Fall 2021
Dear Friends and Family,
Artificial Intelligence is a big deal. Some have compared it to the development of electricity which so dramatically enhanced our lives since it has been so widely applied in the 20th century. Others say the AI revolution will rival the Industrial Revolution, except instead of it being spread over several generations this revolution will have a major impact in one generation. The Segment 7 excerpts provide examples of application areas and illustrations of specific applications. The attached PDF provides more, if you are interested. Additionally, the segment provides some potential disruptions and battlegrounds as the world expands AI applications.
My Takeaways:
Next: Segment 8 will focus on the artificial intelligence technology: a little on how the technology works, a scenario on how it will develop from here, some information on the devices that will be utilized to deliver AI functions to people as consumers, and how AI machines will learn so as to improve their performance.
Happy Learning,
Harley
Dear Friends and Family,
Artificial Intelligence is a big deal. Some have compared it to the development of electricity which so dramatically enhanced our lives since it has been so widely applied in the 20th century. Others say the AI revolution will rival the Industrial Revolution, except instead of it being spread over several generations this revolution will have a major impact in one generation. The Segment 7 excerpts provide examples of application areas and illustrations of specific applications. The attached PDF provides more, if you are interested. Additionally, the segment provides some potential disruptions and battlegrounds as the world expands AI applications.
My Takeaways:
- The areas for potential application of artificial intelligence over and above what exists today is very large: they include: healthcare, transportation, agriculture, military, financial services, education, social sciences, games, tourism, art, grocery shopping, city services, delivery services, firefighting and we are just getting started. Within each of these categories there are numerous applications. The potential is immense.
- The disruptions from AI applications are also very significant beginning with job elimination which could be significant enough to precipitate social instability. Additionally, it will create substantially greater income inequality both between individuals and nations, widespread psychological issues, and significant power shifting not only between nations but also within nations and among individuals.
- There undoubtedly is going to be a clash between China and the United States in the race to further develop and apply artificial intelligence as the victor will have a significant advantage economically and militarily.
Next: Segment 8 will focus on the artificial intelligence technology: a little on how the technology works, a scenario on how it will develop from here, some information on the devices that will be utilized to deliver AI functions to people as consumers, and how AI machines will learn so as to improve their performance.
Happy Learning,
Harley
BIG TECH & AI – SEGMENT 7
THE AI OPPORTUNITY – EXCERPTS
INTRODUCTION: Artificial Intelligence pioneer Andrew Ng had compared AI to Thomas Edison’s harnessing of electricity: a breakthrough technology on its own, and one that once harnessed can be applied to revolutionizing dozens of different industries. Just as 19th century entrepreneurs soon began applying the electricity breakthrough to cooking food, lighting rooms, and powering industrial equipment, today’s AI entrepreneurs are doing the same. The AI revolution will be on the scale of the industrial Revolution, but probably larger and definitely faster. It will perform many kinds of physical and intellectual tasks with a speed and power that far outstrip any human, dramatically increasing productivity in everything from transportation to medicine. Whereas the Industrial Revolution took place across several generations, the AI revolution will have a major impact within one generation.
Such programs can now do a better job than humans at identifying faces, recognizing speech, and issuing loans. For decades, the artificial intelligence revolution always looked to be five years away. But with the development of deep learning over the past few years, that revolution has finally arrived. It will usher in an era of massive productivity increases but also wide-spread disruptions in labor market – and profound sociopsychological effects on people – as AI takes over human jobs across all sorts of industries.
Source: AI Superpowers by Kai-Fu Lee (2018)
Artificial intelligence is technology upon which our future is being built because it intersects with every aspect of our lives: health and medicine, housing, agriculture, transportation, sports, and even love, sex, and death. We are in the midst of significant transformation, not unlike the generations who lived through the Industrial Revolution.
The researchers work at nine tech giants – Google, Amazon, Apple, IBM, Microsoft, and Facebook in the U.S. and Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent in China (BAT) – that are building AI in order to usher in a better, brighter future for all of us. AI is a system that makes autonomous decisions. The tasks AI performs duplicate or mimic acts of human intelligence, like recognizing sounds and objects, solving problems, understanding language and using strategy to meet goals. At this moment in time, AI can recognize patterns and make decisions quickly, find hidden regularities in big data sets and make accurate predictions. And it’s becoming clear with each new milestone achieved that we are entering a new phase of AI, one in which theoretical thinking machines become real and approach our human level of cognition.
