Few Countries Will Benefit From the AI Revolution (qz.com)

hackingbear writes from a report via Quartz: According to Chinese venture capitalist and former Google China president Kai-Fu Lee, the list of countries well-positioned to embrace a future powered by artificial intelligence is exceedingly short: United States and China. "The countries that are not in good shape are the countries that have perhaps a large population, but no AI, no technologies, no Google, no Tencent, no Baidu, no Alibaba, no Facebook, no Amazon," Lee says. "These people will basically be data points to countries whose software is dominant in their country. If a country in Africa uses largely Facebook and Google, they will be providing their data to help Facebook and Google make more money, but their jobs will still be replaced nevertheless." Originally, China's low labor costs might have helped the country modernize, Lee says, but as AI-driven automation takes hold in manufacturing, other countries that want to follow China's blueprint for economic growth probably wouldn't be able to rely on cheap labor alone.

Comments

Everyone benefits

[SuperKendall]

Even the poorest of countries will benefit directly from AI. It will mean improved everything - better materials, better components, better electronics made far more cheaply to the point where people in poor countries can afford them better.

In even the poorest of countries, most people have cell phones now. Why are you suddenly doubting some new and useful technology will make its way there?

Not to mention, as more and more things like automated tractors come to be, it makes it more practical to send equipment rather than cash to poor nations - which mean the people may actually get it, unlike the cash which seems to vanish before it ever reaches those it is meant to help.

Re: Everyone benefits

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you seen the division of wealth lately? Countries generally don't tend to share.

Re:Everyone benefits

[BitterOak]

Exactly! Saying only the U.S. and China will benefit from AI would have been like saying that only the UK would benefit from the Industrial Revolution in the early 19th Century. Countries all over the world use machine-based factories and benefit from their invention even though it basically started in the UK.

Re: Everyone benefits

[Mr0bvious]

Said he who shared it.

Re:Everyone benefits

[hey!]

I would say that "most people benefit" is a possible, even a plausible outcome. But it's far from certain. On the other hand it's almost certain that literally everyone won't do well out of it. I don't think that's ever happened in the history of disruptive technological change.

I think you have to be careful about generalizing from past disruptive events; every technological change is unique. And AI is taking us to a point that is unique even in the history of disruptive technologies -- although I think people may be getting a little ahead of the curve.

Here's my prediction for AI ... I think soon we're going to start hearing more stories about how AI falls short of the hype. I think this will become almost a commonplace notion. We'll keep discovering ways AI falls short, until we realize that many of the things predicted have actually come to pass. Looked at under a microscope, that singularity point in the historical timeline will look more like a smudge.

Re:Everyone benefits

[vux984]

"to the point where people in poor countries can afford them better."

What will they pay for them with? If we don't need them to produce anything, then we don't pay them anything. If we don't pay them anything, they don't have anything to buy goods with.

The only thing the poor countries will be able to sell is raw resources. But the poor people don't own those, those are on or under the land, and the land owners are the wealthy class.

Re: Everyone benefits

[Anne Thwacks]

UK got rich by slavery in sugar plantations etc. In the long run others benefit also but it all starts with slavery

A few British pirates, drug dealers, etc got rich from slavery.

The average person in the UK at the time lived in very similar conditions to the slaves (except the weather is much worse in Manchester than in Jamaica). We keep hearing that 30% of slaves died on some ships during the long passage, and very rarely hear that almost 100% of crew (not officers) died before the ships reached Africa, where the shortage of crew (many "press ganged" on board unwillingly - ie slaves) was made up by recruiting "Kru boys" (ie men from Kru tribe in Sierra Leone, known to be good sailors),, and where up to 50% of fare paying passengers died on the longer voyage to India. Why did they take such risks? cos in Europe, up to 1/3 of the population died in each outbreak of plague.

It is also worth pointing out that in the UK, slavery is not associated with colour - there were no black slaves in the UK.

Some history is told with political bias - even before Zuck was born.

