hi there welcome to this week's pascal's china lens i personally believe that we're entering a new era of ai a new era where i think i feel china is going to lead the world and this is going to take just a couple of years from now that the us and europe will not be able to catch up anymore and so we have to ask ourselves the question can we trust china as becoming the number one ai superpower in the world if you haven't subscribed to my channel please do so i would truly appreciate it i also want to announce that next week my book will be available in dutch and in a couple of weeks from now in english so you can pre-order it on line pascalcopens.com or can we trust china.com where you'll see a lot of information if you're interested on whether we can trust china or not and how to get a different view on this country in transition [Music] what do you think do you believe we should trust china as an ai superpower well that was the question that was asked to me just a couple of days ago i made a presentation on the 18th of march by at the european ai week as an expert in that field on china i was asked to for one hour to talk about ai in china and whether we should trust china when it comes to becoming that ai superpower so very interesting presentation that i made and i want to share some of these findings that i shared at that point now in 2019 i came out with my book china's new normal which is all about setting the standard for innovation from china and what i describe in that book and it's still very real today is that by 2030 china will become the leader in ai and i've described that in 10 different industries how they're applying that in every single industry and are actually becoming an ai superpower 2016 xi jinping already said that by 2030 china would become the leader in innovation and ai was central to that even in the 13th five-year plan it was very much written down that for the next five years from 2016 to 2020 it was all about promoting the integration of the internet about big data about ai and of course these three things combined but the most important is to apply that into the real economy and this was five years that china really focused on applying artificial intelligence for real and this is not just only about research it's really about making it usable and adopted within society and they've been very successful at it one of the drivers and starting points of it was of course in 2017 where beijing said we're going to make a next generation ai plan and they did and then soon after it came the three year action plan and you know when beijing says this is what we need to do they have a step-by-step approach and lots of companies feel there's funding there's opportunity we need to go there and so that's what happened in europe we took us a year longer before we really got our act together same in america but this was really the guidance but what really happened at that point is that china in 2016 decided that disruptive technologies would change everything and this is something going from top down but also the companies the tencents the alibabas the buyers all these companies really understood that all of these disruptive technologies could change their company and change china as a whole the big difference with the west is that most of the tech companies even the big ones they were looking at these disruptive technologies much more as a transformation the big ones did more research but all the others mainly we're looking at it the next step when we're doing going to digital and now we're going to ai and then we're going to blockchain and so this was like a step-by-step approach it wasn't a must-have it wasn't a disruption and for china early on they understood only if we're going to put that central to our strategy we will be able to catch up with the rest of the world specifically the west and artificial intelligence was central to that and so that's why it became so quickly a superpower on ai now the big difference is also how it evolved and if you look at the evolvement of ai what you see is a few things that are very different from the west to start with it started about 10 years ago 2012 but at that point china was not disappointed just like the west was when it comes to artificial intelligence because for us in the west in america and europe we had like decades of experimenting having really high expectations on artificial intelligence and then seeing well the flying cars are not going to happen and so people got disappointed were worried they were worried about their jobs so a lot of fear that ai wouldn't solve the problems that we wanted them to solve after many decades i mean the energy was lost a little bit while in china from 2012 2013 onwards startups were really trying to figure out how to position this into society much more than the big companies in the west so in the west we had the big tech companies doing it and china was more the startups and they were really very pragmatic and practical and trying out everything from face recognition voice recognition i mean all these things and see can we make this can we make dad robots whatever in the factories just experimenting this was a big lap and and they had no expectation they didn't know where to end up well in western companies it was a strategy they knew exactly where they wanted to end up and they put funding into it and so that experimentation created a real upbeat on ai because every time they felt this is working out the recommendation engine we can get more customers i mean it became a big thing and it's only after 2016-17 when the government really pushed for ai that the big tech were focusing on it the alibaba's 10 cents baidus and so on baidu was one of the first ones with their ai also now for self-driving cars and before it was all about their algorithms for language nlp and then what you see is then you suddenly got that all coming together the startups the big tech the government giving funding you saw venture capitalists and this going specifically in b2b where the government was often the customer of these big companies and suddenly it was all coming together and ai became a strategy and so this is only five years old but just 10 years ago when china really started the early steps in a.i the whole west was convinced that it would take china at least 20 years to start becoming innovative but eight years later we were already talking about this ai technology supremacy race between china and the us and why didn't