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3.95 AVERAGE
3.95 AVERAGE
In his 2018 book AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order, Lee describes how China is rapidly moving forward to become the global leader in AI, and may well surpass the United States, because of China's demographics and its amassing of huge data sets. In a 28 September 2018 interview on the PBS Amanpour program, he stated that artificial intelligence, with all its capabilities, will never be capable of creativity or empathy.
Senator Mark Warner named AI Superpowers as his recommended book for The 2018 POLITICO 50 Reading List. Foreign Affairs criticized the book for promoting zero-sum thinking and hyping Chinese state investment in tech ventures that often underperform relative to expectations; for focusing on deep learning to the exclusion of other forms of artificial intelligence; and for overgeneralizing the usefulness of Chinese data sets.
Senator Mark Warner named AI Superpowers as his recommended book for The 2018 POLITICO 50 Reading List. Foreign Affairs criticized the book for promoting zero-sum thinking and hyping Chinese state investment in tech ventures that often underperform relative to expectations; for focusing on deep learning to the exclusion of other forms of artificial intelligence; and for overgeneralizing the usefulness of Chinese data sets.
An excellent look at AI as is defined by the tech industry, and also inserts political, cultural and economic aspects of AI. Very interesting book.
I personally was not overly inspired by the chapter on his epiphany about AI due to a health crisis, but it certainly doesn't hurt to think of human factors when it comes to AI.
I personally was not overly inspired by the chapter on his epiphany about AI due to a health crisis, but it certainly doesn't hurt to think of human factors when it comes to AI.
Personal revelation makes it worthwhile
The book starts off with the premise that China has all the necessary elements to become a global leader in AI and potentially surpass the US next decade. China’s advantages in this race are attributed to the abundance in availability of data, cultural acceptance of benefits of tech ahead of concerns for privacy and a techno-utilitarian policy from the government.
The book then transitions into a cancer memoir like ‘breath becomes air’ albeit the author here is immensely fortunate to survive. He uses this experience to inform his suggestions on how to overcome the challenges that will be brought about by the de-stabilizing effects of AI on jobs.
The book starts off with the premise that China has all the necessary elements to become a global leader in AI and potentially surpass the US next decade. China’s advantages in this race are attributed to the abundance in availability of data, cultural acceptance of benefits of tech ahead of concerns for privacy and a techno-utilitarian policy from the government.
The book then transitions into a cancer memoir like ‘breath becomes air’ albeit the author here is immensely fortunate to survive. He uses this experience to inform his suggestions on how to overcome the challenges that will be brought about by the de-stabilizing effects of AI on jobs.
seriously a must-read!! kai-fu lee provides a nuanced and balanced articulation of the history of AI development in the US and China: he disambiguates “AI” as a technology and explains who’s winning where, and why. but perhaps even more insightful are his musings and suggestions on how AI can transform humanity itself. job losses and growing inequality seem inevitable now — yet if directed properly, technological displacement may allow us to realize a human dignity beyond our production value.
Written by the former head of Google China and one of the pioneers of machine learning in voice recognition, this book is worth reading for anyone who wants to understand AI or US-China relations. I picked this up after working on a video project for an American think tank about China's "Digital Silk Road" initiative and I wanted to know more.
Here are some key takeaways and (below those) some important caveats that he did not write about:
- Task-specific AI and general AI are completely different things. They are probably not all that connected, and the only one that actually exists as of this moment is task-based AI, also known as machine learning (ML).
- ML algorithms are only as good as the data they have, and Chinese companies have access to way more and better quality data than anyone else. There are lots of reasons for this: Communist party centralization, large agglomeration platforms like Alibaba and WeChat, and a lack of concern for laws and regulations on the part of Chinese companies.
- The days of China being the land of cheap knock-offs is over. Chinese companies are simply different from American ones and Chinese users are different. For example, mobile payments are super common there, but still not big over here.
- The lengths that the Chinese state have gone to in order to build up the AI sector in China are amazing, and envy-making. Because of the single party state, Chinese leaders can create the conditions for industry growth that we in the US can only dream about.
- There are four waves to AI: internet AI, business AI, perception AI, and autonomous AI. The US and China have different strengths at each stage but China is better at 1 and 3, whereas the US is better at 3 and 4 is a toss-up because we're not really close to it yet.