Source: The Big Nine by Amy Webb (2019)
APPLICATION AREAS: Artificial intelligence holds many promises for improving and enhancing human functioning in a wide range of applications such as:
Healthcare: The outcomes of every diagnosis and patient consultation at major institutions are being channeled into a central diagnostic database for machine learning. As a result, machines are accumulating more medical knowledge and clinical experience than human doctors every could, and AI will gradually replace, or at a minimum, supplement doctors in making diagnosis. The pandemic is also accelerating the commercial availability of health and fitness wearables to facilitate doctor-supervised health monitoring, remote diagnostics, and even certain treatments. With new kinds of devices there will be new kinds of data captured as well.
Agriculture: John Deere, already has autonomous tractors that can operate long days, under adverse conditions, and even in coordination with other unmanned and manned equipment on farms. AI will also bring about smart agriculture that enables plants to survive climate change: for instance, dramatically reducing the amount of water required to grow certain plants. The US agriculture administration has been developing robotic solutions that utilize AI technologies to assist in pollination, weeding, pesticide applications, and fruit harvesting. Already, machines equipped with cameras and tactile sensors can identify crops that are ready to harvest.
Military: The US military has one of the most advanced drone-based weapons systems in the world. It combines drone technology with satellite imaging and AI-based vision. Drones equipped with facial recognition can be programmed to attack a specific individual or individuals. The CIA and Chinese military are among those developing AI systems that multiply a single fighter plane into a squadron or mini air force of drones at the push of a button. Pilots will be able to launch drones and control their navigation remotely, forcing the enemy to deal with a multitude of aircraft instead of just one. Similarly, artificial foot soldiers will be adept at negotiating potholes, rocks, landmines, shrubs – any natural or artificial land features that create significant obstacles for the average soldier. Robotic warriors will perform more efficiently and effectively than human soldiers in any terrain and climatic conditions. Moreover, the military will benefit from robots’ enhanced performance, without having to manage supply lines with food, medicine, or waste removal systems required for a human army.
Education: China has introduced the use of AI in schools from kindergarten to universities to accelerate learning and intensify competitiveness even further. Many classrooms are equipped with facial-recognition cameras and brainwave trackers that students wear on their foreheads using a headband. The AI system interacts with children by giving hints and, at the same time, gives the teacher real time tracking of students’ attentiveness and overall cognitive functioning. Robots take attendance, serve as teaching assistants, and help evaluate students. Besides boosting grades as well as safety, China’s educators say the system makes education more personalized by understanding the learning habits of individual students and analyzing their physical and mental health. The AI system claims to make more scientifically based decisions about education policies. China expects to lead the world in smart education.
Augmented Reality (AR): Augmented Reality technology will usher in a whole new generation of AI-based technologies, with applications ranging from medicine to consumer entertainment. Augmented Reality allows surgeons to superimpose details from various scans directly over their patients’ body. Human vision and machine vision get merged into one.
People may enjoy a real, physical dinner at a fancy restaurant in the AR company of a distant person who appears to be sitting next to them and sharing conversation. The experience will feel like an intimate two-person dinner when, in fact, each is eating alone and far away.
Tourism: For the price of a physical trip to a destination, many young consumers will invest in devices that enable them to enjoy a variety of Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality vacations. These virtual journeys will be more varied and exciting than their physical equivalents. For instance, users will be able to experience climbing Mount Everest, which most people could never physically do.
ILLUSTRATIONS OF AI IN ACTION:
Swarm Intelligence: Swarms of autonomous drones will work together to paint the exterior of your house in just a few hours. Heat-resistant drone swarms will fight forest fires with hundred of times the current efficiency of traditional fire crews. Other drones will perform search-and-rescue operations in the aftermath of hurricanes and earthquakes, bringing food and water to the stranded and teaming up with nearby drones to airlift people out.
Driverless Cars: To illustrate how big data is used to train a machine consider driverless cars. To teach a driverless car, engineers do not program the car’s computer merely with a set of driving rules. Instead, the driverless cars teach themselves how to drive just as humans do: through experience and practice. With dozens of onboard cameras and sensors feeding data into the system in real time, the cars learn to recognize traffic patterns and adjust their responses accordingly. Each car’s AI system can recognize shapes and differentiate between pedestrians, bicyclists, cars, trucks and tractor-trailers. It builds a real-time map of its immediate physical environment, identifying each object nearby. By applying what it has previously learned, it can predict not only the speed of each type of object but also how it might suddenly change direction. Equipped with this predictive model of everything in its vicinity, the system can compute every possible scenario for the next second, the next two seconds, the next three seconds, and so on. Hence, it can choose options to minimize the chances of a collision.
