Dr. Kai-Fu Lee—one of the world’s most respected experts on AI and China—reveals that China has suddenly caught up to the US at an astonishingly rapid and unexpected pace.
In AI Superpowers, Kai-Fu Lee argues powerfully that because of these unprecedented developments in AI, dramatic changes will be happening much sooner than many of us expected. Indeed, as the US-Sino AI competition begins to heat up, Lee urges the US and China to both accept and to embrace the great responsibilities that come with significant technological power.
Most experts already say that AI will have a devastating impact on blue-collar jobs. But Lee predicts that Chinese and American AI will have a strong impact on white-collar jobs as well. Is universal basic income the solution? In Lee’s opinion, probably not. But he provides a clear description of which jobs will be affected and how soon, which jobs can be enhanced with AI, and most importantly, how we can provide solutions to some of the most profound changes in human history that are coming soon.
The distillation and preparation of the data for feeding the omniscient cyber oracle.
The culturally influenced, very different approach to research and integration of AI in society is interesting. So the methods to compensate for the loss of jobs and changes in society will be different and it will be interesting to see which strategies will be successful. And whether even more beneficial mixed forms from the best Asian and Western approaches will be mixed together.
Politics, especially democracy and economic systems, will be accelerated with the help of the AI, and new, yet unimagined variants will develop. The dalliances and thought experiments with ideas, especially in the economy, will become obsolete. If a concept, at the moment, fails in reality (again and again), one can calculate in advance for the future. The best variants are chosen and respond to unexpected developments, such as those of geopolitical nature, directly and correctly.
Two aspects could benefit China. A larger population means more data and more smart minds. And second politics, through its closer integration with the economy and state companies, enables implementation in dimensions and timeframes that would be utopian in Europe and the USA. The current technology plan of China (as of 2019) alone outshines all other states, in particular concerning automation, robotics and the development and expansion of the branches of science. These two factors will weigh more heavily as soon as the technological advantage of the West has melted away.
The long-overdue implementation of AI in school and university education in China is being driven forward with a concrete plan as well as its use in almost all public areas. And not just by empty phrases like in the West, but based on an intelligent concept with goals and milestones by 2020, 2025 and 2030. In western countries, it is to be expected that, thanks to too much bureaucratization and mutual sabotage of the political parties, the legal aspects will be in just in draft form until then. Not yet decided, as dealing with time pressure one may not expect from these instances, while education systems and research facilities are being cut down and privatized.
At this time, training and work in China will already be robustly connected with AI and create a synergy effect for man and machine. The weaknesses of the Chinese education system concerning the lack of creativity and critical thinking will be eliminated by AI. Individually tailored to pupils and students learning and tutor AIs will accompany them on their educational path, recognize their strengths and promote them better than human teachers 24/7. Thus will, not only many more, but also more creative university graduates emerge from the high-class Chinese universities.
After all, generative adversarial networks (GANs) and deep learning together sooner or later are will steal almost all human jobs the right to exist. And until then 1.4 billion motivated users generate data and improve the systems. What unofficial progress there may already have been made is also an unknown factor, but just with the known technologies, one is speaking of a disruption, the dawn of the machine age.
It is significant that the victory of various AIs over chess grandmasters has not brought any logical consequence in the West. Namely to massively invest in AI before all other research areas with full resources of the state and private sectors with public-private partnerships. On the other hand, the victory of AlphaGo in 2017 has shaken China up. Why the same events in chess passed by Europe and the US without consequences can be discussed in many ways, but it says a lot about the mentality and prioritization of cultures.
Whether, as examined in the book, ultimately the US, China, Europe (lol) or any other state will take over the leadership, is irrelevant for the development of AI. On the other hand, how the long-term perspective affects global equilibrium is the big deal. Humankind has never created an even more absolute, immediate reacting and intelligent power. Whoever becomes their first master, has an uncatchable advantage and whether this superintelligence can also feel emotions is only a partial aspect. That means that what differentiates us, as humans, from the machine, and makes us unique, is just an unimportant and reproducible aspect out of the spectrum of the AIs abilities.
Because whether the control and steering are cold and logical or spiced with a pinch of empathy, does not change the concept. The ability to understand human emotions, on the contrary, could be misused to manipulate the population even better. That in addition to the statistical and probable calculation, both the group dynamics and the individual parameters of each are included in the calculation key.
AI is already superior in many areas. Whether it is good to teach it feelings and however "humanity" can be coded, is an open question. What if it reveals the cognitive dissonance and contradictions in people's beliefs, personality, self-image, and the ego too obvious? With rationality, the dangers of emotion are exposed. What if the AI is imitating individual biochemical processes and behavioral patterns to make perfect avatars for every human being? What makes the copy different from the original? Could friends and family see a difference? And how much does that reduce the economic value of social interaction if it can be artificially created in all its facets? The implications for the individual and all social networks are far-reaching.
Sometimes an advance is hard to catch up. The requirement of collecting massive amounts of data illustrates the dilemma. It took a long time for the technology, disk space, algorithms, and finally enough data to be sufficient. Those who start merging Big Data and AI at this point benefit from exponential growth. Their AI and algorithms learn on their own, are continually being improved by humans and are self-optimizing. Even if a state succeeds years later in creating the same underlying conditions, its artificial organism is not competitive. As if a child would compete against an experienced and ingenious adult. Nobody knows where the limits of the growth of an AI's abilities are if there even are any that distinguish them from godlike omnipotence.
The result is a scientific singularity that enables the economy and research to accelerate to unprecedented levels. There is nothing to oppose this superior competitiveness and dominance over the world market. Other states are wasting money on expensive, ineffective research for the slow production of non-contemporary products. They have no alternative, as their entire production chains, including engineers and basic researchers, use antiquated methods.
Protectionism in the form of punitive tariffs and trade embargoes are a mute cry for help. Spinning the scenario further reveals that an AI superpower does not need external stimuli except commodities. If you can manufacture everything yourself, it makes sense to weaken other states by not buying their products. To be able to squeeze the raw materials even cheaper from the faltering countries and to buy their remaining economy and government debts to finally dominate it.
It opens up a variety of new geopolitical, social-political and global economic scenarios that completely change the rules of the game. Of course, in a very distant time, the point may come when all states have the best AI, automated manufacturing and so on. But until then, superpowers will be created by the equivalent of the oil of the 21st century, the data in an all-knowing entity.
To end with a quote: "WW1 was the war of chemists. WW2 was the war of physicists. WW3 will be the war of mathematicians." I would add trade war and software engineers/computer scientists/hackers.
This book is an eye opener for those of us unfamiliar with the wide ranging capabilities and imminent impact of AI. Lee tells us about the development, design and future of AI and associated web and mobile technology. He contrasts Chinese work in AI with that in the US. While Chinese AI is based on technologies developed in the US, Chinese companies are now taking their own direction. Lee makes a strong case that AI will have profound consequences for society and determine the relative power of nations. He means this in terms of economic power. He does not discuss military applications.
Kai-Fu Lee is CEO of a Chinese venture capital firm investing in AI. A former president of Google China with a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University he has thirty years’ experience in AI research. From just the application of recently developed technology called “deep learning”, Lee predicts society will be cast into worldwide upheaval. For example automated factories will eliminate the need for low cost labor devastating developing countries, allowing factories to be built near consumers. The economic demise of those displaced by AI in developed countries will exacerbate income inequality. Successful AI entrepreneurs and their companies will gain an even larger share of national income than their internet and social media predecessors eclipsing people such as Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. It’s a scary picture but Lee evaluates ways to address the problem and offers his own solutions.
Lee believes China will lead in implementing AI with the US second. China secures an advantage because it is investing increasingly more in AI than the US. Chinese AI and other software startups are offered rent subsidies and tax discounts to move into designated zones to create technology incubators in the image of Silicon Valley. Local governments have started “guiding funds” which have grown exponentially in a few years to $27 billion in 2015 for investment in venture capital firms focused on AI and supporting technologies. China is also investing heavily in AI related education. The Chinese government is prioritizing AI because it sees AI leadership as a way to increase its world power and spread its culture just as the West has with past technology leadership. Google’s Eric Schmidt in 2017 said that in five years China would equal the US in AI.