- Lee is bearish on the impact of AI on jobs. He thinks we could be looking at job destruction of 50% and that it will hit many sectors quickly. He has a very useful graph showing which kinds of jobs are vulnerable and in what ways. He also thinks that we (humans, not China) need to be figuring out how we're going to deal with this. He's not a big fan of UBI, but thinks that some sort of UBI-for-carers would be humane and lead to better societies.
There are a few glaring blindspots in this book. They're understandable because they would inevitably cast China and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in a bad light, but anyone who is really interested in these topics needs to know them.
1) Lee does a good job of describing the techno-utopian POV of the CCP vs. the American "rights-based" framework, but doesn't go into details. The details are disturbing, especially to those of us with rights-based frameworks. For example, the Chinese government have turned the western Chinese state of Xinjiang into a virtual prison. The entire state is under martial law with complete audiovisual and electronic surveillance and current estimates put the number of people in "reeducation camps" (prison camps) over 1.5 million.
2) The Chinese "One Belt, One Road Initiative" is a MASSIVE investment in building a new global infrastructure with Beijing at the center. In addition to ports, railroads, highways, cities, undersea cables, and satelites, they are also exporting governance models that lower the cost of authoritarianism significantly. For example, many countries are accepting Chinese aid in building out their internet infrastructure with the Chinese-style centralization pre-installed. That effectively means dictators can spy on their populations cheaper than before, which creates less of a chance that those dictators will be overthrown.
3) Lee makes a strong case that one of the major reasons that China will "win the AI war" is because they have more and better data. This is partly because their people are less concerned with privacy, but also because their companies and government are less scrupulous with guarding that data. There is lots of evidence that Chinese companies share data with the government and vice versa.
4) Combining points 2 and 3, one of the scary-to-me things to consider happens when Chinese companies are paid (using Chinese loans) to set up surveillance/governance internet infrastructure in other countries, all of that data goes back to Beijing. Zimbabweans recently rejected a large project from Chinese company CloudWalk because this provision alarmed citizens and provoked large protests. Here's why that's concerning: Imagine that Zimbabwe had not rejected the CloudWalk project and, for the next 10 years, used it to manage and monitor their citizens' internet usage and surveil them day-to-day through facial recognition. Perhaps that would deliver better services, but it would also set a high bar for anti-regime success. Then, one day imagine that same autocratic regime wants to move away from Chinese alignment for whatever reason. Now, the Chinese state can back an alternative ruling party and with their superior model of Zimbabwe's own citizens and all of their data, they would probably win any conflict. In the long run, this creates client countries in a more insidious way than even the blunt American corporate empire model ever did.
Here are some key takeaways and (below those) some important caveats that he did not write about:
- Task-specific AI and general AI are completely different things. They are probably not all that connected, and the only one that actually exists as of this moment is task-based AI, also known as machine learning (ML).
- ML algorithms are only as good as the data they have, and Chinese companies have access to way more and better quality data than anyone else. There are lots of reasons for this: Communist party centralization, large agglomeration platforms like Alibaba and WeChat, and a lack of concern for laws and regulations on the part of Chinese companies.
- The days of China being the land of cheap knock-offs is over. Chinese companies are simply different from American ones and Chinese users are different. For example, mobile payments are super common there, but still not big over here.
- The lengths that the Chinese state have gone to in order to build up the AI sector in China are amazing, and envy-making. Because of the single party state, Chinese leaders can create the conditions for industry growth that we in the US can only dream about.
- There are four waves to AI: internet AI, business AI, perception AI, and autonomous AI. The US and China have different strengths at each stage but China is better at 1 and 3, whereas the US is better at 3 and 4 is a toss-up because we're not really close to it yet.
- Lee is bearish on the impact of AI on jobs. He thinks we could be looking at job destruction of 50% and that it will hit many sectors quickly. He has a very useful graph showing which kinds of jobs are vulnerable and in what ways. He also thinks that we (humans, not China) need to be figuring out how we're going to deal with this. He's not a big fan of UBI, but thinks that some sort of UBI-for-carers would be humane and lead to better societies.
There are a few glaring blindspots in this book. They're understandable because they would inevitably cast China and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in a bad light, but anyone who is really interested in these topics needs to know them.
1) Lee does a good job of describing the techno-utopian POV of the CCP vs. the American "rights-based" framework, but doesn't go into details. The details are disturbing, especially to those of us with rights-based frameworks. For example, the Chinese government have turned the western Chinese state of Xinjiang into a virtual prison. The entire state is under martial law with complete audiovisual and electronic surveillance and current estimates put the number of people in "reeducation camps" (prison camps) over 1.5 million.