Further, the collective practice of all driverless cars, as an example, is far more extensive that the total lifetime experience of even the most sophisticated individual human driver. The reason is that the skill of human drivers remains in their isolated memories, encoded as individual reflexes and habits, and passes on with the drivers. But the proficiency of each driverless car is systematically analyzed and shared with other cars. Eventually, as driverless vehicles are interconnected via 5G, they will directly communicate with each other, allowing vehicles to collectively negotiate decisions to optimize the flow of traffic. Once machines are trained to perform tasks, they are often able to do them better than humans. Even AI’s most critical detractors cannot deny this simple truth: AI-powered applications do, indeed have certain advantages over those operated solely with human intelligence. Machines are not restricted by the limitation of human memory or lifespan. Their clock speed and memory can be continually increased. Their behavior is more consistent and predictable than that of humans. They possess more stamina and can operate under the conditions that are unsafe or unsustainable for humans.
Source: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Power by Rajiv Malhotra (2021)
DISRUPTIONS AND BATTLEGROUNDS: On one hand, AI is the holy grail of technology: the advancement that people hope will solve problems across virtually every domain of our lives. On the other, it is disrupting a number of delicate equilibriums and creating conflicts on a variety of fronts. AI plays a pivotal role in each of these disruptions, and each of these battlegrounds has multiple players with competing interests and high stakes.
Battle 1: Economic Development and Jobs: Experts consider it a reasonable consensus that eventually a significant portion of blue-and-white collar jobs in most industries will become obsolete, or at least transformed, to such an extent that workers will need re-education to remain viable. This percentage of vulnerable jobs will continue to increase over time. The obsolescence will be far worse in developing countries where the standard of education is lower. The undeniable fact is that to stay competitive, businesses must adopt AI to cut costs and improve quality; the interests of the workers are secondary. Even the optimists admit that the locations where new jobs will be created will not be the same places where they are destroyed – creating imbalances between regions within a country as well as between countries.
More broadly, AI will worsen the divide between the rich and poor, the haves and the have-nots. There is a real possibility that AI may trigger an unprecedented level of unemployment and precipitate social instability. Especially for countries like India, where a large percentage of the population lacks the education that is vital to survive a technological tsunami.
Battle 2: Global Power: China has bet the proverbial farm on AI. The clash between the U.S. and China is this race for AI leadership because both countries’ current leaders know fully well that whoever dominates this technology stands to occupy the military and economic high ground. Apart from the U.S., China, and a few other countries, most nations will lag increasingly as time goes by. If is virtually impossible to catch up in all the key elements of success that must be brought together. Beside competing directly against each other, the U.S. and China will also compete for control over satellite nations and new colonies.
Battleground 3: Psychological Control and Agency: A troubling trend is that as machines get smarter, a growing number of humans are becoming dumber. In a sense, the public has outsourced its critical thinking, memory, and agency to increasingly sophisticated digital networks. As in any outsourcing arrangement, the provider of services becomes more knowledgeable about the client’s internal affairs and the client becomes more dependent on the supplier. The quest for deep knowledge and critical thinking is becoming a thing of the past because it is easier for people to use internet searches whenever any information is needed. People are operating on autopilot rather than thinking and learning on their own.
Source: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Power by Rajiv Malhotra (2021)
THE SUPERPOWER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE RACE: Chinese AI companies and researchers have already made-up enormous ground on their American counterparts, experimenting with innovative algorithms and business models that promise to revolutionize China’s economy. Together, these businesses and scholars have turned China into a bona fide AI superpower, the only true national counterweight to the U.S. in this emerging technology. How these two countries choose to compete and cooperate in AI will have dramatic implications for global economics and governance. If we are not careful, this single-minded rhetoric around an “AI race” will undermine us in planning and shaping our shared AI future. A race has only one winner: China’s gain is America’s loss and vice-versa. There is not a notion of shared progress or mutual prosperity – just a desire to stay ahead of the other country regardless of the costs.
The U.S. government has no grand strategy for AI nor for our longer-term future. Unlike China, the American government has not pushed a top-down agenda, they have assumed the commercial sector will drive all progress. So, in place of coordinated national strategies to build our organizational capacity inside the government, to build and strengthen our international alliances, and to prepare our military for the future of warfare, the U.S. had subjugated AI to the revolving door of politics. Instead of funding basic research in AI, the federal government has effectively outsourced R&D to the commercial sector and the whims of Wall Street. AI’s consumerism model in the U.S. isn’t inherently evil. Neither is China’s government-centralized model. AI itself isn’t necessarily harmful to society. However, the Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, IBM, Apple are profit-driven, publicly traded companies that must answer to Wall Street, regardless of the altruistic intentions of their leaders and employees.
