A Critical Review of Dr. Kai-Fu Lee’s AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order[1]
AI, like most technologies, is inherently neither good nor evil, according to Kai-Fu Lee, chairman and CEO of Sinovation Ventures.[2]
Generally, when an expert on any given topic speaks to spread knowledge on their topic of expertise, people are inclined to listen. The more accolades and accomplishments an individual has under their belt, the more credibility they are presumed to possess. So, when someone like Dr. Kai-Fu Lee, the founder of Google China, Chairman and CEO of a successful venture-capital fund, former executive at Microsoft and Apple, and one of the top artificial intelligence (AI) researchers in the world, decides to share his knowledge about AI’s implications on the future, people will listen. Dr. Lee’s opinions based on his previous work carry heavy weight and are sure to be greatly considered by others in the AI field. Yet, Dr. Lee believes almost everything he would have said in 2013 about how humanity should react to AI’s speedy evolution and integration into society would not have been the correct approach.
Dr. Lee’s AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order, published in 2018, is the result of the culmination of years as one the world’s top AI researchers, experience in venture capital funding in both the United States and China, and his cancer diagnosis that made him reevaluate his life and the purpose of humanity. Through his knowledge and AI expertise, Dr. Lee recognizes the potential issues stemming from the rapid progression and implementation of AI, including those that can lead to social disorder and political collapse caused by widespread unemployment and gaping inequality. Additionally, Dr. Lee argues there will be a psychological loss of one’s purpose that will challenge one’s value once they have realized they can be replaced by machines. “What then will it mean to be human?” he asks himself.[3]
Through his experience with near death, however, Dr. Lee believes he provides solutions that not only alleviate the threat of massive unemployment and economic inequality, but also embrace the integration of AI through a symbiotic relationship with humanity that calls for humans to become more prosocial and loving of one another. Dr. Lee wants AI to continue its accelerated progression but wants us to retain our humanity alongside it by retaining our love for others, the very essence of what makes us human. This is the theme of his book. In doing so, Dr. Lee hopes that the two AI superpowers, the United States and China, can work together to tackle the issues that will arise as AI continues to develop.
Although recognizing AI’s potential issues in the future and discussing possible solutions is the major focus of this book, Dr. Lee spends the first five of nine chapters of the book discussing the differences between AI development in the United States and China, and provides reasons for why he believes that while the United States currently has the upper hand when it comes to AI capabilities, China will eventually surpass the United States in its AI capabilities within the next 15 years. This is because, he argues, building an AI driven economy requires gladiator entrepreneurs, abundant data, an army of AI expert engineers, and a government eager to embrace the power of transformative technology. China’s techno-utilitarian approach and ruthless copycat entrepreneurial culture gives it an advantage in building a society and economy prepared to harness the potential of AI, whereas the United States is concerned with reaching a moral consensus on ethical issues and possesses an aversion to copying AI inventions that can lead to complacency.
The lack of a modern techno-utilitarian approach, and more specifically, the lack of an AI utilitarian approach in America can be traced to a document President Obama’s White House presented on October 12, 2016. The document laid out how the United States could seize the opportunities AI presented with a vision of what a future of AI integration could look like. The document, however, did not gain much traction and barely registered in the American news cycle. In contrast, China released a similar document in July 2017 titled “Development Plan for a New Generation of Artificial Intelligence.” Dr. Lee relates the response in China as akin to the galvanization resulting from President John F. Kennedy’s speech calling for America to land a man on the moon. The document set off national mobilization for innovation, including subsidies for research, directed venture-capital “guiding funds” toward AI, the government purchasing the products and services of local AI startups, and setting up dozens of special development zones and incubators.
The Chinese utilitarian mentality on technology and AI is one I found myself agreeing with and wished the United States was better at adopting more generally. Dr. Lee stated “... you can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” when writing on the use of autonomous vehicles.[4] I interpreted this as not allowing errors that occur along the way to determine the failure of a method or task. So, in his case, a death caused by an autonomous vehicle should not destroy the use of autonomous vehicles entirely if it means that their usage will eventually lead to fewer accidents and death in the grand scheme. Dr. Lee points this out in a different chapter of the book, but in the United States, “using government funding to invest in economic and technological upgrades is risky,” because “success is often ignored and misfires become fodder for attack ads.”[5] His example is a loan receiver going bankrupt under Obama’s loan guarantee stimulus program for renewable energy projects. The backlash Obama received is common for any political figure in the United States, and I believe it is detrimental to finishing any worthwhile project because the continued pursuit of the project will be questioned and ridiculed by the public through information received from attack ads.
