AI Super Powers – China, Silicon Valley and the new world order
If there was only one book to read this year in the field of technology, it could well be this one; and so what a pity that this work has no French translation! For many of our elites, especially those who don't speak English, it would have been salvation as it details with a great pedagogy the technological, economic, social, metaphysical, geostrategic stakes involved in the rise of this discipline; and the term rise in power seems almost weak as it is a coming upheaval.
Kai-Fu Lee is not the first to come: he was successively on the executive committee of Apple, SGI and Google before setting up a 1.6 billion dollar investment fund dedicated to AI, based in Beijing. Many of his works are still considered essential to the current development of artificial intelligence. This is why his main thesis - China will take strong leadership on almost all AI disciplines - is to be taken seriously, especially since it is particularly well-argued.
The author gives a masterly overview of the development of AI, its sub-disciplines and the chances of success for China and the US in each theme. One feels, beyond his technical mastery of the subject, that he has thought long and hard about each of the issues raised. It is cruel to note that Europe is almost never mentioned, as it seems to be so far behind in his eyes.
In many ways, this is more of a treatise on digital emergence strategy than a simple book on AI. One almost regrets that this book was not released a little earlier, so that its best ideas could have been integrated into the government's AI plan / Cédric Villani. The author insists in particular on the short-term productive upheavals that should affect almost all sectors and that -as I largely evoked in my last book- will lead to the emergence of radically new business models in many fields.
The second part of the book is also fascinating for its fundamental reflections on the future of our societies in the light of AI. Using the example of what is happening now in China, Lee extrapolates and pushes us to think about how we could in turn regulate algorithms and their consequences.
By the way, the idea of AI singularity, dear to many, seems totally out of reach: Lee sees no possibility in the short or medium-term for machines to develop emotional intelligence that closely resembles that of a human. Thus the ideas of Kursweil and many others take a big hit.
This book also includes a very solid analysis of the productive transition to AI and its impact on work and wealth distribution. This is perhaps the most developed part of the book. Lee seems to have spent a lot of energy confronting the most fashionable scenarios and he is not always reassuring, even if he sketches solutions, which to many might seem utopian.
In conclusion, this book, probably one of the best in its category, is widely recommended. If it is written somewhat in the spirit of the arc of a popular American movie, including a happy ending, it remains no less profound and its last chapters, on the place of man in a technological society, are particularly inspired. I found them all the more interesting as I have often had this type of questioning about societies which, by the very nature of their technological essences, seem irremediably dehumanizing. But Kai-Fu Lee, although he is a technologist, has nevertheless remarkably well identified the main factors at stake: social utilitarianism, the mechanization of the psyche, etc.
He ends his work by paying two curious tributes: one to the elusive nature of human love, which he considers to be the only force so singular that it will always escape the machines, and the other to a regulated economy model -the word communism will not be used- which he considers being the only one capable of controlling the immense social distortions that artificial intelligence will inevitably generate.