On September 13, 2018, Peter Diamondis writes on Futurism:
This article has been edited for brevity. Read the full article here.
Last year, China’s government put out its plan to lead the world in AI by 2030. As Eric Schmidt has explained, “it’s pretty simple. By 2020, they will have caught up. By 2025, they will be better than us. By 2030, they will dominate the industries of AI.” And the figures don’t lie.
PricewaterhouseCoopers recently projected AI’s deployment will add $15.7 trillion to the global GDP by 2030, with China taking home $7 trillion of that total, dwarfing North America’ $3.7 trillion in gains. In 2017, China accounted for 48 percent of the world’s total AI startup funding, compared to America’s 38 percent. Already, Chinese investments in AI, chips and electric vehicles have reached an estimated $300 billion.
As discussed by Kai-Fu Lee in his book AI Superpowers, there are four main drivers are tipping the balance in China’s favor.
1. Abundant Data
Perhaps China’s biggest advantage is the sheer quantity of its data. Tencent’s WeChat platform alone has over 889 million daily active users. That’s more than the entire population of Europe. Chinese e-commerce purchases are almost double U.S. totals. But China’s data advantage involves more than just quantity.
As China witnesses an explosion of O2O (online-to-offline) startups, their data is creating a new intelligence layer unparalleled in the West. Whereas American users’ payment and transportation data are fragmented across various platforms, Chinese AI giants like Tencent have created unified online ecosystems that concentrate all your data in one place. This allows them to generate complex maps charting hundreds of millions of users’ every move.
With the unequaled rise of bike-sharing startups like China’s ofo and Mobike, Chinese companies can now harness deeply textured maps of population movement, allowing them to intuit everything from your working habits to your grocery shopping routine. With the explosion of China’s facial recognition capacities, these maps are increasingly populated with faces even when you’re not online. As Chinese tech companies continue merging users’ online behavior with their physical world, the data they collect offers them a tremendous edge over their Silicon Valley counterparts.
2. Hungry Entrepreneurs
Former founder-director of Google Brain, Andrew Ng noted the hunger raving among Chinese entrepreneurs: “The velocity of work is much faster in China than in most of Silicon Valley. When you spot a business opportunity in China, the window of time you have to respond is very short.”
As China’s AI expertise has exploded, these entrepreneurs are finally shrugging off their former ‘copycat’ reputation, building businesses with no analogs in the West. Now home to three of the Seven AI Giants (Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent), China also sees a thriving AI startup ecosystem.
Just this year, China’s computer vision startup SenseTime became the most valuable AI startup in the world. Capable of identifying your face, gauging your age and even your potential purchasing habits, SenseTime is now a world-class leader in facial recognition technologies. The company raised $620 million in its ‘Series C+’ round announced in May, now claiming a valuation of over $4.5 billion. And SenseTime is not alone. As of this past April, China is home to 168 unicorns, collectively valued at over $628 billion.
3. AI Expertise
It is important to note that China is still new to the game. When deep learning got its big break in 2012, China had barely woken up to the AI revolution. But in a few short years, China’s AI community has caught up fast. While the world’s most elite AI researchers still largely cluster in the U.S., favoring companies like Google, Chinese tech giants are quickly closing the gap. Already in academia, Chinese AI researchers stand shoulder-to-shoulder with their American contemporaries. At AAAI’s 2017 conference, an equal number of accepted papers came from U.S.- and China-based researchers.
We’ve also seen increased collaboration between China’s top tech firms and emerging student talent. Tencent, for instance, sponsors scholarships for students at a lab in Hong Kong’s University of Science and Technology, granting them access to masses of WeChat data. Meanwhile, Baidu, Didi, and Tencent have all set up their own research labs.
China’s Face++ now leads the world in face and image recognition AI, beating out top teams from Google, Microsoft and Facebook at the 2017 COCO image-recognition competition. Voice recognition software company iFlyTek has not only outcompeted teams from Alphabet’s DeepMind, Facebook and IBM Watson in natural-language processing, but has done so in its “second language” of English. Now the most valuable AI speech company in the world, iFlyTek’s cutting-edge technology could one day enable translation earpieces that instantaneously translate speech into any language.
4. China’s Government Directive
The day DeepMind’s AlphaGo beat top-ranking Chinese Go player Ke Jie has gone down in history as China’s “Sputnik Moment.” Within two months of the AI’s victory, China’s government issued its plan to make China the global center of AI innovation, aiming for a 1 trillion RMB (about $150 billion USD) AI industry by 2030.
