Kai-Fu Lee, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order

Kai-Fu Lee’s AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order is an important book. I read lots of books and can count on one hand those that have fundamentally altered my worldview. This is one of those books like Pat Buchanan’s The Death of the West.

In The Death of the West, Pat Buchanan drew my attention to how Third World immigration, collapsing birthrates and multiculturalism were going to change the face of Western civilization in my lifetime as Whites become a demographic minority in the United States and Western Europe. After reading that book, I knew that this trend was going to be the story of my lifetime and that of my children. 18 years later, I am now a parent and the future that Buchanan predicted has started to arrive.

Virtually everyone who reads and comments on this website and who shares our politics is reacting to that fundamental long term trend – in the language of Silicon Valley, that “disruption” – which has continued to shape our times down to the present day. The rising populist and nationalist movement in the West is already furious about uncontrolled immigration, our ongoing cultural collapse into a race of deracinated trannies and the mounting job losses, stagnant wages, rising income inequality and the “gig economy” and loss of political power stemming from globalization. The movement is swelling as more people in isolated pockets of Middle America begin to encounter and experience the wonders of diversity for the first time. This is particularly true of regions like the Midwest which have been insulated from it.

At this point, this Chinese guy Kai-Fu Lee bursts into our sphere of the internet and announces that back in the mid-2000s a man named Geoffrey Hinton and a UK-based company called Deep Mind succeeded in developing a form of artificial intelligence, but that it wasn’t until 2012 that the power and significance of this new technology known as deep learning came to be fully understood. The field of artificial intelligence had been stuck in an ice age and was limited to science fiction movies for decades until it began to make rapid progress after this pivotal breakthrough. The “neural networks” approach, as opposed to the “rules-based approach,” which has proven so successful “mimics the brain’s underlying architecture, constructing layers of artificial neurons that can receive and transmit information in a structure aking to our networks of biological neurons.” Deep learning was created after AI researchers discovered a way to efficiently train layers of artificial neurons in multiple layers in neural networks.

We’re already accustomed to all sorts of machines that can do superhuman amounts of work like the mechanical cotton picker which “disrupted” the Southern economy by abolishing sharecropping between the 1940s and 1960s. The mechanical cotton picker, however, required a human to operate it. Deep learning will lead to machines that can see, that can recognize speech patterns, that can think, speak, understand, process and interpret information better than humans.

Imagine going outside and watching your tractor or mechanical cotton picker or your lawnmower just drive itself and do all the work for you. Imagine your car coming to pick you up and having a conversation with it as it drives you by itself across the State of North Carolina. Imagine never having to go to a doctor because doctors have been replaced by AI algorithms.

Welcome to the Brave New World of “narrow AI.”

Kai-Fu Lee categorizes deep learning as a general purpose technology and describes it as the electricity of the 21st century. It is one of four technologies in human history that have truly and profoundly changed the world the other three being the steam engine (First Industrial Revolution), electricity (Second Industrial Revolution) and computers (Third Industrial Revolution). Technological change has been a constant force in our history. We’re now about to go through the Fourth Industrial Revolution which is projected to be several orders of magnitude more destabilizing than the previous three.

For those who are worried about the loss of middle class manufacturing jobs to China, Kai-Fu Lee doesn’t believe that is what you should be worried about anymore. The factories are coming back to the United States, but like the Amazon distribution centers in the future will be staffed with little robots that operate in the dark and create pretty much everything by themselves under the supervision of human managers and robot repair technicians. Similarly, the strawberry fields which currently employ guest workers from Central America will by harvested by new machines powered by deep learning.

Just as steam, oil and coal powered the First Industrial Revolution and the Second Industrial Revolution, the Fourth Industrial Revolution will be powered by … you. The natural resource that drives machine learning and which is training “narrow AI” to perform all these tasks like self driving cars, balancing books, cooking food, picking strawberries, surgery and so on is DATA. The AI algorithms are being used to mine human experience in order to train an emerging slave race of robots to perform tasks in ways that are beyond the capabilities of human workers. The AI can sit there and sift through the abstracts of 3.3 million scientific papers to notice weak correlations that humans have missed.

https://t.co/9udiRftfrD this is what the future looks like — Andrew Yang (@AndrewYang) July 11, 2019

A fully functional robot kitchen pic.twitter.com/L3KHmx4FH9 — Vala Afshar (@ValaAfshar) July 8, 2019

The bulk of AI Superpowers is spent discussing the geopolitical implications of the implementation of deep learning in the global economy. Kai-Fu Lee makes a compelling argument that China will harness the power of deep learning to surpass the United States in our lifetimes. He starts out by noting that the technology has already been created and predicts we are decades away from “general AI.” The United States and China are now in a race to implement the technology.

