There are few more compelling storylines at the intersection of Wall Street and Fear Street than China’s rise to global prominence in the field of artificial intelligence.
You don’t have to look very far to find a military or financial expert who believes that China’s AI program will ever surpass the capabilities of its Democratic counterparts in Silicon Valley.
But, as we wrote earlier, the idea that China is in second place behind the United States is a bit misleading. Sure, it’s technically correct, but we’re talking about a very distant second place. For now, it would be a huge stretch to call it a race.
China’s main advantage when it comes to AI is socialized data. But data can only carry a nation so far.
If you are trying to optimize the national health program, for example, having unrestricted access to the private data of billions of citizens is invaluable. However, personal information is not exactly useful if you train drones to identify and attack soft targets.
Communism
The means of production, in 1949, when the People’s Republic of China was formed, were agriculture and industry. Today, it is technology.
The emergence and implementation of deep learning has led to a revolution in China’s healthcare and infrastructure. Since 2018 the PRCs expanded its national insurance cover almost every citizen in China.
Doctor and author Eric Topol described the impact AI has had on this growth in a recent article by Eleanor Olcott for the Financial Times:
China has shifted faster than the U.S. in medical AI from research to implementation, in part because of the availability of high-quality data, Topol says. “China has a massive data advantage when it comes to medical AI research,” he says, explaining that Chinese researchers can train AI models on data sets covering entire provinces.
In contrast, their U.S. counterparts are limited to working with information from individual hospitals – mostly run by private companies that keep records on internal servers.
This paints the picture of an incompatible American medical system and, in many respects, it is true. There is little hope that the United States can ever hope to accomplish with capitalism what socialized medicine can do in a communist system. However, it is more about prosperity than free treatment.
Capitalism
Where China is able to convert citizen data into domestic action policies, capitalist practices have allowed U.S. AI companies to thrive as their Chinese and EU counterparts are unable to.
In China, government restrictions prevent its major AI companies from thriving on the global stage in the same ways as Meta, Google, Microsoft or Apple. And the presence of regulations limits the EU market in ways that Silicon Valley does not. Like ice cream on the cake, most large tech companies in the U.S. pay little or no taxes.
This leaves U.S. soil fertile for the development of monolithic trading empires with GDP eclipsing many modernized countries. And, with that prosperity, comes a much easier time to recruit the most talented scientists and programmers in the world.
Throw in the fact that a significant portion of cutting-edge academic research in the United States and around the globe is funded by DARPA, the Pentagon’s think tank, and the communist advantage is minimized beyond the PRC’s own boundaries.
The long run
Communism and socialized data give the Chinese government a letter to develop adapted systems for its citizens. As with any walled garden, it is easy to share the benefits contained within. But the PRC is non-competitive when it comes to attracting outside talent.
And that also applies to corporate purchases and mergers. While Tencent and Baidu may have a huge presence in the global AI market, there is no reality where DeepMind is being bought by a Chinese body over the US.
It is beyond the scope of this article to argue about the benefits of AI-powered social media versus having big technology wildly with user data as it does in the United States.
But any conversation about the “AI race” should be preceded by the knowledge that the combined resources, scientific contributions, and technological superiority shared by U.S. academic and corporate institutions in the field of AI are more than enough to outweigh the benefits given to China. of its. socialized data policy.
It is likely that China’s approach to AI will result in revolutionary new achievements in its health care and infrastructure programs. But, most likely, these are areas where Canada, the Netherlands, Japan and dozens of other countries also surpass the United States.
Source
Tristan Greene