AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order

by Kai-Fu Lee

Deep learning is what’s known as “narrow AI”—intelligence that takes data from one specific domain and applies it to optimizing one specific outcome. While impressive, it is still a far cry from “general AI,” the all-purpose technology that can do everything a human can.

Harnessing the power of AI today—the “electricity” of the twenty-first century—requires four analogous inputs: abundant data, hungry entrepreneurs, AI scientists, and an AI-friendly policy environment.

It’s an environment of abundance that lends itself to lofty thinking, to envisioning elegant technical solutions to abstract problems. Throw in the valley’s rich history of computer science breakthroughs, and you’ve set the stage for the geeky-hippie hybrid ideology that has long defined Silicon Valley. Central to that ideology is a wide-eyed techno-optimism, a belief that every person and company can truly change the world through innovative thinking. Copying ideas or product features is frowned

Didi has begun buying up gas stations and auto repair shops to service its fleet, making great margins because of its understanding of its drivers and their trust in the Didi brand.

The IoT refers to collections of real-world, internet-connected devices that can convey data from the world around them to other devices in the network.

Iot definition

They’re plotting driverless trucking routes, installing facial recognition systems on public transportation, and hooking traffic grids into “city brains” that optimize flows.

Civic applications

Sinovation Ventures examined citations in the top one hundred

Vc

Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent. These Seven Giants have, in effect, morphed into what nations were fifty years ago—that is, large and relatively closed-off systems that concentrate talent and resources on breakthroughs that will mostly remain “in house.”

Big 7

Alibaba has taken the lead on “City Brains”: massive AI-driven networks that optimize city services by drawing on data from video cameras, social media, public transit, and location-based apps.

Ai civic applications

something for which neither Intel’s nor Qualcomm’s chips are built. Into the void stepped Nvidia, a chipmaker that had previously excelled at graphics processing for video games. The math behind graphics processing aligned well with the requirements for AI, and Nvidia became the go-to player in the chip market. Between 2016 and early 2018, the company’s stock price multiplied by a factor of ten.

Nvidia ai chip leader

It’s far safer to stay out of the messy business of upgrading an economy.

The paradox

internet AI, business AI, perception AI, and autonomous AI.

Waves

Element AI

DJI,

People like Alibaba founder Jack Ma know how dangerous a ragtag bunch of insurgents can be when battling a monolithic foreign giant. So

Lyft in the United States, Ola in India, Grab in Singapore, Taxify in Estonia, and Careem in the Middle East. After

But in the twelve years since Geoffrey Hinton and his colleagues’ landmark paper on deep learning, I haven’t seen anything that represents a similar sea change in machine intelligence.

In short, this is the coming crisis of jobs and inequality.

Inside those blocks are the residents of Beijing’s Third Space, the economic underclass that toils during the night hours and sleeps during the day.

Hao Jingfang,

Put simply, it’s far easier to build AI algorithms than to build intelligent robots.

Moravec’s Paradox.

The winners of this AI economy will marvel at the awesome power of these machines. But the rest of humankind will be left to grapple with a far deeper question: when machines can do everything that we can, what does it mean to be human?

try to spend my energy doing the one thing I’ve found that truly brings meaning to a person’s life: sharing love with those around us.

But the truth is, there exists no algorithm that could replace the role of my family in my healing process. What they shared with me is far simpler—and yet so much more profound—than anything AI will ever produce.

Funding for these programs would come from steep taxes on the winners of the AI revolution: major technology companies; legacy corporations that adapted to leverage AI; and the millionaires, billionaires, and perhaps even trillionaires who cashed in on these companies’ success. The size of the stipend given is a matter of debate among proponents.

could this work

At the time, advocates saw a GMI as a simple way to end poverty, and in 1970 President Nixon actually came close to passing a bill that would have granted each family enough money to raise itself above the poverty line. But following Nixon’s unsuccessful push, discussion of a UBI or GMI largely dropped out of public discourse.

nixon!?

Silicon Valley elite, with giants of the industry like the prestigious Silicon Valley startup accelerator Y Combinator president Sam Altman and Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes sponsoring research and funding basic income pilot programs.

These would include three broad categories: care work, community service, and education.

3 tiered ubinfor service like in germany

clear-eyed look at the technology’s long-term impact has revealed a sobering truth: in the coming decades, AI’s greatest potential to disrupt and destroy lies not in international military contests but in what it will do to our labor markets and social systems. Appreciating the momentous social and economic turbulence that is on our horizon should humble us. It should also turn our competitive instincts into a search for cooperative solutions to the common challenges that we all face as human beings, people whose fates are inextricably intertwined across all economic classes and national borders.

The first wave—​internet AI—​is happening everywhere.

three more waves and these are all happening at once—​which means that there is room for other big players to also become giants. As a reminder, these three waves are business AI, perception AI, and autonomous AI. It will be worth bearing them in mind as we dive deeper into recent AI developments.

these three waves are business AI, perception AI, and autonomous AI. It