Just as it ultimately didn’t matter where the iPhone was innovated, it doesn’t matter that deep learning was innovated in the West. The Chinese intend to surge ahead of the United States and capitalize on the technology to harness the economic benefits for their own people. The whole process is powered by DATA and there are 1.2 billion Chinese vs. 327 million Americans and China is already generating vastly more DATA than the United States. China is the Saudi Arabia of DATA.

China is already ahead of the United States in all sorts of ways. It is a homogeneous nation which has a culture and authoritarian government which isn’t completely dysfunctional and crippled by liberalism. This is why China now has thousands of miles of highspeed rail. It produces most of our electronics including the products which are “innovated” in the United States but employ virtually no American workers. Americans purchase items with credit cards – the technology of the 1960s – while the Chinese have leapfrogged ahead into mobile payments and 5G networks. Although Kai-Fu Lee never mentions it, nearly half of Americans will be black or Hispanic by 2043 and they aren’t going to compete with 1.2 billion Chinese in STEM jobs. The American elite is also waging war against its shrinking White majority. In contrast, Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent aren’t waging war against the Chinese.

If semi-sentient robots powered by AI algorithms are about to start taking over all these jobs and there is nothing that can be done about it, what is going to happen to the American workforce as this new technology is rolled out into the economy over the next twenty to thirty years?

Kai-Fu Lee has been at the center of the AI world in the United States and China for the past forty years. He personally believes that 40 percent to 50 percent of American jobs will be automated as a result of deep learning. It could be even worse than that because most jobs won’t be destroyed outright. The number of tasks performed by human workers will shrink as they are replaced by AI and that could affect upwards of 80 percent of all American jobs. He describes it as a neverending flood which is likely to destroy ever more working class jobs as the technology improves. The Uber drivers and the truck drivers and the call center workers will be among the first to go. He predicts the white collar jobs will be hit first in four waves of AI – internet AI, business AI, perception AI and autonomous AI – and harder than working class jobs because it is easier for AI algorithms to process and interpret information than to create robots with fingers that can perform the dexterous work of a hotel maid.

Obviously, if what Kai-Fu Lee says in this book is true, then the inevitable result of this is going to be massive global social unrest. He doesn’t devote much time to the impact this is going to have on the Third World except to say that cheap labor as a development strategy is about to become obsolete. Economically speaking, China and the United States will separate from the rest of the world in the AI age and a mere seven global corporations – FAG in the United States, Facebook, Amazon and Google – will dominate this New World Order as millions of working class jobs are destroyed as capital effectively abolishes labor in the global economy. It isn’t clear how anyone in the future will have the money to buy all these wonderful new products. What are all these unemployed people going to do?

The truth is that no one has any clue. There isn’t any plan to deal with this. Most people in China assume the Chinese government is capable of handling the transition. In the United States, the plan is apparently to ignore the looming jobs crisis as long as possible. In Silicon Valley, the most popular solutions are job retraining, job sharing, a reduced work week and buying off populist discontent with Universal Basic Income. Andrew Yang is the only presidential candidate even talking about the crisis. Kamala Harris is getting more traction talking about reparations for slavery and forced busing.

Kai-Fu Lee sees Universal Basic Income as a comfort blanket – essentially, Silicon Valley has convinced itself it can destroy all these jobs and make all this money and buy off populist discontent by giving displaced white collar and blue collar workers a small allowance. Even if everyone was given a $1,000 a month though, that wouldn’t even come close to addressing the magnitude of the jobs crisis this is going to unleash in all the vast swathes of the country which aren’t producing AI scientists for the tech economy. He broods over the fact that the conventional wisdom of the 1990s that the internet age of the Third Industrial Revolution which was expected to create millions of new high paying jobs in the West for displaced manufacturing workers turned out to be a false hope.

In a future economy in which AI-powered robots have created a world of abundance by providing for all our basic economic needs, Kai-Fu Lee argues that humans would have to reorient the economy toward creating jobs which repair the social fabric. He proposes a “Social Investment Stipend” by which the government would redistribute wealth in an AI-powered economy to encourage social healthy activities like paying children to care for their elderly parents or women to be mothers again which are “jobs” which are not recognized as such under the paradigm of free-market capitalism.

One of @AndrewYang's first questions on @TheView involved the saying about give a man a fish or teach a man to fish. My own response to that is what happens when we teach robots to fish? Does all humanity eat, or does all humanity starve?https://t.co/2qG2UaZmOZ #YangOnTheView — Scott Santens (@scottsantens) July 8, 2019

In my view, the most likely response to the looming AI jobs crisis won’t be to answer the question: what happens when we teach robots how to fish and there is plenty of fish to go around for everyone? Isn’t the problem then just how do we distribute the fish?

The most likely scenario and the one Kai-Fu Lee fears is exactly what is playing out with the ongoing immigration crisis which is that inertia will maintain the status quo until the social and economic stress becomes so great in the declining working class and middle class – the losers of immigration and globalization and now the AI revolution – that events simply take over and run their course. If our elites think populism is bad now, they aren’t ready for what is coming in the 2020s.