Yes, yes, in the headline I am mixing-and-matching two ancient Asian cultures but, despite his having been born on Taiwan Dr. Lee really is a sensei in the Japanese meaning of being both master and teacher.
In one of our posts on the AI maven, 2018's "If You Read Only One Column On Artificial Intelligence This Month..." I intro'd with:
Followed by his mini-bio from Edge.org:
"KAI-FU LEE, the founder of the Beijing-based Sinovation Ventures, is ranked #1 in technology in China by Forbes. Educated as a computer scientist at Columbia and Carnegie Mellon, his distinguished career includes working as a research scientist at Apple; Vice President of the Web Products Division at Silicon Graphics; Corporate Vice President at Microsoft and founder of Microsoft Research Asia in Beijing, one of the world’s top research labs; and then Google Corporate President and President of Google Greater China. As an Internet celebrity, he has fifty million+ followers on the Chinese micro-blogging website Weibo. As an author, among his seven bestsellers in the Chinese language, two have sold more than one million copies each. His first book in English is AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order (forthcoming, September)
Here he is at Yahoo Finance, September 15:
Influencers with Andy Serwer: Kai-Fu Lee
In this episode of Influencers, Andy is joined by Sinovation Ventures CEO Kai-Fu Lee as they discuss the future of robotics and how artificial intelligence will change the world over the next 20 years.
Video Transcript
[MUSIC PLAYING]
ANDY SERWER: Artificial intelligence is already reshaping our lives, the way we drive, to fight wars, or even how we develop vaccines. And there's a lot more to come. Kai-Fu Lee has been at the center of AI development for decades with stints as an executive at Apple, Microsoft, and Google. He's now the CEO of Sinovation Ventures, a venture capital firm in China with over $2.5 billion in assets under management. His new book "AI 2041-- 10 Visions For Our Future" helps us understand the promise and peril of that technology over the next two decades.
KAI-FU LEE: It will disrupt health care, improve education, and pretty much impact, disrupt, or enable every imaginable industry.
ANDY SERWER: On this episode of "Influencers," Kai Fu joined me to talk about the jobs that robots will replace, the way AI factors into plans for the so-called metaverse, and what it means for winners and losers in the tech industry.
Hello, everyone. And welcome to "Influencers." I'm Andy Serwer.
And welcome to our guest Kai-Fu Lee, CEO of Sinovation Ventures, former president of Google China, and author of the new book "AI 2041-- 10 Visions For Our Future." Kai-Fu, welcome.
KAI-FU LEE: Well, thank you. Thanks for having me.
ANDY SERWER: So I want to ask you about your book, which uses fiction to explore how AI will transform society not in some far off time, but over the next 20 years. Why did you use fiction? And why such a relatively short time window?
KAI-FU LEE: Because AI is such an important technology that I think everyone should try to understand it. But yet, it sounds like rocket science to some people. And it's very hard to understand.
I wanted to make it the most accessible and even entertaining. So I have a co-author, who is a well-known science fiction writer, [INAUDIBLE]. And he wrote the stories based on my roadmap of what technologies will mature in the next 20 year frame.
ANDY SERWER: So how significant will the impact of AI be over the next two decades, and in what specific ways?
KAI-FU LEE: It's quite significant. 20 years is actually quite a long period of time. Think about 20 years ago. If I went back in time to show the world we have today with iPhone and apps and Netflix and Zoom, none of these existed back then. It would be almost like science fiction.
And that's-- and I think going to the future, things will change even more because AI is now gaining many aspects of intelligence able to converse with us, able to understand text language and images and video, and autonomous vehicles and robots will work. It will disrupt health care, improve education, and pretty much impact, disrupt, or enable every imaginable industry. So quite a large amount of change.
ANDY SERWER: Yeah, we'll talk about some maybe some even more specific examples coming up. But first, I got to ask you about the pandemic. And has this influenced the trajectory of AI?
KAI-FU LEE: I think it accelerated AI a little, partly because people work from home and the workload is being digitized. And then AI can take over or improve parts of that work. And we are already seeing that.
And also partly because of social distancing, robotics is improving at a faster speed. For example, COVID tests in China are done by robots. So it's 100 times faster than people. And such robots can also be used in drug discovery and growing organoids. And this is not only '41. This is 2021. So it's accelerated robotics as well.
ANDY SERWER: Kai-Fu, let me ask you a really fundamental question. What is AI?
KAI-FU LEE: AI is generally considered the study of intelligence and the use of technologies that perform tasks that could only be done with quote, unquote, "intelligence." So that's the general field. And then within AI, there is a subfield called machine learning and sometimes called deep learning, which is one aspect of machine learning, which specifically has to do with developing software technologies using data to learn some tasks that requires intelligence. So it's a data driven way to deliver the appearance of intelligence. And currently AI, machine learning, deep learning are sometimes used interchangeably. So I wanted to clarify that.
ANDY SERWER: And so an example would be a machine that performs a task but then learns from the task and improves its functionality.
KAI-FU LEE: Yes, from data. And it's important to note that the human programmer does not program every logic into that AI. The human programmer says go learn this. And then AI takes all the data and learns from it.
It goes all the way from very simple examples. Like Facebook watches what you click and what you buy and what you watch, and then decides what content to target you so that you watch the most content and stay on Facebook, all the way up to an autonomous vehicle watches the road and knows where you want to get to, plans the route, avoids hitting a pedestrian, and gets you there as quickly as possible, and also safely. So that I think is the range of what AI can do today.
ANDY SERWER: Another one that I love, of course, is the music streaming services that learn your taste, and then serve you more and more choices that delight you if it works, right?
KAI-FU LEE: So the more it knows about you, the better it does. So if a music service knows other people like you, knows what you have liked, and what you liked is indicated by what you listen to a lot, but also what you don't listen to and what you listen to, and then stop. So it's learning all that as it watches you.
And if a service actually knows other aspects about you, then it can become even more intelligent. One of the stories in the book is a super app that was developed by an insurance company, which also develops many other applications like social applications, dating applications, e-commerce, coupons. And then it collects all the patterns about someone. And it does such a good job minimizing your insurance, improving your health.
But the interesting thing in the story is while it optimizes all these good things for you, it also unintentionally does something bad. In the story, it interferes with the main character's love life because the person that she was dating is believed to be dragging down her social status and health. And that relates to a racial issue that-- and the story takes place in India where the caste system is already basically gone. But there are still remnants that AI can pick up when it knows too much about you.
ANDY SERWER: Yes, so you talk about those negative consequences that people are concerned about. And of course, they see the movies where the robots take over. And there's a million movies like that. But so how realistic is it to be concerned about these potential consequences?
KAI-FU LEE: Yeah, the one thing that most people are most concerned about won't happen. But there are many other concerns people should have. The dystopian scenario where the robots take over presumes that AI has self-awareness and emotion and desire and intentionality. And it doesn't have any of that.
AI is today is a giant optimizer. Humans says go optimize this. And it takes all the data and optimizes what the human tells it to optimize.
And it doesn't have any desire or belief. If you shut the program off, if you unplug the computer, it's gone. So that belief that it has an intention, desire, and bad motives is simply not true. And probably won't be developed or developable.
We don't even know how to develop it. We don't know how the human brain works and why we have self-awareness and desires and emotions. So it's going to-- it may happen one day. But certainly very, very unlikely in the next 20 years.
ANDY SERWER: So with negative consequences again, going back to the music example, which is maybe very mundane. But it would negate serendipity, the chances of me just discovering something that is completely unrelated to my previous listening patterns that might in fact be something I want to hear. Is that a potential consequence for instance?....
....MUCH MORE
