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

I believe that the skillful application of AI will be China’s greatest opportunity to catch up with—and possibly surpass—the United States. But more important, this shift will create an opportunity for all people to rediscover what it is that makes us human.

During the two decades leading up to 2010, China was governed by engineers.

They’re using billions of dollars in cash and dizzying stockpiles of data to gobble up available AI talent. They’re also working to construct the “power grids” for the AI age: privately controlled computing networks that distribute machine learning across the economy, with the corporate giants acting as “utilities.” It’s a worrisome phenomenon for

In terms of funding, Google dwarfs even its own government: U.S. federal funding for math and computer science research amounts to less than half of Google’s own R&D budget. That spending spree has bought Alphabet an outsized share of the world’s brightest AI minds.

I believe that as the four waves of AI spread across the global economy, they have the potential to wrench open ever greater economic divides between the haves and have-nots, leading to widespread technological unemployment.

Moravec’s Paradox was articulated in the 1980s, and some things have changed since then. The arrival of deep learning has provided machines with superhuman perceptual abilities when it comes to voice or visual recognition. Those same machine-learning breakthroughs have also turbocharged the intellectual abilities of machines, namely, the power of s

This type of AI-induced job loss is largely missing from the task-based estimates of the economists. If

Over the subsequent decades, neural networks enjoyed brief stints of prominence, followed by near-total abandonment.

Zhou embodies the gladiatorial mentality of Chinese internet entrepreneurs. In his world, competition is war and he will stop at nothing to win. In Silicon Valley, his tactics would guarantee social ostracism, antimonopoly investigations, and endless, costly lawsuits. But in the Chinese coliseum, none of these three can hold back combatants. The on

to which they are entitled by virtue of winning at home.