AI Book Club discussion recording of 'Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future', by Dan Wang

This is a recording of the AI Book Club discussion of Dan Wang's Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future. Our discussion tries to tie some of the book's themes to AI (to align with the book club's theme), but only in places where it makes sense. Some topics we discuss include social engineering, electric vehicles, contrasting energy infrastructures and the ability to power AI compute, mass surveillance networks, the differences between America's lawyerly society and China's engineering state. Fortunately, one of the book club members had recently been to China and could share firsthand experiences and impressions of cities...

You can listen to AI Book Club discussion recording of 'Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future', by Dan Wang online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

AI Book Club discussion recording of 'Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future', by Dan Wang is an episode from I'd Rather Be Writing Podcast by Tom Johnson.

This episode is 00:58:43 long.

This episode was published on Apr 23, 2026.

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