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📚 Book Review: AI Superpowers by Kai-Fu Lee 👍
China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order
A good intro to the current “AI arms race,” with ideas for how to mitigate the potential job loss due to AI. While this is a popular book, it is only useful if you have not been following the developments in AI, and you need to catch up quickly. It makes some good arguments, namely:
There will be a race for AI superiority, and once 2–5 players in the world have AI that is better than any other, it will be difficult for other countries or companies to compete. Instead, they will have to license or use the AI developed elsewhere.
We need to consider how AI will affect jobs, where it will create more jobs, where it will change the nature of a profession, and where it will eliminate an entire class of jobs. Lee opposes a “universal basic income” but instead proposes his own solution that involves paying for the work that many people do for free: taking care of a parent or spouse, sick child, or helping your community.
If you are not interested in reading the entire book, you can check out these videos and podcasts with Kai-Fu Lee:
- Recode: If they don’t want to lose their jobs to a machine, doctors will need to become compassionate ‘human connectors’
- Ted Talk: How AI can Save our Humanity
- A TED Original Podcast: Kai-Fu Lee on the future of AI
J. Scott Christianson is a technologist and an Associate Teaching Professor of management at the Trulaske College of Business, where his interests are focused on the impact of technology on society. You can connect with him on his website, LinkedIn, Twitter, or by following his newsletter, The Free-Range Technologist.