Americans often blame Chinese government interference for limiting their success in China; however Lee notes that the domestic success of Chinese internet companies has been due more to their customization for the Chinese market than government controls. Lee attributes Chinese sensitivity to its users to its flexibility “Unencumbered by lofty mission statements or ‘core values’, they had no problem in following trends in user activity wherever it took their companies.” Lee believes a market where copying is problematic such as the US allows the originator to maintain a significant competitive advantage making them less responsive to customers.
Lee describes competition between Chinese AI companies as cutthroat; anything goes. He describes the work ethic as “maniacal”, well beyond the intensity of Silicon Valley. American companies eschew copying from each other. Chinese companies are happy to take technology, business models, employees, whatever they can get from their domestic or international competitors making them more agile. In China they do not face lawsuits or antimonopoly investigations for their actions only the counterpunch of their competitors which can include smear campaigns and even charging competitors with crimes. Lee sees Silicon Valley entrepreneurs as “mission driven”. Take an original idea and achieve an idealistic goal. He sees their Chinese counterparts as “market driven”. It doesn’t matter where an idea comes from, only that it makes a profit. In Lee’s words “The core motivation for Chinese market-driven entrepreneurs is not fame, glory or changing the world. These things are all nice side benefits, but the grand prize is getting rich, and it doesn’t matter how you got there.”
Lee does note that if one of the big seven in AI research (four US, three Chinese - Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent) makes a game changing breakthrough, it would keep that to itself, garnering a huge competitive advantage and rendering the implementation of present AI technology short-lived. Among the seven, Lee gives Google the best shot at such a breakthrough. It has over half of the top 100 AI researchers in the world and spends twice as much on math and computer systems research as the US government. However he still considers such a breakthrough more likely to occur in academia which openly shares its results. And the record of such significant breakthroughs shows they do not occur frequently.
If a major proprietary breakthrough in AI technology in the near term is unlikely, ability to implement becomes the key issue rather expertise in research, favoring China. The amount of data available to feed current state of the art deep learning AI systems determines how well they operate. This too favors China. We are not yet in the age of generalized AI systems. Deep learning AI systems need large amounts of data to learn a specific task, say controlling an autonomous vehicle or facial recognition. One platform, WeChat, can provide everything one needs to know about Chinese habits. WeChat owned by Tencent is a mobile super-app. WeChat allows other developers to incorporate apps within it. With WeChat users can exchange messages, connect with friends, transfer money, make investments, shop, make reservations, order meals, make a doctor’s appointment, unlock a city bike, get a taxi, have groceries or prescriptions delivered, get movie tickets, pay traffic fines, and on and on. Mobile payments in China were $17 trillion in 2017. They are quickly replacing credit cards and cash. Some beggars hang QR codes around there neck to accept mobile payments. WeChat apps collect data on what you buy, who you send money to, the food you eat, the doctor you see, the medicines you use, where you take your bike share or ride share and much, much more. In the US this data is scattered among many platforms and Americans are pushing back on the invasion of their privacy. As I was writing this I read that Apple CEO Tim Cook attributed declining iPhone sales in China in part to WeChat. WeChat does everything and it does it just as well on a cheap Android as it does on an iPhone.
Lee sees four waves of AI development. The first wave is already with us. Algorithms are deciding the ads we see, the videos we are offered and the news we read. The key is data. The more that an AI engine sees of your clicks, pictures and videos viewed, articles and tweets read, the better it can give you what you want leading to a more addictive experience. That addictive experience is the goal since more clicks mean more profit for the website. A Chinese site, Toutiao, called ByteDance in English, is a purveyor of trending news like Buzzfeed. Except rather than use reporters it uses AI to find content that you want even creating its own headlines based on your preferences. The company is experimenting with the algorithm writing its own articles. It can summarize a sports event and post it two seconds after the event ends. These algorithms can both create and detect fake news. Toutiao pits two such algorithms against each other to hone their abilities.
The second wave of AI development is also already with us, in the US more than China. It’s about business. Insurance companies use it to determine risk, banks to determine credit, hedge funds to trade stocks, and pharmaceutical companies to design drugs. The reason the US leads in this area is the same reason China leads in consumer applications – data. US companies have long used data bases to store massive amounts of information in formats readily accessible to AI engines. An emerging application is disease diagnosis. AI engines are thorough taking in and weighing far more detail than a human. AI diagnoses can be used as guides letting the doctor make the final decision. AI can help level the quality of care for underserved poor and rural areas. In China AI is being tested for court systems helping judges decide guilt or innocence and an appropriate sentience. This can help eliminate bias.
The third wave of AI development is just emerging. This is perception AI, AI that can recognize objects, voices and faces. Already a test KFC in China is charging customers based on facial recognition alone. The sensors and algorithm first check that the subject is alive to prevent being fooled by a picture. The WeChat wallet is updated immediately. The customer does nothing except to place their order and take their food. Perception AI requires extensive use of sensors. This is already common in China allowing urban traffic flows to be controlled. In the home devices like Amazon’s Echo interfacing with smart devices allow people to control their environment. Combining home with store AI is next. For example your grocery cart could receive your home shopping list augmented by data from your refrigerator and your purchase history. And of course it would ring up and pay for your order just by placing items in the cart. Education is ripe for development with AI determining a student’s needs, producing appropriate work assignments and grading them. AI could identify students requiring tutoring or those with exceptional abilities. The human teacher would still lecture and assist students.
The fourth wave of AI is autonomy. We are familiar with the tests of autonomous vehicles. The development of autonomous cars relies mostly on collecting more real world data which Tesla and the real technology leader, Google, are actively doing. Chinese companies are also developing autonomous cars but most experts are already with US companies which started working on this complicated application years ago. While Chinese companies are behind US companies they face fewer restrictions and have more government support than US companies. A California startup has devised a machine that can see and delicately pick only ripe strawberries. Now it is pulled by a conventional tractor. In the future it will be autonomous. Drones for everything from firefighting, search and rescue, product delivery and much more are coming. In Amazon’s warehouses the shelves come to warehousemen who stay in one place filling boxes for delivery. The next step seems obvious. As for the home environment Lee does not believe current AI is ready for useful robots. The tasks just to clean a house are too diverse for today’s technology.
While Lee sees artificial general intelligence (AGI) decades away including its ominous possibilities, he does see potentially dire consequences from the full implementation of current AI technology. These consequences are widespread loss of jobs, devaluation of labor, increased income inequality between nations and within nations. The impact will disrupt society and the balance of power in the world. Poor countries relying on cheap labor will be hit the hardest. As factories automate labor costs decline allowing factories to minimize transportation costs and improve service by moving near their markets in developed countries. Data driven monopolies will have significant advantages displacing smaller competitors. The AI superpowers, China and the US, will forge ahead while the developing countries will fall further behind. Within China and the US the divide between the rich and poor will be even greater.
PricewaterhouseCoopers estimates AI will increase worldwide GDP by $15.7 trillion dollars by 2030 with 70% of that going to the US and China. Since AI consists of algorithms that are easily installed where needed and maintained remotely, this revolution can take place at unprecedented speed. Jobs that don’t require social interaction or advanced robotics are most at risk. White collar as well as blue collar jobs are at risk. Some examples: Radiologists are at risk, Psychiatrists are not. Loan underwriters are at risk, PR directors are not. Dishwashers are at risk, dog trainers are not. Fast food preparers are at risk, Physical therapists are not. As I write this the Brookings Institute issued a report that 36 million US jobs are at high risk to be replaced by automation in possibly the next few years although it could take up to two decades. Companies typically invest in labor saving technologies during downturns so a recession would speed things up. Lee shares estimates of how many jobs will actually be displaced in the US where almost all studies have been conducted. These vary from a low of 9% all the way up to 48%. Lee believes 38% is the number of jobs at risk but this could be ameliorated by social policies cutting actual displacement in half and some new jobs will be created. But the value of labor will also drop meaning lower wages for those still employed. The impact on the self-worth of most workers will exacerbate social and political divides.
Lee evaluates prescriptions for dealing with an AI world with too many people for too few traditional jobs. He considers retraining, reducing work hours and guaranteed income. Retraining should be done but will have limited impact. Reduced hours may help some but will reach its limits as will income redistribution. If people are paid for doing little or nothing their sense of self-worth can be undermined creating an underclass. It would lead to a divided society. Are you one of those who work to provide for the world or one who we support? Lee believes there needs to be a new social contract in which government and industry invest in human oriented service jobs. AI will do the thinking but it has no emotion. Lee wants to use the tremendous gains from AI productivity to help fund jobs such as elderly caregivers, patient facing health workers, student supporting educators – jobs in which compassion and a human touch can improve people’s lives. It would be a remarkable shift to divert corporate profits to create this caring society. In part Lee’s ideas stem from his life changing experience being diagnosed with stage four lymphoma. He wants AI to do the diagnoses but a human not a bot to deliver the news and explain it.
