Minimizing the economic imbalance and the gap between the rich and the poor that artificial intelligence may cause is already a problem that must be considered at the moment. This gap is not only reflected within the country, but also between countries.
■ Text / Li Kaifu "Chairman and CEO of Innovation Works"
In the face of the coming age of artificial intelligence, what are we most worried about?
Usually, people's answers to this question are very similar to the horror plots in various science fiction films. They worry that the development of artificial intelligence will bring about the so-called "singularity", that is, at a certain historical moment of human development, artificial intelligence will completely surpass human wisdom, and then bring human society into an unimaginable change. People have even begun to wonder whether artificial intelligence will eventually control humans and reduce them to so-called "robotics."
These issues are worth discussing, but they do not need to be resolved urgently. Regardless of whether these problems will occur or not, even if they do occur, it will be hundreds of years from now. At present, human beings do not have any known ways and methods to transform the current most outstanding artificial intelligence system into general artificial intelligence, that is, self-aware, common-sense reasoning, consciously acquiring knowledge from multiple fields, and A computer program with the ability to perceive, express and understand.
But this does not mean that we can sit back and relax. On the contrary, the speed of development of existing artificial intelligence technology and products has greatly exceeded our understanding and expectations. Artificial intelligence technology is destined to change our world and is not entirely based on our wishes. Artificial intelligence is a tool, not a form of intelligence. But it is destined to redefine the meaning of work and the way in which wealth is created; it is worth noting that it will bring unprecedented economic imbalances and even change the global power structure.
Therefore, it is imperative that we first pay attention to these imminent real challenges.
■ What exactly is artificial intelligence?
Roughly speaking, artificial intelligence technology refers to obtaining a large amount of information in a certain field (such as loan repayment records), and using this information to make judgments on specific cases (whether a loan should be given to someone) in order to achieve a specific goal ( The technology of maximizing the interest of the lender. The ability of these technologies to work in a given task has been proven to completely surpass human performance.
Today, such artificial intelligence technology is being widely used in various fields. With its further development, it will inevitably have an impact on employment. Many positions and occupations will gradually disappear, such as bank tellers, customer service representatives, telemarketers, stock and bond traders, etc. Over time, artificial intelligence technology will learn to control semi-autonomous or fully autonomous hardware facilities such as driverless cars and robots, gradually replacing factory workers, construction workers, drivers, express delivery and many other occupations.
Different from the industrial revolution and the information revolution, the impact of artificial intelligence technology is not simply directed to certain specific jobs and occupations. For example, craftsmen in traditional manufacturing are replaced by assembly line workers. The career and work landscape has been disrupted on a large scale. Needless to say, most of them are low-paying jobs, but some high-paying jobs will also face challenges.
It is worth noting that this change will bring huge profits to companies and enterprises that develop and adopt artificial intelligence technology. Just imagine, if Uber can fully utilize driverless vehicles for operations; Apple can save a lot of manpower to produce its products; it is conceivable that these companies will use artificial intelligence technology to create amazing profits and benefits! And all this is now in progress. Innovative Works recently invested in a domestic start-up that uses artificial intelligence technology for lending.
As you can see, mankind is facing two development prospects that are difficult to coexist properly: On the one hand, we usher in an era of development where huge wealth can be created with only a small amount of manpower, and on the other hand, a large number of people will also As a result, they were laid off and unemployed.
■ Where to go with all the trade-offs?
One of the answers, of course, is education, that is, targeted education and retraining of personnel in areas that artificial intelligence is not good at. Specifically, artificial intelligence is not good at jobs that require creativity, planning skills, and "cross-domain" thinking skills—such as defense lawyers. These abilities are also currently required by many high-end positions. The problem is that the possibility of imparting and acquiring these abilities and skills through short-term training is low. The other direction is to make up for the "interpersonal skills" lacking in artificial intelligence systems, and to develop more posts that require subtle interpersonal interactions such as social workers, bartenders, and massage technicians. Even so, another question arises: How much demand does our society have for bartenders or similar positions?
