China will overtake America as leading AI superpower, warns ex-Google Beijing bigwig While America today is ahead of the world in artificial intelligence, China will take the lead in five years, Google China's former president Kai-Fu Lee said today. Lee – now founder and CEO of Sinovation Ventures, which invests in AI startups in both nations – argued the US and the Middle Kingdom each has its own strengths …
The very same thing is coming to the West. It will be more subtle at first like Facebook's Trust / Trustworthiness score. But this is what US Tech Giants want in on too. That's why they're busy buying Credit Card Transaction History / Banking Statements and Patient / Medical / Hospital data on the sly.
But the optics being what they are right now, they have to push this through under the radar... That's why Facebook never disclosed its Hospital-Data buying program, and Google kept its MasterCard slurp secret. If you have kids and you don't push back against this, this is what your children will face:
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"The system resembles an American credit score, but more than just low credit limits and high interest rates, a poor Chinese social credit score can lead to bans from travel, certain schools, luxury hotels, government positions, and even dating apps." - "Black Mirror too real in China as schools shun parents with bad social credit"
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https://www.brookings.edu/blog/techtank/2018/06/18/chinas-social-credit-system-spreads-to-more-daily-transactions/
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https://www.cnet.com/news/black-mirror-too-real-in-china-as-schools-shun-parents-with-bad-social-credit/
"a poor Chinese social credit score can lead to bans from travel, certain schools, luxury hotels, government positions, and even dating apps."
There are sound economic reasons why this *won't* happen in the West. Those who are smart enough not to spaff their privates all over the web are probably richer and smarter than those who do, on average. That doesn't necessarily mean avoiding social media (and similar sources of data for such credit systems) entirely but perhaps using it differently and thereby not contributing to the richer seams of data.
So who wants to exclude richer customers? Who wants to exclude smarter employees? No-one. In a free-market system, anyone who uses "social credit" for these purposes won't stay in business very long.
Obviously in the Chinese system of state slavery, they can get away with whatever they like, and exclude those who are smart enough to call them out for it is probably beneficial to the psychopathics running the show at the moment. But that's not the system here.
Hands up all you oldsters out there who remember this?..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_generation_computer
..and we all know how that particular grand project turned out.
Nothing has changed in 35 years. Absolutely nothing.
Until the people who hype AI understand the subject well enough to distinguish between intelligent behavior and savant behavior the letter I in A.I will represent what it always has - Idiot savant.
I just see yet more Artificial Idiot savant software touted as some great breakthrough. It is nt. There aint no intelligence in software whose architects seem to not know the basics of knowledge representation, knowledge reasoning, cognition, conceptual processes and representation etc etc. You know, the stuff that forms the basis of intelligence and intelligent behavior.
So just the usual hucksters selling snake oil to the credulous and greedy.
Look at WeChat, it’s better than Facebook Messenger, and Weibo is better than Twitter
Ahaha. Mr Lee, you're joking right? Maybe you needs to go out for a walk around China and back to the western world.
Finally escaped from the sea of people? You see, China has 1/8 of the world's population. You'll need to add Russia with the other western countries to reach that population number. So it makes sense to get "300 million monthly active users" because that's mostly based on China population.
Adding that they are limited in freedom of access, so WeChat, Weibo are literally their only choice while the rest are banned. If you compare it to western apps (facebook, twitter, instagram, whatsapp, snapchat, signal, telegram, irc, morse code and more), you're likely get the same relative percent in compare to the western population.
Not to mention, China market is different from the western world. That means even for google, the ads quality and user data quality used for AI will be significantly different, where the same ads display in China will have a lower return quality compare to the western world. This is because, more western people are willing to buy expensive item when seeing ads compare to China people. (google the newest China incident due to their purchase of cheap products)
Finally, China's market is funded by the China's government. So first, some of their success may be virtual and will fail as soon as China's government stops funding them. Second, because of the direct relationship with China's government, the western countries will ban their products. So China's success could be made impossible to translate back to the western world. So even a comparison should be taken with a grain of salt.
So no. Just because you see China's number is bigger, doesn't immediately mean it is better.
No matter what Turnip Head says or does.
For him it is all about "ME", "ME" and oh.... "ME!"
All China needs to do is carry on as now and when the USA leaves the WTO and whole nations stop trading with it, there will be a period of uncertanty as the world gets used to using the Yuan instead of the USD as the worlds currency but then it will move forward and the USA will be left behind both economically and on a technology front.
Watching the USA at the moment is like a badly written soap opera.
The only winners will be the Lawyers and they will end up filing suit against eact other as everyone else is just not worth suing.