we see this coming i mean how come we thought it was going to take maybe 50 years before china could actually become a threat on ai and other technologies and now suddenly in eight years they've achieved it and the answer is actually pretty simple the answer has everything to do with the fact that they adopted it and eric schmidt the chairman of the national security commission in the us which used to be the ceo of google said very clearly that we now have to watch and this is 2021 we have to watch china because what they did in the last five years is just incredible this has everything to do with putting it into society ai in china is a must-have it's not a nice to have for us in the west most companies and i've been at the ai week in europe just now i mean there's lots of great things happening but still for most of the companies and we're talking about two-thirds of all the companies in in belgium for example they still see ai as a nice to have not a must-have in china most tech companies see it as a must-have and the result is that in every industry whether it's in healthcare or in fintech in mobility and travel in in agriculture and logistics and in factories every industry there's now global leaders think about e2 or sense time think about ant financial or and group with the fintech think about dd with their recommendation or their prediction algorithms c trip with their chat bots and stuff like that you have ping on the the insurance company the biggest in the world doing things with agriculture to predict if animals are sick or not with face recognition alibaba does the same maybe with cows and so on so everybody does his thing but the interesting thing is they've all become the leaders in their field huge companies where ai is at the center of what they want to do and this is something we don't see as often in the west i mean of course in america google is very much into ai and ibm and microsoft i mean they're really big ai houses but industry-wise you see china going much deeper and much faster now what's also interesting is that in this five-year plan that started in 2021 the 14-5 year plan china isn't talking any more about promotion of ai now it's about nurturing and the reason they're talking about nurturing and it's not just ai it's combined with cloud and blockchain and 5g and so we'll talk about that in a minute but it's about nurturing which means they feel society already has it many of these ai algorithms are open there's ai experts and so they have the foundation now it's just about getting better and better and better at it and that is what's happening and will happen in the next years to come what's interesting is that in this 14-year plan they're really talking about the integration of stuff like iot and ai of course 5g it's about going deeper in research which they've been behind before it's also about innovation hubs and figuring out the infrastructure but then i think the most important china is now on a path to actually have an ai for good or ai ethics that they want to establish it's about standardization it's about protection it's about regulation we've seen all of that just last year with all the regulations and the fintech we've seen the regulations and the ant in the monopoly laws and privacy laws and national security laws well ai is part of that and actually the ai algorithms today the recommendation engines is one of the things part of the privacy law which means that consumers have to consent if they want these algorithms to be used against them or not or for them and so this is going very very far in this very far forward looking in china what's interesting now is that china has been building over the past years great ai ecosystems one of the things they've been done doing very well better than the west is actually gathering contextual data i mean we have a lot of data in the west too like facebook and amazon to have huge data but one of the difference is that we usually stick within one industry that means we have data on for example amazon on books and everything you buy online but amazon doesn't have data on many other industries like agriculture or maybe on on things like travel i mean they don't have that same data but in china with the super apps wechat alipay and so on they have all that contextual data and that's very interesting because it can tell you what the consumer is doing and so you can refine your algorithms and then there's the infrastructure that has been building for a long time i mean before it was all about hubs and about research labs and it was all about going into schools and teaching about ai and this is all great but now these days it's about implementing ai as a strategy within government services and any service that consumers or users or citizens would need and so you see big cities like shenzhen becoming a complete ai hub but you see also for example in in the law in the court ai prosecutors coming up where 97 of all the lawsuits are prosecuted with an engine with an ai algorithm and then the lawyer or the judge just needs to verify is this correct and not because most of these things are similar because we're creatures of habit and so this is really starting to create an a smart city environment where ai is central and this is going to be very interesting of course talent is a big challenge i mean china has more engineers coming out of university than any country in the world there's about 37 percent of the whole world every year graduating we're talking about almost 5 million stem graduates so there's a lot of people now going into artificial intelligence young kids learn it i mean that's all great but they're still behind very often and they have to catch up with some of the smartest people in the west when it comes to ai but give it a number of years and we'll see real miracles happening that's my feeling at least because they have their mind on it and they're smart people everywhere what you also saw in 2021 is a lot of regulations and rules happening in all these industries and ai is part of it the big bottleneck for china is chips and i've made another video about that a couple of weeks ago i mean two weeks ago and it's clear that china is actually behind when it comes to building chips has to do with the machinery that they don't always have but also building a fab fab like smick has one it has many actually it's not so easy it's costly and it takes like 10 20 years like tsmc has been doing very well in taiwan and so the difference