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

by Kai-Fu Lee

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. By

The AI world order will combine winner-take-all economics with an unprecedented concentration of wealth in the hands of a few companies in China and the United States. This, I believe, is the real underlying threat posed by artificial intelligence: tremendous social disorder and political collapse stemming from widespread unemployment and gaping inequality.

internet AI, business AI, perception AI, and autonomous AI. Each of these waves harnesses AI’s power in a different way, disrupting different sectors and weaving artificial intelligence deeper

Smart Finance has discovered thousands of weak features that are correlated to creditworthiness, even if those correlations can’t be explained in a simple way humans can understand. Those offbeat metrics constitute what Smart Finance founder Ke Jiao calls “a new standard of beauty” for lending, one to replace the crude metrics of income, zip code, and even credit score.

Given enough training data—in this case, precise medical records—an AI-powered diagnostic tool could turn any medical professional into a super-diagnostician, a doctor with experience in tens of millions of cases, an uncanny ability to spot hidden correlations, and a perfect memory to boot.

The AI-powered education experience takes place across four scenarios: in-class teaching, homework and drills, tests and grading, and customized tutoring.

Xiaomi doesn’t build all of these devices itself. Instead, it has invested in 220 companies and incubated 29 startups—many operating in Shenzhen—whose intelligent home products are hooked into the Xiaomi ecosystem.

Superintelligence would be the product of human creation, not natural evolution, and thus wouldn’t have the same instincts for survival, reproduction, or domination that motivate humans or animals. Instead, it would likely just seek to achieve the goals given to it in the most efficient way possible.

These breakthroughs would need to remove key constraints on the “narrow AI” programs that we run today and empower them with a wide array of new abilities: multidomain learning; domain-independent learning; natural-language understanding; commonsense reasoning, planning, and learning from a small number of examples.

AI will not facilitate the deskilling of economic production. It won’t take advanced tasks done by a small number of people and break them down further for a larger number of low-skill workers to do. Instead, it will simply take over the execution of tasks that meet two criteria: they can be optimized using data, and they do not require social interaction.

In some cases, the algorithms may replace the doctor entirely. 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.

Traditional doctors could instead evolve into a new profession, one that I’ll call a “compassionate caregiver.” These medical professionals would combine the skills of a nurse, medical technician, social worker, and even psychologist. Compassionate caregivers would be trained not just in operating and understanding the diagnostic tools but also in communicating with patients, consoling them in times of trauma, and emotionally supporting them throughout their treatment.

the values underpinning our visions of an AI future could well become self-fulfilling prophecies. If we tell ourselves that the value of human beings lies solely in their economic contribution, then we will act accordingly.