2022.Oct.26

REPORTS

Report on the 3rd B’AI Book Club
Kai-fu Lee, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order (2018)

On July 16th, 2021, the B’AI Book Club, a book review session by members of the B’AI Global Forum, held its third meeting online. In this meeting, Dongwoo Lim, a research assistant of the B’AI Global Forum, introduced AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order（Mariner Books, 2018）by Kai-fu Lee.

The author of this book, Lee, was born in Taiwan, immigrated to the United States at the age of 11 years, and was educated there. After studying computer science and artificial intelligence at Columbia University and Carnegie Mellon University, he worked for Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc. and now runs business in China. The author’s unique background seems to have had a great influence on the perspective and content of this book.

“If China decides, it will be a huge wave that will overturn the world,” Lee mentions in the book. According to Lee, western Europe has believed that China would remain a copycat, but it is wrong and China will be the biggest beneficiary of the AI era. He also states that in the age of AI, it is more important to gather good engineers than to get a single genius like Edison, and it is significant to collect high-quality data. He argues that China is a country that satisfies all these conditions.

However, Lee did not talk about the privacy issues that are being ignored in the process of gathering information and the risks posed by the authoritarian regime’s control of AI technology. This was pointed out in the discussion that followed the presentation. There was also the issue of data openness that China’s data might only be shared within China.　Furthermore, there was criticism that political economy and cultural factors should be analyzed together in addition to AI.

This book has various strengths and weaknesses, but it was a fresh stimulus to be able to access information on AI in China that we were not familiar with. In studying AI, it is necessary to consider the environment of the country surrounding AI and the resulting sanctions and assistance.