Contributors: Blaise Agüera y Arcas, An Bo, Benjamin Bratton, Chen Qiufan, Gabriele de Seta, Shuang Frost, Vincent Garton, Steve Goodman, Yvette Granata, Anna Greenspan, Amy Ireland, Bogna Konior, Vincent Le, Lawrence Lek, Lukáš Likavčan, Suzanne Livingston, Iris Long, Meng Bingchun, Reza Negarestani, Wang Hongzhe, Regina Kanyu Wang, Wang Xin, Xia Jia, You Mi 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 re-examine the nation’s intense engagement with AI, moving beyond the clichés that still dominate the contemporary debate. 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.