Kai-Fu Lee

As I concluded the final pages of Kai-Fu Lee’s book, somewhat annoyed by the weakness of the ending, I wondered what this world is going to look like when AI replaces many of our routine tasks and work lives.

I can tell you what our world looks like today: interminable gridlock on Toronto streets. Thousands of cars making trips that needn’t be taken at all. Polluting the air. Throwing up pointless tons of CO-2 emissions.

Why couldn’t people make the same trips with VR glasses to virtual workplaces and eliminate the physical consumption of resources? And schools. And malls. And govt facilities.

AI could help build these virtual places.… (mer)

This book cleverly juxtaposes science fiction and technical analysis to illustrate and expound ten major areas in which AI is already transforming the world we know. The SF stories, translated from Chinese by various translators, are uneven in quality, but some are quite good, as is the analysis that follows each. Not everything here is new -- there have been plenty of books on some of these ten areas such as games, jobs, technology, and warfare -- but the assemblage here adds up to something new and devastating. AI comes across as an enormous, unstoppable, hydra-headed beast. Its alliance with the forces of capitalism will be inseparably intimate and the combined result overpowering. We should probably all acquaint ourselves with AI's big picture -- how virtually nothing will escape it -- and this book offers probably the best acreage of canvas to do so.… (mer)

Wider in scope than the title suggests

I enjoyed reading this book because of the high level view it provides of several important tends in tech in the last decade and likely the next one: the growing significance of the Chinese tech ecosystem and of machine learning based applications.

The background section explaining the rise of and competition between Chinese tech companies for the Chinese market is probably good enough reason to get the book, because the stories in it challenge many unstated assumptions in the West about the nature of Chinese tech companies today. ( Eg. That they are copycats which map neatly to an American prototype, or that they are almost like government sponsored monopolies, or even that American companies' failure to dominate that market are mostly due to government action ).

I found his take on which industries are more susceptible to automation in the coming decades based on data categories, and his appraisal of the strengths and weaknesses of the American and Chinese tech ecosystems thought provoking. For example, that Chinese companies will have or already have the data edge in industries that mix digital and physical world operations, due to vertical integration and amount of users,
And that America has the edge in top talent. This later factor would only come into play in the case of a true breakthrough (eg in the amount of labelled data needed), so it is unpredictable. In other industries he sees them as more evenly matched.

There's more in it than those two topics. Later sections make the case that the effects on employment may be more relevant to the world at large than the rivalry angle in the title.

I liked the organization of the book and the clarity of the writing, though it comes at the cost of some repetition. In terms of things that seem missing: more digging into the constraints different ecosystems operate under, eg privacy and labor laws and their enforcement, surveillance, as well as trade secrets. He mentions there is a privacy law in China as well, but there's no digging into details comparing them or what it means in practice.… (mer)