Every evening as our children eat dinner, my phone notifies me that our 3-year-old’s teacher has uploaded photos taken during the day at school. An artificial intelligence facial recognition feature puts a red square around his face, letting me know which photos to look at. It’s kind of creepy, but kind of helpful, too.
In China, surveillance technology and AI surround our everyday lives. It’s built into the way we order food delivered to us from online apps; almost nobody I know here in Shanghai buys groceries at a grocery store, so we rely on AI-powered technologies to keep us fed. It’s visible in the infrastructure we use to go to work and school, from trains using facial recognition in lieu of physical tickets to self-driving taxis. China’s technological system offers unparalleled convenience, and AI is such a huge part of it.
Many American leaders believe America cannot overcome its adversary, China, unless it beats the country in the AI race. Every new chip that President Trump approves for sale to China, every visit by the Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang to Shanghai, and every Chinese AI breakthrough strikes terror into the hearts of China hawks. Hardware, rare-earth metals, revamped power grids and human talent could all dictate which side ends up creating the first superintelligence. The upcoming summit between Trump and China’s leader, Xi Jinping, may lead to a few policy changes, but this belief is more fixed.
The reality is that China and the United States are racing in different directions because the two countries conceptualise AI very differently. Americans want to create the most powerful technology humans have ever known. In the quest for superintelligence, the American government is encouraging private firms to move full speed ahead, regulation be damned. Under the very tightest regulation, by contrast, the Chinese want to make A.I. more practical and embedded in society, more carefully selecting how it’s deployed and used by its population. If the Chinese achieve their AI goals, they may take a lead in the larger geopolitical contest between the two nations.
Most Chinese policymakers don’t believe AI superintelligence is arriving any time soon. Instead, the Chinese strategy is about advancing a government-directed strategy referred to as “AI+” that treats AI like infrastructure. This includes government-coordinated plans, local subsidies and national computing-power programs to diffuse cheap, capable AI tools into every public service. Chinese people encounter AI as a natural part of their day-to-day lives. Sometimes it’s visible and palpable, like the “smile to pay” terminals used in many shops. Sometimes it’s invisible, like Hangzhou’s City Brain, which uses AI to analyse massive amounts of data for urban management needs like regulating traffic and environmental protection.
Unlike in the US, where most people remain wary of AI, the AI strategy in China seems to have less local backlash. China’s AI+ strategy is practical and comprehensible to the Chinese population in a way that the US strategy simply is not, which may explain why the Chinese appear so much more optimistic about AI than Americans.
Chinese leaders are trying to maximise the country’s resources. The country’s chief resource is not oil, soybeans or pork bellies, but Chinese people. As of the 2020 census, nearly 40% of the Chinese lived in rural areas, including 110 million children. Even more are living without access to quality education and health care. For Chinese leaders, the fact that so many Chinese people are structurally denied access to their best lives is a crisis even bigger than the low birthrate. How many potential geniuses are there among those 110 million rural children? What if the GDP per capita of all of them could be quadrupled?
AI may be the answer. Are the teachers in rural schools overworked and undertrained? AI agents can help teach students with personalised instruction. Are the hospitals lacking in high-quality doctors? A.I. can diagnose diseases by analysing patients’ health data. AI could make it easier to hire and train the caregivers needed for China’s growing elderly population, with robot or digital companions supplementing the work of human nurses.
But China’s AI-as-infrastructure strategy is about more than just improving the country’s domestic quality of life. It’s also about exporting Chinese influence. Chinese AI is already integrated into the supply chains that dominate world trade.
The New York Times