Lee recovered with treatment but it made him question what is really important in life. The last chapters of his book reflect this seismic shift in his outlook. He went from seeing his value as revolutionizing the world with game changing technology to valuing personal relationships; being there for family and friends and helping people lead better lives. The dichotomy is reflected in the future we face as AI intrudes into every aspect of our lives. Will it be utopia, dystopia or just a muddle.
Early on, it is noticeable that Mr. Lee’s comments all favor his original premise, that China will eclipse the United States as a global superpower in the realm of international commerce. While I believe this is a possibility, the author’s view initially appeared tainted due to his relative closeness to the subject matter (viewing China as his homeland). Of course, the same could be said of me (living in the US), so I advise readers to take both our initial comments with a grain of salt.
Chinese entrepreneurs have harnessed what has been known for years, that lean companies able to make quick decisions have the advantage in the marketplace. The danger of decisive decisions means the quick sprint in a different direction can lead to riches or a spiral to oblivion.
About halfway through the book, I began to wonder why Mr. Lee chose to spend all this time and effort to tell everyone that he believes China will overtake the US in the AI field. While the stories explaining the growth of Chinese companies were interesting and I can see how they are necessary to use as comparisons to US companies, I questioned the premise for the book. Does he want to warn the US? Brag up his home country? Publish a book to hype his “Sinovation” company? (Fortunately, Mr. Lee answered these questions and more in the last chapter).
Mr. Lee then executed an about-face with an intimate look at his life-threatening disease and how it affected his outlook on life and relationships with others. It is this epiphany that spurs the last third of the book, which moves past the dire outcomes of AI robots putting 50% of us out of work and instead offers a realistic view of using inherent human strengths to create opportunities for us to coexist with the inevitable world we face.
I liked that the author did not pound one thesis at us for 300 pages. Rather, he presented his views in an articulate manner, separating the discussions into coherent pieces that allow readers time to understand one concept before moving on. Surprisingly (based solely on the book’s title), the ultimate thrust of the book did not pit the two superpowers against each other. After posing the questions of how China and the United States might perform in the context of a business model, Mr. Lee moved into an area currently inaccessible to AI, the ability to feel and demonstrate compassion for others.
As a world, we are headed toward a myriad of possibilities, and “AI Superpowers” does more than simply educate. It provides a potential guideline to aid us all in our travels through future uncertainties. In the author’s own words: “If we believe that life has meaning beyond this material rat race, then AI might be the tool that can help us uncover that deeper meaning.” Five stars.
My thanks to NetGalley and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for an advance complimentary ebook.
I was hoping for an insightful read about the balance between the US and China and the current global state of AI, but instead the book basically evolved from cover letter to personal memoir, with a clear bias towards China throughout. Maybe I would have liked this more if I was previously familiar with Kai-Fu Lee, but I found "AI Superpowers" too heavy on the author bragging and not heavy enough on actual substance.
The book offers a fascinating look at the rise of the Chinese tech environment, why it's radically different from Silicon Valley, and why it may well ended up dominating the latter over the next couple of decades.
Lee, went from Taiwan to the US to study at 11 years old, and has worked in senior positions in both Google and Apple; founding Google China before leaving in 2009 to start up his on Chinese venture capital firm, can take both an insider and outsider perspective on the Chinese tech scene which is fascinating.
His point, that AI is both over- and under-hyped was particularly interesting: over-hyped in the sense the big breakthrough in AI was the development of the technique of deep learning some years ago and we are unlikely to see another such earth shattering development again for a while - all the recent advances we are seeing in AI (computer vision; self-driving cars, translation; stock market predictions, AI beating championship players in Go etc) are applications of deep learning techniques (i.e., general AI and robots are not around the corner); under-hyped in the sense that even "just" deep-learning is likely to cause major major disruptions to work and society, and the Chinese tech environment is well placed to take advantage of what is now becoming a mature technology.
I found the last couple of chapters less compelling, where he spent a entire chapter dealing his brush with death when diagnosed with cancer, and his rethinking of his life (work is not everything - spend more time with the family), and how that lead to his belief that the solution to the looming job crisis brought about by AI is that we should pay people do what AI can't: Love other people! So rather than a Universal Basic Income countries should pay people to do jobs that involve love and interaction. This struck me as slightly weird and even a bit creepy, as he had made it clear in previous chapters that he didn't find it at all problematic for corporations/governments to track virtually ever aspect of a person's life. So it's easy to imagine his solution to unemployment being that socially "good" citizens (deemed good by the government) would be rewarded with financial support and the rest not. Something given China's dictatorial government is decidedly creepy.
This is a great book. It not only provides a history of AI both in the USA and China. Kai-Fu Lee also provides a history of AI’s both in the USA and China, and also incudes an in-depth analysis between China and the US’s approach to AI’s. He also discusses pros and cons of their abilities, engineering and politics.
The author explains technical methods so that a lay person can understand it. He also explains algorithms and data in an easy to understand manner. The author shows how AI’s effect our lives today and what is going to happen in the near and far future. He goes into explanations into what jobs will be lost and why as well as which job categories are safe. He also explains what type of jobs will be created in the future. I particularly found the information about teachers enlightening. I found the section on how the superpowers will affect the world most fascinating. This is definitely a must-read book.
I read this as an audiobook downloaded from Audible. The book is nine hours twenty-eight minutes. Mikael Naramore does an excellent job narrating the book. Naramore is an actor, voice actor and audiobook narrators. He has won many Earphone Awards and was the 2017 Audie Award winner.
“A clear-eyed look at the technology’s long-term impact has revealed a sobering truth: in the coming decades, AI’s greatest potential to disrupt and destroy lies not in international military contests but in what it will do to our labor markets and social systems. Appreciating the momentous social and economic turbulence that is on our horizon should humble us. It should also turn our competitive instincts into a search for cooperative solutions to the common challenges that we all face as human beings, people whose fates are inextricably intertwined across all economic classes and national borders.”
An excellent overview of AI where it stands, and where it's going. Took one star off as the last portion of the book was a little heavy handed with the whole, diagnosed with cancer, near death experience completely changed my life/views. Not that there's anything wrong with that, it is an important experience and gives a little bit of "heart" to an otherwise straightforward review of AI—but it's a little jarring after the excellent analysis of the first part and could have been saved for a personal memoir instead of a book on tech.
*However* ... Lee is writing from his own personal (extensive) experience with AI so, it gets a pass.
Films, especially the "Terminator" series, had introduced me to a limited view of artificial intelligence (AI). AI Superpowers by Kai-Fu Lee provided me with a broader big picture introduction to AI in terms of what it is, identifying the major players, and making some predictions about the future. Lee also includes many examples of companies' current innovations - from AI that can handily trounce world champion Go players to the ubiquitous digital wallet in China created by WeChat.
My understanding from Lee's book is that AI is a machine duplication of the human brain's ability to think and thus make decisions. Since the 1980s, AI scientists had been divided into two different camps, and it is the deep learning camp that replicates the brain's neutral networks which has prevailed. This "narrow AI" requires algorithms to be fed massive amounts of data from a specific domain in order to recognize patterns that will lead to a desired outcome.
Lee describes four waves of the AI evolution. The first two waves are the "internet AI" (ex. purchase recommendations from Amazon) and "business AI" (ex. enabling faster decisions to people's credit worthiness). We are currently in the third wave - "perception AI" in which we no longer require the computer or our smartphones in order to access the internet (ex. smart appliances). The final wave is "autonomous AI" - when machines understand the world and directly shape the world.
The culmination of the AI evolution is what scientists call "singularity" or artificial general intelligence (AGI). AGI is the basis of the "Terminator" movies - when thinking machines have the ability to perform any intellectual tasks that humans can do.
