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

by Kai-Fu Lee

It’s up to each country to make its own decisions on how to balance personal privacy and public data. Europe has taken the strictest approach to data protection by introducing the General Data Protection Regulation, a law that sets a variety of restrictions on the collection and use of data within the European Union. The United States continues to grapple with implementing appropriate protections to user privacy, a tension illustrated by Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal and subsequent congressional hearings. China began implementing its own Cybersecurity Law in 2017, which included new punishments for the illegal collection or sale of user data. There’s no right answer to questions about what level of social surveillance is a worthwhile price for greater convenience and safety, or what level of anonymity we should be guaranteed at airports or subway stations. But in terms of immediate impact, China’s relative openness with data collection in public places is giving it a massive head start on implementation of perception AI. It is accelerating the digitization of urban environments and opening the door to new OMO applications in retail, security, and transportation. But pushing perception AI into these spheres requires more than just video cameras and digital data. Unlike internet and business AI, perception AI is a hardware-heavy enterprise. As we turn hospitals, cars, and kitchens into OMO environments, we will need a diverse array of sensor-enabled hardware devices...