Every evening as our children eat dinner, my phone notifies me that our 3-year-old’s teacher has uploaded photos taken during the day at school. An artificial intelligence facial recognition feature puts a red square around his face, letting me know which photos to look at. It’s kind of creepy, but kind of helpful, too.
In China, surveillance technology and A.I. surround our everyday life. It’s built into the way we order food delivered to us from online apps; almost nobody I know here in Shanghai buys groceries at a grocery store, so we rely on A.I.-powered technologies to keep us fed. It’s visible in the infrastructure we use to go to work and school, from trains using facial recognition in lieu of physical tickets to self-driving taxis. China’s technological system offers an unparalleled convenience, and A.I. is such a huge part of it.
Many American leaders believe the United States cannot overcome its adversary China unless it beats the country in the A.I. race. Every new chip that President Trump approves for sale to China, every visit by Nvidia chief’s executive, Jensen Huang, to Shanghai and every Chinese A.I. breakthrough strikes terror into the hearts of America’s China hawks. Hardware, rare-earth metals, revamped power grids and human talent could all dictate which side ends up creating the first superintelligence. The upcoming summit between Mr. Trump and China’s leader, Xi Jinping, may lead to a few policy changes, but this belief is more fixed.
The reality is that China and the United States are racing in different directions, because the two countries conceptualize A.I. very differently. Americans want to create the most powerful technology humans have ever known. In the quest for superintelligence, the U.S. government is encouraging private firms to move full speed ahead, regulation be damned. Under the very tightest regulation, by contrast, the Chinese want to make A.I. more practical and embedded in society, more carefully selecting how it is deployed and used by the population. If the Chinese achieve their A.I. goals, they may take a lead in the larger geopolitical contest between the two nations.
Most Chinese policymakers don’t believe A.I. superintelligence is arriving any time soon. Instead, the Chinese strategy is about advancing a government-directed strategy referred to as “A.I.+” that treats A.I. as if it were infrastructure. This includes government-coordinated plans, local subsidies and national computing-power programs to diffuse cheap, capable A.I. tools into every public service. Chinese people encounter A.I. as a natural part of their day-to-day lives. Sometimes it’s visible and palpable, like the “smile to pay” terminals used in many shops. Sometimes it’s invisible, like Hangzhou’s City Brain, which uses A.I. to analyze massive amounts of data for urban management needs like regulating traffic and environmental protection.
Unlike in the United States, where most people remain wary, A.I. seems to have had less of a backlash in China. The Chinese A.I.+ strategy is practical and comprehensible to the local population in a way that the U.S. strategy simply is not, which may explain why the Chinese appear so much more optimistic about A.I. than Americans.
