The contrast with its eastern neighbour could not have been starker. China has already made major leaps, ahead of even many Western countries in the field of AI. India Today executive editor Damayanti Datta is absolutely right when she points out that if a Doklam-like situation arises again, China may be in an advantageous position, 'simply because it is leading the AI research race.'



Former world chess champion Garry Kasparov, in his very engaging recent book Deep Thinking, points out that China has already produced six chess players, who figure in the top 50 in the world, who were not being trained by imported Russian coaches, as it was in vogue, but by “grandmaster machines”. The results are showing. Kasparov points out that although Russia still dominates the world chess circuit with 11 players in the top 50, their average age is 32, while for the Chinese it is 25.



Although chess is only an indicator, it is a very important one. A whole new generation of Chinese experts in various fields are coming up with a very good grasp of AI-machine interaction. Here, it may be very fanciful for many to think of ‘will-machines-take-over’ scenarios or killbots. As Asimov said it rightly decades ago, we are conditioned to view robots (so implicitly AI) as either menaces or pathos. Machine learning expert Andrew Ng, rightly points out that we should be as anxious about machines taking over as we should worry about ‘the problem of overcrowding on Mars’. Incidentally, Andrew Ng, who was originally with Google, is now with China’s Baidu.