We must consider the developmental track of AI within the broader context of China’s grand plans for the future. In April 2018, China’s President Xi gave a major speech outlining his vision of China as the global cyber superpower – a new cyberspace governance network and an internet that would “spread positive information, uphold the ‘correct’ political direction, and guide public opinion and values towards the ‘right’ direction.” The authoritarian rules China would have us all live by are a divergence from the free speech, market-driven economy and distributed control that we cherish in the West. In China the BAT are beholden to the Chinese government, which has already decided what is best for China. What I want to know—and what you should demand an answer to -- is what’s best for all of humanity? As AI matures, how will the decisions we make today be reflected in the decisions machines make for us in the future?
Source: The Big Nine by Amy Webb.
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
THE AI OPPORTUNITY – EXCERPTS
INTRODUCTION: Artificial Intelligence pioneer Andrew Ng had compared AI to Thomas Edison’s harnessing of electricity: a breakthrough technology on its own, and one that once harnessed can be applied to revolutionizing dozens of different industries. Just as 19th century entrepreneurs soon began applying the electricity breakthrough to cooking food, lighting rooms, and powering industrial equipment, today’s AI entrepreneurs are doing the same. The AI revolution will be on the scale of the industrial Revolution, but probably larger and definitely faster. It will perform many kinds of physical and intellectual tasks with a speed and power that far outstrip any human, dramatically increasing productivity in everything from transportation to medicine. Whereas the Industrial Revolution took place across several generations, the AI revolution will have a major impact within one generation.
Such programs can now do a better job than humans at identifying faces, recognizing speech, and issuing loans. For decades, the artificial intelligence revolution always looked to be five years away. But with the development of deep learning over the past few years, that revolution has finally arrived. It will usher in an era of massive productivity increases but also wide-spread disruptions in labor market – and profound sociopsychological effects on people – as AI takes over human jobs across all sorts of industries.
Source: AI Superpowers by Kai-Fu Lee (2018)
Artificial intelligence is technology upon which our future is being built because it intersects with every aspect of our lives: health and medicine, housing, agriculture, transportation, sports, and even love, sex, and death. We are in the midst of significant transformation, not unlike the generations who lived through the Industrial Revolution.
The researchers work at nine tech giants – Google, Amazon, Apple, IBM, Microsoft, and Facebook in the U.S. and Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent in China (BAT) – that are building AI in order to usher in a better, brighter future for all of us. AI is a system that makes autonomous decisions. The tasks AI performs duplicate or mimic acts of human intelligence, like recognizing sounds and objects, solving problems, understanding language and using strategy to meet goals. At this moment in time, AI can recognize patterns and make decisions quickly, find hidden regularities in big data sets and make accurate predictions. And it’s becoming clear with each new milestone achieved that we are entering a new phase of AI, one in which theoretical thinking machines become real and approach our human level of cognition.
Source: The Big Nine by Amy Webb (2019)
APPLICATION AREAS: Artificial intelligence holds many promises for improving and enhancing human functioning in a wide range of applications such as:
Healthcare: The outcomes of every diagnosis and patient consultation at major institutions are being channeled into a central diagnostic database for machine learning. As a result, machines are accumulating more medical knowledge and clinical experience than human doctors every could, and AI will gradually replace, or at a minimum, supplement doctors in making diagnosis. The pandemic is also accelerating the commercial availability of health and fitness wearables to facilitate doctor-supervised health monitoring, remote diagnostics, and even certain treatments. With new kinds of devices there will be new kinds of data captured as well.
Agriculture: John Deere, already has autonomous tractors that can operate long days, under adverse conditions, and even in coordination with other unmanned and manned equipment on farms. AI will also bring about smart agriculture that enables plants to survive climate change: for instance, dramatically reducing the amount of water required to grow certain plants. The US agriculture administration has been developing robotic solutions that utilize AI technologies to assist in pollination, weeding, pesticide applications, and fruit harvesting. Already, machines equipped with cameras and tactile sensors can identify crops that are ready to harvest.
