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

by Kai-Fu Lee

series of four waves: internet AI, business AI, perception AI, and autonomous AI.

RXThinking is attempting to build. Founded by a Chinese AI researcher with deep experience in Silicon Valley and at Baidu, the startup is training medical AI algorithms to become super-diagnosticians that can be dispatched to all corners of China. Instead of replacing doctors with algorithms, RXThinking’s AI diagnosis app empowers them. It acts like a “navigation app” for the diagnosis process, drawing on all available knowledge to recommend the best route but still letting the doctors steer the car.

And judicial biases can be far less malicious than racism: a study of Israeli judges found them far more severe in their decisions before lunch and more lenient in granting parole after having a good meal.

new blended environments OMO: online-merge-offline.

Just as important, by understanding and predicting the habits of each shopper, these stores will make major improvements in their supply chains, reducing food waste and increasing profitability.

China appears poised to leapfrog the United States in education AI, in large part due to voracious demand from Chinese parents.

Chinese parents of only children pour money into their education, a result of deeply entrenched Chinese values, intense competition for university spots, and a public education system of mixed quality.

But while these machines are automated, they are not autonomous. While they can repeat an action, they can’t make decisions or improvise according to changing conditions.

Heat-resistant drone swarms will fight forest fires with hundreds of times the current efficiency of traditional fire crews.

Google, Baidu, Uber, Didi, Tesla, and many more are building teams, testing technologies, and gathering data en route to taking human drivers entirely out of the equation.

By 2016, Google had taken six years to accumulate 1.5 million miles of real-world driving data. In just six months, Tesla had accumulated 47 million miles.

Tesla takes a more techno-utilitarian approach, pushing their cars to market once they are an improvement over human drivers, hoping that the faster rates of data accumulation will train the systems earlier and save lives overall.

brand-new developments like Xiong’an could even route the traffic in their city centers underground, reserving the heart of town for pedestrians and bicyclists.

Other utopian thinkers see AGI as something that will enable us to rapidly decode the mysteries of the physical universe. DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis predicts that the creation of superintelligence will allow human civilization to solve intractable problems, producing inconceivably brilliant solutions to global warming and previously incurable diseases.

With superintelligent computers that understand the universe on levels that humans cannot even conceive of, these machines become not just tools for lightening the burdens of humanity; they approach the omniscience and omnipotence of a god.

Elon Musk has called superintelligence “the biggest risk we face as a civilization,” comparing the creation ...

The fear is that if human beings presented an obstacle to achieving one of those goals—reverse global warming, for example—a superintelligent agent could easily, even accidentally, wipe us off the face of the earth.

It’s a milestone that I believe we should not cross unless we have first definitively solved all problems of control and safety.

As more and more people see themselves displaced by machines, they will be forced to answer a far deeper question: in an age of intelligent machines, what does it mean to be human?

“American robots work as hard as Chinese robots,” he wrote, “and they also don’t complain or join labor unions.”

In essence, AI is great at thinking, but robots are bad at moving their fingers.

As a technology and an industry, AI naturally gravitates toward monopolies. Its reliance on data for improvement creates a self-perpetuating cycle: better products lead to more users, those users lead to more data, and that data leads to even better products, and thus more users and data.

AI risks creating a twenty-first-century caste system, one that divides the population into the AI elite and what historian Yuval N. Harari has crudely called the “useless class,” people who can never generate enough economic value to support themselves.

Rates of depression triple among those unemployed for six months, and people looking for work are twice as likely to commit suicide as the gainfully employed. Alcohol abuse and opioid overdoses both rise alongside unemployment rates, with some scholars attributing rising mortality rates among uneducated white Americans to declining economic outcomes, a phenomenon they call “deaths of despair.”

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?

In September 2013, I was diagnosed with stage IV lymphoma. In an instant, my world of mental algorithms and personal achievements came crashing down. None of those things could save me now, or give me comfort and a sense of meaning. Like so many people forced to suddenly face their own mortality, I was filled with fear for my future and with a deep, soul-aching regret over the way I had lived my life.

mesmerized by my quest to create machines that thought like people, I had turned into a person that thought like a machine.

Most of all, I’ve stopped viewing my life as an algorithm that optimizes for influence. Instead, I 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.

For a will to be in effect immediately in Taiwan, it must be handwritten, with no blemishes or corrections.

Why did this happen to me? I’d never intentionally hurt anyone. I had always tried to make the world a better place, to create technologies that made life easier for people. I had used my fame in China to educate and inspire young people. I had done nothing to deserve dying at the age of fifty-three. Every one of those thoughts began with “I” and centered on self-righteous assertions of my own “objective” value.

The real tragedy wasn’t that I might not live much longer. It was that I had lived so long without generously sharing love with those so close to me.

The hardest thing about facing death isn’t the experiences you won’t get to have. It’s the ones you can’t have back.

“That is all that remains in the final weeks: love and relationships.”

Guang Shan Buddhist monastery in the south of Taiwan.

“What does it really mean to ‘maximize impact’?” he began. “When people speak in this way, it’s often nothing but a thin disguise for ego, for vanity. If you truly look within yourself, can you say for sure that what motivates you is not ego? It’s a question you must ask your own heart, and whatever you do, don’t try to lie to yourself.”

“Kai-Fu, humans aren’t meant to think this way. This constant calculating, this quantification of everything, it eats away at what’s really inside of us and what exists between us. It suffocates the one thing that gives us true life: love.”

we must humble ourselves. We have to feel in our bones just how small we are, and we must recognize that there’s nothing greater or more valuable in this world than a simple act of sharing love with others.

There’s a certain sensation most people experience right after narrowly avoiding disaster. It’s that tingling feeling that crawls over your skin and across your scalp a few seconds after your car skids to a halt on the highway, just a few feet away from an accident. As the adrenaline dissipates and muscles relax, most of us make a silent pledge to never again do whatever it was that we were just doing.

I’m now more aware than ever that we all live in direct and constant relationship to our own mortality.

This is the synthesis on which I believe we must build our shared future: on AI’s ability to think but coupled with human beings’ ability to love.

As we transition from the industrial age to the AI age, we will need to move away from a mindset that equates work with life or treats humans as variables in a grand productivity optimization algorithm. Instead, we must move toward a new culture that values human love, service, and compassion more than ever before.

Others view the stipend as a full replacement for the lost income of a regular job. In this view, a UBI could become a crucial step toward creating a “leisure society,” one in which people are fully liberated from the need to work, and free to pursue their own passions in life.

Who is the government, UBI proponents ask, to tell people how to spend their time? Just give them the money and let them figure it out on their own.

I propose we explore the creation not of a UBI but of what I call a social investment stipend. The stipend would be a decent government salary given to those who invest their time and energy in those activities that promote a kind, compassionate, and creative society. These would include three broad categories: care work, community service, and education.

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward,” Jobs told the assembled students. “You can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”

As public policy and personal values blend, we should really take the time to study new experiments in defining and measuring progress, such as Bhutan’s decision to pursue “Gross National Happiness” as a key development indicator.

we may end up in a twisted world like the one Hao Jingfang imagined in Folding Beijing, a caste-based society that divides and separates the so-called useful people from the “useless” masses.

We were not put on Earth to merely grind away at repetitive tasks. We don’t need to spend our lives busily accumulating wealth just so that we can die and pass it on to our children—the

If AI ever allows us to truly understand ourselves, it will not be because these algorithms captured the mechanical essence of the human mind. It will be because they liberated us to forget about optimizations and to instead focus on what truly makes us human: loving and being loved.