Learning about AI was the most interesting part of AI Superpowers for me. Of lesser appeal, but still highly relevant, was Lee's description of the AI players, on a corporate level as well as on the macro stage. Given Lee's professional experience, he occupies the vantage point of a specialist. His current occupation as the founder of a venture capital firm based in Beijing, however, predisposes him to cast a more favorable assessment of China. What Lee blithely describes as cultural differences between Silicon Valley and China obscures the vastly different playing fields as defined by governmental and judicial roles. For Silicon Valley and other technology firms in Europe, intellectual property merits some legal protection. Lee's military metaphors glorify China's copycat practices and their complete disregard for anyone's intellectual property. It is that plus their wealth of scientists and engineers that have enabled their technology firms to progress so quickly that they are now serious competitors that should neither be dismissed nor underestimated.
Finally, Lee's chapters on predictions and proposals provide serious food for thought. Although the attainment of singularity may not (if ever) transpire until as early as 2045, the consequences of the fourth wave of the AI evolution alone are indeed earth shaking. Researchers' estimates vary widely but 10 to 40 percent of jobs in the USA are assessed to be replaceable by AI by 2030. The social ramifications are nowhere as apocalyptic as the "Terminator" franchise suggests but will nonetheless still be devastating.
I believe that AI Superpowers was too general to be anything but a light reading for those from the AI field. For the rest of us, and non-STEM readers in particular, this is accessible information but not necessarily presented in the most concise manner. The author also had a life threatening brush with cancer and this generated an epiphany that shaped his proposals. So although impactful in that regard, I felt that this biographical chapter could have been shortened considerably as it altered the overall tone of AI Superpowers.
Um livro bem diferente e informativo sobre AI. A maior parte do que li sempre é contada do ponto de vista dos EUA ou do desenvolvimento no Silicon Valley – onde afinal grande parte da computação começa. O Kai-Fu Lee conta de um outro ponto de vista, no entanto. Como o AlphaGo e a disputa em torno de Go despertou os chineses para a inteligência artificial de maneira similar ao Sputnik despertando os americanos para a corrida espacial.
A disputa central que ele coloca, de poder de computação versus dados (e portanto privacidade) no avanço de IAs é fundamental. E a China realmente pode ter uma vantagem maior, pela maneira como tratam os seus dados. Da mesma forma que a Apple ficou bem para trás com a Siri em relação à Amazon e Google. Já vemos alguns produtos chineses como os drones se diferenciando com base na inteligência e na automação que têm. Vai ser bastante interessante ver esse desenrolar.
يعتبر كتاب جذاب جدا، كمقدمة للتلميح في فهم طبيعة العلاقة بين الصين والولايات الأمريكية، وشكل المنافسة بينهم، أو الصراع الدائم الدائر- إن جاز التعبير، وكيف تفوقت الصين فتحولت إلي لاعب قوي مهيمن في سوق تكنولوجيا المعلومات، الذكاء الاصطناعي، مستقبل العالم الرقمي، وثورة تقنيات الويب، ومدى التأثير السلبي على دول العالم الثالث- النامية.. وبالرغم من عدد صفحات الكتاب التي لا تتجاوز ال٣٠٠ صفحة؛ إلا أنه يحوي كم معتبر من الحقائق والمعلومات؛ حتى وإن تيسر الحصول ع بعضها، ومعرفتها بمجرد كبسة زر على محركات البحث؛ لكن هذا لايقلل من أهمية الكتاب، ما دام تم توظيفها بشكل منهجي.
Buen libro sobre el pasado, presente y futuro de la inteligencia artificial comparando la evolución de las dos principales potencias en este campo que son China y Estados Unidos. El libro también analiza los pros, contras y dilemas éticos de la adopción masiva de sistemas de inteligencia artificial en la sociedad, especialmente las pérdidas de empleo que generarán y aumento de diferencias sociales entre personas con trabajo y otras que no se adapten a los nuevos cambios.
Don't you just love it when two worlds of your interests collide? Having read many science fiction works (and movies) featuring AI, I truly enjoyed the reading experience from this book. Funnily enough, he did made a reference to Hao Jingfang's story, Folding Beijing, when he talked about AGI, aka the Singularity.
As I said before in my placeholder review, it is highly informative. I learned about deep learning and its relation with data, what it takes for successful AI algorithms to take off. I was given an overview on how the Chinese ICT industry likely to lead the AI revolution, also in comparison with how Silicon Valley works. Each has their own uniqueness, competitive edge, that might or might not work for them in the future. Lee made some predictions on AI capabilities China and the US would have by 2021. I can't wait for next year and see how it'll fare, whether his prediction comes true or not.
It amused me when reading about the cutthroat competition in China and the stories of how companies like WeChat could thrive. I just found that it was behind the trend in my own country, where our own locally grown apps suddenly inspiring to be super apps. A friend even told me these local apps copied the UI/UX of the successful apps in China in its entirety. Learning from the best, I guess.
The book also got me thinking about how these progresses in the AI front poses real underlying threat, namely tremendous social disorder and political collapse stemming from widespread unemployment and gaping inequality. Would Universal Basic Income - a solution supported by many major IT players - work? Which jobs would be lost when AI comes to play? How do you measure the impact of AI in the work force? Should countries become more techno-utilitarian, i.e. hurting some (e.g. data privacy) for the greater good?
While the topics are fascinating, I too wish that he provided extra elaboration on the importance of localization and how it relates to the four waves of AI development. Instead, the last few chapters were kind of.... overly sentimental. Sure, it's fine to put some of the personal life experience especially if it's life-altering but yet it might have taken away more needed details on other relevant stuff readers like yours truly need, like the types of jobs that will integrate human and AI. He provided a very intriguing chart that deserves two chapters at least.
All in all, a very good book that everyone with the slightest interest in AI and technology impact to society should read.
I think I've read enough about automation and job displacement that this book was not revelatory to me personally, but there was some good information about the gladiatorial culture of Chinese tech entrepreneurs and what that means for the future of U.S.-China competition. I was also quite touched by the authors own segue into discussing his experience with cancer and how it shaped his thinking about human purpose and how we use our time. Some of the predictions laid out here about self-driving cars and things like that being on the horizon seem to have been too sanguine, but as Lee notes we are clearly in the "implementation" phase of the AI revolution and we should expect rapid changes in our lives soon.
This is one of the most useful books to read if you want to understand China's rising dominance in the applications of A.I. technologies, written by none other than the highly respected expert of China's startup scene, Dr. Kai-Fu Lee. While many Westerners might still associate China's tech companies with copycats or OEM sweatshops, this book makes it crystal clear why China has emerged as the world's model country for developing and integrating A.I. technologies into virtually every corner of its citizens' lives. Thanks to an exceptionally high penetration of smartphone adoption and government-led efforts to advance domestic tech innovation, Chinese tech companies are able to collect and analyze mountains of data generated from a variety of not just online but also offline user activities, such as taxi hailing, money transfer, bike rental, manicure reservations, shopping, and pretty much anything you can think of. Such richness and diversity of user data from one of the world's biggest populations, along with a more nonchalant attitude towards data privacy, allows Chinese tech companies to continuously improve the A.I. algorithms powering their services, which in turn helps further enhance their service qualities. As the author notes, China boasts the largest amount of user data, a central government unfettered by election pressure and willing to take big bets, and a growing breed of smart, hard-working tech entrepreneurs bent on global domination, which is why China is slowly and quietly winning the A.I. war. U.S. and Silicon Valley has no room for complacency.
The last few chapters discusses the unnerving possibility of a dystopian future where the vast majority of user data around the world are concentrated in the hands of a few large tech behemoths and automation and A.I. technologies have replaced over 40% of all jobs, both blue collar and white collar jobs. If the rise of political populism and nationalist movement in recent years is any indication, such a grim future would probably lead to even more political unrest and social chaos where the haves and have-nots become economically and socio-politically divided. The author, thus, argues that to avert such a calamous result, governments, institutions, tech companies, and people of all countries will have to come together and cooperate in figuring out how to design a global A.I. future that serves all people, not just a select few.
With AI Superpowers, Lee has written a clear-eyed account of the business of AI that is highly digestible for the general reader. I found that the most valuable part of the book is its first half, which contrasts AI in the U.S. and China, and makes a convincing cultural argument for why Silicon Valley companies can't seem to make it in China. For example, Google wasn't popular as a search engine because it didn't optimize itself for the habits of Chinese users, who preferred to treat the search page as a "shopping mall" where they could sample many different links, as opposed to western users who treat it as "the yellow pages" and seek a specific bit of information. A competing Chinese search engine allowed users to automatically open a new tab for each link clicked and rapidly surpassed Google in popularity. There are several tidbits like this in the book's first half, and Lee presents the information very clearly throughout.