Re: Everyone benefits

[DarkOx]

And yet, somehow reserves of natural resources just keep staying about the same

I think this statement is over simple. Some people will claim we are rapidly running out of things critical to our survival. Those people are either miss-informed, lying, or using a very different definition of "rapidly" than we use in common speech.

On the other hand we are seeing massive decrease in biodiversity and there is potential for collapse of ecosystems we depend on going over an edge where they could go into some kind of deterioration feedback loop. I think the 'truth' about this lies somewhere in the middle. The reality is though unless you are prepared to radically reduce the population "conservation" alone isn't going to work. We need to make technological advances that allow us to do more with less. Ultimately we probably need to get our consumption levels down below a certain replacement rate.

Totally disagree, dilsproportiatley benefits poor

[SuperKendall]

I think the idea is that America and China will benefit disproportionately better than the rest of the world.

That is utter nonsense.

AI for a place like the US or China means what? Maybe some of us aren't driving ourselves. Some of the vast amount of stuff we get is marginally cheaper. We have the equivalent of personal assistants - many of us on Slashdot are essentially living a large part of this future already.

Meanwhile a poor village in India or Africa gets a solar panel and cell phones, it's 10000x improvement in quality of living. In the future maybe they get drone delivered medicine (as they are already starting to do today) and maybe some children are living that did not before. Maybe a region gets an automated agricultural facility, suddenly now they have more food than ever before. Maybe there's an automated irrigation bot that comes and build canals to fields. Maybe they get pre-fab structures that actually self-clean and resist disease instead of harboring it like grass/mud huts.

The list goes on, but basically ANYTHING they get is a n utterly massive improvement not just in quality, but QUANTITY of life itself.

There is simply no comparison, at this point the most advanced nations are absolutely the ones seeing incremental improvement from technology.

No matter what, AI combined with Intellectual Property laws will be used to create scarcity to simulate a market of supply and demand

Not in poor regions where hacked 3D printers can and will create anything of interest, bypassing all IP laws. It happened for movies and music already, and there's no reason to think it cannot happen to physical objects as well.

I don't see how class warfare benefits a country

[csmithers]

From what I've been reading lately about the perceived effects of the widespread application of AI, class warfare is a very real possibility. Now, if this is the case, I don't see how any country ... the US, China, et al really benefits. Some individuals and corporations may benefit, but the country as a whole does not (imho).

Bad assumptions

[kiminator]

This assumes that the current leaders in AI development will retain nearly all of the benefits from the use of AI. In particular, it assumes that all of the critical information about how to create AI models will be limited among a small number of software companies.

I see no reason why this should be the case. Creation and use of AI models is already being distributed more widely, e.g. through the open-source TensorFlow software. The basic algorithms of AI models are generally quite simple, and while they do require a bit of expertise to use well, they're usually not all that difficult. If you're willing to invest in the hardware, a relatively small number of experienced engineers, and good training data, it shouldn't be hard for most anybody to build their own AI models for their own applications.

Re:Totally disagree, dilsproportiatley benefits po

[mikael]

They are jumping straight to mobile phone networks and skipping landlines. For a fisherman wanting to sell fish, this allows him to find the best port to sell fish at the highest price. Coastal villages don't go hungry because they never got anyone to land a catch. A few text messages let them run like an Amazon marketplace.

Most comments have it backwards.

[FeelGood314]

AI will certainly make better and cheaper products for someone in Africa but what will the guy in Africa have to offer in exchange? AI will make most labor almost worthless. Right now a poor country can compete with low wages but if if a robot costs 1M dollars and can do the work in the USA of 2000 unskilled workers, even if the workers in Africa work for free, the transportation and logistics costs might make the robot more cost effective. The worry is, when this happens a country can't use cheap labor to boot strap its way up.

Re:Japan?

[angel'o'sphere]

Japan ... but failed to follow up within the "software will eat the world" revolution.
Depends how you define fail.
The Japanese economy got destroyed end of the 1980s early 1990s buy american bank consortiums. During that period they cut down their TRON project (e.g. no own hardware anymore).

But in 2003 it was still the most used operation system on the planet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Shame you never heard about it in the west :D