Military: The US military has one of the most advanced drone-based weapons systems in the world. It combines drone technology with satellite imaging and AI-based vision. Drones equipped with facial recognition can be programmed to attack a specific individual or individuals. The CIA and Chinese military are among those developing AI systems that multiply a single fighter plane into a squadron or mini air force of drones at the push of a button. Pilots will be able to launch drones and control their navigation remotely, forcing the enemy to deal with a multitude of aircraft instead of just one. Similarly, artificial foot soldiers will be adept at negotiating potholes, rocks, landmines, shrubs – any natural or artificial land features that create significant obstacles for the average soldier. Robotic warriors will perform more efficiently and effectively than human soldiers in any terrain and climatic conditions. Moreover, the military will benefit from robots’ enhanced performance, without having to manage supply lines with food, medicine, or waste removal systems required for a human army.
Education: China has introduced the use of AI in schools from kindergarten to universities to accelerate learning and intensify competitiveness even further. Many classrooms are equipped with facial-recognition cameras and brainwave trackers that students wear on their foreheads using a headband. The AI system interacts with children by giving hints and, at the same time, gives the teacher real time tracking of students’ attentiveness and overall cognitive functioning. Robots take attendance, serve as teaching assistants, and help evaluate students. Besides boosting grades as well as safety, China’s educators say the system makes education more personalized by understanding the learning habits of individual students and analyzing their physical and mental health. The AI system claims to make more scientifically based decisions about education policies. China expects to lead the world in smart education.
Augmented Reality (AR): Augmented Reality technology will usher in a whole new generation of AI-based technologies, with applications ranging from medicine to consumer entertainment. Augmented Reality allows surgeons to superimpose details from various scans directly over their patients’ body. Human vision and machine vision get merged into one.
People may enjoy a real, physical dinner at a fancy restaurant in the AR company of a distant person who appears to be sitting next to them and sharing conversation. The experience will feel like an intimate two-person dinner when, in fact, each is eating alone and far away.
Tourism: For the price of a physical trip to a destination, many young consumers will invest in devices that enable them to enjoy a variety of Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality vacations. These virtual journeys will be more varied and exciting than their physical equivalents. For instance, users will be able to experience climbing Mount Everest, which most people could never physically do.
ILLUSTRATIONS OF AI IN ACTION:
Swarm Intelligence: Swarms of autonomous drones will work together to paint the exterior of your house in just a few hours. Heat-resistant drone swarms will fight forest fires with hundred of times the current efficiency of traditional fire crews. Other drones will perform search-and-rescue operations in the aftermath of hurricanes and earthquakes, bringing food and water to the stranded and teaming up with nearby drones to airlift people out.
Driverless Cars: To illustrate how big data is used to train a machine consider driverless cars. To teach a driverless car, engineers do not program the car’s computer merely with a set of driving rules. Instead, the driverless cars teach themselves how to drive just as humans do: through experience and practice. With dozens of onboard cameras and sensors feeding data into the system in real time, the cars learn to recognize traffic patterns and adjust their responses accordingly. Each car’s AI system can recognize shapes and differentiate between pedestrians, bicyclists, cars, trucks and tractor-trailers. It builds a real-time map of its immediate physical environment, identifying each object nearby. By applying what it has previously learned, it can predict not only the speed of each type of object but also how it might suddenly change direction. Equipped with this predictive model of everything in its vicinity, the system can compute every possible scenario for the next second, the next two seconds, the next three seconds, and so on. Hence, it can choose options to minimize the chances of a collision.
Further, the collective practice of all driverless cars, as an example, is far more extensive that the total lifetime experience of even the most sophisticated individual human driver. The reason is that the skill of human drivers remains in their isolated memories, encoded as individual reflexes and habits, and passes on with the drivers. But the proficiency of each driverless car is systematically analyzed and shared with other cars. Eventually, as driverless vehicles are interconnected via 5G, they will directly communicate with each other, allowing vehicles to collectively negotiate decisions to optimize the flow of traffic. Once machines are trained to perform tasks, they are often able to do them better than humans. Even AI’s most critical detractors cannot deny this simple truth: AI-powered applications do, indeed have certain advantages over those operated solely with human intelligence. Machines are not restricted by the limitation of human memory or lifespan. Their clock speed and memory can be continually increased. Their behavior is more consistent and predictable than that of humans. They possess more stamina and can operate under the conditions that are unsafe or unsustainable for humans.
Source: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Power by Rajiv Malhotra (2021)
DISRUPTIONS AND BATTLEGROUNDS: On one hand, AI is the holy grail of technology: the advancement that people hope will solve problems across virtually every domain of our lives. On the other, it is disrupting a number of delicate equilibriums and creating conflicts on a variety of fronts. AI plays a pivotal role in each of these disruptions, and each of these battlegrounds has multiple players with competing interests and high stakes.