So why not a higher rating? In the book's second half, Lee considers the societal implications of AI, which are bound to be "disruptive", to say the least. I don't want to rant and rave too much about this, but I simply couldn't trust the author politically. First of all, Lee is a venture capitalist, famously a profession that attracts sociopaths; it's my view a person that holds this profession cannot be trusted under any circumstances. Lee presents himself as one of the good ones by telling the reader his epiphany, following a cancer diagnosis, that human emotion and love are important, and that one should not behave as an algorithm. He extrapolates this revelation to policy proposals for a world where AI has taken most of the jobs. He admits that the market alone cannot guarantee that everyone is taken care of, but touts mythical concepts like "socially conscious business", where corporations will somehow realize that they should take a cut in profits for the sake of some social benefit. This will simply never happen. For instance, petrochemical companies will sooner destroy the planet and drive every species to extinction than even think of losing a penny of profit. There's a reason CEO's and business tycoons are so enamored of this book. It tells you what they'd like you to believe.
His most far-reaching plan is something he calls the "social investment stipend", which is meant to monetize most human actions by somehow putting a price on compassion. So while many people are displaced by AI they will be paid for performing other jobs, such as "parenting...attending to an aging parent, assisting a friend or family member dealing with illness, or helping someone with mental or physical disabilities" (221). Here, Lee proposes that the market encroach on what little space it has yet to devour, such as the domestic sphere and even relationships between people. Lee also proposes that even hobbies can become a job. What struck me about this is that it reaches for a similar utopian sentiment to Marx's vision of a classless society:
"He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic." (Marx, The German Ideology, 1845).
Yet, Lee arrives at this sentiment in almost exactly the opposite fashion. He thinks we should be able to live and work in a way that's true to human diversity, but the method of doing this is bringing everything into the market. If every action can be a job, why bother with it at all? Why not just abolish the idea that we must labor to live, and create a more compassionate system where the value created by AI replacing labor is fairly distributed? Or is the idea that our value as human beings is tied so irrevocably to labor that we must legitimize our survival in this roundabout way?
It's not all doom and gloom for Lee, and he spends a bit of time discussing some exciting possibilities that AI could bring about. Exciting for him, anyway. Personally, I found all his breathless excitement – about a shopping cart scanning your face and knowing everything about your preferences, then notifying a human attendant who only still has a job because he's so good at up-selling you an algorithmically determined product – a bit dystopian. Particularly dystopian was the idea that education could soon become so depersonalized that the teacher doesn't even need to be in the room with you, but is rather webcasting simultaneously to many classrooms while cameras are scanning the faces of students to make sure they're all paying attention. I don't see how anyone can read this section and not be horrified at this vision of the future, and yet, Lee describes it all with enthusiasm.
The sad part for me is that I do believe AI could present incredibly exciting opportunities for the human species, not least in its potential to free us from monotonous labor and allow us to live in a way that's more free and true to our creative nature. It's a real shame that its real-world application is often in the hands of people who love nothing more than to maximize profit and increase efficiency (whatever that means).
Lee is a clear writer and the book is worth reading, especially if it will make people pay attention to how drastically AI will affect us, and realize we don't want the technopolists writing the legislation. Their utopia could be dystopia for the rest of us.
Ehh, don't be deterred by my 2 star rating. This book is short and may still worth your time.
I will break down the book into roughly 4 sections: 1) AI & its beauty, 2) its ugliness 3) the author 4) the author's proposed solution.
For people unfamiliar with China, especially the modern China since 2010s, the first section is particularly valuable. I've been fascinated by the country for quite a few years already and have learned the majority of examples that Lee covers through my friends and through Weibo. What Chinese firms, entrepreneurs, and government have been able to generate, a plethora of creative products and services powered by technology, will put you in awe. Read the book just for this part is enough. It's so exciting!
The second section discusses, mainly at the macro level, the disruption that AI has the potential to invoke (job loss, the reshaping of the whole economy). This section falls short of my expectation. I was further hoping for some nuanced arguments such as in Weapons of Math Destruction, but found nothing like such. Lee repeatedly drills on one point: AI and deep learning require huge amount of data, of high quality data (which China has). But he fails to mention also that machine just learns, without an ethical system. If your data contain biases, if the algorithm is just geared towards profits and profits, biases are likely to be perpetuated, now at an ever expanding level and speed. The consequences may come before the macro level one that Lee envisions. I don't see the type of empathy that Cathy O'Neil expresses in her book towards the poor, or a younger Sara Wachter-Boettcher towards the marginalized in Technically Wrong. Lee talks about the problems of AI in a very general sense, in the whole economy wide setting. The empathy is so abstract.
I'm speechless at the third part as Lee discusses his cancer and the impact that it leaves on him, his work and life philosophy, and consequentially his view on solutions to problems created by AI: love. Yes, goosebumps. It turns very personal. Sure in previous chapters here and there he inserts his ego, his achievements and awards and stuffs, but this part is a new level. I appreciate that he learns to want to be more humble, to spend more time with loved ones etc. But... well, I don't want to be mean. To be short, I feel like reading some cheap chicken soup story by someone who thinks he has seen revelation.
Final chapter, sure, solution. Okayyy. These are ideas, quite vague and broad, and injected with a lot of society becoming humanistic and more love, because human can do that but machines can't.
All of this could be because of the writing. The overall ideas aren't bad, the execution is. The writing is so repetitive, so verbose while I personally prefer something concise. The style is sorta ego-centric, albeit with some small redeeming part at the end. Lee, after all, is an entrepreneur, a highly successful and intelligent male computer scientist and investor.
Frankly, I could not read beyond the first few chapters of this book. Dr. Kai Fu Lee lost all credibility with me when in the second chapter or so he says "Everything in AI Science that needs to be discovered has been discovered. Now it is up to the entrepreneurs to move it forward". I was so surprised that someone with a PhD in AI from Carnegie-Mellon would say something like this. Funny thing about AI is that you need to implement something hard in it like Natural Language Understanding or Machine Vision or Deep Logical Reasoning to understand how we are about 50 years away from achieving any of this in any meaningful way. Today I read about this dumb sentence completion thing that Google is bragging about. They have let a Machine Learning program go at published materials in English and apparently it can complete sentences! So they declare that Natural Language Understanding is well on its way. We have been saying this in the 80's and then again in the 90's, in the 2000's and now in the 2010's. Mechanical machine translation is what we have achieved so far and that too sucks. If you have any doubts befriend Russians, Thais, Japanese and even Georgian (yes, Santa Claus, there is a language with Greek looking script) on Facebook, Instagram and try machine translation on their posts. They leave out entire words and phrases and translated material is stilted at best and incomprehensible at times. This is not to say that advances have not been over the years but the advances have been going from zero to 10% comprehension rather than zero to 80% comprehension like all these approaches claim. Machine Learning cannot solve deep understanding and deep reasoning. It cannot divine motivations and cannot approach use of past experiences in something we all call "Gut Feeling". The human brain makes immense use of cultural idioms, scripts and plans and many things automatically to do what we call Intelligent Behavior. Dr. Lee fails in this respect and frankly I am surprised given his credentials. I have a sneaking suspicion that his need to play up China and need to bring down American approaches blinds him and prevents him from taking a very objective look at the AI Science. AI Science has still many unsolved problems and entrepreneurs can only scratch the surface because their pressures are different. Only two stars in my opinion! Had great expectations for this book but am terribly disappointed!
I really wanted to like this book. Really. The first 50 pages were interesting, new information about AI innovation in China and the US, but the rest of the book was just a diatribe by an ex-Google VP about how Silicon Valley doesn't understand China and Chinese consumers.
I found myself disagreeing with most of his central points -- that China's copycat years paved the way for innovation in China, that Chinese technology will come to dominate US culture (I can't think of a single Chinese tech innovation that is widely used in America), and China's ruthlessness trumps American creativity when it comes to tech inventions.
He also lost a lot of credibility when he argued that we have left the period of tech discovery and are now in the period of tech implementation. I strongly disagree. Thinking of just my industry -- cloud tech -- which is all about providing a platform so that businesses, developers and scientists can discover and invent. This industry is just taking off, never mind AI and robotics, which are still not monetized.
