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Our Global AI Story

On June 12, 2005, Steve Jobs stepped up to a microphone in Stanford Stadium and delivered one of the most memorable commencement speeches ever given. In the talk, he retraced his zig-zagging career, from college dropout to cofounder of Apple, from his unceremonious ouster at that company to his founding of Pixar, and finally his triumphant return to Apple a decade later. Speaking to a crowd of ambitious Stanford students, many of whom were eagerly plotting their own ascent to the peaks of Silicon Valley, Jobs cautioned against trying to chart one’s life and career in advance.

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward,” Jobs told the assembled students. “You can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”

Jobs’s wisdom has resonated with me since I first heard it, but never more so than today. In writing this book, I’ve had the chance to connect the dots on four decades of work, growth, and evolution. That journey has spanned companies and cultures, from AI researcher and business executive to venture capitalist, author, and cancer survivor. It has touched on issues both global and deeply personal: the rise of artificial intelligence, the intertwined fates of the places that I’ve called home, and my own evolution from a workaholic to a more loving father, husband, and human being.

All of these experiences have come together to shape my view of our global AI future, to connect the dots looking backward and to use those constellations as guidance going forward. My background in technology and business expertise has crystallized how these technologies are developing in both China and the United States. My sudden confrontation with cancer woke me up to why we must use these technologies to foster a more loving society. Finally, my experience moving and transitioning between two different cultures has impressed on me the value of shared progress and the need for mutual understanding across national borders.

AN AI FUTURE WITHOUT AN AI RACE

In writing about global development of artificial intelligence, it’s easy to revert to military metaphors and a zero-sum mentality. Many compare the “AI race” of today to the space race of the 1960s or, even worse, to the Cold War arms race that created ever more powerful weapons of mass destruction. Even the title of this book employs the word “superpowers,” a phrase that many associate with geopolitical rivalry. I use this phrase, however, specifically to reflect the technological balance of AI capabilities, not to suggest an all-out struggle for military supremacy. But these distinctions are easily blurred by those more interested in political posturing than in human flourishing.

If we are not careful, this single-minded rhetoric around an “AI race” will undermine us in planning and shaping our shared AI future. A race has only one winner: China’s gain is America’s loss, and vice-versa. There is no notion of shared progress or mutual prosperity—just a desire to stay ahead of the other country, regardless of the costs. This mentality has led many commentators in the United States to use China’s AI progress as a rhetorical whip with which to spur American leaders to action. They argue that America is at risk of losing its edge in the technology that will fuel the military competition of the twenty-first century.

But this is not a new Cold War. AI today has numerous potential military applications, but its true value lies not in destruction but in creation. If understood and harnessed properly, it can truly help all of us generate economic value and prosperity on a scale never before seen in human history.

In this sense, our current AI boom shares far more with the dawn of the Industrial Revolution or the invention of electricity than with the Cold War arms race. Yes, Chinese and American companies will compete with each other to better leverage this technology for productivity gains. But they are not seeking the conquest of the other nation. When Google promotes its TensorFlow technology abroad, or Alibaba implements its City Brain in Kuala Lumpur, these actions are more akin to the early export of steam engines and lightbulbs than as an opening volley in a new global arms race.

A clear-eyed look at the technology’s long-term impact has revealed a sobering truth: in the coming decades, AI’s greatest potential to disrupt and destroy lies not in international military contests but in what it will do to our labor markets and social systems. Appreciating the momentous social and economic turbulence that is on our horizon should humble us. It should also turn our competitive instincts into a search for cooperative solutions to the common challenges that we all face as human beings, people whose fates are inextricably intertwined across all economic classes and national borders.

GLOBAL WISDOM FOR THE AI AGE

As both the creative and disruptive force of AI is felt across the world, we need to look to each other for support and inspiration. The United States and China will lead the way in economically productive applications of AI, but other countries and cultures will certainly continue to make invaluable contributions to our broader social evolution. No single country will have all the answers to the tangled web of issues we face, but if we draw on diverse sources of wisdom, I believe there is no problem that we can’t tackle together. This wisdom will include pragmatic reforms to our education systems, subtle nuances in cultural values, and deep shifts in how we conceive of development, privacy, and governance.

In revamping our education systems, we can learn much from South Korea’s embrace of gifted and talented education. These programs seek to identify and realize the potential of the country’s top technical minds, an approach suited to creating the material prosperity that can then be broadly shared across society. Schools around the globe can also draw lessons from American experiments in social and emotional education, fostering skills that will prove invaluable to the human-centric workforce of the future.

