No-limits China sets its sights on AI top spot
WITH FEW CONCERNS FOR PRIVACY OR HUMAN RIGHTS, BEIJING REMAINS AT THE VANGUARD
On the outskirts of Beijing, a policeman peers over his glasses at a driver stopped at a motorway checkpoint. As he looks at the man’s face, a tiny camera in one of the lenses of his glasses records his features and checks them with a national database.
The artificial intelligence powered glasses are what Chinese citizens refer to as“black tech”, because they spot delinquents on the country’s “blacklist”. Other examples include robots for crowd control, drones that hover over the country’s borders, and intelligent systems to track behaviour online. Some reports claim the government has installed scanners that can forcibly read information from smartphones.
In the last two weeks, Facebook has been mired in a privacy storm in the UK and US over potential misuse of personal data. But such an event might baffle many in China, where the country’s surveillance culture eclipses anything Facebook has done.
The gulf between East and West in how privacy is approached may now put China at the forefront when it comes to developing artificial intelligence, seen as a critical technology of the next decade.
Bid to become cyberpower
China has made clear its intention to become the AI heavyweight by 2030 with the help of huge state-backed funding. The West also has big plans to maintain its status as a cyber power.
To date, the battle for AI supremacy has been between companies, as Google, Facebook and Amazon competed for scarce expertise in the field, but now it is pitting nations against each other in a quest for technological dominance unseen since the space race.
Machines that can “think” could cure disease, change the way we work and transform travel. Not only is artificial intelligence likely to take millions of jobs, but it will probably decide who is suitable for the jobs that remain. It may even replace humans in the bedroom.
There is the bottom line to consider, too: it has been estimated that AI could add an additional £630 billion (Dh3,239.9 billion) to the UK economy by 2035.
But it is not just about money. Machines that can think are beginning to shape the world we live in, and therefore the person, or nation, that creates it holds huge power.
Shenzhen, China’s answer to Silicon Valley, is home to research and development centres for tech heavyweights like Huawei, a network company-turned-smartphone manufacturer.
There you can find the headquarters of Baidu, China’s answer to Google, and iFlytek, a voice recognition company worth $82 billion. The UK can claim DeepMind, a Londonbased start-up bought by Google in 2014 for a rumoured £400 million.
The company makes selflearning algorithms, used to cut energy consumption and in healthcare.
In 2015 DeepMind struck a deal with the Royal Free Hospital to feed data on 1.6 million patients to help create AI that could alert the appropriate doctor when a patient’s condition worsened.
However, the deal was later deemed illegal by the data protection watchdog. The Information Commissioner said the trial had not obtained the consent of the patients involved.
The incident illustrates a key difference between development of AI in the East and the West: it is hard to imagine such privacy concerns holding back development in China.
Dr Adrian Weller, AI director at the Turing Institute in London, believes that while the UK has made “great progress n certain areas” we are “very far off” in others. “To date, the West has been leading research across many areas of AI but clearly China is catching up quickly and may be overtaking us in some areas,” he says.
“Chinese students are coming to the UK and US and going back to China, and the government is making sure that it is a leader in these areas. Like us, they want to do well in the space.”
The strengths and weaknesses of each region differ greatly. The US is more steeped in technological expertise and has the deep pockets of Silicon Valley. Most of the technology revolves around automation, typically with the goal of cutting cost or generating revenue. This has seen human jobs replaced by AI to cut costs or time. Companies have created AI designed to do a better job at sentencing prisoners than judges, and many job interviews are now conducted using AI programmes to cut HR budgets.
American company HireVue claims to be able to detect whether a person’s facial movements and tone of voice - along with their CV - make them right for the job, based on the personality traits they are looking for.
Loren Larsen, HireVue’s chief technology officer, said: “The computer is better at asking questions that can predict whether the person is the right candidate or not, and it is more consistent. In the end, the machine is better at predicting performance - you are better off being hired by a machine.”
Infrastructure
In contrast, China is embarking on large-scale projects that could help it create smart cities and nationwide surveillance. One of the hubs of this research is a testing facility run by the telecoms giant Huawei.
The building, a marble palace with gleaming white walls, high ceilings and large moving screens, would not look out of place in Blade Runner. Here, the company demonstrates smart government systems that can monitor a city in real-time from a computer screen, including emergency services, along with power and communications networks.
Professor Dame Wendy Hall, who advises the UK Government on AI and lectures at Tsinghua University in Beijing, said: “The biggest difference is privacy versus surveillance. One of the biggest leaps forward in this fourth wave of AI is to capture face and voice systems, and the way the Chinese are using that by putting it in CCTV everywhere.
“The advantage China has is that you could design a city that works for people in a way that we can’t, including automated cars or make shopping experiences better according to who they are, or offices telling someone where to go for a meeting. It is a very interesting moral dilemma.”
Dr Weller of the Turing Institute, says: “There is a sense that China is less concerned about privacy and this might push it forward a little faster in some areas where we can’t access data.”
The advantage China has is that you could design a city that works for people in a way that we can’t, including automated cars or make shopping experiences better.”
Prof Wendy Hall | AI adviser to UK government