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

by Kai-Fu Lee

Based on the current trends in technology advancement and adoption, I predict that within fifteen years, artificial intelligence will technically be able to replace around 40 to 50 percent of jobs in the United States.

but I forecast that the disruption to job markets will be very real, very large, and coming soon.

“I’d rather cry in the back of a BMW than smile on the back of a bicycle.”

When asked how far China lags behind Silicon Valley in artificial intelligence research, some Chinese entrepreneurs jokingly answer “sixteen hours”—the time difference between California and Beijing.

and Chinese capabilities across all four waves of AI, both in the present day and with my best estimate for how that balance will have evolved five years in the future.

The balance of capabilities between the United States and China across the four waves of AI, currently and estimated for five years in the future

Getting to AGI would require a series of foundational scientific breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, a string of advances on the scale of, or greater than, deep learning. 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. Taking the next step to emotionally intelligent robots may require self-awareness, humor, love, empathy, and appreciation for beauty. These are the key hurdles that separate what AI does today—spotting correlations in data and making predictions—and artificial general intelligence.

There is also a real possibility that AGI is something humans will never achieve.

AI algorithms will be to many white-collar workers what tractors were to farmhands: a tool that dramatically increases the productivity of each worker and thus shrinks the total number of employees required. And unlike tractors, algorithms can be shipped instantly around the world at no additional cost to their creator.

Pushing more people into these jobs while the rich leverage AI for huge gains doesn’t just create a society that is dramatically unequal. I fear it will also prove unsustainable and frighteningly unstable.

Techno-optimists will point to history, citing the Industrial Revolution and the nineteenth-century textile industry as “proof” that things always work out for the best. But as we’ve seen, this argument stands on increasingly shaky ground. The coming scale, pace, and skill-bias of the AI revolution mean that we face a new and historically unique challenge. Even if the most dire predictions of unemployment do not materialize, AI will take the growing wealth inequality of the internet age and accelerate it tremendously.