These are visions of Hao Jingfang, a Chinese science-fiction writer and economics researcher. Hao’s novelette “Folding Beijing” won the prestigious Hugo Award in 2016 for its arresting depiction of a city in which economic classes are separated into different worlds.

In the post-AlphaGo world, Chinese students, researchers, and engineers are among the most voracious readers of www.arxiv.org. They trawl the site for new techniques, soaking up everything the world’s top researchers have to offer.

This near-death experience also gave me a new vision for how humans can coexist with artificial intelligence. Yes, this technology will both create enormous economic value and destroy an astounding number of jobs. If we remain trapped in a mindset that equates our economic value with our worth as human beings, this transition to the age of AI will

Even in the company’s “second language” of English, iFlyTek often beats teams from Google, DeepMind, Facebook, and IBM Watson in natural-language processing—that is, the ability of AI to decipher overall meaning rather than just words.

Google has taken a slow-and-steady approach to gathering that data, driving around its own small fleet of vehicles equipped with very expensive sensing technologies. Tesla instead began installing cheaper equipment on its…

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Scanning the AI horizon, we see waves of technology that will soon wash over the global economy and tilt the geopolitical landscape toward China. Traditional American companies are doing a good job of using deep learning to squeeze greater profits from their businesses, and AI-driven companies like Google remain bastions of elite expertise. But whe

What ultimately resuscitated the field of neural networks—and sparked the AI renaissance we are living through today—were changes to two of the key raw ingredients that neural networks feed on, along with one major technical breakthrough. Neural networks require large amounts of two things: computing power and data. The data “trains” the program to

my opinion, the conventional wisdom on this is backward. While China will face a wrenching labor-market transition due to automation, large segments of that transition may arrive later or move slower than the job losses wracking the American economy. While the simplest and most routine factory jobs—quality control and simple assembly-line tasks—wil

Taken one step further, deep learning will power self-driving cars by helping them to “see” the world around them—recognize patterns in the camera’s pixels (red octagons), figure out what they correlate to (stop signs), and use that information to make decisions (apply pressure to the brake to slowly stop) that optimize for your desired outcome (de