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

by Kai-Fu Lee

In predicting what jobs were at risk of automation, economists looked at what tasks a person completed while going about their job and asked whether a machine would be able to complete those same tasks. In other words, the task-based approach asked how possible it was to do a one-to-one replacement of a machine for a human worker. My background trains me to approach the problem differently. Early in my career, I worked on turning cutting-edge AI technologies into useful products, and as a venture capitalist I fund and help build new startups. That work helps me see AI as forming two distinct threats to jobs: one-to-one replacements and ground-up disruptions. Many of the AI companies I’ve invested in are looking to build a single AI-driven product that can replace a specific kind of worker—for instance, a robot that can do the lifting and carrying of a warehouse employee or an autonomous-vehicle algorithm that can complete the core tasks of a taxi driver. If successful, these companies will end up selling their products to companies, many of whom may lay off redundant workers as a result. These types of one-to-one replacements are exactly the job losses captured by economists using the task-based approach, and I take PwC’s 38 percent estimate as a reasonable guess for this category. But then there exists a completely different breed of AI startups: those that reimagine an industry from the ground up. These companies don’t look to replace one human worker with one tailor-mad...