Book Review: AI Superpowers

AI Superpowers (2018) is the most educative and insightful book I've read this year. It has filled me with hope and inspiration.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading the 250+ paged book as it contains amazing facts spiced with the author's real life experiences. It is written by AI guru, Dr Kai-Fu Lee who has held important and senior positions in Apple, Microsoft, Google. He is a Stage 4 cancer survivor.

He has dedicated the book to his Carnegie Mellon professor, the now 82 year old, Turing and Padma Bhushan awardee, Raj Reddy, whom he calls his "mentor in AI and in life".

I have compiled paraphrased summaries of some of the chapters I especially liked, on how Silicon Valley & Chinese startups compare and the Four Waves of AI, to keep re-reading them.

In the chapter "The Wisdom of Cancer", he poignantly articulates what life means to him -

"My sense of self-worth was derived from my achievements at work, from my ability to create economic value and to expand my own influence in the world. 

I came to view my own life as a kind of optimization algorithm with a clear goals: maximize personal influence and minimize anything that doesn’t contribute to that goal. I sought to quantify everything in my life, balancing these “inputs” and fine-tuning the algorithm.

I didn’t entirely neglect my wife or daughters, but I always sought to spend just enough time with them so they didn’t complain. 

In September 2013, I was diagnosed with stage IV lymphoma. In an instant, my world of mental algorithms and personal achievements came crashing down. 

My family had given me nothing but warmth and love, and I had responded to that on the basis of cold calculations. In effect, mesmerized by my quest to create machines that thought like people, I had turned into a person that thought like a machine. 

My cancer would go into remission, sparing my life, but the epiphanies sparked by this personal confrontation with death have stuck with me. They’ve led me to reshuffle my priorities and to totally change my life. I spend far more time with my wife and daughters, and moved to be closer to my aging mother. 

I’ve stopped viewing my life as an algorithm that optimizes for influence. Instead, I try to spend my energy doing the one thing I’ve found that truly brings meaning to a person’s life: sharing love with those around us.

This near-death experience also gave me a new vision for how humans can coexist with artificial intelligence. Yes, this technology will both create enormous economic value and destroy an astounding number of jobs. If we remain trapped in a mindset that equates our economic value with our worth as human beings, this transition to the age of AI will devastate our societies and wreak havoc on our individual psychologies."

In his assessment of future jobs, he predicts that jobs involving minimal social interaction, low dexterity and structured environments are at risk while those those which involve creativity, compassion and unstructured environments have the potential to thrive.

If you're curious about how AI will change the future, buy, beg, borrow or steal this book - and read it!