is that china is catching up there but when it comes to ai chips actually there's very few tech companies large tech companies like alibaba tencent baidu xiaomi by dance from tick tock all these companies there's very few of them today that are not designing their own ai chips and they're starting to fabricate it as well with smicken with others and so high silicon and so on and so you will see in a couple of years from now that china will probably not be dependent on the u.s anymore when it comes to purely ai chips for the others it might be still a challenge specifically going to the lower nanometers for cell phones and smart smart watches and so on but for ai chips i mean a lot's gonna happen this is starting a new era of ai and i think it's really cool i'm really excited about what's happening now because you're starting to see everything come together i mean data and ai china starts to become the leader to become a smart society i mean america is starting to become to be behind and so we in the west we need to be careful there but what's really leapfrogging into the future is that connectivity today with 5g i mean i don't need to talk about how advanced 5g is in from china specifically the implementation of it in society i mean it's available almost everywhere and there's half a billion accounts already on 5g so by the end of this year there's going to be 2 million 5g base stations uh implant implemented in china so everything's connected the most connected place on the planet on that scale cloud is same like like alibaba cloud 10 cent cloud same as like amazon microsoft so there's very similarities but 5g is really a couple of years ahead and this is now all moving to the edge moving to the sensors what it means iot internet of things where the computing of the algorithms the ai algorithms are happening everywhere not just in a central cloud-based environment and that's very interesting because now you suddenly have a decentralized system and a decentralized system really allows to compute much more and specifically when we think about ecology and stuff like that it's actually an advantage then you have robotics very interesting to watch as well as an industry because china has more industrial robots today than america than south korea japan and germany together i mean not of all all of them are operational but there's a huge investment in automated factories in automated industries and logistics into the chinese environment add that to 5g add that to this iot add that to the whole thing about data and ai and you're getting the smartest connected interconnected environment in the world so china is becoming the biggest lap to make everything automated and directed and of course then you need trust and that's where blockchain is coming in with the biggest blockchain network in the world that china has been building i mean this is going to be or has to become the most trusted place on the planet when it comes to sending data around and verifying things and then of course you need ethics because otherwise ai could be used for bad and for evil and not for good and so china needs to focus on that too what i've seen is that over the past i would say 10 years since 2012 2011 there's been a huge progress this has all been about digitalization and that has helped to create more data in society now that the data is there since 2016 every company is now becoming an ai company in china or tech companies are becoming an ai superpower and what's happening now from today on is that china is now looking for purpose and this is where this ethic and ai for good is coming in and so because if you're very powerful you need to be also responsible and accountable and so is china doing a great job there that's the question many people doubt and something to answer and this is becoming a war an ai war on values it's quite interesting the words we are using into the ai ethics because very often says like yeah in the west we have universal values and in china it's relative it's traditional values it's not the same as the liberal values that we have in the west but is that really effect and are values universal because isn't all aren't all values based on culture in some fashion and so if we look at the universal values that we talk about in the west very often about freedom and privacy and fairness and diversity and justice transparency all these things which of course as a western myself i value a lot as an individual and so we are told in the west and i i completely agree with that that we should treat every individual according to these universal values and so this is very important for me as a westerner as well and for i think most of the westerners so we we will fight for it to keep our values alive and then we look at china and we're wondering do they have the same values and many people say no but actually i disagree if you look at china they have pretty much the same values because it's also a culture of 2 500 years that has these values inside but one of the big difference maybe that it's been looked at more from a collective than from an individualistic point of view what i mean by that is that in china it's more important to actually know how to behave towards the collective in the society then actually us telling what to do with the individual so instead of an outside in it's an inside out reflection this this is really about self-discipline and about social responsibility and a lot of things about community focus china really wants people to understand what they have to do to be good and so we have the same values but it's a different way of looking at it very often and so i believe this is the reason why i don't see the ai ethics in china and ai ethics in the west being so different in itself but it might be a different lens of how to look at it specifically if we look at confusionistic of confusion values what we see this has a lot to do with things like harmony and peace and respect and modesty i mean confucius was talking about this 2500 years ago still xi jinping and many people are talking about this today we often say yeah these are kind of hollow words and win-win and what does it really mean but this is pretty deep and this is about morals and ethics that chinese have had for 2500 years that they understood this is how i need to behave within society what it means it's not about how we treat individuals it's more about how you treat your collective how you treat the people around you the people you trust