2) The Chinese "One Belt, One Road Initiative" is a MASSIVE investment in building a new global infrastructure with Beijing at the center. In addition to ports, railroads, highways, cities, undersea cables, and satelites, they are also exporting governance models that lower the cost of authoritarianism significantly. For example, many countries are accepting Chinese aid in building out their internet infrastructure with the Chinese-style centralization pre-installed. That effectively means dictators can spy on their populations cheaper than before, which creates less of a chance that those dictators will be overthrown.
3) Lee makes a strong case that one of the major reasons that China will "win the AI war" is because they have more and better data. This is partly because their people are less concerned with privacy, but also because their companies and government are less scrupulous with guarding that data. There is lots of evidence that Chinese companies share data with the government and vice versa.
4) Combining points 2 and 3, one of the scary-to-me things to consider happens when Chinese companies are paid (using Chinese loans) to set up surveillance/governance internet infrastructure in other countries, all of that data goes back to Beijing. Zimbabweans recently rejected a large project from Chinese company CloudWalk because this provision alarmed citizens and provoked large protests. Here's why that's concerning: Imagine that Zimbabwe had not rejected the CloudWalk project and, for the next 10 years, used it to manage and monitor their citizens' internet usage and surveil them day-to-day through facial recognition. Perhaps that would deliver better services, but it would also set a high bar for anti-regime success. Then, one day imagine that same autocratic regime wants to move away from Chinese alignment for whatever reason. Now, the Chinese state can back an alternative ruling party and with their superior model of Zimbabwe's own citizens and all of their data, they would probably win any conflict. In the long run, this creates client countries in a more insidious way than even the blunt American corporate empire model ever did.
This book is much better than the hyperbolic title. It can be trite at times, but I learned quite a lot and Kai-Fu Lee's evolution and ideas for the future are quite compelling.
The least interesting part of the book is that implied by the title, the "battle" between China and Silicon Valley as it relates to AI. What I did find interesting and learned a lot from: i. good introduction to the Chinese internet ecosystem; ii. interesting attempt to describe Chinese business culture and contrast to the US. (This does suffer from some of the same problems and reminds me of books on Japanese business in the late 1980s--a bit too enamoured, a bit too simple--but is still useful and valuable); iii. A good framework for understanding the state of AI as a technology and its business impact; iv. a good discussion and review of the literature on the potential economic/societal disruption that appears likely to be caused by very significant and likely AI related job loss; v. A prescription for policies and ideas on how humanity can and should deal with that disruption. This is where the book surprises, as first Kai-Fu Lee first shares a very personal story of his own "rebirth" after facing a cancer scare. His Blueprint for AI and Human coexistence is not all convincing, and may be far too optimistic for what humanity is capable off, but has some compelling ideas as a starting point we will do well if others in business and government build on his ideas.
The least interesting part of the book is that implied by the title, the "battle" between China and Silicon Valley as it relates to AI. What I did find interesting and learned a lot from: i. good introduction to the Chinese internet ecosystem; ii. interesting attempt to describe Chinese business culture and contrast to the US. (This does suffer from some of the same problems and reminds me of books on Japanese business in the late 1980s--a bit too enamoured, a bit too simple--but is still useful and valuable); iii. A good framework for understanding the state of AI as a technology and its business impact; iv. a good discussion and review of the literature on the potential economic/societal disruption that appears likely to be caused by very significant and likely AI related job loss; v. A prescription for policies and ideas on how humanity can and should deal with that disruption. This is where the book surprises, as first Kai-Fu Lee first shares a very personal story of his own "rebirth" after facing a cancer scare. His Blueprint for AI and Human coexistence is not all convincing, and may be far too optimistic for what humanity is capable off, but has some compelling ideas as a starting point we will do well if others in business and government build on his ideas.
De entre los distintos libros que he estado leyendo de IA, creo que este tiene algo especial. El hecho de comparar lo que está ocurriendo en China y USA y, al mismo tiempo, terminar con una reflexión de cómo abordar la tecnología de una forma humana tiene bastante para reflexionar.
Part Chinese technology and economic history, AI 101, memoir, and socio-political futurism. Could be more critical in the darker side of AI and how companies will abuse it as well as China’s already dystopian applications.
{Words on Words 60-Second Spotlight Review: https://bit.ly/2ymCzcg }
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.
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.