- Battle for economic development and jobs.
- Battle for power in the new world order.
- Battle for psychological control of desires and agency.
- Battle for the metaphysics of the self and its ethics.
- Battle for India’s future.
Battle 1: Economic Development and Jobs: Experts consider it a reasonable consensus that eventually a significant portion of blue-and-white collar jobs in most industries will become obsolete, or at least transformed, to such an extent that workers will need re-education to remain viable. This percentage of vulnerable jobs will continue to increase over time. The obsolescence will be far worse in developing countries where the standard of education is lower. The undeniable fact is that to stay competitive, businesses must adopt AI to cut costs and improve quality; the interests of the workers are secondary. Even the optimists admit that the locations where new jobs will be created will not be the same places where they are destroyed – creating imbalances between regions within a country as well as between countries.
More broadly, AI will worsen the divide between the rich and poor, the haves and the have-nots. There is a real possibility that AI may trigger an unprecedented level of unemployment and precipitate social instability. Especially for countries like India, where a large percentage of the population lacks the education that is vital to survive a technological tsunami.
Battle 2: Global Power: China has bet the proverbial farm on AI. The clash between the U.S. and China is this race for AI leadership because both countries’ current leaders know fully well that whoever dominates this technology stands to occupy the military and economic high ground. Apart from the U.S., China, and a few other countries, most nations will lag increasingly as time goes by. If is virtually impossible to catch up in all the key elements of success that must be brought together. Beside competing directly against each other, the U.S. and China will also compete for control over satellite nations and new colonies.
Battleground 3: Psychological Control and Agency: A troubling trend is that as machines get smarter, a growing number of humans are becoming dumber. In a sense, the public has outsourced its critical thinking, memory, and agency to increasingly sophisticated digital networks. As in any outsourcing arrangement, the provider of services becomes more knowledgeable about the client’s internal affairs and the client becomes more dependent on the supplier. The quest for deep knowledge and critical thinking is becoming a thing of the past because it is easier for people to use internet searches whenever any information is needed. People are operating on autopilot rather than thinking and learning on their own.
Source: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Power by Rajiv Malhotra (2021)
THE SUPERPOWER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE RACE: Chinese AI companies and researchers have already made-up enormous ground on their American counterparts, experimenting with innovative algorithms and business models that promise to revolutionize China’s economy. Together, these businesses and scholars have turned China into a bona fide AI superpower, the only true national counterweight to the U.S. in this emerging technology. How these two countries choose to compete and cooperate in AI will have dramatic implications for global economics and governance. If we are not careful, this single-minded rhetoric around an “AI race” will undermine us in planning and shaping our shared AI future. A race has only one winner: China’s gain is America’s loss and vice-versa. There is not a notion of shared progress or mutual prosperity – just a desire to stay ahead of the other country regardless of the costs.
The U.S. government has no grand strategy for AI nor for our longer-term future. Unlike China, the American government has not pushed a top-down agenda, they have assumed the commercial sector will drive all progress. So, in place of coordinated national strategies to build our organizational capacity inside the government, to build and strengthen our international alliances, and to prepare our military for the future of warfare, the U.S. had subjugated AI to the revolving door of politics. Instead of funding basic research in AI, the federal government has effectively outsourced R&D to the commercial sector and the whims of Wall Street. AI’s consumerism model in the U.S. isn’t inherently evil. Neither is China’s government-centralized model. AI itself isn’t necessarily harmful to society. However, the Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, IBM, Apple are profit-driven, publicly traded companies that must answer to Wall Street, regardless of the altruistic intentions of their leaders and employees.
We must consider the developmental track of AI within the broader context of China’s grand plans for the future. In April 2018, China’s President Xi gave a major speech outlining his vision of China as the global cyber superpower – a new cyberspace governance network and an internet that would “spread positive information, uphold the ‘correct’ political direction, and guide public opinion and values towards the ‘right’ direction.” The authoritarian rules China would have us all live by are a divergence from the free speech, market-driven economy and distributed control that we cherish in the West. In China the BAT are beholden to the Chinese government, which has already decided what is best for China. What I want to know—and what you should demand an answer to -- is what’s best for all of humanity? As AI matures, how will the decisions we make today be reflected in the decisions machines make for us in the future?
Source: The Big Nine by Amy Webb.
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
| 7l_big_tech_7l_ai_opportunity_--_segment_7.pdf |