AI being developed in both of these countries will be similar in only one way: it will require harvesting of your data all day, every day. Say goodbye to privacy. This is because the people developing AI tend to have a bias for giant datasets, even when they can be substituted with small datasets without loss of performance. (Cliché programmer behaviour.)
In all other ways, though, they will be quite different.
One major reason for this is because, in China, almost all AI funding is coming from government institutions or corporations which have to toe the line of these institutions. Therefore, all instances of AI will be developed with their interests in mind. In the USA, however, most AI funding is coming from corporations (whose interests are different from the government) with a negligible portion coming from the government.
So, in China, most AI systems will be a mix of automated operations (the best example is Alexa) with surveillance projects like the social credit system, whereas in the USA, they will be developed for consumer or business use.
Another major reason is the secrecy of Chinese researchers. Until quite recently, most papers published and talks given were by researchers from the West. This surprised me a lot, because the Chinese are known to be very open about their technological advancements. Case in point: China still allows GitHub through its firewall. This may be happening due to the Chinese having gone so far beyond the current state-of-the-art that they no longer saw the need for publicising their methods and results. We still do not know.
Furthermore, there is still no clear ethical framework for development and deployment of AI. Thus, we do not know how the AI systems from both of these countries will be with regards to ethics, although my best guess is that they will be quite dismal.
However, one thing which can be said with quite a lot of certainty is that the USA will be behind China when we talk about AI. Yuval Noah Harari explained this best in Sapiens: the institutions which embrace and develop technology and then execute their ideologies with it will be the ones that develop the future, which is why the USA will lose its competitive edge in AI. The American government, which was the origin of a lot of the technologies of today has lost out to China. It does not fund research proactively, its immigration policies are not friendly to international researchers and it cannot execute its vision with AI the way China can (look at the blazing fast execution of the social credit system).
Chinese AI systems will, therefore, be developed with better resources and will have the necessary legal frameworks in place for their release, while the US corporations will have to battle public fear/uncertainty and litigation. Overall, China will have a superior AI ecosystem which will work as planned far before the US develops working AI or a plan for it.
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Computer Science and Engineering
- Artificial Intelligence