I found the book to be an enthralling comparative analysis grounded in Dr. Lee’s unique personal experiences as Google China’s founder and as a world-renowned AI researcher that was full of interesting anecdotes and jokes that often left me chuckling. Then, I received a gut punch by the seventh chapter as I learned about his battle with cancer. He provoked personal emotions of longing and love for my own family as he described his sense of regret for his devotion to his career over his family, going as far as saying that there was a time when he would have chosen to miss the birth of his first daughter to go to an Apple meeting with John Sculley. In building his crescendo around the importance of human love, he leaves the audience with a sense of hope for the future through the solutions he offers for the job market working in conjunction with AI.
The book is beautifully written in a way that pulls at one’s heartstrings and makes someone want to go out and contribute to the world, while still managing to inform the audience about the state of the AI race between the United States and China, and the looming threats that come with the accelerated progression of AI. Dr. Lee addressed counterarguments to his solutions but did not claim to have all of the answers. Dr. Lee knows there will be a challenge in adopting his idea of the creation of a prosocial job market that is secured through government and venture capital funding.
Dr. Lee believes a prosocial job industry that is centered around human compassion can work in conjunction with AI’s role in routine optimization and analytical tasks. For example, the new prosocial job market could change someone’s profession from a “doctor” to one that Dr. Lee calls a “compassionate caregiver.” Compassionate caregivers are still well trained but more so in activities that require more social intelligence rather than as vessels of medical knowledge. Similarly, paralegals can pass off research tasks to AI tools to focus on communicating more with clients and making them feel cared for. These are examples of old professions adapted to the new status quo of AI integration, but Dr. Lee argues that new unfathomable jobs will spout in the direction of prosocial services. A life coach, for example, would probably seem pointless and odd to someone in the 1950s, as Dr. Lee identifies.
Furthermore, the most prosocial professions existing today, such as home health and personal care aides, are some of the fastest growing but lack job security and basic dignity. These are the jobs Dr. Lee urges society to embrace the new AI economy so that humans can find their purpose and identity by maintaining jobs that promote social unity. It is possible, in his view, that this can be accomplished by allocating money to the prosocial sector through government and venture capital funding.
Dr. Lee’s argument is persuasive, and I find myself convinced of the benefits of developing and funding a prosocial job market. My only critique on the whole was that Dr. Lee seemed too optimistic that the United States and China would work more closely together to solve the potential threats of AI. He does not view the competition between the United States and China as “a new Cold War,” and instead harnesses focus away from military superiority and onto generic creation as the primary focus of each country in relation to AI development. I do not believe AI development has to focus on military superiority to be used as a way to display superiority over another country. The cultural and political differences between the United States and China, as well as their roles as leaders in the world order, means that they will always compete with one another and use anything that has the potential to demonstrate superiority to the rest of the world as a point of independent pride over the other. They will always race before they work together.
Granted, AI Superpowers was published in 2018, and geopolitical tensions have risen since then. Dr. Lee does address this point in the afterword which was added in 2021. He acknowledges that it was wishful thinking that the United States and China would work together on AI development.
Overall, I highly recommend AI Superpowers to anyone curious about the modern AI landscape in the United States and China, and I would encourage readers to analyze and critique Dr. Lee’s solutions to the problems facing AI development, such as mass unemployment and polarized social and economic disparity.
[1] Kai-Fu Lee, AI Superpowers: Chia, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order (First Mariner Books ed., 2021).
[2] Kai-Fu Lee, The Real Story of AI, Caixin Global (May 4, 2022), https://www.caixinglobal.com/2022-05-04/kai-fu-lee-the-real-story-of-ai-101880125.html.
[3] Kai-Fu Lee, AI Superpowers: Chia, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order (First Mariner Books ed., 2021) at 147.
[4] Id. at 133.
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