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

by Kai-Fu Lee

Deep-learning pioneer Andrew Ng has compared AI to Thomas Edison’s harnessing of electricity: a breakthrough technology on its own, and one that once harnessed can be applied to revolutionizing dozens of different industries.

In deep learning, there’s no data like more data. The more examples of a given phenomenon a network is exposed to, the more accurately it can pick out patterns and identify things in the real world. Given much more data, an algorithm designed by a handful of mid-level AI engineers usually outperforms one designed by a world-class deep-learning researcher. Having a monopoly on the best and the brightest just isn’t what it used to be.

Tumult in job markets and turmoil across societies will occur against the backdrop of a far more personal and human crisis—a psychological loss of one’s purpose. For centuries, human beings have filled their days by working: trading their time and sweat for shelter and food. We’ve built deeply entrenched cultural values around this exchange, and many of us have been conditioned to derive our sense of self-worth from the act of daily work. The rise of artificial intelligence will challenge these values and threatens to undercut that sense of life-purpose in a vanishingly short window of time.