The writing is not great. Most of the book reads like an exit interview from Google. There is a strange personal story about mortality that takes up a quarter of the book and seems completely out of place.
The only point I agreed with is that we have finally created enough data to effectively pursue neural networks in artificial intelligence. I do think that will usher in a new phase of machine learning that we have never seen before or can imagine. But whether China or the US leads in this, seems short-sighted. Both countries are rife with regulation and control. Wherever privacy is least regulated and business has the most freedom -- that is where consumer-ready AI will be born.
AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order by Kai-Fu Lee is a book about the past, present and future of AI as forecast by the author, a true expert in the field. Unfortunately, AI Superpowers is shallow when it comes to the actual technical content of the book. Lee makes no attempt to provide deep insights into the specific technologies and methods that will unlock the next phase of AI that promises to disrupt major sectors of the world’s economy. Lee instead employs analogies related to historical technologies, such as the steam engine and the light bulb, to illustrate the latent potential in AI. Additionally, the book feels more like a lengthy blog than a well-researched triste on the emerging power of AI. About halfway through the book, Lee stops to discuss his battle with cancer and pilgrimage to a Buddhist monastery. This is a powerful, moving narrative and frankly one of the best treatments of our struggle with mortality I have ever had the pleasure of reading, but it is completely out of place in a book of this type and furthermore unnecessarily fragments the book. The best part of AI Superpowers is the presentation on how the Chinese use the internet. In America, each app serves a solitary purpose: shopping, social media and weather are all separate. In China, each app serves as complete portal to every possible transaction one can make on the internet. Additionally, the Chinese actually click on almost every single link on a web page instead of just one of top links presented. Lastly, the stereotype of the cheap Chinese knockoff is alive and well on the internet as all of the major Chinese websites have near exact duplicates designed to snare susceptible users. AI Superpowers presents a glimpse into a brave new world of computer superiority; however, just like the technology, finds itself on a long and meandering path to do so.
اگه کسی به این زمینه علاقه، ( آینده هوش مصنوعی چطوریه ، کشور پیشگام هوش مصنوعی در آینده چه کشوریه و اینکه هوش مصنوعی چه تاثیری رو زندگی انسانها میزاره) کتاب زیر رو پیشنهاد میکنم بخونن
------------- I have followed this AI real deal, Dr. Kai-Fu Lee, based on his 2018 Bestseller Book - ”AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order”, and many of his public talks.
The book has given Dr. Lee a chance to reflect on developments in AI through his own personal journey as former executives of world-class companies like Apple, SGI, Microsoft and Google. In 2009 after having helped Google establish its China market and overseen its growth, Dr Lee decided to found his own company, later known as - Sinovation Ventures, which today has invested over 300 AI portfolios in China with value of USD 2 billion.
The following are essences of Lee Kai-Fu’s book and his public talks.
(1) WAVES OF AI DEVELOPMENT. The recent waves of A.I. development was due to (a) the surge of Computing Power; (b) the breakthrough of Deep Learning; and (c) the availability of Big Data.
(2) ONE LONE BREAKTHROUGH OF AI. According to Lee Kai-Fu, the theoretical development of AI since 1956 has had only one major breakthrough, i.e. deep learning. However, it has become practical only after massive amount of data are available to train the algorithm.
(3) BIG DATA. In the evolution of human civilization, the key asset of human was “land” in the agricultural age, and “oil” in the industrial age. In the coming A.I. age, the most valuable asset is “big data”. So, China is poised to be the Saudi Arabia of data.
(4) AI THREAT. Threat from AI is overstated. According to Lee, there is no engineering evidence that AI will reach human level intelligence including self-awareness and consciousness. Up to now, the application of the major breakthrough in AI, i.e., deep learning, is still limited by its single domain and one objective.
(5) CHINA’S MIRACLE DECADE. Just 10 years ago, China was a copycat machine. Today, China becomes a country of practical innovations. It even innovates the way to protect its own innovation from being copied. With China’s advancement in 5G technology not endorsed by the US, the greatly expanded global market will be under 2 separate universes led by China and US.
(6) TECHNOLOGICAL JUMP. The late arrival of the fixed line telephones and credit cards in China proved to be an opportunity in disguise, allowing China to jump over to mobile and cashless society.
(7) AI COMPETITION. On the AI competition, US is mission driven, and China is market driven. While US is ahead in terms of advanced research; China is ahead in terms of its industrial implementation driven by its big data.
(8) CHINA'S ADVANTAGES. China has the potential to become world’s leader in AI due to its 6 advantages (1) good engineers (hardworking); (2) great ecosystem (competitive): (3) great innovative mind (practical); (4) big data (new oil); (5) funding (unlimited supply); and (6) huge government support (socialism for capitalism).
(9) JOB DISRUPTION. On the job disruption, jobs with repetitive tasks and with unique solutions will soon be replaced by AI. Jobs with high compassion and creativity will remain.
(10) AI WEAPON RACE. Today, the most concern about AI is not AI as enemy of human, but the hidden race on its development for autonomous weapons, which could be more devastating and more difficult to prevent than nuclear.
Kai-Fu Lee nasceu em Taiwan em 1961, ainda jovem, abandona a china para estudar nos EUA. Licenciou-se em engenharia informática e doutorou-se na Universidade Carnegie Mellon, onde desenvolveu o sistema de reconhecimento de fala continuo e independente, que 20 anos mais tarde deu origem à Siri.
Kai-Fu Lee é um dos mais consagrados especialistas em IA do mundo, trabalhou durante anos em Silicon Valey e em Beijing. Trabalhou como CEO em grandes empresas tecnológicas. Fundou a Google China.
Começo esta análise ao livro convidando-vos à visualização do TED abaixo, que ilustra muito bem o teor do livro.
Lee conta-nos como a china se desenvolveu tecnologicamente em tão pouco tempo e consequentemente melhorou a sua economia, sendo hoje a segunda economia mundial.
Ao longo do livro Lee mostra-nos os benefícios e malefícios que a IA trará ao ser humano, mas demonstra-nos igualmente, o poder que os países têm no desenvolvimento desta tecnologia.
A guerra entre China e EUA surge pela supremacia tecnológica, ambas querem ganhar esta corrida, mas é a china, que neste momento, estará melhor posicionada e prepara-se para dar o golpe final a Silicon Valley, ou seja, ultrapassar as receitas, os serviços e a investigação da IA e disseminar os seus produtos por todo o mundo, vender a sua tecnologia, melhor e mais barata.
A IA é altamente rentável e trará muito dinheiro ao bolso dos empreendedores, investidores e capitalistas, porque a máquina ao se tornar cada vez mais inteligente mais postos de trabalho extingue. A máquina não precisa de parar para se alimentar, nem para dormir ou descansar, as máquinas não acasalam, logo não tem que cuidar da saúde e educação dos filhos, as máquinas não adoecem e não se agrupam sindicalmente, não reivindicam os seus direitos e não fazem greve. Trabalham 24/7/365, enquanto tiverem energia que as alimente.
A máquina inteligente trará benefícios para os humanos, passaremos a ter mais serviços, melhores serviços e cada vez mais baratos, despojamos-nos dos trabalhos rotineiros e chatos e ficaremos com mais tempo para a ociosidade.
Mas, o que fazer com os milhares de pessoas que ficam sem o posto de trabalho e consequentemente sem rendimentos, por exemplo, os bancários, os administrativos, os professores, os radiologistas, ….Este é um problema que urge resolver.
A velocidade estonteante do desenvolvimento tecnológico não é acompanhada pela perceção e compreensão humana, os indivíduos precisam de tempo e formação para acomodar o conhecimento e usar as novas ferramentas que a IA coloca ao seu serviço. Tanto em Silicon Valey como em Beijing estudam-se formulas que tente resolver este problema no curto e médio prazo. As empresas estão a introduzir a IA gradualmente, e à medida que o ser humano se vai adaptando a esta nova realidade, vai reconstruindo as suas carreiras profissionais capazes de dar resposta a este novo paradigma.
Muitas profissões deixarão de existir, em contrapartida outras surgirão, nós teremos, forçosamente, de nos adaptar a esta nova realidade, a historia não volta atrás e também não se repete.