the people you know your network your society and so it's the same thing it's just often a different view but if you then look at the ai ethics that for example in the left in china are being built are being created and in europe where we also spend a lot of time on building great ai ethics we see the exact same things but we're using a little bit different words and the things like harmony and and tolerance and justice and and respect these things they show up in the chinese side but they're actually meaning the exact same thing pretty much so we all talk about fairness we talk about safety we talk about things like privacy robustness transparency in the end we're all humans and we all want to do the same thing so ai for good ai ethics in china in europe it's pretty similar but we shouldn't underestimate the difference of the focus and the big difference in my view how i experience it when i look in detail at all these plants is that in the west it's much more about protecting the individual while in china it looks more like giving the opportunity of the community the collective to progress and this actually is a little bit different so we're saying almost the same thing but we have a little bit different priorities and so we are more caring about the individual very often china is more caring about the collective but both are important and so what i would say if i would summarize that simply is that ai ethics in china is more about doing the right way and this goes back to confusionism what is it the right way to actually behave and treat your environment and the aim is to be as fair as possible for as many people as possible for all if possible that also means that maybe there's a few people that are not treated correctly because they are actually harming the collective on the other hand in the west it's much more about the only way that we should treat the individual and that's how i as a westerner i appreciate and i understand it and this is really about it has to be fair for each and every one of us now there's many exceptions and and there's double standards everywhere and so i do believe we're both saying the same thing it's just rhetoric a little bit but the feeling of the collective is much stronger in china than it is in the in in the west when it comes to ethics and so if you just look from 2017 when china really started building this ai ethics plan every single month they were gathering together the government was the academics of course the industry but also civil society i mean anybody that is giving a civil society service but also people were surveyed so many many people get surveyed and so the ministry of science and technology in 2019 came out with some governance principles for a new generation ai these were guidelines like how should we do it and that's the guidelines i just showed before this was really about harmony and fairness and stuff like that but because we are all human and we all have the same values ultimately the code that we're writing about ethics is becoming very similar and so if you look in september just last year china came out beijing came out with a new generation ai ethics code and i'll put the link uh under the the the in the description so you can actually look at the whole description of the ai uh intelligence at the code and so what you see there is that it's very similar to what we have in europe what we're building in europe there's not much difference so we want to do the same thing as china does and be good for society and protect it ultimately what we're doing is we're creating a parallel world europe and america specifically if i look at europe and i look at china we're building the same ai protection ai progress ai world and this has everything to do with balancing the progress we want people to make thanks to ai for society and for individuals i mean we want people to benefit from ai but at the same time we need to protect the people and definitely protect the nation or the society because ai can be used against us from a military point of view and so we're both looking whether it's the west europe america or china we're looking at the same parameters and trying to balance the same thing and so it's no surprise that this code is very very similar but there is a little difference in focus and the difference is a little bit on priorities if you look at china it's very close to europe and the whole code is built very similarly or this whole regulation that they're building is very clear one about the other it's not that china just copied it although they probably took a lot from the eu eu discussions but the reality is that this is focused a little bit more on the progress of society this is just collective thinking while in europe we're focusing a little bit more on protecting of individuals 90 of the time we're probably saying the same thing if i look at this this description but there is some differences and and that is not unimportant but i do believe that europe and china should trust each other into becoming an ai superpower each of them because we're actually saying the same thing when it comes to the us it's a little bit different in the us the regulation is very different at this stage and not as far as in europe and what you do see is that it's a lot more about helping people and individuals to progress and that is of course for people to actually benefit like the recommendation engines and so on i mean it's about getting healthcare better and so on but it's also for protecting the big companies and ultimately to ris to protect the society and so this is about protecting the nation and so you feel that us is a little bit more focused on these other things and therefore i believe that ai superpowers us and china becoming the two biggest one will have more challenges with trusting each other than europe and china would have but that is just a reality now the good thing is that we all are putting our focus and attention on ai ethics because we want to be trusted as an ai superpower whether it's europe america or china and so we should collaborate together unfortunately that's not happening enough and so can we trust china on becoming an ai superpower is really about do we want to create these parallel worlds or do we want to work together to create one big world and that question in the current environment of what's happening in the world today is probably going to be a big question to answer over the next weeks months and years to come
2022-03-25