Artificial intelligence companies have burst onto the scene, pursuing a wide range of smart technologies. Credit: O’Reilly Conferences, Creative Commons
The Hollywood version of artificial intelligence is Scarlett Johansson’s disembodied, Siri-like voice learning to fall in love. But artificial intelligence in the real world looks more like TikTok, a blaze of algorithms calculating dance and music video preferences.
At its core, artificial intelligence is advanced machine learning, an emerging technology that encompasses natural language processing, facial recognition, robotics and autonomous vehicles. That also makes it a tool or weapon and thereby places it at the center of the increasingly contentious digital arms race now playing out between the U.S. and China.Several Chinese AI firms, including SenseTime and iFlytek, are on the U.S. Entity List, meaning American firms are restricted from exporting to them. The firms were sanctioned because of their ties to the Chinese military or surveillance operations targeting ethnic minorities in China’s western region of Xinjiang. But it’s not nations that are leading the charge to
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Agribusiness giant Syngenta is unique on the world stage: it is a state-owned Chinese firm with an American CEO. After ChemChina's historic purchase of the company in 2017 — the largest ever purchase by a Chinese company overseas — Syngenta is now ready for its big China debut with a planned blockbuster IPO in Shanghai this fall. But while "modernizing" farming in China has been good for Syngenta's business, helping Beijing achieve its long-sought after goal of food self sufficiency will be more complicated feat.
The journalists and authors talk about what sets China's use of surveillance tech apart from other countries; how the building blocks of that tech came from the West; and how the surveillance state can be...