According to my personal speculation, to solve the problem of large-scale unemployment brought about by the artificial intelligence revolution, what I call more so-called "caring services." This is a service that artificial intelligence cannot complete, and society needs a lot; not to mention the sense of mission and honor on which you and I are born. Such service positions are too numerous to list, such as volunteers who accompany the elderly to seek medical treatment, instructors in orphanages, and volunteers in alcohol-free cooperatives. In other words, many of the so-called voluntary service jobs today may become real professions in the future.
Some of these services will even be transformed into high-paying occupations and become more specialized, such as medical service providers with professional medical knowledge, compassion and strong communication skills who can assist and cooperate with the "artificial intelligence cancer diagnostic program". Generally speaking, people can choose to work shorter hours than they do now.
■ Who will pay for these jobs?
The huge wealth that I mentioned at the beginning of the article that is concentrated in the hands of a relatively small number of companies can now come in handy. In my opinion, a considerable part of the wealth created by artificial intelligence will inevitably be transferred to people whose jobs have been replaced. And this process seems to be achieved only through Keynesian fiscal policy—that is, increasing government spending in related fields and increasing taxation of high-profit companies.
As for the form of social welfare under that situation, I think it may be a conditional universal basic income program, that is, social welfare will be for people who have economic needs and meet the conditions. The so-called "condition" means that the applicant must work hard to participate in employment or re-employment training, or guarantee to participate in the "care service" of a certain working hours.
Of course, in order to fund such social welfare, raising the tax rate may be inevitable. The government must not only subsidize the lives and work of most people, but also try to make up for the personal income tax that a large number of laid-off employees were unable to pay.
This brings up the ultimate and most important challenge regarding artificial intelligence. The Keynesian fiscal policy that I described may be feasible in the United States and China, because these two countries can use their large and successful artificial intelligence companies to obtain taxes and use this to support their high social welfare programs. But what about other countries?
In comparison, other countries will face two insurmountable problems. First, most of the wealth created by artificial intelligence will flow into the United States and China. Artificial intelligence is an industry where the "stronger is stronger": the more data, the better the product; the better the product, the more data can be obtained; the more data, the more talented people are; the more talented people, the better the product better. In this virtuous circle, China and the United States have gathered a large number of talents, market shares, and data that can be mobilized.
For example, China’s speech recognition company iFLYTEK and face recognition companies such as Megvii Technology and SenseTime have become industry leaders in terms of market value. Under the leadership of companies such as Google, Tesla and Uber, the United States is also second to none in driverless technology. In the field of consumer Internet, seven Chinese and American companies—Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent—have extensively used artificial intelligence technology in their existing products and services, and are rapidly adopting artificial intelligence technology. Its operating territory has been expanded to a global scale to occupy a larger share of the artificial intelligence market as much as possible. Judging from the current situation, the United States seems to occupy the markets of developed countries and some developing countries, while Chinese companies have undoubtedly won the markets of most developing countries.
For countries other than China and the United States, another challenge lies in the growing populations of many countries, especially some developing countries. A huge population can become a kind of economic capital, just as it has played a positive role in the economic development of China and India in recent decades. But in the era of artificial intelligence, this capital may become an economic burden, because most of the population will face laid-off jobs.
So, if many countries cannot subsidize workers by taxing highly profitable artificial intelligence companies, what other options do they have? According to my personal inference, in order to prevent their people from falling into poverty, these countries will negotiate and negotiate with the country that provides the most artificial intelligence software-China or the United States, and finally exchange the profits of specific artificial intelligence companies in local users in exchange for the country The required social welfare subsidies. As a result, it will eventually become the economic dependency of China and the United States. Such an economic development trend will also reshape today's geopolitical map.
In a nutshell, minimizing the economic imbalance and the gap between the rich and the poor that artificial intelligence may cause is already an issue that must be considered at the moment. This gap is not only reflected within countries, but also between countries. From an optimistic point of view: artificial intelligence presents us with an opportunity to break the global economic imbalance, and the huge impact of the challenge will prevent any country from staying out.
* This article first appeared in the February 2020 issue of "Manager" magazine