Technology, China and Competition

The Telegraph has a good short piece in China's technological development. They note:

AI director at the Turing Institute in London, believes that while the UK has made “great progress in 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.”

 We have argued before that the students coming to the US, and whose studies are often paid for under US DoD or similar university contracts, take what they have learned and go back to China and compete with the West. That seems to be an area that the current Administration, like all previous ones, seem to ignore to the benefit of China.

They continue:

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-fuelled programmes to cut HR budgets.

 The question is not what AI can do but who will it replace. There must be buyers for products, even products produced by AI. Who then will do this? Somehow the lack of coverage of this by US media is appalling.