{"id":76046,"date":"2018-02-17T19:23:27","date_gmt":"2018-02-18T03:23:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/02\/how-chinas-massive-ai-plan-actually-works"},"modified":"2018-02-22T15:05:32","modified_gmt":"2018-02-22T23:05:32","slug":"how-chinas-massive-ai-plan-actually-works","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/02\/how-chinas-massive-ai-plan-actually-works","title":{"rendered":"How China\u2019s Massive AI Plan Actually Works"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/how-chinas-massive-ai-plan-actually-works.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>When the Chinese government released its <a href=\"https:\/\/na-production.s3.amazonaws.com\/documents\/translation-fulltext-8.1.17.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Next Generation Artificial Intelligence Plan<\/a> in July 2017, it crisply articulated the country\u2019s ambition: to become the \u201cworld\u2019s primary AI innovation center\u201d by 2030. That headline goal turned heads within the global tech elite. Longtime Google CEO Eric Schmidt <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cnas.org\/publications\/transcript\/eric-schmidt-keynote-address-at-the-center-for-a-new-american-security-artificial-intelligence-and-global-security-summit\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">cited the plan<\/a> as proof that China threatened to overtake the United States in AI. High-ranking American military leaders and AI entrepreneurs held it up as evidence that the United States was <a href=\"http:\/\/foreignpolicy.com\/2017\/11\/03\/the-next-space-race-is-artificial-intelligence-and-america-is-losing-to-china\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">falling behind<\/a> in the \u201cspace race\u201d of this century. In December 2017, China\u2019s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology followed up with a \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.newamerica.org\/cybersecurity-initiative\/digichina\/blog\/translation-chinese-government-outlines-ai-ambitions-through-2020\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">three-year action plan<\/a>,\u201d a translation of which was recently released by New America\u2019s DigiChina initiative.<\/p>\n<p>But how do these plans actually work? There\u2019s a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.technologyreview.com\/s\/609038\/chinas-ai-awakening\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">tendency<\/a> to place this AI mobilization within China\u2019s longstanding tradition of centrally planned engineering achievements that have wowed the world. The rapid build-out of the country\u2019s bullet train network stands as a monument to the power of combining central planning and deep pockets: in the span of a decade, the Chinese central government spent around <a href=\"https:\/\/www.economist.com\/blogs\/graphicdetail\/2017\/09\/daily-chart\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">$360 billion building 13,670 miles<\/a> of high-speed rail (HSR) track, more mileage than the rest of the world combined.<\/p>\n<p>But putting the AI plan in this tradition can be misleading. While it follows this model in form (ambitious goal set by the central government), it differs in function (what will actually drive the transformation). The HSR network was dreamed up and drawn up by central government officials, and largely executed by state-owned enterprises. In AI, the real energy is and will be with private technology companies, and to a lesser extent academia.<\/p>\n<p><!-- Link: <a href=\"https:\/\/macropolo.org\/chinas-massive-ai-plan-actually-works\/\">https:\/\/macropolo.org\/chinas-massive-ai-plan-actually-works\/<\/a> --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When the Chinese government released its Next Generation Artificial Intelligence Plan in July 2017, it crisply articulated the country\u2019s ambition: to become the \u201cworld\u2019s primary AI innovation center\u201d by 2030. That headline goal turned heads within the global tech elite. Longtime Google CEO Eric Schmidt cited the plan as proof that China threatened to overtake [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":367,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38,1490,9,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-76046","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-engineering","category-government","category-military","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76046","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/367"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76046"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76046\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":76241,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76046\/revisions\/76241"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}