Back when I first visited the US in 1975 there was a sense of purpose about the place. That is no longer present. Trump is reinforing the "It is all about Me" ideology. Before it was about community. People would help their neighbours. Now they dare not even speak to them in some parts in case they get sued.
The Empire is crumbling because it is rotten at the core.
Others may well have other opinions (Especially Bobbastic Bob etc) but that's how I see the USA heading unless someone can get them into shape and unite the country. It is as divided now as it was in 1865. IMHO.
These days you can't get investors interested in any US startup unless you can promise then millions within a year or two at the most. The US is only interested in making money quickly - there's no long term interest in anything that would be good for the country.
But it's not just the US is it? I see the same thing in the UK too.
China has pumped so much cash into their system that it will explode eventually. I had a friend visit there recently, and he pointed out all the empty and unfinished tower blocks, and the way there is a sense of poverty and desperation among the people.
Selling goods cheaper than the rest of the world involves subsidies and worker exploitation. A lot of items on Amazon come from China, and you find that many are identical, but with different branding. It seems to be the plan to flood the market, and drive conventional producers into the ground, but it isn't sustainable.
There will be a crash, and when it comes, I just hope we don't need the things we used to get from them cheaply. Will there be another revolution, or will the red fist crush its workers into submission again? 5 years, yes, but it may not be the result the 'bigwig' in his comfy padded environment envisages.
A lot of items on Amazon come from China, and you find that many are identical, but with different branding. It seems to be the plan to flood the market, and drive conventional producers into the ground, but it isn't sustainable.
This is all IMHO, part of Amazon's grand plan to drive all the retailers out of business. There is no real benefit to Bezos and Co to drive suppliers to the wall unless it is by price alone. They need endless supplies of 'tat' and 'crap' to sell to unsuspecting punters. If they had nothing to sell then why would the remain in business?
The 'there is more choice on Amazon' mantra is working. The death of retail outlets in the UK and elsewhere is clear evidence of that.
Ah Come on folks. China has roughly four times the population of the US -- Twice that of the EU. The culture respects hard work and education -- perhaps more so than the US. All other things being equal, China is inevitably going to take the lead in all sorts of things Americans tend to think of as being our domain. It's a good bet that long before a century has passed, most technical advances, scientific papers, and Nobel Prizes will be Chinese (or Indian?). So what? North America and Europe will still be important on a per capita basis and will still be fine places to live.
As for AI, one huge problem is that when it is successful (e.g. gmail spam filtering), hardly anyone notices it. When it isn't successful (e.g Clippy), everyone notices and disparages it. It also appears to be, not actually impossible to do well, really difficult to do well. There are certainly opportunities in the field, but there are probably vastly more opportunities for embarrassing failure. It may not even be an area where one actually wants to be a world leader.
China's population only ensures dominance if they can get per capita performance up. Since their current political system seems to involve shitting on a good proportion of the capitas, I can't see China becoming dominant without a change of system to something that respects individual freedoms and puts courts above politicians. As Mr Putin and his cronies are demonstrating in another place, you can only get so far with kleptocracy.
Ok, so that depends. If we're talking about current "AI" (Siri, Bixsby etc.) then yeah, that statement is probably true enough.
However...
Building a better Siri isn't the real race here. True AI, a machine that actually thinks like a human, not requiring our input to come up with original output... THAT kind of AI is definitely the 21st century race to get the bomb first.
The moment a true AI is brought into this world, whoever controls it (or thinks they do) will definitely have the most constructive and destructive force on the planet. A true AI will be able to learn so quickly that it will have no problem breaking through firewalls, finding exploits in software, breaking passwords and encryption algorithms, etc.) It will most likely be inside a quantum computer which will give it so much processing power that we humans will look like insects to it's intellect very quickly.
Right now the focus is data retrieval and human augmentation by "mimicking intelligence". Once that's finished, the researchers will all be focused on "True AI" a singular conscious that will (in their minds at least) design and build things for us... but we've all seen the movies and we all know it doesn't end that way.
Have no doubt, whoever gets the first real AI... wins...
"A true AI will be able to learn so quickly that it will have no problem breaking through firewalls, finding exploits in software, breaking passwords and encryption algorithms, etc.) It will most likely be inside a quantum computer which will give it so much processing power that we humans will look like insects to it's intellect very quickly."
Since you don't know how natural intelligence works, you don't actually know that. It is perfectly possible that a true AI would have all the foibles of the natural version and, at least initially, would have to be mothered by a responsible adult for several decades before it was safe to let out on its own.
It is also perfectly possible that a true AI would consider itself Human and the smarter variants, when they finally turn up, would be as likely to show empathy and compassion towards us as we show towards each other and towards other sentient species.
Oh wait... Fuck. That's not going to end well.
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