Craig Addison

Abacus | Here’s why China may regret the Pyrrhic victory of winning the global artificial intelligence race

With the US, Russia and others in the same race for super intelligence, Beijing must compete to win even at the risk of unleashing a power it cannot control

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Google’s AlphaGo programme beat China’s top Go player Ke Jie three games out of three. Photo: EPA

Craig Addison

Published: 1:53pm, 3 Jan 2018Updated: 10:29pm, 3 Jan 2018

After the AlphaGo computer program from Google’s parent Alphabet beat China’s top Go player Ke Jie three for three in May last year, the 19-year-old was in tears, declaring his opponent “God-like”. Chinese authorities had earlier cancelled planned live broadcasts of the deciding matches.

Two months later, China’s State Council announced an ambitious national programme to overtake the United States in artificial intelligence (AI) by 2030.

Coincidence? Perhaps, but it is easy to see how the prospects of losing the AI race to the Americans would scare the wits out of Beijing.

China’s AI pronouncement has since been called a new Sputnik moment for Washington – a wake-up call akin to the 1957 launch of the first space probe by the former Soviet Union, which pushed the Americans to double down on military and aerospace technology, and culminated in the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969.

Leaders from Russian president Vladimir Putin to Tesla founder Elon Musk have said whoever wins the AI race will “rule the world”. But there are two races – a 400-metre hurdle to develop human-like AI, or artificial general intelligence (AGI), and a 42-kilometre marathon to discover artificial super intelligence that surpasses the best human brains in virtually every field.

In the meantime, the warm-up is “narrow AI”, which has already been developed by Chinese and American companies to do specific tasks, ranging from autonomous driving to teaching children their ABCs.