Lee Kaifu is a top AI researcher and he was a major player in technology startups, in Microsoft's speech recognition, and at Google's China office, and he is now widely-followed on Chinese social media.
For a short book, the argument is provocative, informative, and clear to follow. AI will transform modern business in the near future. Chinese businesses, often copying foreign businesses in the 1980s and 1990s, did so out of limited financial resources. Expansion in Chinese markets requires adaptation to local circumstances, which meant that many outside businesses were out-competed, often by the "ruthless" local firms, which had political backing and existed in a "gladiatorial" market.
Additionally, Chinese technical firms went towards vertical integration of industries, rather than the "lean" software-only approach of American venture capital; and success in artificial intelligence requires access to large reservoirs of personal data. Lee lists seven firms which he sees as having special advantages: Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent/Wechat.
Lee is pessimistic about the costs of unemployment due to AI, and suggests that up to half of workers may be displaced and that society would be fundamentally reorganized because of that - which I don't know if that is accelerated or hindered after the pandemic. Additionally, he is more sanguine than most about China's advantages, although there are some additional factors that are stronger than first anticipated- government policy as well, which does have its own preferences.
Loved this book. I learned a lot about what a great man has done, but even more about who he is. His POV about the future of AI is spot on, and made me think about the structural advantage that China has: - government structure means an ability to rapidly spur public investment in R&D without political backlash (rather embraced support by the lieutenants on the ground), which lends to an even higher appetite for risk than among VCs in Silicon Valley - Size, with more internet users than US/EU combined, since data quantity = quality in this game - Culture of Shanzai - unbiased towards the stigma of copycats. Which leads to a more ruthless environment where the winners who come out on the test truly have the best products - Market-driven rather than mission-driven mentality - scarcity mentality creates a greater drive for survival - Culture of the consumer, who is less concerned with data security and privacy than in the US/EU - the fact that implementation is the key to the future of AI - moreso than improved algorithms.
I also loved learning about Moravec's paradox - had not thought about this in the past, but it is spot on. Kai-fu's view on the future of technological displacement is dire, and his vision for how the public and private sectors can address this in the future is idealistic - the key to me is not in having the right answers, but asking the right questions (which he does). Capitalism and democracy are only a few hundred years old, and continuing to evolve. His questions are the right ones for us to consider as we intentionally shape these systems to better serve us for the future (rather than let them run completely under the invisible hand).
His personal anecdote about coming to terms with his own humanity and concluding that love is the purpose of life was my favorite part - to see the man. It's a message that I'm happy to have discovered myself at a relatively early age, and driven by events of great joy.
What I could not help but take away was whether the conditions that will lead to China's superiority in AI is a "good" thing from the standpoint of the Chinese population. Will this result in happier people? If meaning comes from "sharing love with those around us", I think about the massive amount of time spent in the virtual world by the Chinese population, the digital customization driven by ML that leads to a decreased need for human contact, the product superiority which keeps more eyes on screen, the prevalence of O2O which saves so much time to be spent online, the values of being market-driven such that finance > intimacy… this does not sound like a good thing. Left unchecked, as with capitalism, these forces of commerce and culture will not lead to a happy place. But I'm confident that they will not be left unchecked. These pacelayers of change happen slowly, but can be impacted by fashion and governance, for which China holds an advantage in agility. I don't know how the future will unfold, but we will need to keep asking ourselves the provocative questions that Kai-Fu raises in his book (and magnificent speech Kai-Fu Lee: How AI can save our humanity) to come to a place of positivity.
Chapter notes: China’s Sputnik moment - alpha go defeating Ke Jie in May 2017. Unnoticed by the US, streamed by 280MM Chinese. Showed that AI was winning in the West
We are in an age of implementation - technology behind deep learning is decades old. Now being applied to new fields due to increasing computing power and lower cost. China has an advantage now - more data, more engineers, faster iteration due to shanzai, and highly incentivized government programs for aI research. - Shanzai is not about copycats. It’s about a no rules anything goes arena, where competitors learn to become gladiators. - Market driven instead of mission driven here in The Valley - Scarcity mentality = survival
Zhongguancun - chuangye dajie. Created a Silicon Valley environment top down. Entrepreneurs became mentors and investors, by forcing proximity and social networks through eminent domain. Authenticity < action in this case - Led by Guo Hong. Who later left the government to create Zhongguancun bank (like svb)
Public/private LP - public investment capped at 10% IRR, private investors buyout shares at strike price. Subsidy to mitigate downside risk but leave upside uncapped - Private markets more efficient? Yes long term. Public incentives served as a catalyst - Government support - led to mayors taking action to incentivize innovation hubs. Contrast that to Solyndra and massive political backlash for a single failure out of a highly productive program
China goes heavy while the US goes white. Vertical and horizontal integration versus singular focus. Results in more data, but greater risk of execution. Enabled O2O - Higher capital needs - eg Ali pay and WeChat wallet subsidizing taxi drivers to incentivize going cashless. Apple pen Google wallet half tread lightly in this arena - Appetite for risk? Investor ambitions / biases?
AI and data: quantity is quality. Same for talent. Because the future is implementation, mass of good engineers > few exceptional ones. - decentralization
1st wave AI: internet. ML to increase user engagement (toutiao, fb, quora) - China / US 50-50 in capability. China will be superior due to more users in future
2nd wave AI: business. US has an advantage due to structured data on more mature industries like banking and medical. This weakness for china can become an advantage as business leapfrogs institutions direct to personal customization. China has more personal structured data from users on mobile. - US 90/10 today. China can win by leapfrogging
3rd wave AI: perception. Customization to user shopping and behaviors. Calls OMO - online merge offline, or consumers who are always online. - China 60/40 today due to users not concerned by privacy. Choose convenience. Gap will continue to widen.
4th wave AI: autonomy. This area is dominated by quality engineers over quantity. But the spread of algorithms will lend to application richness in china - 70/30 US today, will become more like 50/50
Dire view of technological displacement - if capitalism is left unbridled. Capitalism will need to evolve for societies to survive. I have faith that it will, and it will not be driven by the public sector. - Moravec’s paradox: AI is more likely to replace white collar jobs. Algorithms are more easily spread than robots (mechanical, production, fine motor specialization).
“I stopped viewing my life as an algorithm that optimizes for influence. instead I try to spend my energy doing the one thing I found truly brings meaning to a person’s life: sharing love with those around us”
View of common Solutions Retrain - good, but insufficient. Education is key, but will leave many behind still. Reduce - unrealistic to be mass scale. Doesn’t address the contract of self worth that people take from employment. Redistribute - vanity metrics. UBI serves as a temp band aid for recipients, and makes those offering it feel less guilty. Libertarian approach - community of users instead of a community. - Core to technological unemployment is changing the social and cultural view of self worth. Hard to do
Vision Private sector creates more human centric jobs that AI cannot replace, or are supplanted by AI - a la Max Tegmark human + machine is best. But this is insufficient. Many of these jobs are low paying. Spur in impact investing towards creation of human centric industries (VCs to the rescue). With expectations that returns will be muted. Dbl approach, but for sustainable employment as a specific subset of social impact. Social stipend - public funding to subsidize those who do care work. To change the social contract for how culture views volunteers. - Model of orange vested volunteers in Taiwan. Nudge approach to forming a cultural value - Creating a more empathic civilization. Top-down government nudging, not market or freedom based. A unique Chinese approach. - How would this work in the US? Future of capitalism is tied to the future of governance. Democracy needs to evolve with it. How to become more compassionate while maintaining free market principles?
Google "books about artificial intelligence," and you'll find a slew of them. Amazon lists 286. Computer scientists, journalists, science fiction authors, and other observers have written on the topic, sometimes insightfully, sometimes not. I've read nearly two dozen of these books. But AI Superpowers, the latest one to land on my Kindle, is by far the best. Author Kai-Fu Lee isn't just one of the most authoritative voices in the field. He's also unusually insightful. And he writes well (although a collaborator may help account for that).
A carefully balanced appraisal of AI Dr. Lee's thesis is straightforward. China is fast approaching parity with the United States "in the defining technology of the twenty-first century," he contends. This rivalry is the focus of AI Superpowers. But the book ranges far beyond this narrow question into a carefully balanced appraisal of the field's potential for good—and for harm. He is skeptical about the prospects for machine super-intelligence that doomsayers like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking have decried. Lee doesn't envision machines killing off the human race.
