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 A.I. surround our everyday life. 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 A.I.-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 an unparalleled convenience, and A.I. is such a huge part of it.
Many American leaders believe the United States cannot overcome its adversary China unless it beats the country in the A.I. race. Every new chip that President Trump approves for sale to China, every visit by Nvidia chief’s executive, Jensen Huang, to Shanghai and every Chinese A.I. breakthrough strikes terror into the hearts of America’s 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 Mr. 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 conceptualize A.I. very differently. Americans want to create the most powerful technology humans have ever known. In the quest for superintelligence, the U.S. 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 is deployed and used by the population. If the Chinese achieve their A.I. goals, they may take a lead in the larger geopolitical contest between the two nations.
Most Chinese policymakers don’t believe A.I. superintelligence is arriving any time soon. Instead, the Chinese strategy is about advancing a government-directed strategy referred to as “A.I.+” that treats A.I. as if it were infrastructure. This includes government-coordinated plans, local subsidies and national computing-power programs to diffuse cheap, capable A.I. tools into every public service. Chinese people encounter A.I. 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 A.I. to analyze massive amounts of data for urban management needs like regulating traffic and environmental protection.
Unlike in the United States, where most people remain wary, A.I. seems to have had less of a backlash in China. The Chinese A.I.+ strategy is practical and comprehensible to the local population in a way that the U.S. strategy simply is not, which may explain why the Chinese appear so much more optimistic about A.I. than Americans.
Chinese leaders are trying to maximize 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 percent of 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 gross domestic product per capita of all of them could be quadrupled?
A.I. may be the answer. Are the teachers in rural schools overworked and undertrained? A.I. agents can help teach students with personalized instruction. Are the hospitals lacking in high-quality doctors? A.I. can diagnose diseases by analyzing patients’ health data. A.I. could make it easier to hire and train the caregivers needed for China’s growing elderly population, with robotic or digital companions supplementing the work of human nurses.
A.I. could also make it easier to predict and prepare for extreme weather events that could set back local economies. It could further optimize the transition to green energy. China has ports in which machines put containers on ships with barely any human supervision.
But China’s A.I.-as-infrastructure strategy is about more than just improving the country’s domestic quality of life. It’s also about exporting Chinese influence. Chinese A.I. is already integrated into the supply chains that dominate world trade.
And increasingly, rather than selling individual goods or services, China is selling a whole suite — energy, infrastructure, telecoms, transportation, surveillance — with A.I. systems to manage it all. As emerging markets from Southeast Asia to Latin America to Europe seek solutions to large problems like keeping power grids running, Chinese A.I. solutions may be what they end up buying. These models don’t have to be as powerful as American ones; they just have to be powerful enough. In that way, as China exports those A.I. models, it will be exporting Chinese governance as well, with all of the safety, abundance, surveillance and embedded hierarchies that entails.
That’s why the difference between these two countries in the A.I. race matters so much. America’s spaceship might still be the first to take off. But back on planet Earth, the Chinese will be using A.I. to run their hospitals, schools, roads and more. Brazilians, Russians, Africans and even the Europeans may be doing so soon, too.
Jacob Dreyer is a writer and editor who has lived in Shanghai for most of the past 18 years.
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