Over the past decade, Chinese government spending on STEM research has grown by double digits year on year. Mayors across the country have built out innovation zones, incubators and government-backed VC funds, even covering rent and clearing out avenues for AI startups and accelerators. Beijing plans to invest $2 billion in an AI development park, which would house up to 400 AI enterprises and a national AI lab, driving R&D, patents and societal innovation. Cities like Xiong’an New Area are building out entire AI cities in the next two decades, centered around autonomous vehicles, solar panel-embedded roads, and computer vision-geared infrastructure.
Lastly, local governments have begun to team with China’s leading AI companies to build up party-corporate complexes. Acting as a “national team,” companies like Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent and iFlyTek collaborate with national organizations like China’s National Engineering Lab for Deep Learning Technologies to pioneer research and supercharge innovation.
Final Thoughts
Once disregarded as a market of ‘copycats’ looking to Silicon Valley for inspiration and know-how, China’s AI ecosystem has long departed this stage. Propelled by an abundance of government funds, smart infrastructure overhauls, leading AI research, and some of the world’s most driven entrepreneurs, China’s AI ecosystem is unstoppable.
https://futurism.com/china-spotlight-next-ai-superpower-affiliate/
Gary Reber Comments:
The author states that “China’s AI ecosystem is unstoppable.” And I should add, its robotics development as applied to the production of goods and services.
Certainly, this is the result of sharing American technological knowledge over decades during which American corporations have increasingly out-sourced production of good and services, along with sharing technological knowledge, often a requirement to invest in co-owned productive enterprises in China and other countries.
While this reality persists, there are those who still advocate no-restriction free trade, not fair trade. So many politicians, academics, and journalists are OK with the continued out-sourcing of the production of goods and services to China and other low wage and non-environmentally regulated countries, as long as wholesale and end user prices can be kept lower than if those goods and services were produced in the United States. And as well, our technological knowledge.
Remember, entrepreneurs and governments of other countries do not have to invent the “wheel” all over again and proceed from there leaning how to catch up to those who have far surpassed the early and developing stages of gaining technological knowledge. When shared with foreigners, they can simply learn and apply in short order. And that is what has and is happening with the result they then are able to surpass our capability to lead in AI, robotics, and other fields.
Those who oppose measures to significantly daunt out-sourcing are engaging in dangerous thinking, as, if we continue on this out-sourcing path it will do significant harm to our economy and our capability to strengthen our capability to produce at home, and be the leader in technology and the resulting tectonic shifts in the technologies of production that are enabling non-human productive processes to significantly reduce the need for human labor . We need to uphold an economic policy that strengthens manufacturing and technological development in the United States, and cease production in China and other countries. This will strengthen our economy and galvanize “Made In The USA.”
Why is it that we continue to allow cheap-labor-produced China manufactured goods to go duty-free.
Non-tariffs over decades have resulted in American corporations out-sourcing to China and other third-world countries, enabling new investment in those countries and building their economies through exporting tariff-free back to the United States at the expense of Americans, who have been losing jobs to out-sourcing. We need a pro-active policy to stop allowing goods produced as a result of out-sourcing from entering the United States without a tariff applied. This will help to deter American corporations from further out-sourcing and bringing back production to the United States.
What is frustrating is that there is not a broader discussion on the national level in political circles over the threat to our economic well-being of Communist-ruled China. Over the last two decades, China has gotten away with robbing us of our jobs and the productive foundation that enables us to be self-sufficient in producing the goods, products and services that Americans need and want, and create and keep jobs at home.
China has attracted our corporations to invest in China and decrease investment in the United States, significantly decreasing the availability of good-paying manufacturing jobs, and China has pilfered our intellectual property, as more and more American corporations move their production to China.
China has also hacked into politicians files and our government offices.
And according to international trade experts, China has been “stealing” more than $5 TRILLION from Americans––each year. China has devastated our heartland, our businesses, and the livelihoods of millions of Americans.
But after years of sitting back and letting hardworking Americans take the brunt of China’s attacks and unfair trade policies, imposing tariffs is a way to de-incentivize American corporations from further out-sourcing, and instead invest in American-made production expansion, while simultaneously creating new productive capital asset owners and jobs.
Former NSA chief Keith Alexander recently described Beijing’s dirty tricks and thievery as…“The greatest transfer of wealth in history.”
Between 2001 and 2015, the U.S. lost more than 3 million jobs as a result of China’s policy, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Three-fourths of those were blue-collar workers––those who live next door and all across America. It is a crime when hardworking Americans have their dreams snatched away due to out-sourcing. Yet that’s what China’s dictatorship has been getting away with for the past 20 years. They’ve stolen the American right to owning private property in the production of goods, products and services and a good job with fair pay.
We need to uphold the Section 301 provision of the Trade Act of 1974. The Act was first signed into law by then-President Ford. Section 301 is designed “To eliminate unfair foreign trade practices that adversely affect U.S. trade and investment.”