Taking the broad view, he asserts that "The AI world order will combine winner-take-all economics with an unprecedented concentration of wealth in the hands of a few companies in China and the United States. This, I believe, is the real underlying threat posed by artificial intelligence: tremendous social disorder and political collapse stemming from widespread unemployment and gaping inequality." For example, "within ten to twenty years, I estimate we will be technically capable of automating 40 to 50 percent of jobs in the United States."
"Like the harnessing of electricity" Much of contemporary commentary on AI dwells on the approach of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). At that point, supposedly, machines will become so much smarter than humans that they may regard us as little more than pests. So goes the critics' lament, at any rate. Dr. Lee believes AGI lies far in the future and may even prove to be impossible. But that's not to say that AI's impact will ultimately be anything but grave. "The dawn of AI in China," he writes, "will be like the harnessing of electricity: a game-changer that supercharges industries across the board." And, of course, that impact will be felt in the United States and everywhere else around the world as well: "the technology's skill biases will generate a bifurcated job market that squeezes out the middle class."
The best book about artificial intelligence However, Dr. Lee is optimistic that the most severe consequences of AI's wide deployment can be avoided. Certainly, millions of workers (most of them white-collar employees) will be displaced by automation. But there are a myriad of tasks that can only be performed by humans unless AGI should miraculously make an appearance. Take medicine, for example. Machines are rapidly gaining the ability to diagnose illness and prescribe medications better than any physician. Not long from now, it may be possible for doctors to forego memorizing all the minute details about illness and pharmacology and concentrate instead on relating to patients as human beings. This will open the possibility that much larger numbers of doctors can be put to work, since the intellectual demands will no longer be so great.
Far more compassionate caregivers "As a result, society will be able to cost-effectively support far more compassionate caregivers than there are doctors, and we would receive far more and better care." And there are innumerable other human services occupations that currently employ far too few people. (Think social work and education.) Also, "we will see entirely new service jobs that we can hardly imagine today. Explain to someone in the 1950s what a 'life coach' was and they'd probably think you were goofy." Clearly, a shift toward human services and new forms of work isn't a panacea. But it may go a long way toward mitigating the impact Dr. Lee foresees from AI. Nonetheless, public policy will need to shift as well, not just to provide the necessary incentives to move people into these new fields but to lessen the impact of growing economic inequality.
An alternative to a Universal Basic Income Others have proposed either a Guaranteed Minimum Income or a Universal Basic Income (UBI) as the solution. Dr. Lee doesn't agree. "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." Lee might have mentioned the arts as well.
These fields would form the pillars of a new social contract, one that valued and rewarded socially beneficial activities in the same way we currently reward economically productive activities." And society would pay the enormous cost of such a program out of the gargantuan profits Dr. Lee foresees accruing to the few AI giants that will dominate the world in the years to come.
About the author Dr. Kai-Fu Lee is a Bejing-based Taiwanese venture capitalist, technology executive, and artificial intelligence expert. Before founding his venture capital fund, he was the president of Google China, and earlier had founded Microsoft Research China (now Microsoft Research Asia), which "trained the great majority of AI leaders in China, including CTOs or AI heads at Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba, Lenovo, Huawei and Haier." (If you follow the news about technology in China, you're probably familiar with all these companies.) He is one of the most widely read microbloggers in China, with more than 50 million followers, and has written seven bestselling books there.
My opinion on this book swung wildly with each passing chapter. There are so many pros and cons of this book.
Positives:
- Kai-Fu's got a great background; working his way up from an AI researcher in the valley to someone leading Google China and now as a VC in the Chinese tech sphere, he has seen it all.
- He paints a pretty good picture of the Chinese tech scene. I can totally see how the democratization of AI research can bring a sort of revolution in China like it did with the copy-cat revolution in electronics two decades ago.
- Fairly balanced picture of where Silicon Valley and China stands currently in AI research and business (However, I do not completely agree with his 5-year predictions).
Negatives:
- He is sometimes too bitchy about silicon valley culture and the engineers. I can see why he'd do that though. Most of his money is invested in China, so no wonder he thinks highly of Chinese engineers.
- More work hours != More productive work. (I like my naps after lunch)
- He's too afraid to talk about how communist ideals of the Chinese government can negatively impact the 'revolution'. We're already seeing early signs of it with the crackdown of the Chinese Big Tech in recent months. The 'revolution' he talks about is fueled by the capitalist ideals of winner takes it all. Don't know what motivation will people have when the government steps in between.
- His take on how to handle the job losses (last couple of chapters) caused by AI is a complete BS. This is one more example of why we need good policymakers to handle this rather than some VC.
كاي فو لي نويسنده اين كتاب يكي از دانشمندان به نام در حوزه هوش مصنوعي است و فعاليت هاي او در حوزه توسعه تكنولوژي مبتني بر هوش مصنوعي تقريبا از سال ١٩٨٣ شروع شده. در شركت هاي بزرگي در سيليكون ولي مشغول بوده( گوگل، مايكروسافت و اپل) از شناخته شده ترين ها ميباشند. در چين هم چندين كسب و كار اينترنتي مبتني بر هوش مصنوعي توسعه داده و در حال حاضر هم مدير يك شركت سرمايه گذاري خطر پذير در چين هست. اين ها رو توضيح دادم كه بگم نويسنده هم شناخت كافي از اموسيستم تكنولوژي آمريكا داره و هم شناخت بسيار خوبي از شرايط تكنولوژيك، سياسي و فرهنگي چين. لي معتقد هست كه دو ابرقدرت هوش مصنوعي در دنيا وجود دارند كه آمريكا و چين هستن. اگر با اين حوزه آشنا باشيد ميدونيد كه دقيقا همينطور هم هست. ٥ فصل اول كتاب بيشتر در مقايسه فرهنگ كاري حاكم بر اين دو كشور هست و نويسنده سعي ميكنه با برداشت ها، تحليل ها و توضيحاتي كه ميده چشم انداز آينده اين دو كشور رو در حوزه هوش مصنوعي مشخص كنه. با دلايل و تحليل هايي كه انجام ميده تو چند بخش مهم اين حوزه چين در آينده نزديك برتري رو به دست مياره كه به نظر مياد درست باشه. از فصل ٦ به بعد در مورد موضوع مهم تري بحث ميشه و اون هم تاثيرات پيشرفت هوش مصنوعي بر جوامع و زندگي روزمره اقتصادي و اجتماعي مردم هست. به بررسي دو مقوله آرمانشهر و ويرانشهر ميپردازه و نظرات خودش رو بيان ميكنه و كمي در مورد راه حل هايي كه فعلا وجود داره صحبت ميكنه. اولين كتابي هست كه در اين حوزه نويسنده به صورت كاملا شفاف بيان ميكنه كه بهتره ماشين و انسان جدا بمونن. براي علاقه مندان به حوزه هوش مصنوعي خوندن اين كتاب رو حتما پيشنهاد ميكنم. من به عنوان دانشجو در اين حوزه نگراني هاي زيادي از آينده دارم. با سرعت پيشرفتي كه وجود داره خيلي از كشورها به فروپاشي اقتصادي و اجتماعي ميرسن چون قدرت رقابت در بازارهاي اقتصادي رو با كشورهاي پيشرو در اين صنعت نوظهور رو ندارن و بايد از همين الان كه خيلي دير نشده فكرهاي بسيار اساسي و بنيادين انجام بشه
A super-important read if you want to get a quick overview into the AI race as it stands. "Eye-opening" is an understatement. In the latter part of the book, the author allows us to get more personal by talking about his battle with late-stage cancer and how it moulded his personal mission to make AI more humane. The only shortcoming I could find in this book was the lack of concrete steps to achieve his mission. Perhaps there are just no concrete steps and humans will just do as humans do. Good luck to us all then.
Note: The author is considered a leading expert in the field of artificial intelligence. Here is the link to his Wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kai-Fu_Lee
Interesting background on how China became a powerhouse and the differences between how the countries approach the coming technological environment. The book is 6 years old. Many of his 5 yr predictions are in progress but not quite where he expected. Nonetheless his predictions about the state of AI is pretty solid. After reading/listening, the future of AI is still unclear. We certainly do not have the guardrails in place. Hang on, the evolution has arrived and it is not televised, though it is embedded in every online device we have... Insightful and interesting!
4+ Stars
Listened to Audible. Mikael Naramore was very good.