For adaptations in how we approach work, we would be wise to look to the culture of craftsmanship in Switzerland and Japan, places where the pursuit of perfection has elevated routine work activities into the realm of human expression and artistry. Meanwhile, vibrant and meaningful cultures of volunteering in countries like Canada and the Netherlands should inspire us to diversify our traditional notions of “work.” Chinese culture can also be a source of wisdom when it comes to caring for elders and in fostering intergenerational households. As public policy and personal values blend, we should really take the time to study new experiments in defining and measuring progress, such as Bhutan’s decision to pursue “Gross National Happiness” as a key development indicator.

Finally, our governments will need to consistently look to one another in evaluating thorny new tradeoffs in data privacy, digital monopolies, online security, and algorithmic bias. In tackling these issues, we can learn much from comparing the different approaches taken by regulators in Europe, the United States, and China. While Europe has opted for a more heavy-handed approach (fining Google, for example, for antitrust and trying to wrest control over data away from the technology companies), China and the United States have given these companies greater leeway, letting technology and markets develop before intervening on the margins.

All these approaches present tradeoffs, with some favoring privacy over technological progress, and others doing the reverse. Leveraging technology to build the kind of societies we desire will mean following the real-world impact of these policies across geographies and remaining open-minded about different approaches to AI governance.

WRITING OUR AI STORY

But accessing and embracing these diverse sources of insight first requires we maintain a sense of agency in relation to this quickly accelerating technology. With the daily barrage of headlines about AI, it’s easy to feel as if human beings are losing control over our own destiny. Prophecies of both robot overlords and a “useless class” of unemployed workers tend to blend in our minds, conjuring up an overwhelming sense of human helplessness in the face of all-powerful technologies. Both of these doomsday scenarios contain a kernel of truth about AI’s potential, but the feelings of helplessness they engender obscure the key point: when it comes to shaping the future of artificial intelligence, the single most important factor will be the actions of human beings.

We are not passive spectators in the story of AI—we are the authors of it. That means the values underpinning our visions of an AI future could well become self-fulfilling prophecies. If we tell ourselves that the value of human beings lies solely in their economic contribution, then we will act accordingly. Machines will displace humans in the workplace, and we may end up in a twisted world like the one Hao Jingfang imagined in Folding Beijing, a caste-based society that divides and separates the so-called useful people from the “useless” masses.

But this is in no way a foregone conclusion. The ideology underlying this dystopian vision—of human beings as nothing more than the sum of their economically productive parts—reveals just how far we’ve led ourselves astray. We were not put on Earth to merely grind away at repetitive tasks. We don’t need to spend our lives busily accumulating wealth just so that we can die and pass it on to our children—the latest “iteration” of the human algorithm—who will refine and repeat that process.

If we believe that life has meaning beyond this material rat race, then AI just might be the tool that can help us uncover that deeper meaning.

HEARTS AND MINDS

When I launched my AI career in 1983, I did so by waxing philosophic in my application to the Ph.D. program at Carnegie Mellon. I described AI as “the quantification of the human thinking process, the explication of human behavior,” and our “final step” to understanding ourselves. It was a succinct distillation of the romantic notions in the field at that time and one that inspired me as I pushed the bounds of AI capabilities and human knowledge.

Today, thirty-five years older and hopefully a bit wiser, I see things differently. The AI programs that we’ve created have proven capable of mimicking and surpassing human brains at many tasks. As a researcher and scientist, I’m proud of these accomplishments. But if the original goal was to truly understand myself and other human beings, then these decades of “progress” got me nowhere. In effect, I got my sense of anatomy mixed up. Instead of seeking to outperform the human brain, I should have sought to understand the human heart.

It’s a lesson that it took me far too long to learn. I have spent much of my adult life obsessively working to optimize my impact, to turn my brain into a finely tuned algorithm for maximizing my own influence. I bounced between countries and worked across time zones for that purpose, never realizing that something far more meaningful and far more human lay in the hearts of the family members, friends, and loved ones who surrounded me. It took a cancer diagnosis and the unselfish love of my family for me to finally connect all these dots into a clearer picture of what separates us from the machines we build.

That process changed my life, and in a roundabout way has led me back to my original goal of using AI to reveal our nature as human beings. If AI ever allows us to truly understand ourselves, it will not be because these algorithms captured the mechanical essence of the human mind. It will be because they liberated us to forget about optimizations and to instead focus on what truly makes us human: loving and being loved.

Reaching that point will require hard work and conscious choices by all of us. Luckily, as human beings, we possess the free will to choose our own goals that AI still lacks. We can choose to come together, working across class boundaries and national borders to write our own ending to the AI story.

Let us choose to let machines be machines, and let humans be humans. Let us choose to simply use our machines, and more importantly, to love one another.