristotelian sense of “logos” as the use of evidence and logic in rhetorical persuasion, rather than authority or emotion. Logogram seeks to be a place where the arguments stand on their own.
The logo, by the way, is the seal-script version of the character 智, meaning “wisdom” but also used in the word 智能, a compound of “wisdom” + “capability,” which is how “intelligence” is translated in the term “artificial intelligence.”2 Again, this serves as a neat metaphor for both the wisdom I hope to bring in my endeavors here, and also the debatably wisdom-capable machine systems that are their ultimate subject.
Such as, for instance: 山, a pictogram visually depicting its meaning of “mountain,” and 中, which can be considered an ideogram abstractly representing the idea of “center, middle, inside.”
It is also, coincidentally, the name of a nice teahouse in my former home of Austin, Texas.