Historically it starts with the trade imbalance between China and the U.S. It is by far the largest in the world. In 2017 alone, China imported just $130 billion in trade from America, while China exported $506 billion to the USA.
Over the last 20 years, our trade imbalance has added up to a monumental $4.5 trillion.
In short, China is getting $5.6 trillion out of the deal, and we’re only getting $1.3 trillion.
We’re losing American corporations to out-sourcing opportunities based on lower production costs, and in the process losing jobs left and right.
Sooner or later, this vicious cycle catches up with every American. All because China devalues practically everything made in America.
Is this the future we want for our children and grandchildren, where virtually nothing is produced in American anymore?
Please read U.S. Trade Representative, Robert Lighthizer’s plan to end the China imbalance for good. His 215-page “Payback Plan” lays out dozens of examples of unfair acts, policies and practices of the Chinese government. And it proves, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that U.S. corporations, workers and shareholder owners have lost billions in wealth. See https://ustr.gov/…/2…/july/statement-us-trade-representative
Lighthizer’s report reveals, “Counterfeiting occurs in medicines, consumer electronics, toys, computer accessories, clothing and footwear, formalwear, automobile parts and semiconductors.”
The Payback Plan” proves China’s been working to steal away our top talent and it showed how it’s even manipulated its currency to gain advantages over U.S. companies.
The bottom line is this and why we must act: China disrupted and damaged hundreds of U.S. businesses, from coal mining operations in West Virginia… to steel companies in Pennsylvania… to tech businesses in Silicon Valley.
When thinking about our leverage over China, remember that China is the world’s most populous nation––1.4 billion people jam-packed into cities all over the country.
The United States has ten metro cities with populations of more than 1 million. By comparison, China has more than 100! And how does China manage to feed all of these people?
Middle America, that’s how.
The United States will ship 2 billion bushels of soybeans in 2018––and China has always been our top buyer.
We ship out 900,000 tons of wheat and more than 100 million bushels of grain.
China recognizes that without America, the country might literally starve.
Beyond that, China realizes that America is by far the largest market for its products.
If we cut it off, its economy will collapse. And China knows it.
Up until now, our governmental administrations haven’t used this trade chip against China. But we need to strongly tell China that if it want access to our food and consumer markets to will have to dramatically realign its trade with Americans to play fair and “pay back” hardworking Americans for all the jobs it’s stolen over the last 30 years.
International finance expert Seth Kaplowitz sums it up nicely:
“Not everybody likes the president, not everybody supports the president…
“But the one thing everyone recognizes is that China needs the United States to trade with… to get [its] goods to market, as well as to provide American goods to [its] markets.”
In short, China can’t afford NOT to do business with us.
What China’s gotten away with for two decades is a national tragedy. It’s a shame that millions of Americans have had the shirts ripped off their backs, while ineffective governmental officials stood by and did nothing.
Sadly, too few liberals and conservatives don’t seem able to grasp this issue and its consequences, and no one in government has sought to know how to make EVERY citizen productive. Not everyone can work, and we don’t have jobs for all. We began shutting down/shipping out jobs as far back as the 1980s, ended actual welfare aid in the 1990s––lost over 6 million manufacturing jobs alone since 2000. We have remained on an economic downhill slide, heading for collapse with nearly 50 percent of our citizens barely making ends meet to provide for basic, fixed monthly expenses.
Imposing tariffs will daunt out-sourcing as long as everything produced in China is taxed coming into the United States. Along with tariffs we will need a plan to finance new investment to form new physical productive capital assets that will enable Americans at home to produce what Americans need and want. This new investment needs to be financed in ways that create new owners, without the requirement of past savings required for capital credit, with the capital credit being interest-free, and repayable solely out of the earnings of the investments. In this manner, we can build a responsible and environmentally protective future economy that can support general affluence for EVERY citizen.
Support the Agenda of The JUST Third WAY Movement (also known as “Economic Personalism”) at http://foreconomicjustice.org/?p=5797, http://www.cesj.org/resources/articles-index/the-just-third-way-basic-principles-of-economic-and-social-justice-by-norman-g-kurland/ and http://www.cesj.org/resources/articles-index/the-just-third-way-a-new-vision-for-providing-hope-justice-and-economic-empowerment/.
Support Monetary Justice at http://capitalhomestead.org/page/monetary-justice.
Support the enactment of the proposed Capital Homestead Act (aka Economic Democracy Act and Economic Empowerment Act) at http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/, http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/capital-homestead-act-a-plan-for-getting-ownership-income-and-power-to-every-citizen/, http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/capital-homestead-act-summary/ and http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/ch-vehicles/. And The Capital Homestead Act brochure, pdf print version at http://www.cesj.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/C-CHAflyer_1018101.pdf and Capital Homestead Accounts (CHAs) at http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/ch-vehicles/capital-homestead-accounts-chas/
